Page 85 of The Merger
“So, we were south of Ketchum in a remote section of the Rocky Mountains. I live almost two hours south in Twin Falls. I could have dropped you off in Ketchum, but there’s nowhere to wait there without spending a lot of money. Pretty much everything in the Sun Valley area costs an arm and a leg. I hope the two of you don’t mind, but I’m taking you to my house so you can get cleaned up and we can get you some different clothes while you call your people.”
I turned my head to look out the window. “Works for me. As you can tell, we don’t have our cards or any cash.”
The town was bigger than I’d have thought for a town in Idaho. Not that I’d given much thought to Idaho, ever. It was one of the few places I’d never taken a job as an interim CEO. She laughed as she noticed me taking it in. “First time in Idaho, I see.”
“This place is actually pretty amazing. I’m a little shocked I’ve never heard of it,” Sabrina said.
Claire laughed. “Well, we try to keep it to ourselves. Keeps the Californians away. Or at least it did. I’m just glad my Steve and I bought our place years ago. Costs have skyrocketed the last several years. There’s no way we’d be able to move here now. Just like that cabin. Steve’s had that since the late sixties. Now anything near Sun Valley is obscenely expensive.”
While Sabrina helped Claire make dinner, I stepped out onto the front porch and tried to get myself together. The weather had a bit of a bite to it as the sun started to set over the Snake River Canyon, but the colors spreading across the sky gave me something to focus on long enough for the pressure in my chest to ease up.
The loud thud of Steve’s cane on the porch let me know I wasn’t alone anymore. He hobbled over. The thump of his boot mixed with the thud of his cane until he joined me where I leaned against his porch rail.
“This is God’s country, here. Been all over the world, and never found another place like it.” He sighed as he took in the expanse of the canyon lit in reds and oranges.
“The maps in the cabin, were those from your travels?” Making small talk seemed like the thing to do under the circumstances.
A fond smile lit up his face. “Some of them were from when I was young. After high school I bummed around the country. I fancied myself a bit of a beatnik in those days. I didn’t want to be another office drone, and setting out on the road was my way of bucking the system.”
“Is that how you met Claire?”
“In a way. I met her here actually. She grew up here. I was making my way around the country, by this point I was in my mid-thirties. My family had all but given up on me since I was determined to waste my life doing odd jobs and refusing to set down roots. I went to a greasy spoon on the edge of town, and Claire was my waitress. From that point on I made a point of rolling through town at the same time every year. She should have given up on me.”
“What changed? She said it was ten years from the time you met until you married, is that right?” I couldn’t help but see parallels between our stories. Not strong ones, but we’d both found the woman we knew we were meant to be with and spent years without her.
“I was a fool for ten years, yes,” he replied. “It didn’t take me long before I knew I wanted her to be in my life, but every time I came back to town I expected to find her married. She met me at the diner even when she didn’t work there anymore. For a couple of weeks every year we spent all our time together. Those two weeks carried me the rest of the year.”
I waited for him to collect his thoughts. Even nearly fifty years later their time apart weighed on him. That was a feeling I knew well. When he didn’t speak, I felt a need to fill the silence. One of my truths for the one he shared.
“Sabrina and I got married on a whim a little over five years ago. We met at a bar in Las Vegas. It was nearly empty, and we were both hiding from obligations. I was trying to reconcile working for my father. A man who, to this day, refuses to acknowledge me, but still insisted I take a job with his company. I hated it almost as much as I hated him.”
“She was there for her twenty-first birthday celebration with some friends from college. They wanted to go clubbing, but she didn't, so they left her in the casino to fend for herself.”
“Those don’t sound like very good friends,” he said.
“She hasn’t seen or spoken to them that I know of since she graduated.”
He grunted. “Good riddance.”
“We hit it off instantly, and I knew she was the one. We got married, but she didn’t meet me in the morning like we’d planned. I found out later that one of her friends was walking around without covering her drink.”
He listened as I told him how she forgot about me, and the years I worked to get her back.
“You asked what changed. I guess the answer is me. I knew it was time for me to finally settle down. Grow some roots. I moved to town, started a construction company. It took a few more years to break even, and a couple more before I started making a steady profit. Even then I believed I was too old for her, but the stubborn woman was still single. One day she met me right here on the canyon and said-”
“Are you done yet?” Claire chimed in from the doorway. “Stubborn old fool that he was-well still is-I had to spell it out for him.”
Steve shrugged, not disputing what she said. “We married a couple months later. The company I started was doing well enough that we were able to travel from time to time. She collected the rest of the maps with me.”
“What about the keys?” Sabrina asked, joining Claire by the door.
The old couple smiled. “Those are as much our story as the maps. The diary keys were for the journal I started keeping the night I met Steve,” Claire began.
“The hex keys were from the furniture I put together for our first place. There are keys to homes, cars, basically every stop along this road we’ve traveled together,” Steve finished.
He looked over at us. “Now, don’t go thinking it’s been all rainbows. We’ve had struggles along the way. We’d have liked to have a family, but that wasn’t in the cards for us.”
Claire made a sound. “That was hard. It took some work to accept it would only ever be the two of us, but our life was as it was supposed to be.”