Archive of Our Own

It’s seventeen minutes past the hour all up and down the west coast, and here too at your beloved WDSP, the Dispatch. Weatherman says to hunker down out there, grab that someone special close to you and hold ‘em tight. As for the rest of us, alone through the wind and the rain, well. Al Green wants to get next to you. You wanna get next to me? I’ll be with you all night, spinning records til the storm takes me out. And if it does, baby, I’ll meet you in your dreams… 

--

The motel is far enough away from Los Angeles that those traveling west in search of Hollywood stay the night but close enough that those getting the hell out of Dodge drive right past. That means prime time for Buck starts around 10 pm. Weary travelers decide to bed down for the night, blinking heavily against the overpowering fluorescents in the lobby after hours of pitch black highways as they try to negotiate him down from $12 a night - that’s highway robbery, that is, I’ll be out of your hair come sun up. Or they decide to top off on gas to try and make it those few extra hours, allowing Buck, as he pumps, to sneak a look into the backseats of Pintos and station wagons full to bursting with someone’s entire life stacked so precariously it’ll surely come tumbling out the second they pop the trunk.

Buck wishes there was no telling what’ll come out of a storm, but there’s only two possible answers and whether it’s red or black, the house always wins. He should be sweeping the floor but the snap of cold that the storm brought in has tightened up his ankle and he’s no good with a broom and a cane. It’s been a long time since he felt the flush of a job well done, let alone sought it out. There’s nothing to overachieve on if nobody expects anything from you in the first place. He’s betting on black tonight anyway.

From behind the front desk, he can see the lights at the diner next door flicker before they shutter off for good for the night. Once upon a time, the diner had been open twenty-four hours, but once Bobby had taken over, he’d wrangled for himself a tidy 10 pm to 4 am break with the promise to vend a few sandwiches out of the lobby fridge for the latecomers. The boss had Buck up a ladder to finally unscrew that part of the sign off earlier this year and he’d still taken it out of Buck’s paycheck when he dropped the damn thing and cracked the neon.

Collar turned up to the snapping wind, Bobby jogs his way from his door to Buck’s to deliver him a plate of food, wrapped up in so many layers of Saran Wrap to protect it from the wind and sand that Buck’ll need a knife to carve it open. Luckily that’s what Bobby hands him next, a fork and steak knife bundled in flimsy paper napkins. “You’re gonna be okay tonight, kid?”

“What’s the over/under on out of season stormy weather check-ins?” Buck asks as he reveals meatloaf and roast potatoes, extra ketchup across both. The good stuff. Thank god for Bobby Nash.

“Zero?” Bobby guesses. He slides past the front desk, even though he’s not supposed to, and unloads his paper bag of sandwiches into the fridge.

“Well, then I’m betting over,” Buck calls. “It’s Mr. Han’s lucky night: if he died out here tonight, the ambulance wouldn’t come ‘til morning. I just couldn’t handle the smell.”

When he rounds the corner, Bobby levels him with the unimpressed look Buck was goading out of him, but doesn’t otherwise rise to the bait. Buck shoots him a toothy grin, cheeks full of potatoes.

“Stay safe. Don’t be a hero.”

Buck swallows hard with a laugh. “They don’t pay me enough to be a hero. Night, pops.”

He gets another impatient shake of the head from Bobby on his way out the door. Al Green slides smoothly into The Temptations, and the sky opens up to heed their call for rain to wash away David Guffin’s broken heart. Bobby’s headlights slash across the lobby pulling out of the roped off patch of dirt that masquerades as a parking lot and shrink slowly into the distance as Bobby crawls his way toward the roadside shack he calls home. Buck can’t imagine what it must be like to escape this place, if only for a few hours.

Buck takes his plate up to the window to watch the rain batter the earth. Joshua Trees are made of sterner stuff, preceding Buck by decades and will no doubt outlive him by a fair few decades as well. In the morning, Buck bets the desert will still hold its rain at the surface, long shallow puddles reflecting blue skies like a mirage until it evaporates back up where it belongs. It doesn’t have to be bone dry here, it’s like the damn ground doesn’t even want the help when it’s given to him.

Evan, you don’t have to be so goddamn stubborn.

When it’s given, Buck corrects himself, and shovels another forkful into his mouth before wandering back over to the desk. He pushes the antenna on the radio just until the crackling stops, adjusts the dial until the music’s screaming at him. Maybe in an hour he’ll be able to catch a few z’s on the cot in the back room, courtesy of the set of bells he hung over the door last week. 

Unfortunately for Buck, the next spin of the wheel lands on red.

--

The car doesn’t have its headlights on, so Buck can’t see much about it other than it’s dark, black maybe, until it sneaks closer and turns a smear of red-yellow-blue under the lights of the Four Aces sign. And it looks old. Not classic old, just old, the kind of beater your dad still drives even though he should have dumped it years ago because she just needs a little coaxing, you just gotta know how to make her purr. Buck pauses - not the parking job you’d expect if they wanted gas. 

Then a guy gets out of the driver’s seat: tall, broad, wearing a jacket but in no hurry to get out of the rain. His purposeful strides take him into the light, up the curb and under the cover of the roof. In just the short walk, he’s been soaked top to bottom. He pulls a hand down his face then back across his hair, not quite slicking everything back like he no doubt intended, but he’s dry enough. 

Then he enters the lobby and says, “Hello? Anybody in?”

He’s a vet, Buck would bet his last dollar. The combat boots tucked inconspicuously under the jeans are one thing, but it’s the faded green jacket that says it all - Diaz barely visible where it’s stamped over the left side of chest, the way his shoulders sit tense and set back underneath it. Buck looks more military than Diaz does - he’s still keeping it high and tight, clean shaven, his arms are starting to finally fill in after all that PT. Diaz, by contrast, has a few days’ growth on him at least, dark shadows scrubbing across his cheeks, darker over his lips even, and a few long tendrils of wet hair still plastered to his forehead. 

“Hey,” Buck says, “what can I do you for?”

“I need a room,” Diaz answers, more like a question. His eyes cut around the room, lingering on doors and signs longer than anything else.

“Just for the night?”

“Probably. Can you do day to day?”

Buck looks outside at the long line of absolutely goddamn nothing and no one for miles, except Mr. Han in the Spade Suite, which he wouldn’t even be sure about himself if it weren’t for his towel hanging on the door knob every other morning at 10 am like clockwork, a sign Buck was a little too slow on the draw to understand meant he wanted a new one. “Yeah, man, I think I can swing that. How many guests?”

“Just me,” Diaz says firmly, which Buck reckons is a lie. Nobody seems to be in the passenger seat, from what Buck can see, so he’s probably got a girl in the backseat, hiding and giggling at the prospect of getting away with a lower fee. 

“Bathroom’s around the corner - the rooms don’t have ‘em. Outside access only - your key should unlock the door.” He peels a towel off the stack of clean, though not exactly fresh, white towels from under the desk and sets it on the counter.

“Could I get two?” Diaz says.

“That’s a dollar extra.”

Diaz’s expression doesn’t change.

“It’s eighteen bucks,” Buck says, already picturing the come stained sheets in his future. Charging a little extra for the inconvenience isn’t uncalled for.

Diaz makes a face, his lips pursing like he’s about to argue, but he doesn’t. He pulls some cash out of his pocket, low and close to his hips like he doesn’t want Buck to see it, but Buck is skilled enough to see every damn thing that happens in the small stretch of paradise called Four Aces. He’s got more money in that bundle of cash than Buck would know what to do with, the kind of cash that spells trouble, so Buck straightens up in his seat and averts his eyes.

“Name for the room?”

Diaz looks up at him, his eyes challenging. “Why do you need that?”

“For the ledger.”

He slaps a twenty on the counter. “Keep the change.”

“Thank you, Mr. Fakeman,” Buck says and sets Diaz’s room key on top of his second towel. “The Heart Suite’s just around the corner. Can’t miss it. Have a nice stay.”

Diaz pulls the towels under his arm and knocks the key tag on the counter, perhaps to signify the end of their conversation. But then he pauses at the door and says, “You got anything to eat?”

“Ham and cheese, turkey and cheese, tomato and cheese.”

He pauses, considering his options like it’s the goddamn path to world peace at stake and not a couple of slapdash sandwiches. Don’t get Buck wrong, Bobby’s a good cook and all, but there’s only so much you can do to deli meat and they’re not exactly in the Michelin guide book. “I’ll, um. Maybe I’ll come back.”

“I’ll be here,” Buck promises, and watches him disappear back into the rain.

They don’t have security cameras because well, you got eyes, don’t ya? Buck’s boss always says, which he does, and a set of windows too that tell all. From the desk, he watches Diaz slip back into his car and pull it around back to park on the other side of the diner dumpsters, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to Buck; now he’ll have to walk even further in the rain. He’s hidden from Buck’s view - hey, maybe that’s the point - but emerges with a large duffle strapped across his back and an even larger bundle in his arms. 

Which looks like. Well, if Buck is being honest with himself, it looks like a body. A dead body. Wrapped in a sheet. At the door to his room, fiddling with the key to unlock it, Diaz quickly scans around. 

“Oh shit,” Buck hisses and spins until he’s curled up against the wall with his arms pressed tight to his chest so as not to risk giving himself away. And he reasons with himself. Dead bodies wrapped in sheets are typically things people are taking out of motel rooms, not into them. Unless the body’s not dead and it’s a kidnapping sort of racket and Diaz has got some sort of girl or kid in there and Buck’s motel is one itchy trigger finger away from a crime scene. 

By the time he chances another look out the window, Diaz is gone and the door to the Heart Suite is shut behind him. Back at the desk, Buck picks up the receiver on the phone, the dial tone humming impatiently up at him. Then he sets it back down.

Don’t be a hero. 

Instead Buck gets a good grip on his steak knife where it sits on top of his bouncing knee under the desk, sets his cane where he can grab it quickly. He watches the door all night and doesn’t sleep a wink.

--

Dawn breaks. The rain breaks. But my friends, I ain’t ever breaking up with you. I’m here from ten to six, they’re strict, so I gotta split, but I'll be back to ferry your long days into pleasant nights. Just before we go, the overnight crew at WDSP, the Dispatch, your Dispatch, we are sounding the alarm, we are ringing your bell, it is nothing short of an emergency. The call? To be good to each other, brothers and sisters. To give shelter from the storm. Are you going to answer…?

--

“I don’t know what to tell you, Buck, I got water flowing through my house like the damn Mississippi.”

Buck scoffs. “So what, you’re not coming?”

“No, Buck, I’m not coming,” Bobby says. He’s terse, defensive. If Buck listens closely, maybe slurring a little. “I gotta get some kind of patch on there before the showers start back up in the afternoon. They said tonight’s gonna be worse than last night.”

“But you could come here after you’re done?” Buck tries, clutching the phone a little tighter, breathing down the line harder than he probably should. Ringing in his free ear, he feels the faded echo of another call, another plea unanswered.

Can you please tell her to come get me?

“Listen, kid.” Bobby sighs, pauses. Maybe he’s reconsidering. Performing the calculus of drinking at the diner instead of drinking home alone. But the numbers don’t come out in Buck’s favor. They rarely ever seem to. “I gotta go.” 

Buck slams the receiver back down on the phone so hard, the phone rings back at him. It will be one of those impossible days, rare but achingly hard, when Buck is so alone it’s like he might as well not even exist. 

Forget him then. He snatches his clipboard off of its nail on the wall behind him, the key rack next to it jangling threateningly before it settles and decides maybe it’ll keep its place on the wall just for one more day. The start of day checklist has a few things he can manage one handed and three legged, so he sets about doing them. 

Outside, Mr. Han’s gone for the day already. The only car in the parking lot is Diaz’s, unmoved from where it was parked last night. Buck slips the steak knife into his back pocket before he ventures out of the safety of the lobby. 

It’s been months since he’s checked in on the Diamond and Club Suites, it’s not like the boss is going to check them anyway. The towel already hangs on the doorknob of the Spade Suite, which Buck shoves under his arm and replaces with Mr. Han’s new one, knowing better than to enter his room while he’s out. Not that Buck really understands why - Han keeps it cleaner than anything else Buck has ever cleaned here, so clean you wouldn’t even know someone was staying there. It’s that military mindset, no question about it.

Buck comes to a pause at the door to the Heart Suite, listening intently and identifying footsteps, a single squeal of a mattress. Maybe even laughter? 

The door swings open, Buck startling back, his actions mirrored nearly exactly by Diaz. Diaz recovers first, slipping out of the room and pulling the door closed.

He looks like he’s gotten about as much sleep as Buck has, the dark circles smudged under his eyes make him look haunting, haunted. His eyes snap down Buck’s body, not quite cold, but certainly calculating. They hang longest on the smooth wooden cane Buck grips until he’s white knuckled.

“You need something?”

“Funny, I was going to ask you the same thing,” Buck tries to cover before he remembers he doesn’t have to cover. No excuse needed to provide superior customer service.

“I’m good. Hungry.” He nods off to the diner, and Buck’s eyes follow naturally, turning his head until he realizes he’s vulnerable and snaps it back to Diaz.

“It’s, um. Closed.”

“Closed?”

“The guy who runs it - his roof has a leak at home. Gotta fix it before the rains come back.”

Diaz’s eyebrows lift. “He need any help?”

Now that Buck wasn’t expecting. Embarrassed he didn’t even bother asking Bobby, he says, “What do you know about roof leaks?”

“Patched a fair few in ‘Nam.”

Oh of course, Buck is sure he did - side by side in his standard issue tool belt was his standard issue Colt .45 and a 20 oz. hammer. And he’s not even fully convinced there’s a roof leak anyway, more likely a steady stream of Beam than a steady stream of rain. “He’s fine. You’re not checking out today?”

“One more night, I think,” Diaz says, pulling a twenty straight from his pocket, wad of cash nowhere in sight, and when he hands it over, Buck notices the wedding ring on his finger for the first time. “Could use another towel or two. Maybe a turkey and cheese.”

“I can arrange that.”

“Thank you. Very much.” He looks down at the embroidered name patch on Buck’s jacket and adds, “Buck.”

“Don’t worry about it, Freddie.”

Diaz frowns at him. “Eddie.”

“What?”

“What?”

“Who’s Freddie?”

“You are. Freddie Fakeman. For the ledger.”

“Freddie. Fakeman,” Diaz says, then makes a little noise that Buck could swear was a laugh, like someone attempting a laugh who had only heard it described, or who hadn’t laughed for a long time.

“I can call you something else,” Buck probes.

“Freddie’s fine.” Diaz gets a hand on his doorknob, but then seems to think better of it. “Actually, I gotta send a letter. Or a telegram if you got one.”

The post office is a good nine miles down the road, plenty of time to scheme and snoop about whatever or whoever might be hiding in Diaz’s room. 

Don’t be a hero, says that snide little voice in Buck’s head again, and Buck’s big mouth opens up and offers out before he can think better of it, “You want to make a phone call? We got long distance now.” 

Diaz accepts and Buck leads them back into the lobby, casting one quick glance over his shoulder back at the Heart Suite before he lets the door close behind him.

At the desk, Diaz dials for the operator and waits. “Los Angeles. I’m looking for a number.” His eyes flick up to Buck, who, caught out, shuffles just barely into the backroom and presses to the wall to try and hear something over the hum of the fridge. “Isabel Diaz,” he thinks he hears Diaz say. After another longer pause, he tries a few other names - Paco, Josephina - but a call seems never to connect. 

“Might have to try that letter after all,” Diaz says after he hangs up the phone. His voice isn’t pitched loudly, like he knows Buck hasn’t gone too far. Buck peeks around the corner, his face quirked in a who me? type of expression that doesn’t seem to convince Diaz. 

Buck takes his place back behind his desk, replacing the telephone next to the ledger. “I’ll be here.”

“Yeah. How long is this shift of yours?”

“It’s 24 on, then 24 on, then 24 on. You get the idea.”

“Sounds familiar,” Diaz commiserates, not that Buck was asking. 

“Goes by in a flash,” Buck lies. “Plenty of action here too. And the police are real quick to respond if I need them.”

Diaz nods, looking almost amused at him. “Sure, man.”

Buck goes to sit down in his chair to prove just how busy he is, but the steak knife digs into his ass and he barely manages to swallow down a yelp. “Shit goddamn,” he hisses, startling Diaz, but he heads that off by pointing due west. “Post office about nine miles down the highway. You really can’t miss it.”

Once Diaz is out of the lobby, he pulls the knife from his pocket and tosses it onto the desk. He cranes his head and waits for Diaz’s car to pull its way out of the motel, the white and blue Texas plate on his bumper staring Buck down as it heads toward the eye of the coming storm. A crack of lightning works its way across the sky down to the earth in the distance like a warm welcome to Diaz, like a warning to Buck.

Buck picks up the phone, dials Bobby again, waits for it to ring out before he replaces the receiver. It’s fine. Bobby probably doesn’t need any help anyway, and even if he did, there’s nothing Buck can do without a car. His fingers bounce impatiently on the desk.

Don’t do it, Buckley. You’re only good for getting in trouble.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Buck mutters. He snaps up his master key ring from inside the drawer, strides across the motel, and doesn’t give a second thought to the whole thing until he peeks into the Heart Suite to find something so low on his list of possibilities, it’s damn near embarrassing to admit it.

“What the fuck,” Buck blurts out.

“You said a bad word,” replies the kid.

--

Lincoln Logs are spilled out on the floor in front of Christopher. He doesn’t seem to be making much progress, but he doesn’t seem particularly bothered by it. Buck keeps the door cracked, only open enough that he can peek through to watch for Diaz’s car to come back, just closed enough to keep out most of the desert chill. 

Christopher started chattering away the second Buck introduced himself - charming and all, but has this kid never heard of Stranger Danger? Not that Buck is Danger. Or wasn’t exactly like this himself as a kid, wandering the streets, looking for dropped nickels, and talking the ear off of anyone who would stop and listen just so someone would listen. 

He’s been asking Buck a series of questions about the motel, really testing the limits of Buck’s knowledge - 1932 and that could be cool and the owner swears Grace Kelly came by once but why would she and I dunno, about seven months and my friend Bobby and I think I’m too tall to jump on the beds. 

“Do you have a TV?”

“No, what am I made of money? I’m not even sure we’d get any reception out here. We get maybe five radio stations and only one of them plays anything good. Do you like to watch TV?”

He shakes his head. “My abuelos only watch the news.”

“Boring,” Buck agrees.

“My mom didn’t like it. She said it was always bad news.”

“Seems to be the case these days.” Buck watches him for a moment, then chances, “Say, where’s your mom now?”

“Gone.” Christopher says it so matter-of-factly, that Buck falters on his follow up. 

“Is that - are you staying with your dad?”

He nods. “He came to get me, like he promised. My abuelos said he might not come home, but he did because he promised me he would.”

“He sounds like a good dad.”

Christopher looks up at him, grinning, as he says, “The best. Did you know he has a Silver Star?”

Buck, who does not even know the guy’s full name, certainly didn’t know that. He chances another look through the crack in the door, but Diaz will be gone for a while longer yet.

“I like your cane.”

“Thanks. I carved it straight out of a tree myself.”

Christopher laughs at that. “My crutches were made of aluminum.”

“You had crutches made of aluminum foil? Whoa. What happened to them, did they use all the foil up at a great big barbecue?”

“They told me I had to wear leg braces instead. But they make me fall down a lot.” He lifts his elbow to show off a nearly healed long scrape up his arm. 

“Ouch.”

He shrugs. “I just get back up. My mom and I used to practice a lot. Do you want me to show you?”

“Absolutely. I could probably learn a thing or two from you.”

“You have to put your hands here and here,” he says gesturing at the air in front of him and at his back.

Buck scoots closer. “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

“Because that’s the rules,” he says obviously, and Buck can follow those rules even if he has a hard time with some of the other ones. 

He watches Christopher pick himself off the floor, a slow and shaky affair that has Buck’s hands twitching in the air to steady him, but he holds himself still because Christopher doesn’t ask, and Buck, though far less patient and polite than Christopher at this age, would have pitched a fit if some grown up tried to swoop in and stop him from trying something on his own, even if he did end up falling flat on his face.

“That’s pretty cool,” Buck tells him, looking up at him as he stumbles a little on unsteady feet before he settles onto the bed with a bounce, the thin mattress groaning painfully at him in response. 

Christopher grins over at Buck, who grins back instinctively. 

After years of proving himself a disappointment over and over again, Buck has hardwired himself to do whatever he can to put a smile on someone else’s face, whether it’s a customer he’s taking care of or a girl he’s taking to bed or a kid who just needs a bit of attention and care. 

And he forgets how long it’s been since he’s had a real conversation with someone, someone who’s going to stay, someone who’s going to remember - feels like months, maybe even years, it’s hard to tell. But this isn’t real. It’s another transaction. It’s good customer service. Christopher and his dad will hit the road tomorrow and their pit stop at the Four Aces will become a distant memory. And Buck will still be here, whether he wants to be or not.

Buck rises from the floor himself, with marginally more grace than Christopher. “Hey, kid, I gotta get back to work. It was great to meet you. Maybe I’ll see you again.”

“I hope so. I like it here,” Christopher says, which puts a sick twist in Buck’s stomach for reasons he can’t place.

The words leave his mouth before he realizes it, “Maybe you should stay.”

He closes the door and forces himself across the pavement, back into the safe space of the empty lobby where he can collapse into his chair behind the desk. He stays there until Diaz returns, not sliding back into his hidden parking spot like Buck expects, but swerving up to park in front of the gas. Now when Buck sees him, he steadily shuffles the deck on what he knows about Diaz, pulling out some cards, slipping in others, placing father at the top. 

“Anybody call for me?” Diaz opens the car door to ask as soon as Buck comes out to greet him. Buck shakes his head, which Diaz echoes in response. “It’s probably too soon, yeah.”

Buck rounds the car to pull the gas nozzle out its holder. “How much?” 

“All the way.”

Even though it shouldn’t be, it’s a gut punch realization that he’s leaving, if not now, then soon. And by rights, Buck shouldn’t even care - he doesn’t know this guy from Adam. He’s just a customer. A customer with a great kid and hard edges that soften as soon as he thinks someone needs help. A customer with a troublemaking wad of cash and no name. 

“Hey, you think I could get one of those sandwiches too?”

The nozzle hovers over fuel filler, open and inviting, hungry even. A full tank of gas could be enough to get them to at least the outskirts of Los Angeles, but Buck wouldn’t know. He never finished his journey. 

Buck replaces the unused gas nozzle back into its holder. His feet carry himself inside to open the fridge, but there are no sandwiches in it. 

Outside, Diaz looks up at him with enough hope in his eyes that Buck starts to feel guilty. “Sorry, man, I must have eaten them.”

“No worries. Anywhere else around here to eat?”

“No.”

“All right,” Diaz says, measured. His eyes flick over toward his room, toward his kid, as he considers something.

“He’s fine,” Buck offers. “He said he wasn’t hungry anyway.”

Diaz’s attention snaps back to Buck, a storm brewing behind his dark eyes just about as threatening as the one headed their way. “What did you do?”

“N-nothing! I swear. We were just talking. Wait.” Buck tries to hobble after him, but Diaz runs faster than anyone Buck has ever known, bursts into his room, and slams the door behind him.

The door to Diaz’s car still sits open, so Buck closes it for the coming rain, just as thunder cracks like a whip all around him. 

--

The open road promises solitude. There are plenty of novelists and songwriters who imbue an endless stretch of highway with a sense of romance, of possibility. A siren song strong enough that Buck himself found a new life as a rambling man, leaving Pennsylvania behind in the rearview. He traveled half the length and width of America before he met a man in dress blues outside a bar in Colorado, a man who managed to convince him that he could give Buck a purpose, if he wanted one. 

I got plenty to do, Buck had told him, waving a map with a red marker weaving its way along the highways, not forecasting where Buck was going, but only documenting where he’d been. 

Don’t confuse something to do for something with meaning, the man had said. And that had somehow gotten Buck to sign his life away on a dotted line, enlisted before he could bother to be drafted.

Man is a social animal, his bunkmate had proclaimed, though with an air of disdain that Buck didn’t really understand. They stretched their long days into even longer nights, battling fear and anger and exhaustion and the weight of expectation to be elite with contraband booze and mostly complete decks of cards and half-heartedly trying to stay silent in their bunks as they jerked off to pictures of their girls and full-heartedly trying to stay silent crying and homesick. 

For a bright few months, the solitude that Buck had told himself he had prized was unmasked as loneliness. Truth be told, he loved more of it than he hated it. He loved the searing pain in his arms and legs as muscles formed with training and he hated the weight of a rifle in his hand and he loved being passed a bottle of whiskey to kiss a sip from and he hated staring at pictures of bullet torn skin and exposed guts to try to convince himself to feel nothing about it and, goddamn, he even loved getting screamed at because they were all getting screamed at. 

He loved it until he didn’t. Until he didn’t have a choice anymore but to return to the careless arms of the open road, branching out into a thousand possibilities of paths to take, lives to live, things to do. He traveled until he couldn’t. Until a pitstop became a purpose, or something like it, and the idea of leaving left him entirely. 

Nonetheless. Man is a social animal. And Buck stands at the windows of the lobby, squinting through the rain at the door of the Heart Suite and wishing it would open right up until the moment it does.

Diaz jogs across the pavement, angled like he’s headed for the bathroom, but then he skirts along the side of the building under the barest lip of cover that the roof provides. He shakes the rain off his jacket before he opens the door to the lobby.

“Buck?” he calls, even though Buck is standing right there.

“Yeah? How can I help you?”

“I told Christopher if he asked politely, you might let us into the diner. See what we can fix up.”

“Oh. I don’t have a key.”

The beginnings of a smile tug at the corner of Diaz’s mouth. “That’s not gonna be a problem.”

And it really isn’t. Diaz jimmies the lock at the back door with a screwdriver and a little bit of elbow grease while Buck and Christopher stand watching him with their jackets held over their heads. Christopher scoots in first, eyes bouncing around as he takes in the kitchen. Diaz tilts his head in invitation at Buck.

“C’mon in,” he says, like it’s his place to offer, with the brand of confidence that Buck can’t help but find magnetic. 

“You sure?” Buck asks even as he walks in after Christopher and flips a few switches on the wall that illuminate the kitchen and the dining room. “Honestly, man, I thought you were pissed at me.”

“I’m a little on edge, I’ll admit.” Diaz shakes his head as the door swings shut behind him. “Just don’t do that again.”

“Are you hiding a second son somewhere I don’t know about?”

Diaz makes that little amused laugh noise he made this morning. “One’s enough for me.” He kneels to pick up the jacket Christopher discarded on the floor with the innocent carelessness that comes with childhood and tells him, “All right, kiddo. Go sit in a booth for me, will you.”

“Can I watch?” Christopher asks.

“It’s kind of dangerous back here,” Buck says. “But you get a pretty good view from the stools while me and your dad make you something, what do you think about that?”

Christopher nods and lets his dad lift him up onto the tall stool so he can lean forward on his elbows and peer over the counter. Diaz runs a fond hand over Christopher’s hair, which Christopher preens at, too young to be embarrassed. The open display of affection, of love given and returned, rewrites more of the story Buck had conjured up in his head of them. 

Buck clears his throat, pulls one of Bobby’s aprons off a peg on the wall, and ties it around his waist. “What can I get you, Freddie? I make a pretty mean scrambled egg. I’ve even been known to make a couple of pieces of toast. Only slightly charred, you know, adds a little something extra to the flavor.”

“My name is Eddie. If you can believe it.”

Buck laughs. “No shit. Well, I’m still Buck.”

He holds out his hand, an unremarkable human gesture that is remarkably foreign to Buck these days. He’s not expecting the shock that sparks in his palm when Eddie’s hand engulfs him, nor the warmth that trickles through the veins up his arms and pumps straight into his heart, so overwhelming that he questions whether he’s ever known warmth before, if he’s ever even been alive.

“Oh shit,” Eddie says, his voice shaking underneath the play at humor, “shocked ya. Shouldn’t have been scrubbing my socks against the carpet floor. Very inconsiderate.”

Buck can’t bring himself to say anything, let alone let go, and Eddie seems in no hurry either, closely watching their point of connection with a look on his face like he can’t seem to make sense of it either. The squealing of the counter stool as Christopher turns it playful back and forth breaks them apart, their hands hovering near still until Eddie puts his into his pocket.

“Cold hands,” Eddie remarks softly.

“Warm heart, though,” Buck says, echoing what his sister used to tell him when they came in from the snow and settled as close to the radiator as they could manage without burning themselves and Buck couldn’t shake the chill.

“Let’s hope so.” Eddie turns and pulls open the refrigerator door, then slides open the freezer below. “There’s nothing in here.”

“Really?” 

He pulls open a couple cabinets too. “It’s all empty.”

“Well, we don’t get a lot of people in.” It figures Bobby wouldn’t overorder, with how cheap the boss is, probably just enough to keep the two of them fed, Buck reasons. 

Eddie eyes him. “I thought you said it was pretty busy through here.”

“I lied. But that was before I knew everything was, uh. Copascetic,” Buck admits, abashed. “Usually it’s just me and Bobby and Mr. Han in the Spade suite.”

“I didn’t know anyone else was here.”

“He rarely is. I think he does some sort of research or testing for the military or something, out in the desert there, I don’t know.” Buck leans in closer, dropping his voice, “Bobby told me once he got a piece of rebar stuck through his skull.”

“Jesus Christ. How is he still alive?”

“Right? If that isn’t enough to put you off your lunch, we could split a few of my TV dinners.”

He jogs out to the lobby and by the time he gets back, Christopher has unearthed a few crayons from somewhere and is going to town on a paper menu, and Eddie has the oven pre-heating. He takes the two boxes off of Buck, frowning in judgement at each of them, which is rich for someone who’s almost certainly eaten more than his fair share of tins of military mystery meat over the past few years. Unearthing the aluminum trays from their cardboard reveals two freezer burnt excuses for Salisbury steak, mixed vegetables, and what might be a little scoop of apple pie filling, and Buck has to admit they do look a little more worse for wear than expected.

“Did you know that the process of finding three different kinds of food that cook at the same amount of time and temperature is called synchronization?” Buck tells him.

“I didn’t. My mother wouldn’t have been caught dead making one of these things when I was a kid. She much preferred to butcher my abuela’s perfectly good enchilada recipe.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever had an enchilada.”

“Well, she would love to make you some, I’m sure.” Eddie closes up their dinner behind the oven door, folds his arms together, and turns his attention to Buck. “How come you know so much about frozen dinners?”

“I got a lot of encyclopedias. And a lot of free time.”

Eddie leans back against the stove and folds his arms. “I bet. How’d you come by this place?”

Buck settles in across from him, hiking himself up onto a prep counter and hooking his cane over the edge. Bobby would kill him on the spot if he saw Buck on his counters, but serves him right for abandoning Buck. 

“I used to travel. When I left home, my sister, she gave me her old VW Beetle, this real hunk of junk, white like the Love Bug too. God she loved that thing, but me and the Beetle, we had a real love-hate relationship: it loved to break down and I hated that about it. I’d drive until it couldn’t drive anymore, and wherever it broke down, I stayed. Worked a few odd jobs, bartending, delivering packages, I even wrangled cattle for a while, if you can believe it. Whatever I had to do to save up, get it fixed up so we could make it to the next town.”

“Sounds kind of lonely,” Eddie says, then hurries to correct himself. “I didn’t mean that, I’m sure you had a fine time.”

Buck draws a fine line between then and now, different shades in the same color of loneliness, but for all the flaws of the open road, standing still somehow seems worse.

“No, it wasn’t always, really. I loved it sometimes, or I loved feeling like I could be anyone or do anything. I miss it, I guess. Or maybe I just miss being somewhere other than here.” Buck shrugs. “Anyway, once upon a time, I stopped here for the night. They needed some help, and next thing you know, I work here.”

“You just sold your Beetle and decided you’ll live in the desert?”

“Sold my Beetle? Yeah, I guess so.”

“How long has it been?”

A twisted feeling settles into Buck that he ascribes to guilt. Couldn’t hack it in college, couldn’t hack it in the Navy. But he probably still had big plans back then, telling himself something foolish like he was finally going to make something of himself. He can’t remember where he was supposed to go to fix it all - maybe west, chasing Hollywood like the rest of the doe eyed dreamers, maybe south, beyond more borders than Buck’s ever crossed.

“I don’t - I don’t know. The time flies.” Buck waves that off. “It’s not so bad. I got a cot in the lobby, good food when Bobby comes in.”

“Why don’t you stay in one of the rooms?”

“Those are for the guests,” Buck says obviously.

“Okay,” Eddie laughs. “I don’t think they’ll mind. You know, when I told them at the post office I was staying here, they kind of laughed at me.”

Buck’s hands start to itch at the attention. Maybe Bobby cooked this place clean, but there’s gotta be some kind of booze hidden here somewhere, too familiar with the stench of Bobby’s liquored breath to be convinced otherwise. His search turns up nothing by the time the oven timer buzzes.

At the prospect of lunch, Christopher casts aside his drawing, a seemingly disconnected series of things - a house with a four on it that upon further study could be the motel, a big fire truck, three people in one corner, two big and one little, and another thing in the other corner, something that looks like a half man, half unicorn hybrid. Not exactly the work of a budding master, but there’s something charming about it nonetheless.

“This is hot, let it cool for a little bit,” Eddie says as he slides one of the trays in front of Christopher with a fork. “Let me know if you need help.”

“I won’t,” Christopher tells him seriously, and Eddie nods, just as seriously.

Eddie offers up the other tray in Buck’s direction. “You wanna split?”

“You go ahead.”

They settle into a booth just behind Christopher so Eddie’s eyes can flick up at him every once in a while as he picks at his food. How he chooses to restart their conversation surprises Buck. “When did you serve?”

“I didn’t. I almost did. I enlisted.”

“Enlisted,” Eddie repeats, not necessarily impressed, not necessarily judgmental, which are the two typical responses Buck used to get whenever someone would ask, back when he still had his uniform. “Drafted, myself. Ended up working my way to Staff Sergeant, field medic.”

Buck nods, impressed. “I had some sort of dream about becoming a Navy SEAL, but I washed out of basic.”

“How’d you manage that?” Eddie takes a bite of his dinner, then seems to think better of taking another one, setting down his fork.

There isn’t an easy answer to that, one hasn’t come to Buck in all the time that’s passed since it happened, not even at the moment it happened. “There are twenty-six bones and thirty-three joints in your ankle and foot, plus the tibia and the fibula in your calf. Did you know that?”

“So I’ve heard,” Eddie answers, amused. Right. Medic.

“Well, you’re looking at a man who has damn near crushed every single one of them.”

“Jesus. What the hell happened?”

His bunkmate - the Professor they’d called him when they thought he couldn’t hear them, or when they just didn’t care if he did - had no trace of a sneer in the end. His hand had reached out, his eyes had searched desperately, for that point of connection, for anyone to see him, save him. And Buck, ever the social animal, had gone running.

Don’t be a hero, Buckley, goddammit!

He barely remembers it happening is the thing, not the sight of it at least, and not the feeling. He does remember the sound - the grinding and crunching of metal titan he was meant to tame and control but he wasn’t strong enough. He wasn’t brave enough. He wasn’t quick enough. 

“I made a mistake,” Buck says. At the barest twitch forward of Eddie’s hand on the table in his direction, at the slightest hint of empathy, Buck stands abruptly, uncomfortable and casting about for something to do. “You must be thirsty. I can get you some water.”

“Buck,” Eddie says with the same kind of gentling tone Buck would use to calm a wild horse. 

Between his wide gaze and its mirror in the eyes of his son, who asks quietly, “Are you okay, Buck?” Buck is unsure what to do with so much attention now that he has it. If they look at him too closely, they’ll start to see right through him. They’ll see he’s been empty for so long, nothing could fill him back up.

“Enjoy your dinner. I’ll be at my desk if you need me,” Buck tells them and turns away, his still buzzing hand gripping his cane as he goes.

--

I don’t take my direction from the news man, the law man, the police man. No, man, the single voice of truth in my head and in my heart is the sound of my beloved mother. Though her sweet voice counsels me in the darkest hours, it is my duty as her son, as a young buck, to do the exact opposite of what she says. Mama told me to stay away from that radio and I took over the waves. Mama told me to keep my head down and I stuck my neck out. Mama told me to stay home and I hit the road. Mama told me that boy is trouble and I gave my life for him. The only way to live is to learn the hard way, and mama, I’m the valedictorian…

--

Buck once met a man whose motto was who cares. He ascribed this to a more relaxed mindset, where things are groovy and time is a free flowing river or whatever his sister’s weird stoner friends would say, not so much an exercise in nihilism. And Buck didn’t really understand it at the time, but he gets it now.

Who cares if I sweep the floor if no one is there to see it? Who cares if I have a phone if no one is going to call me on it? Who cares if I send a postcard if no one plans to answer it? 

Eddie’s car still sits in front of the lobby, blocking his view of the road. He’s spent more than a few nights tracing the line where the black night meets the black asphalt, waiting for light or burning rubber to disrupt it. It’s been a while since he’s had a night like this, where he feels truly unmoored, where he thinks long and hard about what would happen if he stepped one foot in front the other, out of the lobby, onto the road, into the next city, just for something to goddamn do. It’s not like anyone would care.

The Diazes have been holed up in their room for hours now, no need for Buck now that he’s proven himself a bummer. 

Evan, why did you always insist on making a scene?

They’ll be gone in the morning, Buck is sure of it - Eddie will set the key on the lobby counter without a warm but brief thank you that’ll dissipate before his car leaves the parking lot. Life will settle again into the steady state Buck floats through without noticing much. The thought settles lead-heavy in his stomach and pushes him up and out of his chair, out of the lobby, out into the rain.

He turns his hands up and out, savoring the heavy feeling of rain dropping onto his palms, each a little electric spark like the feeling of Eddie’s hand wrapped around his. At the edge of the parking lot, he thinks for a second he can do it, he can lift his foot and set it on the road. Just to push at the careful barrier that’s been drawn around him, just to see what happens. 

He thinks too he can hear his name in the wind, writing it off as a wish until a hand takes his, delivering another shock right to the heart that has him gasping and turning.

“Christopher?” Buck shouts over the rain. “What are you doing out here?”

Christopher’s face is twisted in fear as he clutches onto Buck. “My dad. He needs help.”

“Where is he?”

“He locked himself in the bathroom.”

On instinct alone, Buck scoops up Christopher into his arms and sprints over to the Heart Suite, the door still hanging open and spilling light out into the night. Underneath the tension of the moment, the barest hint of warmth blossoms in him at the opportunity to take care of Christopher and Eddie, to move himself with clarity of purpose. After settling Christopher onto his feet in the room, Buck snatches the duvet off of the bed and wraps it tightly around Christopher’s shivering frame. “It’s okay. Stay here, okay?”

Christopher’s head ducks, and Buck squats to meet him eye to eye. Tears mingle with the rain staining his face, and Buck promises him, “It’s gonna be okay. I got him.” He waits for Christopher to nod in response before he takes off again, long, sure strides pulling him quickly towards the bathroom, unsure of what awaits him there. 

Buck could be wrong again, shuffle the deck one last time, slipping jokers in like what if he’s in there with a knife? What if he’s in there with a gun? Not all dads are good dads, and not all good dads are good to themselves.

“Eddie,” he calls, pounding on the door. “Eddie, I’m gonna unlock the door.” At Eddie’s lack of response, he unlocks the door with steady hands and opens it to reveal Eddie in the corner by the shower. He only clutches himself.

“I’m here,” Buck promises again and again. “I’m here.”

His eyes are red rimmed, bruised, wet, tortured - that’s the first thing Buck sees about him, the only thing he can seem to focus on. Eddie’s eyes are more expressive than anyone Buck thinks he’s ever known - they light up with amusement and soften with fondness and harden with suspicion. They catch Buck’s now, wide and pleading, and Buck has no choice but to go to him, to fold himself up until he fits into the space by Eddie and sit with him for long minutes until his hiccuping sobs quiet down and become long, shaky breaths of recovery. 

“Are you okay?” Eddie has the audacity to ask first.

“What?” Buck nearly laughs. “I’m fine.”

“You’re wet.”

“It’s raining. I can’t go out with an umbrella. I’m too tall, I’ll get struck by lightning.” Buck waits for his dumb joke to have the intended effect, the barest twitch of Eddie’s mouth betrays him. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” Eddie says, sobering quicker than Buck expects. His face pinches, like maybe he’s embarrassed, as he scrubs over it. “I overreacted. I’m sorry.”

“Christopher was pretty scared. He’s okay - he’s good, I put him in your room,” Buck is quick to add. “I can - I can help. If you need it.”

“You already have,” Eddie answers. Though his voice is quiet, it still echoes in the room. 

He lets Buck pull him from the floor, wrap an arm around him to escort him back to the Heart Suite, where Christopher waits for them on the bed, still dwarfed in the comforter. Eddie falls to his knees in front of him and wraps his arms around him. Christopher drops the comforter to do the same.

“Dad,” he murmurs.

“It was just a dream,” Eddie soothes. “I had a bad dream. I’m sorry I scared you, Christopher.”

“It wasn’t a dream.”

“Shh.”

“It wasn’t, dad, I saw him.”

Buck stands at the door, watching them whisper to each other, neither uninvited because Eddie had squeezed his shoulder in gratitude and left the door open behind himself, nor part of their family no matter how easy it feels like it would be to slip in. He casts his eyes to the side anyway, finding a hole in the wall opposite the bed, plaster buckled and exposing its insides. On the floor, Buck finds the remains of the alarm clock that should be on the bedside table and connects the pieces. He dumps them into the small trash can in the corner, and if anyone comes asking after it, he’ll tell them they don’t offer clocks for free. That’ll be extra.

After Christopher agrees to be changed into clean, dry clothes and settled back into bed to find an easy sleep, Eddie offers the same to Buck, like he just can’t help his fatherly instinct. His voice is low and still a little rough. “You need a change of clothes? Do you have a change of clothes? You’ve been wearing the same thing the whole time we’ve been here.”

Buck agrees, accepting a pair of folded grey sweats, Army issued from the looks of them, and he and Eddie change, sharing brief locker room glances. Of Eddie, Buck notes puckered scars dotting his torso, a few scattered tattoos, and white briefs that leave little to the imagination. Buck doesn’t bother to ask what Eddie sees of him. He’s stood proud in front of anyone who’d had the pleasure to see him, fingers tracing paths along his thighs, stomach, circling around his invitation, but after a while, heated looks crumpled into pity as they inevitably spied the long jagged scars from a surgeon who was more concerned with saving the foot than saving the ego, and Buck lost the taste after that. But Eddie glances anyway, his practical eyes never lingering anywhere for too long.

Eddie nods his head back toward the door and Buck follows, like that’s what he’s made to do. Huddled under the slight lip of the roof that protects from the rain, Eddie knocks himself the last cigarette out from a beaten up pack, lights it with unsteady hands. Buck has to remind himself he doesn’t know Eddie, that there’s no good reason for him to think this loss of cool is out of character, but it feels that way. He takes a drag, then hands it off to Buck, cigarette tucked between two fingers, wedding ring still wrapped around a third. 

“You married?” Buck asks before placing his lips where Eddie’s have just been. 

Eddie shakes his head as he studies the ring. “I thought it would help ward off questions about me and Christopher, but his mom is… She wrote me a dear John. Told me she was gonna move to LA with Chris, to look her up when I got home. I didn’t even know she died for another six months after it happened, she didn’t even make it out of Texas.” Buck hands the cigarette back because Eddie looks like he needs it more. “I spent every day getting shot at, but she’s the one who got hit by a car. What are the fucking odds.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too. I loved her so much, but it was never the way I needed to. You know?”

Buck might, nodding either way. He loves his sister, even after all this time, in the way she needs but isn’t willing to accept. He loves his parents, even if they don’t know how to love him in spite of his flaws. Need and want are two different things but they intertwine delicately, at times impossible to separate into two unique strands so one can be snipped at the root.

“You love Christopher how he needs though, right?”

“I fucked up,” Eddie deflects. “I scared him. I’ve never seen his face like that. Just. Terrified. No parent should ever see their kid that way. Make their kid feel that way.”

“You didn’t mean it.”

Eddie leans forward off the side of the building, shuffling until his back is turned to Buck, a barrier between them that Buck thinks is supposed to make them feel safer, but Buck already knows what it’s like to have a wall between them and it’s just no good. He grips Eddie’s shoulder until he goes perpendicular, staring out into the rain instead of Buck, the cigarette between his lips like a stopper. Before Buck can act on the impulse to pull it from his lips, Eddie does so first, handing it over and exhaling smoke with an audible sigh. 

“I talked to a couple of my guys before I left. One of them, Greggs, he says his wife makes him sleep on the couch.”

Buck frowns, unable to make the connection, but fighting for once the endless stream of questions about to drip off his tongue. 

“The screaming, she said she could handle, the waking up with a start in the middle of the night, that was fine. But one night, she tried to wake him up, and he - he didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t know it was her. He was still back there. And he had his hand around her throat before he knew what he was doing.” Eddie’s hand hangs in front of him, power in his empty but curved fingers. “He almost crushed her windpipe.”

“Eddie, no,” Buck says, now easily jumping to the conclusion Eddie has laid out for him, his heart breaking in the leap. He forces the cigarette at him so his hand shifts from Greggs’ back to Eddie’s. “You won’t do that to him. You wouldn’t.”

Eddie nods like he’s allowing Buck to say that, even if he doesn’t quite believe it himself. “I trust myself. Most days I don’t even think about it anymore. And then at night, sometimes I see these things. These. These awful things, men I couldn’t save. And back home, when my mom would look at me, I’d wonder if that’s all she sees.”

“You love him. You’re a good dad. That’s what I see.”

“What if that’s not enough? I love him, but I wasn’t there for him, not when he was growing up, not even when Shannon died. My parents were raising him.”

“You got drafted though, right?” Buck asks, eager to refute.

“Yeah, in ‘68.”

Buck gestures at him in triumph. “So it wasn’t really your fault.”

“But I stayed. I kept reenlisting. I didn’t even ask her. And I thought - I thought it was right, you know? I thought that’s what I should be doing. Providing for them. I was more useful there than at home, I didn’t even know what to do with a kid but love him. And I do, I love him so goddamn much sometimes I can’t believe how lucky I got, that that’s my kid. And I could have come home to him, but I didn’t.”

“You couldn’t have been gone that long?”

“Three tours.”

Buck tries to crunch the math in his head, but that doesn’t make any sense. Army tours must be shorter than the Navy’s. Eddie is so damn determined to make himself a villain in this story, but Buck knows better than anyone that simply being there is not enough. Proximity is not an indicator of care, of usefulness, of devotion. His own father never left, not once in the eighteen years they spent together, but Buck could count easily on one hand the amount of times his father was there for him. 

“There was a minute. Just a minute, I swear,” Eddie confesses, turning imploring eyes up at Buck finally. “Where my parents almost convinced me to let them keep him. I thought. Maybe they could give him a better life. Maybe they could find their way with him, that they’d learned from how they raised me. I thought it was going to be my choice, but. They had a lawyer, they had all this paperwork. And I just. I knew. I knew they had his whole life lined up in a way they never could control mine, and I ran. I ran for him, for a life he wanted to live, not the one they wanted. And I don’t know if I have the cops after me or if my abuela in LA will just make us turn around and go back to El Paso or if we should just cut and run south, disappear in Guadalajara.”

Buck can’t soften his dreams or tear up a court order, but that’s not the kind of fixing that Eddie needs, not really. Whereas Buck is lonely, Eddie is simply alone. He’s used to fighting with someone at his back, a whole army of men to lean on, and his only ally at home is long gone. There’s an empty slot next to him, where another half will make a whole. 

“You could stay. With me,” Buck offers, quiet under the rain. “Here, I mean. They’ll never find you here. I could get you a job, and - and you could probably stay in this room.”

Eddie makes a little amused noise and offers back, maybe not as sincere as Buck would like, he can’t even tell, “Or you could come with me.”

The idea alone leaves Buck with a gut punch of panic. It’s an innocent enough proposition, for kids lying on their childhood floors wondering how the hell they’ll ever get out of their hometowns, one that drove Buck for years and for miles, one that left him the moment he stepped over the threshold of the motel lobby. 

“I can’t.”

“I’ll drop you anywhere you want to go. You don’t want to?”

“I just. I can’t.”

Eddie looks at him like it’s not a joke anymore. “That’s not what I asked. Buck, what do you want?”

For all that Eddie has choices, some good and some bad, at least there are roads stretching out ahead of him, and Buck can’t see that for himself. The motel is known, safe. He’s become comfortable at the motel. Complacent. No longer brave, the way Maddie told him to be as she folded her Beetle’s keys into his hands, wishing for him what she couldn’t wish for herself. Useless, because there is rarely any gas to pump or beds to turn over or dishes to wash. Who cares? Well, Buck does. Or used to. That’s what his parents never understood about him, his teachers never got. Buck is a fuck up sometimes, sure, his ego overpowering his common sense, but it wasn’t because he was lazy and it wasn’t because he didn’t care. It was because he was trying, so hard, to do something, anything worth doing, even if he didn’t always get it right. 

“I don’t think I like who I am here,” Buck admits. “And I don’t know how to change that.”

Eddie nods like he knows. It’s impossible that he knows, that he can read Buck so easily. “Then maybe you should leave.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not? Are you afraid of something?”

“No,” Buck answers, a kneejerk reaction. Because it’s not fear weighing his feet down, but something else, nameless but just as primal. 

Sometime in the last minute, Eddie has curled himself toward Buck, the cigarette forgotten between the two of them. He knows with startling clarity that if Eddie leaned forward, Buck would let him. Let him do what - he doesn’t know, but he’d be at Eddie’s mercy if the moment presented itself. Let him keep pressing on the bruise, like Buck suspects he will, perhaps, but Eddie, who always seems to choose kindness even when there’s no real reason to, does not.

“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” is what he tells Buck. “Even if you don’t want to be.”

--

We here at WDSP, the Dispatch, are sounding the alarm, a warning to those who need it, an invitation to those who don’t. Lovers, maybe even fighters, are all searching for the same thing - connection. You can find it at the end of a dial tone, turning a house into a home, even throwing a dog a bone. And if you ain’t got all that, you can find it through these radio waves.  I’ll be here. I’ll be there. Just reach out…

--

4 am slips by, then sunrise, then 8 am, and Bobby doesn’t answer the phone. Bobby’s never had trouble drinking on the job, so there’s no call to do it on his own. Eddie raises his eyebrows and Buck shakes his head. 

Before they leave the lobby, Eddie pulls another twenty dollar bill out of his pocket, but Buck stays his hand. “Keep it. Nobody’s gonna notice anyway, right?”

They’d decided collectively not to bring a kid to a bender, but Buck begins to wonder if he should go too, the creeping feeling at the back of his neck a warning he rarely used to trust making itself known. The case for listening to it becomes immediately more convincing when a snap cracks through the air, followed by a slow groan as lights shudder off in the lobby, in the towering sign over their heads.

“Is that the power?” Buck asks, even though it’s obvious. He just can’t quite believe it.

Eddie squints up at the sign too. “I can help with that when we get back.”

“Of course,” Buck laughs. “Let me guess. You fixed a lot of broken power lines in ‘Nam?”

“My father taught me. He didn’t believe in the idea of a handy man. He thought men should be handy. He would say he could tell whether a man was worth his salt by handshake alone. Soft hands were idle hands, and an idle man was a worthless man.”

The way Eddie explains that, it doesn’t seem like a fond recalling of his father, like maybe the distance Buck was raised with is a distance they both share. He asks Eddie, “What do you think?”

“There are plenty of ways to put your hands to use. Not all of them are as noble as he wants to believe.” Eddie clears his throat, then swings into the driver’s seat. “Are you coming or what?”

Just looking at the car makes Buck’s guts feel like they’re twisting. “I can’t.”

Eddie sighs, impatient like Buck hasn’t seen him before. “What do you mean, you can’t?”

“Someone has to stay here. In case there are any customers.”

“What customers? Buck, nobody’s been by the entire time I’ve been here.”

“Then for Christopher,” Buck prompts.

Eddie looks for a moment like he’s going to be swayed by that before he shakes his head. “It’ll just be for a few minutes. I thought you wanted to see him. I’m not just going for my health here.”

“I mean, if something’s happened to Bobby. You - you’re a doctor, right?”

“Medic.”

“What if he needs help? What if you have to take him to the hospital? It could be hours.”

“Christopher will be fine on his own for a while. He’s used to it.”

“Maybe he shouldn’t be.”

That stops Eddie’s arguments effectively, his eyes hardening the way Buck’s come to recognize they do when he perceives a threat to his kid. “Excuse me?” 

“I didn’t mean that,” Buck hurries to say. “Sorry, I don’t know why I said that. I just. Please. I’m really worried about him. Could you just let me know?”

“Okay,” Eddie agrees slowly, a frown still on his face.

“It’s about six miles, on the right. The mailbox is fire engine red. You can’t miss it.”

Eddie pulls his door shut, still looking up at Buck like he’s waiting for Buck to change his mind. But he won’t and he doesn’t, so Eddie goes. It feels almost as bad as if Buck had left himself. So he’s embarrassed when Bobby catches him off guard knocking on the door of the lobby. Christopher doesn’t look up from where he’s coloring at the desk as Buck goes to greet him.

“Bobby,” Buck says in surprise. Bobby’s eyes are bloodshot as they often are, but otherwise he looks sober, cleaned up, no trace of a thirty six hour bender behind him.

“Hey, kid.” 

Buck ducks his head through the door, looking up the road for Eddie. “Did you see Eddie?”

“Must have just missed him,” Bobby says with a shrug. “You hungry? I’m feeling like steak and potatoes.”

“You’re okay?”

“Never better.”

“And your roof?”

“False alarm.”

Buck feels vindicated that he hadn’t fallen for the lie, but it isn’t much worse than the truth. He might have even preferred the lie. “Okay. Well. I want you to meet Eddie.”

“I had a feeling you guys might be a good fit,” Bobby says, which Buck is pleased to hear. “Why don’t you go get that kid of yours? I’ll fix him up something too. You both can tell me all about Eddie.”

He disappears off to open up the diner, and Christopher reacts to the prospect of a real lunch with excitement as Buck walks them over a few minutes later.

“Where’s your cane?”

Buck didn’t even realize he didn’t have it, but now that he does, his hand feels suspiciously empty. Come to think of it, he hadn’t grabbed it last night either. “I don’t know. I guess I’m feeling pretty good today.”

“Grateful for the good days,” Christopher says, which is an oddly grown up thing for a seven year old to say so it must be one of the things his mother taught him. It must be a privilege that he still gets to carry around pieces of her with him.

Something delicious is already in the air by the time they get to the diner, and it takes a lot for Bobby to agree to leave the kitchen when he’s cooking - he never does for Buck, but he does for Christopher. Bobby holds his hand out, but Christopher doesn’t take it, curling his hand to his chest instead from where he stands a step behind Buck. “Hey, Christopher, I’m Bobby.”

“It’s okay,” Buck laughs, a fond hand on Christopher’s head to ground him as he squints up at Bobby. 

“What can I make you?”

“What do you have?” Christopher asks suspiciously, no doubt remembering yesterday’s sad excuse for food wrapped in aluminum. 

“Anything in the world,” Bobby says, lighting up in a way Buck has never seen him before. It makes him wonder if Bobby ever had kids - he’s never mentioned them.

“Grilled cheese sandwich. And tomato soup.”

“Dream bigger, kid.”

“And a chocolate cake,” Christopher tries.

“That’s more like it.” He holds his hand out again and this time Christopher takes it, gasping then laughing at the touch. “You want to play a song for us?” His hand twists and a nickel appears like magic between his fingers, which he offers to Christopher, then nods his head over to a jukebox in the corner Buck has never noticed before.

“Make it a good one,” Buck tells Christopher as he watches him study the choices seriously. 

He thinks about choice - the last time he’d had it was back home in Pennsylvania, when Maddie would let him pick a record to play while she actually did her math homework and he pretended to do his, so long as it was from her collection and it wasn’t from her secret stash of Elvis records he had to pretend she didn’t have. He pictures him and Christopher just like him and Maddie, curled up on the floor in front of a fire, sorting through their shelves of LPs and playing only the good ones while Eddie, who couldn’t be trusted because he still listened to his mother’s old standards, deals with the Swiss Miss in the kitchen. 

“Don’t confuse something to do for something with meaning.”

Buck, annoyed to be yanked out of the picture forming clearer in his mind by the second, even if it was trending towards Rockwellian levels of schmaltz, asks, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Bobby eyes him from where he peels potatoes. “You’re thinking about leaving?”

“Of course not,” Buck scoffs.

“You don’t have to follow him if you can get him to stay. They could both stay. They’d be happy here.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. You take good care of us.”

Buck never really thought of it that way. Is that what he’s been doing? “Gee,” he jokes. “Thanks, pops.”

From the jukebox, Buck recognizes the clear crooning voice of Ritchie Valens - another of Maddie’s favorites - telling them they belong together. Christopher howls with laughter when Buck tries to sing along, shameless with one of Bobby’s wooden spoons as a microphone. He’s never promised he’s a singer worth note, but he knows how to put on a show. In payment, Bobby delivers them nothing short of a feast spread across the table of their booth. 

“Dessert comes last,” Buck tells Christopher, and he doesn’t even put up a fight about it. He’s only able to get a few bites in before a white truck pulls up on the side of the road, not into the parking lot or into the gas station, but clearly meant for them. Bobby’s eyes narrow as Buck’s do. Time to go to work.

A woman gets out of the truck on the wrong side, spurring Buck to realize it’s a mail truck. She’s dressed in a grey mailman’s outfit, a wool cap covering her head, which seems to have no hair. 

“Hey!” Buck calls, then again when she doesn’t seem to look up. “Hello!”

“Hi,” she says, startled.

“Can I help you?”

“I have a telegram. For Eddie Diaz?” She waves an envelope as proof.

“He’s one of my guests. I can give it to him.”

She looks at him over the rim of her glasses, disbelief painting her voice as she says, “You work here?”

“At the motel.”

“I didn’t know it was open.”

“Twenty-four seven.” Buck holds out his hand impatiently, and she still seems to hesitate. 

She takes a careful step off the road into the dirt, then another, just far enough until she can drop the telegram into his hand, then she jogs quickly back to her truck. 

“I don’t bite,” Buck chirps.

“Uh huh,” she says, doubtful. “See you around maybe.”

Back at the diner, Bobby meets him in the kitchen and eyes the telegram, just as curious as Buck is. “What’s it say? Open it.”

Buck snatches a look at Christopher, though he wouldn’t know Buck’s invading their privacy in any case. The envelope is barely sealed, just a kiss of moisture at the point of the flap that gives way easily. Underneath a series of words and numbers that must pertain to routing or something and the name Isabel Diaz, the telegram says, You both are always welcome. It is safe here, nieto, come home, followed by a phone number. It’s Eddie’s answer, the road he’ll take. 

“You should get rid of that,” Bobby says in his ear. “He’ll leave if he sees that.”

Buck nods absently as his fingers start to close around it, crinkling the paper until it’s balled up in his fist. Then he drops it in the trash.

--

Eddie’s gone longer than Buck expects, but he pulls up at the motel with more speed than Buck anticipates, not parking his car in any kind of spot, but seemingly with the aim of just being able to jump out of it as fast as he can, which he does.

“Hey.”

Eddie comes to an abrupt stop. “Jesus, I didn’t see you standing there.”

“Well, I am,” Buck says, annoyed.

“Where’s Christopher?”

“Over there,” Buck points to where Christopher is obviously sitting crosslegged against the pavement in front of the Heart Suite. “He found some sidewalk chalk in one of the closets in the lobby. Who knew we had that kind of stuff? Not me. Listen, I’m sorry I sent you out there for nothing.”

Eddie’s frown deepens. “What do you mean?”

“Bobby’s here. It’s crazy, he showed up maybe twenty minutes after you left. Like ships passing in the night. He made me and Christopher lunch. Where have you been?”

Eddie looks stressed by this information for some reason. He clarifies, “Bobby Nash?” When Buck nods, Eddie adds, “What’s Bobby look like?”

Buck laughs. What’s his deal? “Tall? Brown, kind of greying hair. I don’t know. Like a dad?”

“Like this?” Eddie pulls a picture out of his pocket and holds it up for Buck. The edges that aren’t warped with heat are yellowed with age. It’s a family portrait - Bobby, not much younger than he is now, in a well pressed uniform, a woman in a sweater and pinned curls, and two younger kids, maybe ten or twelve.

Buck looks back up at him in betrayal. “Did you break into his house? What the fuck, Eddie.”

“There was no house, Buck. Well, there was a house, probably, but it’s in ruins, burned, abandoned.” He shakes the fire-touched picture again. 

“Then you went to the wrong house,” Buck guesses.

“That’s what I thought, but I found this. I found this and the red mailbox was still there. So I went to the post office. Buck,” he says, like a plea, his thought unfinished because he expects Buck to connect the pieces, but he can’t. 

Buck blinks hard. “What are you saying?”

“Bobby Nash died in 1958. Along with his wife and kids. In a fire in that house.”

“Don’t say that,” Buck snaps, getting angry now, the burning kind of anger Eddie won’t be able to wave away with a simple kind of apology. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I talked to the postmaster. He confirmed the whole thing. Bobby used to work at this diner, but he’s not - there’s - look, if you need help, we can get you help.” He reaches for Buck, but Buck shifts his shoulder, dodging his touch. “You can - you can come with me and Christopher to LA, we can get you help, we can talk to a doctor.”

Eddie looks so serious, is the thing. Buck doesn’t know him to be a prankster, but Buck doesn’t know him at all. The creeping feeling returns. Eddie’s a stranger. Eddie’s been through god knows what. Eddie’s parents don’t even trust him. Now that he thinks about it, Bobby’s the closest thing Buck’s had to a friend, let alone family in years, even if all they do most days is trade hellos and eat dinner. 

“Why are you doing this? Why are you talking to me like I’m the one who’s crazy? I’m not the one who’s seeing things.”

Eddie takes a measured breath, his posture straightening. Like he’s bracing himself for a fight, maybe, Buck’s seen plenty of guys across plenty of bars do the same before they go swinging. But then Eddie says, calmer than he seems to want to, “I know you don’t mean that.”

“It’s not just me. There’s Mr. Han - ”

“Yeah. Howard Han? I asked about him too. People don’t survive rebar through the head. I must have seen it before, in the war - my dream, I saw this man - ” Eddie tries to explain, but Buck cuts him off, waving a furious hand. 

“He just made Christopher lunch!” Buck shouts and at that, Christopher finally looks up. Buck waves him over. “Christopher, Christopher. Tell him about Bobby.”

Christopher’s gaze bounces between them uncertainly, his face falling as he notes the tension even if he doesn’t know or understand its source. “I like him,” Christopher says, thank god. Buck throws a hand out, communicating, see? “He wants us to stay. We could stay here with Buck, he said it’s okay.”

“You saw him?” Eddie confirms. He holds up the picture desperately. “You saw this man?”

Christopher nods. “He made us lunch. It was so good. Is that Brooke?”

“Who’s Brooke?” Buck asks, glancing back at the picture.

“He told me about his daughter. And Bobby Junior?”

Eddie’s face falls, his mouth opening and working over reactions that can’t seem to leave his lips. 

“Maybe he faked his own death. Maybe - maybe he’s hiding out,” Buck suggests, his resolve to be angry failing faster than it should as it gets replaced with guilt for having pressed on Eddie’s one insecurity, shared in confidence. 

“Why would he do that?”

“Aren’t you doing the same thing?”

Eddie doesn’t answer that, just looks over at the diner with fierce eyes. “Then I guess I should go introduce myself to him.”

When Eddie tugs on the front door of the diner, it doesn’t budge, locked. After trading a look with Buck, who doesn’t understand why it’s locked either, he knocks.

“Bobby?” Buck calls to no answer.

Eddie jimmies open this door with a pocket knife easier than he did the backdoor, just one flimsy flip lock keeping them out. Inside the diner, the pots and pans are all washed and put away already.

“Lunch?” Eddie clarifies. “Buck, there’s still no power here.” He pulls open the fridge, empty as it was yesterday, the freezer too. 

“He’s probably in his car,” Buck says, striding back to the front door to point it out in the parking lot, but it’s not there. He pulls on the door, but it shudders against him, locked again. “The hell?” he mutters as he twists the lock and pushes the door open. Bobby’s car isn’t in the parking lot and there’s no way he could have left without Buck seeing him. Just like there’s no way the jukebox could have played. No way the fridge held meat and cheese and butter and eggs. 

There’s. There’s no way. 

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” Buck tells Eddie when he exits the diner.

Even Eddie looks spooked. “I think we should go.” 

He leads Christopher back to the Heart Suite, but Buck keeps looking, clearing the Diamond Suite, the Club Suite, the Spade Suite, the lobby - no Bobby. No Mr. Han, not even a towel waiting for him on the doorknob. 

The door is still open in Eddie’s car, the keys in the seat, a neatly refolded map on the dash. In a daze, he picks up the map, unsure how it doesn’t slip through his fingers with how unsteady it makes him feel. “Why does this say 1973 on it?” he asks Eddie when he returns. 

“I just bought it,” Eddie says dismissively as he throws the duffle into the trunk and slams it shut.

His mouth goes dry, his voice strains as he tries to speak. “I didn’t know. I didn’t. It’s been three years?” Buck says muzzily. “I’ve been here three years? It’s 1973?”

He’s been here for three years, and done what? Ate in a foodless diner. Tended to an unused room. Waited for customers who never came. Filled empty days and sleepless nights with nothing, no lasting memories. And for what?

His knees go weak, and it’s no wonder. He could be as dead as Bobby, as Mr. Han, and he wouldn’t even know the difference. “Bobby’s not real? I’m not. I’m not real?”

“You are. Buck. Look at me,” Eddie demands and Buck does, he lets Eddie fill his vision. “I see you.”

“That means nothing,” Buck tells him. Clearly, it hadn’t mattered the slightest in Bobby’s case.

“It’s not nothing,” Eddie promises, and it hurts Buck to hear it. It’s all he wants to hear from Eddie, it’s the door opening, the leverage he needs to keep him. It doesn’t matter if he’s real or not, not if he stays at the motel, not if he has Eddie and Christopher. Days will pass, weeks and months and years, and Buck will forget he ever knew this. He’ll go back to the way things were, blind to the truth but maybe happier this time. Happier because he has them.

Stay. Stay stay stay stay, begs to leave Buck’s mouth, like bile burning and rising up through his throat, and he swallows against it, grits his teeth, and hisses, “You have to leave this place.”

“Buck, no,” Christopher says. 

Buck steps back, pressing his hands to his eyes so he can’t see them, so he can’t be convinced to keep them. “You have to go right now. And don’t come back. To Los Angeles. Isabel said it was safe.”

“Okay,” Eddie says, resolute, so Buck can look at him again. “Okay. Christopher, get in the car.”

“I can’t.” Christopher starts to cry, his hands wrapped around his chest to clutch at his arms. “Dad. I can’t. They don’t want me to go,” Christopher hiccups out.

Eddie throws a panicked look at Buck before he scoops Christopher up and puts him in the passenger seat, jamming a fist down on the door lock before slamming the car door. Christopher is wailing for him, fumbling with the door but his fingers can’t grip the lock.

“I know, I know, kid, hold on,” Eddie says through the driver’s side, too quiet and desperate to be heard over the sounds of Christopher screaming, “Daaaad, daddy, help.”

With strength, Eddie looks to Buck, an offer in his red rimmed eyes. Buck wants to take it, more than he’s wanted anything in his life maybe, more than the unconditional love of his parents and for Maddie to have gone on the run with him and to play the hero to an adoring crowd.

His hand reaches toward Eddie, but now that he can really see himself, it’s shimmering and fading in the sunlight like a mirage. Soon there will be nothing for Eddie to hold onto. For a minute, just for a minute, he swears, he thinks it will be better this way. Eddie will forget him the way everyone else does, the way he’s supposed to. 

Then Eddie grasps him, the electric shock of life coursing through him. He tugs on Buck’s hand until he can get his other hand to Buck’s shoulder, thumb pressed so firmly against his pulse point that it has no choice but to awaken and beat its hello back to it.

“Sorry about this,” he says just before he nearly tackles Buck into the backseat, hauling him bodily onto the leather and folding up his legs before he slams the car door shut. 

The car jerks to life and picks up speed quickly, rolling Buck around as the back tires fishtail before gripping asphalt. And Buck goes screaming through gritted teeth, his hands pressed to the sides of his head to keep his brain from pounding its way out. Life altering pain finds him all over again, shivering up and down his body as he reacquaints himself with reality for the first time in years.

“Don’t look back,” Eddie pleads. “Don’t look back.”

Buck is seized with terror at the thought that the further they drive, the less likely he is to survive, that Eddie will get some miles down the road before Buck disappears completely, dragged back to the motel that serves as his only tether to earth. But it doesn’t happen. Eddie drives and the pain recedes so all Buck feels is the clean, cool leather and the gentle bumps of the highway beneath them. 

“Eddie,” he says, finding as much power as he can manage even if his voice is stripped raw.

Eddie’s eyes catch him through the rear view mirror. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I - yeah.”

Eddie slows to a stop in the middle of the highway, not that it matters, not that anyone’s coming or going for miles. He gently cups Christopher’s face, thumb brushing at the tears staining his cheeks. His eyes search through Christopher’s until he finds what he’s looking for, exhaling out his fear. Then he turns for Buck, the question in his eyes echoed in his outstretched hand. Buck folds their hands together, squeezing until he can pull the warmth from Eddie’s into his own. 

Then Buck tells him, more sure of this than he has been of anything in years, “Drive.”

--

All good things must end - nothing gold can stay, as they say. Well, if that’s true, then surely that means all bad things must end. New dawns become new beginnings, a new deck is shuffled and you still gotta play the hand you’re dealt. Bet when you got to, bluff when you don’t, fold if you must. Maybe your card will come around next time. All that matters is that you’re still playing the game. This is WDSP, going all in, then signing off…

----