Page 37 of The Do-Over
Rob laughed. “I’m sure he wouldn’t believe it. He never thought I would amount to anything. He thought I spent too much time focusing on basketball when I should have been learning a trade.”
“You sure proved him wrong, didn’t you?” Bradley asked. “If it hadn’t been for basketball, you wouldn’t have gotten out on your own when you did. You might not have been able to go to medical school.”
“I definitely wouldn’t. My father wasn’t going to pay for that.”
“So think of it that way. Even though he isn’t there, imagine you’re going back to Deer Ridge to prove to him what a success you turned out to be. Pretend you’re rubbing it in his face.”
“He won’t be there.”
“That’s the best part! You can rub it in his face without having to deal with what he might actually have to say about it. You can imagine his responses. I think you should picture him crying about it.”
Rob had to laugh at that. “He wouldn’t have cried about it.”
“Doesn’t mean you can’t imagine it however you want to.”
“That’s true.”
“Look, you’ve made a big success out of your life, and this award is a celebration of that. And that’s something you should celebrate, Rob, okay? So just go down there and have a good time.”
“A good time in Deer Ridge. That’s a joke.”
“Have the best time you can. And when you get back to Chicago, we’ll go for a drink on me. Okay?”
“Yeah, that—hang on.”
“What’s up?”
The snow was coming down harder now. Rob was having trouble seeing in front of him. He turned up the windshield wipers and put the defogger on. “The weather here is crappy. Are you getting snow?”
“A bit,” Bradley said. “The shovels came around earlier, so the roads are clear.” He paused. “Are they clear where you are?”
“No, snow shovels won’t get to these back roads for days,” Rob said. “That’s how it works out here. The snow gets melted away by cars driving over the roads before the shovels make it around.”
“I hope you’re driving slowly,” Bradley said. “You’ve always been a speed demon.”
“Trust me, I’m crawling.” Rob glanced at the speedometer. He was going about forty miles per hour. Well, relatively crawling.
“How far away from Deer Ridge are you?”
“Not very far. I should be in town in about fifteen minutes. I don’t think the roads will be any better there.” He thought back to what it had been like growing up in that town. “Everyone will be sequestered in their houses. No one will be on the roads. The snowplow operators are probably drinking gin and tonics with their feet up in front of a fire.”
“It’s one of those places where the whole town shuts down when it snows?”
“Not exactly. It’s just small enough that you can walk everywhere you really need to go, so people will be doing that instead of driving.”
“Sounds like a hoot,” Bradley said. “You should take me someday.”
“Oh, believe me, you don’t want to go to Deer Ridge. If you and I travel together—”
Rob cut off his sentence as the rear wheels of his car skidded to the side. He tried to relax and steer into the skid, the way he’d always been taught, but the car began to spin.
Belatedly, he thought, I should have been driving slower.
He was off the road, and then the car was tilting at a terrifying angle, and everything went black.
