Road to Arcadia: the Path East

Chapter Thirty-five: Main Street

He couldn't shake the constant punches of nostalgia hitting his senses every five seconds. The smell of the inside of his mom's sedan. The heat of the mid-morning sun on the seatbelt. The feel of crumbs sneakily laying across the seams of the seat's upholstery. Every movement, every sensation was fitting to him like memory foam.

It was only a five-minute drive into town. There was traffic on the roads, but no congestion yet.

The ride was mostly quiet, with Kai's mother only occasionally pointing out subtle changes in road signs as they drove. When they pulled into town, she found a reliable spot in a public parking lot. There were plenty to choose from.

From his vantage point, Kai could see a handful of pedestrians meandering the streets.

"It's busy today," he commented idly.

His mom laughed. "Busy? This is the quietest I've seen it in a while."

He contemplated that, trying to dig in his memory reserves for what this street looked like in his childhood. He supposed she was right. "In my defense, once you get west of the lakes, any street with more than two people on it is probably a metropolis, anyway."

She hummed an amused lick in response, leading them both further down the road.

"So what's all this stuff that's changed?" he asked out loud. "So far it looks like the same place to me."

She shook her head, amusement yet to fade. "What, did you think it was going to be one big, obvious thing that changed in the past year?"

He shrugged. "Well, that was what happened that one time when the water tower fell outside Gram's town."

"You always have a flair for the dramatic, my dear. Listen, if there's something that has changed and you don't notice, I'll be sure to point it out to you, okay?"

They continued on.

Kai knew there were things he had to tell her sooner than later, but the words were still too firmly lodged in his chest to get them out. He tried to bide the time by addressing other things on his unwritten agenda. "Uh, how's everyone else been?"

She nodded carefully. "Good, good. We're all hanging in. The neighbors ask about you all the time, you know. They always ask if we've heard from you."

The statement caught him off guard. He had assumed after he left home, he was as good as a figment, a dissipating specter whose name washed itself clean of those around him like a white sheeted ghost. "Oh yeah? Even Mrs. Romero? I thought she would've been happy to see me run off." He couldn't help but imagine the crotchety old lady always scowling from her front porch every time he would walk past.

His mom hesitated. "No, Mrs. Romero asked about you, too, for a while after you left. But--she's no longer with us now, sadly."

His shoulders tensed. "Mrs. Romero died? What happened?"

She avoided his gaze as she recounted the story. "She was having trouble keeping up with the bills and they turned off her heat before the big ice storm in January." Her voice caught. "None of us knew, of course. We would've been happy to help, but I think she just didn't want to be a bother."

He replayed her words like a broken record in his head. "So she wasn't sick or anything? She just--froze to death?"

His mother nodded once. "We were lucky we didn't have any sustained power outages during that storm, or we could have lost a lot more neighbors."

Arcadia may as well have been a blip on the radar. Now Kai was fully resubmerged into the fuckery that was his hometown. A poor--granted, crabby--old woman dies of a completely preventable death and the only response anyone can offer is well, could have been worse.