Laura Dave - The Last Thing He Told Me

She has a name tag on, AMY, her hair in a short bob.

We get in line at reception, but it’s too late. She walks over, a smile plastered to her face.

“Hi there,” she says. “I’m Amy, the hotel concierge. Welcome to Austin! Is there anything I can help you with while you’re waiting to check in?”

“We’re good. Unless you happen to have a map of the campus?” I say.

“Of UT-Austin?” she says. “Absolutely. I also could help set you up on a campus tour. And there is some outstanding coffee that you won’t want to miss when you head to that part of town. Are you coffee drinkers?”

Bailey eyes me as though it’s my fault Amy is hovering and jabbering on—and maybe she isn’t wrong. I did ask for a map as opposed to just telling chatty Amy to move along. But I want a map. I want to hold something in my hands that makes it seem a little more like I know what I’m doing.

“Can I set up a shuttle service to take you there?”

We get to the front of the line, where a desk clerk named Steve is holding out two glasses of lemonade.

“Hiya, Amy.”

“Steve! I was just about to set these two ladies up with some college maps and good flat whites.”

“Excellent,” Steve says. “I’ll get you settled into your digs. What brings you to our little corner of the world? And how can I go about making it your favorite corner?”

That’s it for Bailey. She gives up and starts to walk away—Steve the final nail in the aggressively friendly coffin. She heads toward the elevator bank, drilling me with a final look as she goes. A look of blame for these conversations she can’t handle, for being far from home, for being in Austin at all. Any goodwill I managed to accrue on the plane is apparently gone.

“So, Ms. Nichols, you’ll be staying on the eighth floor with a great view of the Lady Bird Lake,” he says. “We have a pretty great spa in the hotel if you’re looking to refresh from your flight before heading up to the room. Or I can set you up with a late lunch?”

I put up my hands in surrender.

“A room key, Steve,” I say. “Just a room key. As quick as you can hand it over.”

We drop our suitcases upstairs. We don’t stop to eat anything.

At two thirty, we leave the hotel and head back toward the Congress Avenue Bridge. I decide we should walk. I figure a long walk may help jog a memory in Bailey, assuming there is a memory to jog. And this walk will lead us through the heart of downtown Austin and up toward the campus and the Darrell K Royal Stadium, the only football stadium in the city.

As soon as we make it over the bridge, the downtown splays out before us—vibrant and spinning, even in the early afternoon. It somehow feels more like it’s nighttime: music playing, bars open, garden restaurants packed with people.

Bailey keeps her head down, eyes on her phone. How is she going to recognize anything if she isn’t paying attention? But when we stop at a traffic light on Fifth Street, the DON’T WALK sign flashing before us, she does look up.

She looks up and I catch her do a double take.

“What?” I say.

“Nothing.”

She shakes her head. But she keeps staring.

I follow her eyes to a sign for Antone’s, written in blue script. HOME OF THE BLUES written below it. A couple cuddles by the front door, taking a selfie.

She points at the club. “I’m pretty sure that my father has a John Lee Hooker record from there,” she says.

I know she’s correct as soon as she says it. I can picture the album cover: Antone’s logo on the front of it—the sleek lettering in script. And Hooker singing into a microphone, hat and sunglasses on, guitar in hand. I remember a night last week—how could it possibly have been last week?—when Bailey was at play practice, and the two of us were in the house alone. Owen strummed on his guitar. I can’t remember the words of the song now, but Owen’s face while he sang—that I remember.

“He does,” I say. “You’re right.”

“Not that it matters,” she says.

“I don’t think we know what matters yet,” I say.

“Is that supposed to be uplifting or something?” she says.

Uplifting? Three days ago, we were all together in our kitchen, a million miles from this reality. Bailey was eating a bowl of cereal, talking to her father about the weekend. She wanted Owen to let her take a drive down to the Peninsula with Bobby, who wanted to go on a long bike ride around Monterey. Maybe we can all go, Owen said. Bailey rolled her eyes, but I could see that she was considering it, especially after Owen said that we could stop in Carmel on the way home. He wanted to stop and get clam chowder at a small restaurant she loved near the beach, a restaurant where he’s been taking her since shortly after they moved to Sausalito.

That was three days ago. Now the two of us are in a new reality where Owen is missing, where we spend our time trying to figure out where he is. And why. A new reality where I’m constantly asking myself whether I’m wrong to hold on to the belief that the answers to those questions aren’t going to upend my most central ideas of who Owen is.

I’m not aiming for uplifting. I’m just trying to say something neutral so she doesn’t know how angry I am too.

When the light changes, I walk quickly across the street, turning onto Congress, picking up speed as I go.

“Try to keep up,” I say.

“Where are we going?” Bailey says.

“Somewhere better than here,” I say.

About an hour later, we round the capital and circle onto San Jacinto Boulevard. And the stadium comes into view. It is enormous, demanding—even from several blocks away.

As we walk toward it, we pass the Caven-Clark Sports Center. It seems to be the student rec center complete with a series of matching orange-laced buildings, Clark Field, and a large track. Students are playing tag football and doing sprints up the stairs and lounging on benches, making this part of campus feel at once completely separate and still a part of its city. Seamlessly integrated.

I look down at my campus map and start moving toward the closest stadium entrance.

But Bailey stops walking suddenly. “I don’t want to do this,” she says.

I meet her eyes.

“Even if I was at the stadium, then what? What’s that going to tell us about anything?”

“Bailey…” I say.

“Seriously, what are we doing here?”

She won’t respond well if I tell her that I stayed up last night reading about childhood memories—how we forget them. And how we get them back. They often come from returning to a place and then being allowed to experience it in the same way you experienced it the first time. That is what we are doing here. We are following her instinct. We are tapping into her memory that she’s been here before. And my instinct, from the minute I realized where Grady Bradford came from, that we should.

“There are things your father hasn’t told us beyond what’s going on at The Shop,” I say. “I’m trying to figure out what they are.”

“That sounds pretty general,” she says.

“It’ll get less general the more you remember,” I say.

“So… this is on me, then?”

“No, it’s on me. If I was wrong to take you here, I’ll be the first to say it.”

She gets quiet.

“Look, will you just come inside? Can you do that?” I say. “We’ve come this far.”

“Do I have a choice?” she says.

“Yes,” I say. “Always. With me you always do.”

I can see it flash across her face—her surprise that I mean it. And I do mean it. We are a hundred feet from the closest stadium entrance, GATE 2, but it is up to Bailey. If she wants to turn around, I won’t stop her. Maybe this frees her to keep going, because that’s what she does.