Clothing Optional (Part II)

The couples had the best tent Dixon had ever seen, and that, God help him, was how it started.

There were four of them, two couples who traveled together and had clearly been doing this for years, and they had set up a canvas bell tent at the edge of the camping meadow that was less a tent than a small furnished country manor. There were lanterns. There were low cushions. And there was, wall to wall, layered three deep, a spread of plush overlapping rugs and sheepskins and something that might have been an actual Persian carpet, the whole floor of the place soft and deep and warm in the lantern light, and Dixon, walking past it in the dusk with Graham, stopped dead in his tracks.

"Oh," he said with great interest. "Oh, that looks really really comfortable."

One of the women tent owners, gold-lit in the tent mouth, followed his gaze to the floor and smiled. She was fifty or so, with a grey braid over one shoulder and the easy nature of a person that truly knew herself. "It's the best sleep in the whole place," she said. "Perhaps the best sleep anywhere in the world."

And here was the honest truth of Dixon in that moment, the truth he would try and mostly fail to explain to Brooklyn later: he was not thinking about the four people gazing at him. He was thinking about his hip. He was thinking about the rock that had been under his hip, and the tortilla-thick sleeping pad that had done nothing to blunt its blows, and the furnace-hot motel in Needles, and every other torture his spine had been subjected to since June. He was looking at that deep warm floor the way a starving man looks at bread, and, without being asked inside, he took off his shoes and he got down onto it to feel it, purely, innocently, as a man auditioning a surface for sleep.

It was, in fact, the most comfortable thing he had ever lain down on.

"Oh no," he said quietly, into the sheepskin. "This is a problem."

"Right?" said one of the men, delighted. He was a big soft-spoken guy with a white beard, and he was, Dixon noticed, wearing a sarong and nothing else.

Graham, from the tent mouth, said, "I'll see you at the van, pal," in the voice of a man who had seen this tent before and knew precisely what it was, and he was gone into the dusk before Dixon could ask what he meant by that.

Dixon lay there for a moment with his eyes half closed and his whole ruined back sending up flares of gratitude, and he became aware, in stages, that the four of them had settled down around him. Not on him exactly. Around him. A hand was placed warmly on his shoulder blade. Someone's leg came to rest softly against his. He could sense there was wine being passed around, and the low easy laughter of close friends, and the lantern light, and the enormous soft floor. Dixon’s mind was apart from his body. He was floating, as if on a bed of clouds, when he came to understand, roughly four seconds too late to have gracefully bowed out of it, that he had lain down in the exact geographic center of what might be referred to as a cuddle puddle.

"I want to be very clear about something," Dixon announced into the air, not moving, because moving would have meant leaving the carpet. "I came in here for the bedding."

"I came in for the bedding too and I never left," said the woman with the braid, and patted his chest, and all five of them laughed, warm and unbothered, and folded him into their group.

So that was how it happened. After a whole afternoon of nothing crossing a room to get to him, he finally crossed a room to something and that something was the world’s most comfortable sleeping surface.

Their names were June and Pete, and Marisol and Theo. June was the woman with the braid. Pete was the man with the beard and the sarong. Marisol was maybe forty, dark and compact, with a laugh that came out of her in one loud bark and a habit of finishing Theo's sentences. Theo was tall and pale and quiet and let her. They had been coming here together for nine years. They had met, June explained, with her head on Pete's stomach and one hand still resting on Dixon's chest as if he were a cat that she was fond of, in a pottery class in Eugene, all four of them, and the pottery had not lasted but this had.

"Is there a safe word?" Dixon asked no one in particular. He asked sincerely. He had learned to ask from Winter.

Marisol laughed, almost snorted actually. "Honey, it's just a cuddle among friends. The safe word is 'I'm going to go now.'"

"I'm not going to go now," said Dixon quietly.

"Yeah, we noticed," said Pete with a light chuckle.

Nobody was in any hurry to make something happen. Nobody was in a rush. They lay there and talked and sipped their wine. Dixon mostly kept his eyes closed and tried not to fully drift off to sleep. The floor was warm and the lantern light was soft. And the four people who were very used to touching each other, apparently, had room for one more. June's hand moved on Dixon’s chest in slow circles, the way his own thumb had moved on Hip's eye. He felt cared for the way he thought that Hip likely had felt. Then he made himself stop thinking about that, because he didn’t want to be thinking about the little dog at that moment with his shirt half unbuttoned in a group of strangers' tent.

Someone had unbuttoned his shirt. He wasn't sure who. He didn’t object.

Theo's hand was on his ankle. Dixon noted this, a man's hand on his ankle, not something he had felt for a long time. He considered how he felt about it, and found that he liked it about as much as the sheepskin rugs, in that it was warm and it was kind and it was a nice touch. Marisol had rolled in against his other side, all of her, and she smelled like woodsmoke and the hot-spring minerals and her mouth was very near his ear.

"You're thinking," she said, looking at him intensely as if reading his energy.

"I'm always thinking," Dixon admitted.

"We can tell. You've got a lot of thinking in your shoulders." She put her hand flat between them, the shoulders, and pressed. "What are you thinking about?" she asked.

"Honestly?" Dixon said easily. "Whether my back is going to crack if I move."

Dixon did move and his back cracked, loudly, a sound like a branch snapping, and Pete said "oh, there it is" with real satisfaction. Marisol laughed loudly again and June said "that's been in there since Atlanta," though he had not said anything to anyone about Atlanta, and Dixon lay there in the wreckage of his own spine and laughed with them, helplessly, with his eyes shut, a big laugh that came up in tiny little tremors from under everything in him.

June leaned in close and kissed him then. Again, it was unhurried and easy. She tasted of the wine she was drinking. Dixon kissed her back, suddenly feeling awake and alive. He could feel the approval of the others around him, and then he felt Marisol's hand turn him toward her, and he kissed her too. She moved her hand in his hair the way Sloane's hand had once back in the bar in Atlanta, and he thought of her briefly, before re-centering on the two women and two men around him, right here, right now.

"Okay, Boy Scout," he said, to himself, out loud. It came out of him unexpectedly and then he found he had to tell the whole story of Winter and the knot-work and the wax and wine flying through the air and how it had been a mess of the first order. They all laughed about this together. June asked if Dixon would like to tie her up, to which Dixon suggested that he did, in fact, tie some pretty good knots. Pete laughed so hard he had to sit up.

At some point, the lantern got turned down. The tent turned gold and then amber and then became a soft dark in the forest under the stars and trees. The sheepskin was under Dixon, and the floor was the best floor in the world, and these four people who had known each other for years made room for a man they had known for only an hour, and Dixon loved it.

He left the tent around 11:30, walking quietly under the stars, with his back feeling better than it had in a week and a small private grin he was glad no one could see. He walked back across the dark meadow to Graham's van thinking that his life had gotten extremely difficult to summarize, but in mostly very good ways.

While these thoughts were swirling through his head, that was exactly the moment when Cash called. To be clear, Cash never called unprompted. He was a teenager. He barely responded to texts.

Dixon’s phone lit up with an incoming video call. It was 11:40 at night. There on the little screen was his son's face, a picture taken at a Chick-fil-A in Atlanta. Dixon, standing barefoot in the middle of a nudist retreat with his clothes in disarray, answered the call on the first ring the way you answer when it's your kid, because you always answer when it's your kid.

"Hey, big guy. You ok? It’s late," he said with mild concern.

"Oh hey, Dad," Cash said. He was in bed, the painted compass on his ceiling behind him, his face illuminated by his phone in the otherwise dim light of his room. "I was just thinking about you. I haven’t gotten a postcard this week."

"Oh, shoot. I have one for you. I'm just sort of off the grid this week," Dixon said, happy underneath it all to find out that the teenager was even reading the postcards.

"Where are you?" Cash squinted at the screen. "It's like super dark. Are you in. . . a parking lot?"

"Yeah. Um, yes. I'm on a camping trip," Dixon said, which was true. "I’m up in the mountains kind of on the way to Bend from where you are. I’m with my friend Graham." Dixon knew that Cash didn’t know Graham, but he thought it would add some legitimacy to his situation to be with someone with a name.

Something moved at the bottom of Cash’s video window. Dixon could just make out the penny-colored shape of Magnolia. Little Magnolia, on Cash's bed, on Cash's feet, where she had clearly been sleeping happily every night since June. Maggie lifted her head at the sound of Dixon's voice coming out of the phone and looked at the screen.

"Aww. Is that Moo Moo?" Dixon asked.

"Yeah, she sleeps on my feet," Cash said. "She does it every night. Mom says it's. . . what’s the word she uses. . . unsanitary." He tipped the phone down so Dixon could see her, curled up in the blankets. Dixon stood in the dark of the parking lot and looked at the dog that he loved so much. His heart broke, but he didn’t let on to this.

"Hi, Moo Moo," he said softly to her. "You're doing a great job, little one."

Magnolia put her head back down and returned to her sleep.

"You good, Dad?" Cash asked, as the phone came back up to his face. "You seem like. . . I don't know. You've been doing a lot of weird stuff lately." It was the same thing Bobby had said. It was, Dixon was beginning to understand, the family verdict, arrived at independently from different points of view, and it was not wrong. "I mean, are you going to get a house somewhere? I’m just sort of wondering if you are. . .lost."

Dixon looked at his seventeen-year-old son through his phone. He had clearly called at 11:40 on a school night to check on his father, and here he stood in the dark in his bare feet and told him the only version of the truth a father gives a kid at that hour.

"I'm good, Cash. I promise. I'm really good. I'm seeing some amazing things out here. I don’t exactly have a place right now, but don’t worry about me. I’m an adult and I will figure things out. Plus, I’ve seen some crazy cool things. I saw the Milky Way the other night, right on the horizon like a paint brush of stars leading up across the sky. I saw a fox the other morning. And heck. I saw a whole herd of elk. The bull elk made a sound I can't even describe. It was. . . it was like someone was murdering someone. But it was super cool. It didn’t sound like something from this world. I promise, I'll send you a postcard tomorrow."

"Okay." Cash was quiet for a second. "Yeah, Elk sound pretty cool." There was a pause for a few seconds as Cash thought about what else to say. "OK dad. I was just wanted to check on you. I’ll talk to you later."

"Goodnight, son. Get some sleep. Oh and kiss the dog for me, please," Dixon said.

"Dad, I'm not kissing the dog for you," Cash said with mild teenage disgust.

"Oh jeez, you kiss that dog every chance you get, don't lie to me," Dixon answered.

"Goodnight, Dad," Cash said, and he was grinning when he hung up, and Dixon stood there for a while in the dark holding the phone.

Playing in this sceneOptionalThe Sit Boy Soundtrack Collection

►0:00 / 0:00

[verse]
I used to drive right past all the things,
The turnoffs and the signs.
I had a schedule and my reasons
And an excuse every time.
Then I found myself lookin’ harder
And making myself pause.
I’m taking time to see
And makin’ room for me.

[pre-chorus]
 Turns out you can be free and lost
 In the very same breath.
 I've been both since last summer
 And I'm still here. Yet.

[chorus]
 Life's a whole lot of optional,
 You pick what's right for you.
 But living ain't one of the options,
 That one you lean into.
 So take the optional (oh, oh)
 Most people never do.
 Yeah, take the optional (oh, oh)
 Most people never do.

[verse]
Now I sleep outside and stare straight up
Watch the stars come out above.
See the creatures in the wilds
And let them just be loved.
Take care of my friends
They take care of me too
Sometimes lose the shirt…
maybe the shorts too
Funny what life can bring
If you’re willing to let it do.

[pre-chorus]
Turns out you can hurt all over
And feel brand new inside.
I've been both since the summer started...
And I'm still here. I'm alive.

[chorus]
Life's a whole lot of optional,
You pick what's right for you.
But living ain't one of the options,
That one you lean into.
So take the optional (oh, oh)
Most people never do.
Yeah, take the optional (oh, oh)
Most people never do.

[bridge]
I’ve ordered everything on the menu,
Some things I won't describe to you.
But the best things I did all week, honest,
Are the things that you feel all the way inside
Just make sure to see ‘em through.
Some things you just have to do.

And when somebody asked me, am I okay,
I told them what was true.
I wasn't putting on a brave face
I was just being honest,
I had to!

[chorus]
Life's a whole lot of optional,
You pick what's right for you.
But living ain't one of the options,
That one you lean into.
So take the optional (oh, oh)
Most people never do.
Yeah, take the optional (oh, oh)
Most people never do.

[outro]
Most people never do...
I did.
And I'd do it all again with you.

That was clearly the bright version of things, he thought. He'd built a way to deliver the good news, the postcards, the I'm good, the elk and stars, instead of the everything else. But standing there in the dark of the forest, he understood that this time it wasn't a performance. He was good. He was actually better than good. That was the part he was going to have to figure out how to say to somebody eventually, but it was not going to be his kid at 11:40 on a school night. It was true, and the truth of it sat warm within him next to the ache that was no longer in his back.

He wandered back to the van and took the postcard out of his bag and looked at it in the dim light. Windsurfers, forever suspended in the air. He still had no pen. He had bought a pen in Hood River and it was somewhere in the bottom of his bag, under a week of clothes, and he was not going to dig for it at midnight.

"Tomorrow," he told the card, and put it back.

The thing on Saturday night that Graham had promised to attend was in Salem, conveniently on their path back to Portland.

Graham drove them down out of the mountains and into the green Willamette Valley in the afternoon. The land turned from forest to agriculture: hop fields and vineyards and berries. The closer they got to actual civilization the more Dixon's phone woke up and started catching up on a week of messages all at once, buzzing in a long stuttering cascade in the cupholder like a thing coming back to life.

Graham finally explained that the night’s activities were at a private club. It was a members' only swingers club. It was a discreet place, in a warehouse that was rented and decorated just for the once-monthly parties. It was owned by a couple whom Graham knew well and at times formed a throuple with. The members were mostly couples, but everyone had to come with a date, even if one was dating the owners. Since Sue and Dan were a couple that night, Graham was taking Dixon as his date. He warned him not to read too much into it. It wasn’t like they had to "do" anything together, he told him. Graham was going to join Sue and Dan and a few other couples in a big communal bed at the center of the space.

"I know, this might seem a little crazy, but you don't have to do anything," Graham said, pulling into the lot in front of the building in a nicer looking industrial park. "That's the first rule of the whole world. Everything is optional and nobody has to do anything they don't want to. You can get a club soda and watch people be free and then leave if you want. Or not. It’s genuinely up to you."

"I contain multitudes," Dixon said dramatically, which was Bobby's line, and Graham laughed.

"You contained four of them on Wednesday," Graham said, laughing and getting out of the van. "Pace yourself, friend," he added with a grin.

Inside it was more stylish and tasteful than Dixon had braced for. There was low light and good music and a bar and people who looked like accountants and nurses and one guy Dixon was fairly sure coached youth soccer. Everyone was dressed nicely. The men were mostly in ties and many of the women were in fancy dresses and heels. Graham explained to Dixon that in clubs like these, the men needed to be clothed at all times in the public areas, but women were basically allowed to do whatever they liked. If they wanted to strip down to their lingerie, or less, no one would prevent them from doing so. This meant that about half the women were in lingerie, while all of the men were fully dressed. This seemed odd to Dixon, but he guessed there was some legal reason behind it.

The club had a main space with a large dance floor in the center, bars on its edges. Couples were grouped around the sides at high-top tables with their drinks watching the dancing. Along the back wall there were a number of rooms, all of which had beds in them and all of which also had windows for people on the outside to see what was happening inside. About half of the rooms were occupied with various numbers of people having sex in groups. At the far corner of the space, there was a huge round bed that Dixon was fairly certain could accommodate at least twenty people. It was flanked by semi-circular leather couches. A few couples were sitting on the couches, but the giant bed was empty at the moment. Graham spotted his friends, Sue and Dan across the room, and pointed them out to Dixon. "Aren’t they cute?" he said to Dixon over the loud music. "OK, Dix, I’m going to go have sex with my friends. You want to join us?" he asked.

"No thanks. I think I’ll take a peek around first," Dixon said with a smile. "Go have fun," he said, waving his fingers at him like Graham had done to him outside the dispensary in Bend.

Dixon went and got a club soda with a lime and found that he was more curious than scandalized by the scene around him. He had told Sloane once, a long time ago and half a country away, that he was probably more ‘spicy’ in that department than he let on. He was not shocked at all actually. He was, if anything, a little charmed by the place. The people seemed happy, free and fulfilled.

A woman in a black mesh body suit covered in sparkly diamond-looking stones came and sat on Dixon’s lap. She had long brown hair in the most luscious curls that Dixon had ever seen. "Is this seat taken?" she said with a broad grin. "I suppose I should have asked first, before I sat down," she said with a wink.

"I do, hereby, grant you permission, to sit on my lap," Dixon said, lighting up. Her name was Dawn and she was miraculous. She was in an open marriage, she explained. Her husband and his girlfriend were over in one of the rooms. She’d been a part of it, but needed a break.

Dixon was just about to ask the first of about a hundred questions, when, at that very moment, his phone lit up, because of course it did, and it was another family wanting to interview him for a dog sit, right then, on video, because, fucking of course. They had texted a few minutes before and said they were trying to decide between a few people who were waiting on them to make a choice and they wanted to talk to him before they did so. If he wasn’t available, they had said, it was fine. They would pick one of the others. Dixon scanned the messages on his phone quickly, groaned loudly, and said very kindly to Dawn, "I’m so sorry. I have to take this. It’s. . . work. . . sort of. Can I come back in a minute?"

"Sure," Dawn said. "Unless I find another taker first," she said with a wink. She kissed him softly on the cheek and then added, "but I really don’t want another taker. Come back soon. I give the best oral you’ll have in your entire life. I could suck the label off of a bottle of Coke." She stood up, Dixon quivering slightly, and Dixon tapped the keyboard on his phone "calling you now" and made his way out of the club.

There was only one place quiet enough, and clothed enough, to take a semi-professional video call, and it was Graham's van out in the parking lot. Dixon went outside and climbed into the back of the Sprinter. He wondered, not for the first time that week, why every person who needed something from him now needed to see his face while they asked for it. He propped the phone on the little counter, buttoned his shirt correctly, fluffed his hair, put on his settled-competent-man face, and dialed.

They were lovely. They were a retired couple, Sherry and Don, with a Bernedoodle named Molly and a tortoise named Cabbage who had, Don said with real pride, outlived two of their cars. They asked good questions. Sherry had a list written on index cards and was going down the list with a pen. Don explained that they had never left Molly in her eight years and it was finally time for them to take a vacation. Dixon answered their questions calmly. He told stories that made them laugh and warmed their hearts. He explained that just because he was in between houses he still wanted to care for animals and that this all made him feel like he was contributing something to the world in a very personal way. Sherry had stopped writing and was just listening, visibly won over, when the side door of the van slid open and a woman fell through it.

Dixon straightened up with a start. His eyes got wide as he regarded the woman, suddenly slumped on the floor next to him. He tried to keep eye contact with Sherry and Don, but he was losing the battle.

She was young and very drunk and she was clearly not okay. She'd wandered out of the club to get some air and somehow found the one open van. She came in sort of sideways and thumped down hard on the floor and said, "Ouch," in a very weak voice. Dixon knew that voice. He'd heard it last at a rooftop bar in Las Vegas. He'd remembered walking a version of it to an elevator at four in the morning.

Dixon looked at the phone. He looked at the woman. He looked at the phone again. He was still trying to tell a story about Hip. The woman on the floor had turned a color a person should not turn.

"I am so sorry," he said to Sherry and Don, and he really meant it. The phone was still propped up on the counter and was still connected to the couple. "Someone needs help here. Give me a minute. Please don't go anywhere. I’ll be right back," he said, already moving away and out of their view.

And then he stopped being the man in the interview and became the other man, the one who had been walking people to safety his whole life. He got down on the floor of the van next to her. He put a hand on her back. "Hey. Hey, I've got you. You're okay. What's your name?" He found the water Graham kept in the door, cracked it, put it in her hands and closed her fingers around it. "Just take small sips. There you go. Not too fast," he instructed her. He reached for the little trash bin from under the counter and had it ready and he held her hair back when she needed to use it. He talked to her softly and steadily, the way he'd talked to Hip through her nail trim. He just talked about nothing: about the cool air, about how she was doing great, about how they were going to find her people in a minute and not one second before she was ready.

He found out that her name was Kayla and that she was twenty-six. She had come with a friend named Jess who was somewhere in the club, and it was her first time at a place like this, and she had had three of something pink to get brave, and then a fourth.

"I told Jess I was fine," she said, mumbling into the bin. "I kept telling her I was fine."

"Yeah," Dixon said. He had his hand on her back, moving it in the small slow circles. "I know that one. I've been telling people that since June," he said with a chuckle.

She looked up at him. She really looked into his eyes then. "Were you, fine?"

"Sometimes," he said. He moved her hair out of her face and held it back again. "Sometimes not. You're going to be fine, though. That part's true. Nothing’s really wrong. You just feel wrong right now, but it will pass by tomorrow."

He held the bin and held her hand and he told her she was doing a great job, and he meant it.

This all took about fifteen minutes. When she was looking a little less ghostly and a lot steadier, he walked her back to the door of the club and put her into the hands of a friend who'd been frantically looking for her, a girl with a shaved head who had clearly been about to cry. He made sure, the way he always made sure, watching for longer than strictly necessary, that the friend was the safe kind of friend and not the other kind, and only then did he go back to the van.

The phone was still on the counter, still connected, still showing Sherry and Don, who had not gone anywhere. They had listened to the whole thing and were still there.

"Oh my goodness," Dixon said when he saw the phone. "I am so sorry about that," Dixon started. "That was not. . .um. . .that's not usually how these calls. . ."

"Dix," Sherry said, and her eyes were a little wet around the edges, and her index cards were nowhere in sight. "Please come watch Molly for us. You’re exactly the kind of person that we can leave her with for the first time in her life."

"We hadn't decided," Don cut in. "We'd talked to some people. But we decided about ten minutes ago when you were helping that girl."

Dixon sat in the back of the van and didn't know what to say, which happened to him rarely.

"You took care of that girl even though we were in the middle of talking," Sherry said. "You forgot we were here. And we got to see you in action." She smiled at him through the little screen. "Molly is going to love you. So will Cabbage."

Dixon penciled Molly and Cabbage onto the calendar in his head before he'd hung up.

Then he sat in the dark van in the parking lot outside a swingers club in Salem, Oregon, with the music thumping faintly through the walls of the building, and he decided not to go back in. He really wanted to go and dive into something with Dawn in her sparkly mesh bodysuit, but instead he sat there a while and just let the night be what it was.

He thought about Hip standing at the cabinet. He thought about the fox that had needed nothing from him at all, and how beautiful that had been. He loved both of those things in very different ways. He felt that both of them could be true and important to him at the same time.

Graham eventually found him there an hour later. He stood leaning in the side door with his tie loosened and for some reason his reading glasses back on top of his head.

"You left," Graham said. "I looked up and you were gone."

"Yeah. I got a call and then a girl got sick in your van. But I cleaned it up. It's fine," he said, somewhat sadly, suddenly thinking of Dawn. "I met this amazing woman named Dawn, but we got interrupted."

Graham looked at him for a moment with his lawyer look, and then he nodded, his small nod, and climbed in. "Oh yeah, Dawn, huh. She could suck the label off of a Coke bottle, that one."

Dixon groaned.

"So this girl, you took care of her and she’s good now." he said and it was not a question. "Of course you did." He started the engine. "You know that's the whole trip, right? That's the thing I wanted you to see on Saturday. I just didn't know it would be in the parking lot."

They drove back north on Sunday, out of the valley and up toward Portland, and Dixon finally caught up with the world that had been waiting for him.

Brooklyn called, on video, to get the real story, because Brooklyn always got the real story, that was their deal.

"So let me make sure I have this," she said. She was dressed in expensive yoga pants and a matching sports halter top. She had her coffee and she was pacing, the phone going around her kitchen in Atlanta, the cabinets and the windows and then the cabinets again. "You spent the week at a nudist hot spring in the mountains of Oregon, went to a swingers club with your new bi-bestie Graham, you fell into a, I'm sorry, a cuddle puddle, you took a work call standing on a trail in the woods, and you booked two dog sits, one of them because a girl threw up in a van."

"That's essentially accurate and not a bad summary of the week," he said.

"And the cuddle puddle. Was that a. . . I mean, was that more cuddle, Dixon, or was that actually a puddle?"

"Well, it started as a cuddle. There were definitely puddles at the end," he said with a laugh.

"Oh my God." She set the coffee down. She picked it back up. "Okay. Okay. I'm a grown woman. Just breathe. What was the best part of the week? And please, I am praying, don't say the puddle."

Dixon looked out the van window at the hop fields going by. He thought about the carpet, and June's hand, and the fox, and the elk, and the rock.

"Honestly?" he said. "Helping the girl in the van."

Brooklyn stopped pacing.

"Of course it was," she said quietly. She was looking at him through the little screen with the look she got, the one that saw straight through the white-washed version to whatever was really beneath it. Whatever she saw seemed to satisfy her. "You've completely lost your mind. And yet, I have never seen you look better. I hate that those two things are related. Are you eating?"

"A lawyer made me mushrooms and eggs in the desert," Dixon said proudly.

"Are you happy?" She asked it, but it came out more like an accusation.

"Yeah," he said. "I think I actually am."

"Good," Brooklyn said fiercely, and her chin tightened the way it did when she wasn't going to cry on camera, and she hung up before either of them had to deal with it.

Sloane texted while he was still thinking about his conversation with Brooklyn.

Sloane: OK I owe you like four responses. I was in the south of France for Amelie's wedding, which, do not get me started, my phone was basically a paperweight for a week. Did you see Riley on Kimmel?? He killed it. My friend knew someone on the show, I just about died.

Dixon: I didn't see it. I've been in the woods. Riley on Kimmel though. That's amazing.

Sloane: It's totally happening for him. #WILD. Anyway I never got your recording, France ate it. Can you send it to me again?

Dixon pulled up the recording of Gone By Morning he'd made in Janet's kitchen, the one with Juno howling on take four. He sent it again now, and this time it went through. He watched the three dots circulate and waited the way you wait when it's someone whose opinion you've decided to care about.

The dots went for a while.

Sloane: Dixon. I've listened to it three times. It’s fantastic. Such vivid story-telling. Now the dog howling should not work but it does give it a kind of authenticity it would not have without it. I feel like I was there on the road with you.

Sloane: You need to do more of this. I'm not being nice. I don't have time to be nice. More of this please.

He read it twice. Then he put the phone in his lap and looked out at Portland up ahead.

Sloane: PS - I admit, the line about the girl with the turquoise earrings made me a little jealous. But, I’m ok. Please keep working on this. I want to know the story even if you’re, like, getting it on with tons of hot chicks. ;)

He read the message and thought about her feelings. He thought about how people might take his work for the first time, even if it were his fictional telling of his stories. He decided to process that more before he did anything with it. He also decided that he needed to think more about how he felt about her before he engaged with her on the topic of the two of them.

He typed out three emojis: a guitar, a dog and a record. He hit send.

Graham dropped him at his RAV4 in the parking lot where they'd left it, and the two of them stood there a minute in the way of men who'd had a real week and weren't going to make a big deal about it.

"Thank you," Dixon said, warmly. "Genuinely. That was. . . I don't have the words yet. I'll text you when I find them."

"Between-everything," Graham said, suddenly with an earnest tone in his voice. "I told you it was a real place." He brought his reading glasses down off his head and onto his nose, a man returning to the other world. He peered through the glasses closely at Dixon. "You'll find a home again someday, little one. I keep telling you. It just might look like nothing anybody would recognize as a home."

"That's the second time you've told me that," Dixon said.

"It's the second time it's been true." Graham raised his glasses and got back in the van. "For what it's worth, you took the optional this week. Most people never do. I’m kind of proud of you." He smiled and started to slide the door closed. "Go watch your dogs, Dix." He shut the door with a loud slam. Dixon watched as he drove away.

He got into the RAV4, which still, faintly smelled of lavender, and would for a long time, and he sat for a second before he started it. He had a house in Seattle waiting for him tomorrow with two big dogs and an axolotl named S'more. Past that he had a whole calendar filling up in pencil. He had a camera full of new pictures of windsurfers and mushrooms and the Milky Way. He had a fox that had looked at him and kept walking. He had a bull that had bugled at the whole cold world, a girl he'd gotten water into, a woman with a grey braid who'd patted his chest, and a text from Sloane that said more of this.

He got out of the car one more time, opened the back, and found the envelope in his bag, the one with the pictures from the night in Atlanta with Margaret or whatever her real name was. He'd had some photos printed from one of the disposable cameras along the way. He slid two shots in with the others: one of orange chanterelles glowing in the dark forest duff and one of a man hanging in the air over the river on his kite board. He put them next to the mailbox photographs and the wedding at the bar and the one of him doing his Gene Kelly impression around a lamppost. He closed the envelope and put it back. The pictures belonged together. That was all. The ones from the night he started looking at the details of the world again and the ones from the week he'd started living in the world again.

Then he dug out a pen.

He sat on the back bumper with the windsurfer card on his knee and wrote small, because the card was small and Cash had told him not to make them weird and long.

Cash, Back in the Gorge where I sent you the first one of these. Stopped this time. Got a picture of a guy ten feet in the air over the river. Slept on a rock. Saw thirty elk. Ate mushrooms a lawyer picked in the woods and lived. Kiss the dog. Love Dad

There was a mailbox at the corner of the lot. He walked it over and dropped it in and it made the small squeaky sound mailboxes make.

Then he got into the RAV4 and turned its actual metal key in its actual metal slot and pointed the car north, toward Seattle, toward a new set of dogs he hadn't met yet, and pulled out of the lot.

At the light, before the on-ramp, he picked up the phone and sent a text he'd owed all week, this one to Winter who had told him to write from wherever he ended up.

Dixon: Survived the woods. The Boy Scout is intact. Mostly.

The traffic light turned green. He put the phone down and headed north. Seattle was three hours away and he planned to use the time to think about what he’d experienced that week, and maybe start writing a song about it.

Published August 30th, 2026 from Denver, Colorado