Page 9 of No Safe Place

“Show me the watch.”

From his bedside table, Declan lifted up the stainless-steel Rolex I had recently bequeathed him for his twenty-first birthday.

“That’s a fine timepiece, son.”

“Sure is, Dad.”

“Remember, since it’s an automatic watch, you have to wear it to keep it wound.”

“I remember, Dad.”

“Also remember to keep the crown screwed down tight otherwise the waterproof hermetic seal will be broken.”

“Got it, Dad. I’ll call you later when the sun is up.”

Then the screen went black for some reason.

“Weird,” I said as I put my phone down onto the table.

I went back to my coffee. There was a road called Route 4 on my left with a bridge over the Farmington River, and as I sipped, I looked out at the cars coming over it. Inside of them were mostly tired and grim-faced folks in medical scrubs and business attire heading out to work at the nearby UConn Health complex and the Connecticut state capital of Hartford some twenty miles to the southeast.

As the busy bee drivers periodically stopped at the light and glanced down zombielike at their phones, a part of me wanted to walk over and knock on their windows and point out the fly-fishing mecca of the Farmington River right there beside them that they were totally missing out on.

“Or then again,” I said, quietly nodding to myself as I blew on the coffee cup lid.

“Maybe it’s just best for all concerned to keep the most beautiful trout river on Earth to me and the cormorants today after all.”

Still basking in the zen of the New England fall, I was thinking about taking out my burner phone to get an Uber back to town to get another storybook day of my American fishing odyssey underway when I glanced over at a woman getting out of a car in the coffee shop’s parking lot.

Some people from your past you could be sitting next to in a subway car or a plane cabin and look right through one another. But with other ones, the slightest glance of eyes on eyes clicks things back in time instantly, and five or ten or even twenty years suddenly disappear like they’d never even happened at all.

“Mike?” Colleen Doherty said as she stepped over.

“Michael Gannon?”

10

“Colleen?” I said, smiling in shock, almost spilling my coffee as I leaped up.

Colleen Doherty was from about as far back in my past as it went. One of the first girls I had ever had a real crush on, she was the older sister of my Bronx Catholic grammar school good buddy, Connor.

And back when I was, what, ten years old, I used to sleep over at Connor’s house. On Friday nights as we sat and watched The A-Team and Miami Vice or snuck the remote over to MTV when Mr. or Mrs. Doherty left the room, I would have butterflies in my stomach as I snuck glances at Colleen across the coffee table.

She’d completely ignore me, of course, but like every other boy in the neighborhood who had eyesight, I had been smitten from the first moment I saw the tall black-haired looker.

Because it was not just Colleen’s long blue-black hair that turned heads. It was her eyes. She had these icy gray eyes that were bright, almost glowing. They had taken my ten-year-old breath away, that was for sure. Even before I knew anything about anything, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I thought she was like an angel or something.

Talk about getting the blood pumping, I thought as I watched those angel eyes fix on my own again after all these years.

“It really is you,” Colleen said. “The shape you’re in. Wow! You look twenty.”

“You don’t look so bad yourself,” I said, beaming back at her. “You cut your hair.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, touching it. “Years ago. How many has it been?”

My smile suddenly broke as the ancient memories abruptly came to an end.

A dead end.

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