Dearly Departing

put her things in the back seat. “You should try and nod off yourself on the way there. I’m going to make you drive most of the way through Saskatchewan starting bright and early in the morning.”
Dawn groaned. “Ugh... the prairies are so flat and boring.”
Ray pinched her cheek and drove out of the parking lot. “Boring as hell. But you have to drive through the prairies to make it to the mountains.”
“I’ve never seen the Rockies before.”
“Been a long time for me, too. Only went through them once by car. Mom and Dad drove us when we were kids in ’82.
“They had roads back then?”
“Did I say car? We travelled on horseback.”
Dawn was asleep by the time the last few strings of hotel and gas-station lights were fading in the rear-view mirror. Ray set the cruise to a hundred and ten and headed off into the black of night.
The first thing Tyler did when he woke up on Dawn’s couch was check for his wallet. It wasn’t in his back pocket. Shit. He saw it a moment later, sitting open on the glass coffee table. He reached for it and looked inside. Driver’s license. Birth certificate. Social Insurance... Goddamn it. She stole the credit card.
He dug around through the clothes and blankets on the couch and eventually found it buried between two of the cushions. I must have tried hiding it just before the crazy bitch attacked me. Tyler put it back in the wallet and shoved it deep into a front pocket of his jeans. She’s not going to get it in there. I’ll break her goddamn hands if she tries.
The credit card was all he had. It was a five-thousand dollar fix meant to get his life back together. Our fix. For both of us. Why did she get so mad? Doesn’t she understand how much I love her?
He checked his watch. 10:03 PM. What day? He looked for the date on his phone. His dry mouth went suddenly drier. Tyler had been passed out on his girlfriend’s couch for twenty-four hours. He had to stop the drugs. Dawn had been right about that part of their relationship. Too much of a good thing resulted in too many lost days. He had to slow down. They both had to cut back and concentrate on their finances.
Didn’t she tell me she was fired? That made two of them. Tyler had been given his walking papers at the beginning of the week. It all came back to the too much fun, too many late and lost days stuff. Employers didn’t put up with that shit. Tyler had been down that road far too many times. The credit card would’ve made things better. They could have started over again. They would start over again.
Where is she?
He remembered grabbing Dawn by the throat. Tyler hadn’t planned on hurting her. He was merely defending himself and trying to shake some sense into her. She kicked me in the balls. I fell back... pushed her away from me. He saw the broken remote on the floor and spotted the dent in the drywall. She fell. It wasn’t my fault.
Tyler assumed she was sleeping in the bedroom. He went to the kitchen and drank two full glasses of water.
We’re going to be okay. We’re going to forget this ever happened, and make things work.
Dawn wasn’t in the bedroom. Shit. Shit. Shit. Another thought gripped him. She’d gone to the washroom and tried taking a shower. How hard did she hit the wall? What if she’d fallen inside the bathtub?
The washroom was empty.
The cold water he’d swallowed down lurched around in his gut. Tyler thought it might come rushing back up. “That bitch... She left me.”
How far could she get in one day? Where would she go?
She had said something about her grandmother dying. Her Grummy. Tyler racked his brain trying to figure where the old woman lived. Was she even in Winnipeg? The phonebook. He would go through the listings and call every goddamn Wallace there was.
Tyler searched for it in the living room. He went through the cupboards of the kitchen, and ended up in the bedroom, rummaging through Dawn’s dresser. He left the room in an even messier state but didn’t find what he was looking for. I’ll phone her dad. He’ll know where his own mother lives.
He went for his cell phone and stopped. Dumb idea. There was a good chance Dawn had already told her father about the fight. She would twist the story around—make Tyler look like the bad guy. Maybe her old man was already looking for him. He had to get out of the apartment.
Halfway down the stairs Tyler remembered the rest. Dawn was going to pick her father up from the airport. That would’ve been this morning... maybe this afternoon. They were probably gone already, but Tyler was a hopeful kind of guy. Planes got delayed all the time. Flights could get cancelled altogether.
He got into his truck and started for the airport. Tyler had no desire to tangle with Dawn’s father. The bastard was big and scary-looking. But he was in his fifties or sixties. Tyler was twenty-six. He wouldn’t let an old janitor stop him from patching things up with the woman he loved.
And if Dawn couldn’t understand that, well too bad. Sometimes a guy had to put his foot down in a relationship to make things work.

 
 
 
 
Chapter 6
 
Ray wasn’t worried about the eggs. They could keep a long time in the fridge. The half pack of bacon concerned him a little more. The best before date was still two weeks away, but he’d opened it the day before leaving on vacation. Raw bacon had no discernable smell to speak of—it was tough deciding whether the stuff was spoiled