Free Say Nice Things About Detroit by Scott Lasser

if Natalie felt so strongly about Dirk, then Carolyn knew she would have, too. They were her people and she felt guilty to be alive, for had she been a good sister, she would have been with them.
    VI
    H E DROVE EAST, across the endless plains. Carolyn wouldn’t take his calls. She was gone and David found himself sick with longing for her. He remembered odd physical details: the turquoise vein that jumped across the crook in her arm, the pink color she painted her toenails, the bony knobs at the edges of her wrists. He understood it was a silly youthful crush—he couldn’t ever rule out that it was related to Natalie, to what he’d lost, most specifically his youth—but he felt it deeply. He saw no reason why even at his age he shouldn’t be able to fall in love. And maybe this time enjoy it.
    He drove into town on the new 696 and exited at Telegraph. He’d been driving since Colorado, two days of interstates, and now finally he’d made it to surface streets. He was coming home. In the back of his car he had eight suits, the uniform of his work. Things were still slightly formal here. The rest of his clothes were back there, too, plus a few books, a pair of ski boots, two diplomas, five years of tax returns, a nine-by-twelve-inch envelope filled with pictures of Julie and—mostly—Cory. Back in Denver he hadn’t been able to throw these pictures away, though he found them too painful to look at. He doubted he would ever look at them again, or let them go.
    His entire life fit easily in the back of an Audi A6. He lacked a drive for acquisition but always had the feeling that he should have more and want more.
    â€¢ • •
    H E DROVE UP Telegraph and remembered a day in Denver when it was gray and windy like this. Cory had had a Little League game. He was ten or eleven. They drove all the way to a field in Arvada, the first to arrive. Soon it became clear they would be the only ones to arrive. It was April, cold, maybe forty degrees, the wind whipping along the foothills, picking up dust and throwing it across the infield the way breakers threw mist. David phoned the coach.
    â€œDidn’t you check the website? The game’s called,” the coach said.
    â€œFor what?”
    â€œToo damn cold and windy.”
    In Michigan, in April, you played no matter the weather. You played if it wasn’t snowing or raining too hard, and you thanked God for the chance. David closed the phone, told his son the news. He got Cory to throw for ten minutes because he thought there were important lessons in it. Soon Cory’s cheeks turned red and raw in the wind, and often they had to stop throwing to turn away from the flying dust. Still, they played. David could see that Cory wasn’t having a good time, and that was perhaps the point. David believed in perseverance.
    â€œI’ve played in worse than this,” he told his son when they stopped. He handed Cory a cloth handkerchief, which he carried because the kid’s nose never stopped running.
    Cory blew his nose as a blanket of dust fell on them. “Maybe I won’t ever have to,” he said. “I could get lucky.”
    David made all the lights up Telegraph till he got to Maple. It was November, the day of the midterm election. He’d voted early in Colorado, a last vote in the West. The trees were bare, the Detroit sky low and gray, the air above freezing but damp, cold and familiar, again the weather of home.
    â€¢ • •
    O N HIS THIRD day at work, a Thursday, Smalls stepped into his office with the folder. David had so far billed three and a half hours, all of it for existing clients. Smalls was, appropriately, a short man, plump, in his midfifties at least, but he walked with a bounce in his step that had caught David’s eye; he half expected the man to break into a foxtrot as he stepped down the halls of Bergen Smalls Rand and Bergen.
    â€œI’ve got one for you,” Smalls