Free The Dart League King by Keith Lee Morris Page A

always looked at her face and she liked him for that, and she remembered then being with him at the lake house, the moment after she’d first undressed, when he’d had a chance for appraisal after wondering all these years, and even then he’d seemed more interested in her eyes. That had been a nice moment, before he’d seemed to drift off, and now there was a nice moment again.
    He said hello, she said hi. “It’s a good night,” he said, whatever that meant. And then he just sat there. He looked out the
window. This was both the attractive and the unattractive thing about him, his tendency toward silence. It was nice not to have to say something all the time, just to be able to sit with someone, not have to fill up the space with words. But sometimes you wanted to talk. And when he was quiet it was as if you couldn’t say anything, as if you weren’t there at all, as if only Tristan were there, Tristan and the world inside his head. He could go away for minutes at a time, so that the only thing that seemed to exist was whatever went on in his head, and you were just a sort of absence waiting to become present again. It was this sense of having vanished that explained why she’d never gone out with him back in high school when he’d been so in love with her—that and the fact that he’d never asked her to.
    So this was how it was going to be—hello, hi, it’s a good night, stare out the window, start all over again at square one, as if they hadn’t been together for the first time just a month and a half ago, as if that shouldn’t have meant something or didn’t amount to anything after all these years. She wasn’t hurt by this, just exasperated. Tomorrow morning she would have to go back to work, drop Hayley off at day care and drive up the mountain to the ski resort, sit at a desk while the summer sun shone out the window and make phone calls, try to sell condos, try to sell family ski passes, try to sell vacation packages, try to convince people in the outside world she longed to go to that they in fact needed to come here, and she would want to scream into the phone Don’t be stupid! She didn’t have time for silence tonight.
    But she couldn’t think of anything to say. So she looked out the window too, because what was out there was more interesting
than the people throwing darts at the dartboard. Out the window were birch trees, and Sand Creek, and boats, one boat with green and red lights on the bow slipping quietly up to a dock right now, the waves gentle behind it like a soft stream of air, and on the other side of the creek the small parking area, and then past that the lights of the city beach, and beyond that, even though you couldn’t see it from here in the bar, the lake itself, the reason all these people first came here, the reason there was a town here at all. And then she could see way off in the distance the Cabinet Mountains, black against the fading sky. What if you could just fly off, what if you could just lift yourself up from the table and go right out that window, fly off right above the creek and the beach and high up over the water, sailing through the evening sky with the mountains coming closer, growing bigger, and what if you could soar above the peaks of that range until you found a skeleton in the trees, maybe in the thick brush by a stream, a skeleton wearing a coat and tie, wearing just the right socks to match. Would that accomplish anything? Or what if you could sail on past those mountains, what if there weren’t any skeleton at all, what if you could trace where that man had walked over the mountains, where he’d walked into Montana, where he’d grown a mustache maybe and renamed himself Rupert, moved on to Chicago, started a chain of clothing stores, and was waiting right now for something he couldn’t put his finger on, the name of something he’d left behind, a daughter he’d somehow forgotten? Would that make a difference?
    Out of the corner of her eye