Though he could do with a spot of sun lately, Ethan Mack doesn’t mind foggy nights. Halos gather around the streetlights; a ferry horn bellows somewhere in the brume. Midnight chill seeps down his collar as he sits on the bench in front of the Shop-Way, puffing his pipe.
Strictly speaking, this is not permitted. Per the handbook, Shop-Way employees must clock out for smoke breaks. Of course, Ethan himself is the one who wrote that handbook, although even so, he tries not to lift himself above the rules. But he and Tanner are the only ones here, and the kid is in the back, none the wiser.
Watching Tova go into the night always prickles his nerves. According to his police scanner, there are always lunatics on the roads at night. Why must she do her shopping so late?
It’s been almost two years since she started coming late in the evening. Since Ethan started pressing his flannel collar before his shift. Trying to make himself a bit tidier. Make himself seem more presentable.
He pulls the pipe’s warmth into his chest, then exhales.
The smoke melts into the fog.
The fog reminds Ethan of home: Kilberry, on the Sound of Jura in western Scotland. Still home, though he’s lived in the United States forty years. Forty years since he packed a duffel and quit his post as a docker in Kennacraig. Forty years since he chased a lass.
It had fizzled with Cindy. The plan was rubbish to begin with, shacking up with a holiday-making American, pissing his savings on a ticket from Heathrow to JFK. He still remembers how the isles grew smaller and smaller through the little oval window.
Tanner pokes his muttonish head out the door. If he registers Ethan’s rule breaking, he doesn’t show it. The lad’s not the brightest bulb. He says, “Did you want me to do the entire cold case?”
“A’course. What do you think I’m paying you for?”
Tanner grumbles as he slinks back inside. Ethan shakes his head. Kids these days.
New York City was gritty in the seventies, and before long, Ethan and Cindy had bigger plans. Cindy emptied her flat in Brooklyn to buy an old Volkswagen van, which they drove across the country, and its vastness blew Ethan’s mind. Pennsylvania, Indiana, Nebraska, Nevada. Any one of them could’ve contained Scotland entirely.
When they found the sea again, Ethan was relieved. They lingered on the coast of Northern California for weeks, making love in the shadows of giant redwoods, before working their way north along the Pacific Coast Highway. In a ramshackle chapel somewhere near the Oregon border, he and Cindy tied the knot.
Weeks later, in Aberdeen, Washington, the van’s transmission finally failed. Ethan tinkered with it, but it was gone. And in the morning, so was Cindy.
And that was that.
Aberdeen suited Ethan well. He’d never visited the Scottish town it was named for, up on the northern coast, but something about it felt familiar: the low, gray skies, the rough, hardworking people. He found a job as a longshoreman, a bed in a rooming house, and spent quiet mornings sipping tea and watching the fog drift over the ship masts.
The union took care of him, retiring him at fifty-five with a modest pension. Out of necessity, he moved closer to the city to see the physical therapists who worked on his back after years of loading logs onto boats. But retirement made him restless. Shop-Way needed someone to cover the swing shift, so he took it, sitting at the register in an ergonomic chair. Eventually, he went a step further and used his savings to buy the place.
Now, a decade later, he doesn’t really need the money. The pension covers his rent, groceries, and gas for his truck. But the trickle of profit from the store buys him new vinyl records and a nice bottle of Islay scotch every now and then—proper whisky, none of that Highlands nonsense.
Headlights sweep over the wet pavement as a car swerves into the parking lot. Ethan snuffs out his pipe and steps back inside.
Behind the register, he watches as a young couple stumbles in, arms so tightly entwined they move as one. They zigzag through the aisles, laughing as they bounce off displays of chips and soda, finally fumbling with a debit card at the register. Then they speed off, headlights flashing across the windows.
Idiots. They’ll end up killing someone. Someone like his sister Mariah, hit by a truck at barely ten years old by fishermen on their way home from the pub. The world, Ethan thinks, is full of idiots.
The thought of Tova’s hatchback out there on that road makes Ethan queasy. He wishes he could drive by her house and make sure her car is parked there. Maybe her lights would be on.
But no. He broke himself once, chasing a lass.
