do as he pleased. Tomorrow meant getting on another airplane, checking into another hotel. That part would be easy. This past January, curious, he had performed a rough count, and found he had done it more than a thousand times.
WHITEOUT
Now the snow poured down so Mason only glimpsed the road between wiper flaps. On the windows the snow built to ridges and fell away, and when he looked out seeking a familiar glimpse of flat, snowbound farmland, there were only individual flakes whipped out of a slurry of descending whiteness. Heâd been alone on the road for almost an hour, a privacy heâd used to cry about Wendy at first, though the grief had passed, giving way to a feeling of giddy excitement. He was going home for the first time in thirteen years.
The freeway was closed, and there had been no patrol cars since the announcement, back before the radio voices turned mushy. He doubted he would see one before he reached Mansfield. It was Christmas Eve, and the slashed state budget meant fewer cops all over.
A deejay had described the storm stretching from the Canadian Rockies to the Appalachians, dumping snow on central Ohio until tomorrow afternoon, delivering more white than anyone wanted for Christmas. Mason had laughed. Like a snow globe, the pun contained the entire Midwest. He opened the ashtray and got out the baggie of crushed cocaine. He had it tied off with a twister around a red cocktail straw for easy access while driving, and he took a snort, never taking his eyes from the vanishing and reappearing road, careful to miss nothing.
It was four oâclock and growing dark. In his parentsâ house the furnace bellowed in the basement. His older brother was opening dessert wine and his mother dusting the cookies with powderedsugar while his father stood by the tree at the living-room window, gazing out on the weather with the military sternness that was his mainmast. That was how it had been thirteen years ago when Mason returned from college at about this hour. He had come in lugging a bag of dirty laundry, prepared to deliver a rehearsed speech about how heâd failed out his first semester. He was not ready to see his mother so happy, wiping her hands on her apron so she could take him by the ears and kiss his forehead and cheeks, or Leonard waiting behind her with a second glass of port, or his father drifting in, a smile breaking through his solemn features. All that week Mason was unable to tell them, and afterward heâd driven back to school and worked in the tire shop, avoiding their calls until he found a job at a resort in Kentucky and started making his way south. No doubt they came looking for him, found the empty apartment theyâd been renting. He might have been in Memphis then. It was hard to say, it was so long ago he felt more embarrassment now than guilt â he had been a boy then. Eventually heâd reached New Orleans and called that home, though these last few years, when he was feeling especially rotten and desolate, heâd taken to monitoring his family on the Internet. He thought about calling sometimes, but it felt like a lame gesture, and he was more interested in them, anyway, than in telling the story he sensed theyâd want to hear about him.
Tracking them was easy, given his brotherâs tendency to post family news on his blog, even though no one posted comments save for the occasional fat cousin from Michigan whom nobody saw. Mason had been watching them for some time now. He knew all about them, felt as if their lives had been restricted to a small compartment of his consciousness. Sometimes he felt he might be connected to them in a way modern science couldnât explain. He knew details, his fatherâs heart congestion, his motherâs struggle with her bone density. He knew Leonard had lucked into a managerialposition at Toyota and was seeing a woman who had a little girl. He had seen pictures online â the woman, Tanya, was good
Tim Lahaye, Jerry B. Jenkins