Page 42 of The Professor's Wife

“What if you ran out of fuel?”

“I have a fuel can stored.”

“What…” I paused, trying to find an emergency he couldn’t get himself out of. All I could settle on was, “But why?”

Tristan mulled that over, and I could tell it was a serious topic because there was little humor in him. Something bothered him.

“I want to show you something.”

He reached into a drawer beneath the kitchenette and pulled out a small, worn photo album. The leather cover was faded, the corners grayed. He handed it to me without a word.

Intrigued, I opened it slowly.

Inside were Polaroid photos—dozens of them. Not of sunsets or places he had visited, but of what I knew was Tristan and his father.

A younger Tristan, maybe six or seven, grinned beside a heavyset man with the same blue eyes and unruly blond hair. They stood in front of the same sky-blue camper van, parked in forests, beside lakes, outside busy diners. One photo showed them roasting marshmallows over a campfire. In another, Tristan slept in the passenger seat, his head resting against his dad’s chest.

I glanced at the seat itself, imagining Tristan that small in this very camper.

“My old man loved the road,” Tristan explained softly. “He bought this van in the seventies. Even when it got old and rusted, it stayed the same. Felt the same. Old but familiar. Like home. He always said it was the only thing that ever made him feel free.”

I turned the page.

They grew older with every photo. His father aged. Tristan grew taller. The van changed along with them, aging until it looked nothing like it did now.

My throat thickened with emotion as I watched Tristan and his father grow before my eyes.

“He passed away…” Tristan’s voice tightened. He paused, collecting himself. “I found the van in storage. I didn’t evenknow he’d kept it until I went through everything he left behind. It was falling apart. Took me months to bring it back to life.”

I looked up at him, my heart aching. “You did all this yourself?”

He nodded and looked around the van, heavy in thought. “Every bolt. Every panel. I didn’t know what I was doing half the time, but I figured it out. I had to. It was the only way I could make it up to him…”

He paused again and took a deep breath.

“It was one of the most important things he left me. It’s not just a nice ride.”

I ran my fingers over a photo of Tristan, older now, standing beside the freshly restored van. He looked proud and determined, but…

Alone.

“We weren’t on the best of terms when he died,” Tristan said quietly. “I was off being a young shit. He’d call me every night, and I put him on ignore. I took oil and gas jobs in remote places where you make a shitload of money. When I came home, I lived a very…” He paused, searching for the right word. “Materialistic life.”

I didn’t respond.

I waited for him to continue as he took a few moments to collect himself. His gaze was distant. He was somewhere else, lost to moments in the past I could see were still weighing him down.

“I got too wrapped up in the noise. Forgot about this way of life,” he finally continued. “But when he went…it wasn’t pretty. It was fast and painful, and all he wanted was someone there when he went. And I…”

He shook his head, rubbing his jaw as his nostrils flared.

“I wasn’t fucking there when he needed me, Daze.”

My eyes felt raw.

His hurt was so palpable.

“I’ve got a place where I want to scatter his ashes,” he whispered. “A place we used to love. I’m headed there now.”