What We Were

He thought he was driving toward a city. He was driving toward everything he’d ever left running. – Always (Unpublished) by Josephine Graham

Nic

Two days of highway, one motel in Billings that smelled like cigarettes no amount of Febreze could fix, and the only thing that's changed is how tight my chest gets the closer I get to Omaha.

I crossed into Montana yesterday afternoon and didn't stop thinking until somewhere around the South Dakota border, when I couldn't handle the silence anymore and turned on some music. Skipped three songs in the first twenty minutes. Two of them were mine.

The road feels flat and endless; well, it does until it dumps onto I-29 and Iowa clips by so fast on my left it barely counts. But it's just enough to remind me Nebraska's close now.

The skyline comes up the way it always does. Slow, then all at once.

Downtown first, glass and brick stacked against a late August sky that is gold and going soft at the edges. I take the exit before I mean to, muscle memory steering me into the Old Market before my brain catches up, and then I'm crawling down cobblestone streets I haven't driven in eight years, past brick storefronts that look exactly the same and somehow completely different.

There's a new coffee shop where the record store used to be. A boutique where Lonnie's Pizza was, the one with the garlic knots Andy used to bring home on Friday nights when Dad was — when Dad wasn't around to notice the extra ten bucks missing from his wallet.

I could cut over a few streets from here. It's faster; it's how anyone who lives here would do it.

I go around instead. The long way, six extra minutes through streets I don't need to drive through, past a park and a Walgreens and a stretch of nothing in particular.

I pass a bar with a neon sign shaped like a football helmet. The End Zone. New. Has to be; I don't remember it, and I spent enough nights in this part of town that I'd remember a place called The End Zone. I'm pretty sure it used to be a dive bar, where the bartenders rarely looked too hard at the IDs. I tried at seventeen and got laughed out the door by a bartender who told me to come back when I had a better fake. I can't even remember what that place was called now. Just the burn of being seventeen and humiliated and certain, certain, that nothing would ever feel that embarrassing again.

God, the things we don't know at seventeen.

My phone buzzes in the cupholder. I don't look at it. I know who it is; Derek's been calling since yesterday, and I've been letting it ring because I don't have anything to tell him that he wants to hear. Finish the album, or they drop you. That's the gist of our conversations now. Two years since the nomination, two years of label patience running thin, and I've got six songs that are fine and one that won't come no matter how many nights I sit with the guitar until my fingers ache.

I came back to Omaha because, well, most of my material had been written here, or inspired by things here. It seemed like the only logical solution to fix all my problems. Besides if I don't come up with any more songs and my label decides to drop me at least, I'll have a crash mat in the form of my brothers.

The residential streets are quieter, slower, trees heavy and green and arching over the road like they're trying to hide the houses underneath them. Some of these houses I know. Knew the families in them, knew which driveways had basketball hoops and which yards had dogs that would chase you to the property line and stop dead like there was an invisible fence even when there wasn't.

And then there's the house.

It hasn't changed much. That's the thing that gets me. The entire drive I imagined what it would look like. How different it probably is. Except it's the same for the most part. Aside from the fresh coat of blue paint and some minor repairs, it's the same as I left it. Same porch. Same narrow window at ground level on the side of the house, the one that used to fog up every winter because the basement never got warm enough, the one Gabe and I used to crack open and climb out of when we were supposed to be asleep.

I park at the curb.

For a long minute I sit with the engine off, hands on the wheel, and I let myself feel it — the whole weight of it, eight years compressed into my sternum like a fist.

Three months. Finish the record, hand it in, go home.

That's the plan. That's the entire plan, start to finish, and there is nothing else in it.

I say that to myself twice before I get out of the car, which is once more than a true thing needs.

The front door opens before I'm halfway up the walk.

Andy fills the doorway the way he always has, bigger than the frame, like the house was built for someone smaller and he just decided to outgrow it anyway. He's got a kitchen towel over one shoulder and motor oil on his hands, because of course he does, because some things really don't change.

He doesn't say anything for a second. Just looks at me. Like he's comparing me to what I'd looked like the last time he'd seen me.

“You got old,” he says, a sly smile creeping out from his stone-faced expression.

It startles a laugh out of me, rough and surprised. “I could say the same about you.”

"I'm thirty-three. I'm allowed." He steps back, holds the door, and something in his shoulders eases. “You gonna stand there or you coming in?”

I look past him, into the house. The hallway. The stairs. The kitchen light on at the end of it, warm and yellow, exactly the way it used to be on the good nights, the nights that were quiet enough to feel safe.

My chest does that thing again. Tighter this time.

“Yeah,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel. “Yeah, I'm coming in.”

I follow my brother inside, and the door closes behind me, and Omaha swallows me whole.