Forty Days on the California Trail

July 13, 1993. A big day, but Wally immediately flubbed the plan and wound up sleeping on a picnic table by the river. Not so easy at sixty-four. Unsurprisingly, it stank like river. Or something that died and gassed out a little closer to his sleeping bag than the river. Still, there was a moon overhead and fireflies in the high grass when he woke after midnight. That was nice. The road had its charms and warts and now he was here to see them all. Or smell them, as the case may be. 

The plan was to hitchhike out of Shakopee, Minnesota, and make it to Mankato by nightfall. Here’s how he flubbed it: when the nice young couple picked him up in their minivan, he started talking mindlessly and rambled into the childhood memory of a hitchhiker who preyed on high school students in Wisconsin. Probably a myth, but that was that. They dropped him off with a nervous excuse. The driver refused to look at him as he tripped out the sliding door. He watched the taillights fade and walked to the roadside rest without another offer. It was a learning process, being on the road.

Sometime before dawn a trio of racoons came through and sniffed at his backpack. He shooed them away (a bit harder than you’d think) and sat watching the sun come up over a slow, buggy pool. The wind rushed forward to promise a hot day out on the highway. It was hard to calculate how long it would take to walk to San Diego from Minnesota. He had drawn the route on a map, avoiding the interstates, and it looked to be about 40 days, assuming occasional rides and that his body could take six hours a day of walking. The rides would make it easier, but not too much, he hoped. He’d been ruled by the bustle of time his whole career, and now that he was retired, it was a true peasants’ revolt out here in the open country.

He walked a few hard miles before a filling station appeared like an oasis in a sea of knee-high corn. The bathroom was open, and he used the sink to wash his hair, then combed it through and looked in the mirror. Retired Wally… not much different than Realtor Wally. He blew his nose, examined it in the mirror, then slung the backpack over his shoulder.

Inside the store the chubby young clerk didn’t look up. There were no other customers.

“Do you have those sandwiches a person can throw in the microwave?” Wally asked.

“In the cooler.”

“You probably won’t believe it, but I’m walking all the way to California. Not that I don’t have a car. Lincoln, if you want to know. Got a daughter there in San Diego about your age. She’s an engineer. Smart girl, always had the best grades in school. You in school?” 

If she answered, Wally didn’t hear. He put the sandwich in the microwave and snatched two bottles of lemonade from the cooler. “Why walk, you might ask, if a man’s got a car? Well, let’s just say it’s time to slow things down a bit. I’ve sold houses for over thirty years. Long time, that. If you have family or friends looking to sell… Oh, never mind, dear. Force of habit. Still, I’ll leave a card.”  

The clerk didn’t look at the card on the counter. She waited while he gathered a few more provisions, prattling along the way. “Of course who knows what the body can handle. I used to be a runner, even before it was a fad. Been through an awful lot of fads. What did you say your name was, dear?”

“Six twenty-four.”

“Sorry?”

“Six dollars and twenty-four cents.”

Wally looked at the counter. That seemed about right. “There you go. And you go right ahead and keep the change.”

When he stepped out into the parking lot, he thought it was nice, all the people he was bound to meet along the way. 

 

Le Sueur, Minnesota

A veteran who was still wearing his green army jacket dropped him off in Le Sueur, Minnesota, around eleven in the morning. Wally played it smart and kept the talking to a minimum, which wasn’t the easiest thing he’d done all week. There was even more river in Le Sueur. It didn’t smell as bad as the previous night, and he found the town mildly charming. To the west he crossed a bridge over the water and stopped to have a drink of lemonade. He tried to imagine how surprised Robin would be to see him again. She was making a good life for herself out there in California. Not easy for a young woman on her own, but he always told her nothing could stop someone so bright as his sweet singing Robin.

It had been only a month since his last visit. The Northwest Airlines flight lasted over four hours, and it was fun to talk business until his neighbor fell asleep. Didn’t get his name. Robin was glad to see him, but the visit was just a long weekend. They both had to get back to work. The subject of her mother did not come up, which was an additional blessing out there in sun country.

When he got back, it seemed that time caught up with him. He missed her immediately. It wasn’t fair, those miles between them, and the pull of his work to forget and serve his clients was, for the first time in his life, unacceptable. Within a week he’d made the decision to retire. What to do with his time was obvious, and he wouldn’t go back in the damn plane. One minute you’re here, and after four hours of jostling claustrophobia, the beast spits you out with no sense of the real interval of people, mountains, filling stations, meadows and smelly rivers. Enough of that.

He put the lemonade bottle in his backpack and watched a glob of spittle falling to the water.

 

Police Encounter #1

In the afternoon a squad car pulled over to the shoulder of the road. The bald officer stepped out and adjusted his belt. He was tall and thin and threw a shadow that reached into the lane of traffic.

“St. Peter’s a fine town,” Wally said, reading off the car as he caught up.

The officer frowned. “It is. Got an ID on you, sir?”

“Surely. And a business card if you like, though I’m recently retired. Thirty-one years in real estate.”

“Just the ID.”

Wally rummaged the pockets of his backpack to find his wallet. 

“The town is not really fond of vagrants,” the officer said as he looked at the license.

“No, sir. I’m no vagrant. Just passing through, so in that sense yes, but I’m not a vagrant by trade. I’m a booster of law enforcement, in fact. Back home I hosted the National Night Out.”

The officer looked back at the license. “Mr. Dunn. Well, they pay me to be curious around here, so you won’t mind me asking where you’re going on a hot day like this.” 

“Ha, now that’s a long story. How much time you got?” Wally stood hugging his backpack like a bag of groceries, a business card between his fingers. “As I said, I’m recently retired and thought I’d take a walk, that’s the short of it. Got a daughter to visit.”

“And where does this daughter live?”

For once he thought for a moment before answering. The officer looked professionally agitated. “A bit south of here. Bit south. My business card.” 

Despite his reluctance, the officer took the card. Wally had received lots of compliments on it. His smiling face on a cartoon astronaut body, standing on the roof of a house, planting an American flag. Another Large Leap for the American Dream. Wally had his heroes, starting with Neil Armstrong. 

“Alright Mr. Dunn. I’m sure you won’t be any trouble for St. Peter. Just passing through, you say.”

“Yessir. I’ll find a place for the night in Mankato.”

The officer did not give him his card back. “Mankato’s fine. On your way, then.”

Later in the afternoon Wally caught the scent of coffee and pastries, but the thought of the officer lurking around each corner pushed him quickly through the town.

 

The Iowa Border

Rain. Funny how the imagination fails you. He had a rain jacket in the pack, but the rain he’d imagined was light and warm over green fields. This was a biblical rain, a punishing storm, dark and straight down like in the movies. The farm town, Bigelow, didn’t have a motel or restaurant. Nothing open. There was a large machine he didn’t know the name of parked alongside the grain elevator. He crawled underneath it and sat in the dirt and leaned his head against another thing he didn’t know the name of. It was a difficult night of sleep.

In the morning the storm cleared out. He emerged from the machine and windmilled his arms to get the blood moving. His clothes were soaked. As he crossed the border just outside of town, he turned around and said goodbye to his wet, tiresome home.

 

Sioux City Feast

Wally accepted rides a little more freely once his heels began blistering. Just outside of Sioux City an older man in a Cadillac Fleetwood pulled alongside him and motioned for him to get in.   

“That’s about the craziest thing I ever heard,” said the driver after introducing himself as Bill Thune. He wore a cap that read USS Intrepid in gold stitching. Coming from an older man the comment stung, and Wally stammered for a better justification.

“But you’re newly retired and entitled to a little madness. They work us for decades until we don’t even know who we are.”

That silenced Wally, a rare event. He paused to consider the man, only a minor slouch to his ramrod profile, from across an acre of velour seat. This was someone he hadn’t expected. Wally was, in fact, a tad intimidated. “Well, my big idea could have been easier on the feet.”

“At least you haven’t gone cowardly of big ideas. Can’t say that about all of them. Your walk may damn near kill you, but I’ll respect you if it does. Kids scatter these days and there’s no helping it. How have you found our state highways?”

“Hot, of course. And lonely out in the fields, I don’t mind saying.”

“You can just about count on hot in July. But no worries, you’re almost to Nebraska, and you’re riding with Bill Thune now. Why don’t you come out with the gang for something to eat? You hungry?”

There was no denying it.

“It’s settled. Just headed out to Morningside to meet them now.”

Morningside turned out to mean the McDonald’s on Morningside Avenue, and the Gang was a group of retirees that took over a corner of the restaurant each Wednesday. Bill explained that the composition of the gang had varied over the years through what he called “natural attrition.”

The Cadillac took up more than one space in the parking lot. This McDonald’s was mostly empty other than the gang in a corner. More than a couple of them wore some emblem of the military. Wally sat next to a man named Claude, who drank coffee from a Styrofoam cup he said he’d owned for seven years. In fact, they all drank coffee from Styrofoam cups. It seemed the point of the club. 

“Wally here is on something of a mission,” Bill said to the group. This met with satisfactory nods. “He set out on foot to find his daughter in California.” Claude looked at him approvingly, then leaned over and said he’d be happy to drive him all the way if he liked. “I’m a widower,” he said.

“Which way you going? You should take south 75 out of town,” said Raymond. 

“Rubbish. He should take 35 toward Hubbard. Especially if he’s walking. The other way is too dangerous,” said Harold. Thus began the debate. Wally went into his backpack and produced the map and spread it across two tables pushed together. The gang gathered around it like generals on the eve of D-Day. Bill Thune stood above them nodding in assent or casting an occasional veto. Wally was surprised to find a willing audience for the planning he’d been doing in his head for weeks. He even made a few revisions, much to the delight of the gang. 

They ate a breakfast of hot cakes, sausage patties and hash browns. Afterwards, Roger gave him a little silver coin he said was his good luck charm. When Wally tried to resist, Roger waved him off and said he had hundreds of them. They all shuffled back to the counter for a recharge of their Styrofoam cups. 

“That must be one special girl, your Robin,” Bill said after they’d had their fill.

“Oh, she is. Smart as they come, class president in high school and graduated from the U magna cum laude. It’s not an easy thing, being a woman of science. Seems she has to work twice as hard as anyone else.”

“It’s damn unfair and you should be proud. But listen, Wally, the way you’re headed is a little dangerous. Once you get down near those mountains things could get kinetic. You ready for something like that?”

“I find that most people are trustworthy. I don’t attract much trouble.” Wally smiled large as if to demonstrate his powers.

Bill frowned. “I foresee some difficulty for you, all right. Do you at least have a good knife on you, son?” 

“No. Nothing like that.”

Bill pulled on the haft of a fixed blade and it came out of his waistband. He laid it on his open palm. “My gift for your journey.” 

Wally picked up his coffee. “That’s too much, Bill. A nice thought. I’ll be alright.”

“Suit yourself.” Bill re-holstered his weapon. “Listen to me, though. I’m eight-two years old. Been retired a little over thirty years. Well mostly, anyway. A little advice. Once you complete this mission of yours, try to envision something sustainable for your future. I can already tell you’re not the kind to sit around watching ball games. That’s fine. But try to remember it’s just another stage, not the end of any bold life. It would be damn ironic to kill yourself proving the fact.”

Bill drove him to the edge of South Sioux City before they parted. As the gold Cadillac pulled away from the shoulder, Wally glanced up at the sky and thought about revisiting his old religion. There was just no denying the blessings that came and went in a person’s life, one of which was certainly a bellyful of pancakes.

 

The Starling Motel

Colby, Kansas. Fewer rides the last few days, and Wally guessed rightly that his appearance was a factor. The sweat and wind, occasional rain, the hard miles toward a recumbent horizon. Time to give his heels a break and soak in a tub. Maybe get a haircut.

The Starling was a modest building just off highway 25, splayed low like the town. It had a TV with long antenna ears, a writing desk with a pen on a chain, and a bathroom that came with soap and little lemon shampoos. That was about everything he needed. After dropping his backpack on the desk, he laid down and slept for an hour, dreaming of being chased over farmland by acrobatic crop dusters. 

In the early evening he walked up Chickamauga Avenue to 4th Street and entered a bar and grill. Wally counted three patrons in the place and worried a little about the food. He ordered a burger and beer. For some reason, his mission had affected his gift for chatter. He sat just a few seats away from a young couple who did not turn his way. Neither did Wally make some excuse with the catsup when the food came. He was aware of this change and a bit confused by it. As he paid the bill, he realized that he was out of business cards.

When he got back to the motel, he saw a middle-aged woman exiting her Subaru and then fidgeting with the lock on the room next door. Long brunette hair, abruptly beautiful. He found enough of his old self to say hello on the sidewalk. “Looks like we’re neighbors, you might say. Name’s Wally Dunn. You need anything at all, you just give a knock on that door right there. 108, that’s mine.”

“Thank you, Mr. Dunn.”

He tarried a moment, shuffling backwards idiotically. Back in his room he ran the tub and sat down at the writing desk. Should he send some warning to Robin that he was coming? That would ruin the surprise, but now he worried that his arrival would upset her routine. She’d tell his ex-wife about his strange journey, and they’d write it off as another of his impulsive behaviors. It would help if he could articulate himself better, but that was a dead letter lately. He decided to go soak his legs before this line of thought spiraled him into a black mood.

The tub was large and forgiving. Heat worked into his calves and stung his heels. Wally was a shower man who didn’t know much about the virtues of the bathtub. Halfway through the enlightening soak, music began next door. Paper walls, apparently. It was a classical piece, but beyond that Wally couldn’t say. Violins and some kind of dark horn. He didn’t know how the woman was playing it in the bare room. The tub was hypnotizing, and he nearly fell asleep under the spell. After drying off, he set the pillow against the wall and settled in. Her raven hair cascaded as he shut his eyes. Before he drifted off, he prayed for the world’s mysteries to rise and charm away the walls between his room and the angelic 109. 

 

Police Encounter #2

“What, then.”

“Sir?

“You expect me to believe that you’re a real estate agent without a car or business card?”

“I do have a car, you see. I left it back in Minnesota.”

“It would have been convenient, don’t you think, to have brought it along on a road trip?”

“Convenient. See that’s the thing. I’m sort of done with convenience. It’s hard to explain.”

The officer handed his license back. “You some kind of hippy, Mr. Dunn?”

“No sir. But is there some reason that you’re stopping me? It seems to me a person should be able to know that. I’ve been law abiding my whole life.”

“Seems to you.”

“Yessir. Respectfully.”

“I hear stories out here, Dunn, and I wasn’t born yesterday. Fine, if you’re not going to be straight with me, that’s up to you. But I’m going to ask you to get into the car.”

“What on earth for? Am I under arrest?”

“If you want to be. On the other hand, I might just drive you to the Otero County line and let you out. That way you’ve made up a little ground on this journey of yours, and I have one less vagabond to worry about in my jurisdiction. Win-win.”

Wally felt suddenly bold. “What if I don’t want a ride?”

The officer smirked and dropped his hands. “I’m afraid I insist, Mr. Dunn.”

When the officer let Wally out fifteen miles up the road, he remarked, “I’ve never met a real estate agent who didn’t have a business card. That’s a new one. But good day to you, Mr. Dunn.”

 

Deserts, not Mountains

He was losing track of time. The land was dry and brown and each day was a little more dangerous in the heat. Paolo verde and ironwood, fields of stone, a hundred varieties of cactus he couldn’t name. He walked in the mornings and evenings, but it was easy to get stuck midday on the fractured highway. As he went, the desert wrens sounded like the prophets of childhood sermons in his ear.

For long stretches no one came along. Hours. The road lay like a copper band under the sun. On the horizon there were the shadows of apparent mountains, even a low line of white to the north, but they did not reach out for him. Once he saw a coyote cross the road a few hundred yards ahead and disappear into the brush, and the thought of snakes crowded the mind as he glanced into the creosote a foot or two off the pavement. 

Just as the sun reached its zenith one day, a station wagon came down the valley and stopped. He climbed in behind a man and woman in the front seat. A young girl sat beside him with an open book on her lap. He guessed they were Navaho. The girl ignored her reading and stared at him as they drove. 

“We’re going about twenty miles this way, then we turn south,” the man said.

“You’re good people to pick me up on such a hot day.”

“Oh, just about every day is hot now.” 

The woman ashed her cigarette out the window. Wally tried to turn on the gab but ran out of gas immediately. He was beginning to think something was seriously wrong. As they drove in silence, the two figures resembled his own parents driving him and his brother to Crookston more than fifty years ago. His father’s assured voice, his mother’s nod. Talking about a new job or something. Where are those places now? His grandfather had owned the failing hardware store in town, and his father refused to take up the business. Both men were dead many years now. 

The girl beside him laughed suddenly. It was Robin’s laugh. She had always been a reader, his girl, even when she was small. This was like the road trips they’d taken out west to the Black Hills or Devil’s Tower. There was less bickering in those days. Wally didn’t have the business that came later, and there was more time for everything. It was hard to remember, but here he was now sitting in the middle of it. The girl smiled and stared with her open book. There was even some warm feeling remaining in the front seat.

They dropped him off in a haunted state of mind and turned south. Wally continued in the heat with a backpack that felt heavier than ever. It was his fault, after all. At the time it just seemed like survival, getting by, striving to pay the mortgage and car loans with just enough money left over for a few modest things for themselves. He never learned to say no at work. That was a curse that followed him his whole life. He always tried to make up for it at home, tried too hard, in fact. When the money came, he spent stupidly in an attempt to justify his absence, and soon they were in debt. The stress of that and the mania it caused in him broke the marriage. He moved out just before Robin’s freshman year in high school and never remarried.

Enough. The road had been rising for a mile or so onto a plateau. Just outside of a sudden town he came to a roadside stand. The woman had baskets with oranges and avocados, dates and figs. She worked a little stove in the back and made pork taquitos for a quarter a piece. Wally ate his fill under a small umbrella and forced a little small talk. The sun was still high when he hoisted his backpack and considered the buildings ahead.

 

The Lighthouse

He wasn’t halfway through the town when the first flush came over his dry skin. At a bus stop he sat on the bench and drank the last of his water. The bus came and people shuffled by in the heat, and the exhaust made him cough as it motored away. His body felt sluggish under the weight of a headache. He went through his bag and could not find any aspirin, so he got up and pushed on. Midway through town he became confused about which way to turn and wound up on a street with fewer businesses and more trees. That felt better. There was a shady drive that drew him onward, and he came spellbound to what he thought was a hospital. Perhaps he should stop and talk to a doctor, he thought, but then his tongue felt swollen and difficult.

Inside there was an unoccupied front desk. A register in cursive hand. Wally figured to investigate a little further. He went down a hallway with white window light over antiseptic tiles. There was a café with a very old person watching President Clinton on the TV. He couldn’t tell if the person was a man or a woman, but it was certainly not a doctor.

“You’re not the doctor,” he said, and continued down the hallway.

He got very tired. The image of Robin appeared as real as anyone standing before him, and he apologized for how tired he felt. “I don’t know if I’ll make it after all, dear,” he said. “My tongue is funny.”

The way opened to another large room with tables and chairs. There were old people everywhere. Some looked at puzzles and books, others chatted quietly. A few seemed to stare at nothing at all. From across the room a man with a walker scowled as if Wally owed everyone an explanation for entering the room. 

“It sure would be nice to sit down,” he said. When no one responded, he made his way to a table and fell into a chair beside a man in a yellow sweater. Wally looked around the room and asked, “Are we dead?”

“Fuck you, bud,” said the man. In his fog Wally recognized the statement as mildly antagonistic. “It’s just that I’m so damn hot,” he explained. “And I believe that you are all seeing hard. No. I mean… you’re all getting hard to see.”

The man yelled: “Margaret! Somebody needs to call 9-1-1 again.”

The words scared him, but as the room spun around, Wally thought his new friend might be on to something.

 

Police Encounter #3

The officer spoke quietly into his radio. A voice on the speaker responded in a language of static. Wally had no idea why he was lying on the floor. They had cleared the tables and chairs around him, and now two figures were wheeling in a gurney. His new friend was standing next to him. Wally tapped his cane and the yellow man bent to him.

“Mister, whatever you do, don’t tell the officer I’m out of business cards.”

 

The Wallyphonic Miscellany

Seventy-two hours in the hospital recovering from heat stroke, including an entire day with an ice pack on his groin. Even at sixty-four there were new lessons in life. The nurse was a pretty blonde, but he didn’t feel up to flirting with his nether regions gone numb. At least his tongue felt normal again. He found it funny on release that they pushed him in a wheelchair to the curb, so that he could rise and begin the next eight-hundred-mile walk. He stood and thanked the nurse. In truth, he’d made a hospital resolution to accept a lot more rides on the road.

Outside of Albuquerque he jumped into a van full of soccer players, high schoolers in full uniform headed to a game. They immediately named him Grandpa, which grated on him as he sat in the back row. Other than a few Viagra quips, they were such good-natured youths, joking and singing with a wild optimism about their chances in the game and beyond, that he started calling himself by the name. The general malaise from his heat stroke began to break up, and they slapped him on the back as they dropped him off in a Walmart parking lot.

Days later near the Arizona border. Another mistake with the map. This time he was caught after sundown in a desert with no cars. He saw more than one coyote in the afterglow. It was getting cold, and he wondered if he were to lay down somewhere in his sleeping bag, would it be too cold for the snakes to get him? A little further along, there was a dilapidated shack just off the road. The door was nearly off its hinges, but the floor was raised from the dirt. He lay down on the wood floor with his blanket and looked out gaps between the planks at the cold stars. As he shook, it occurred to him that maybe he could befriend anything at all, including the cold snakes of the world. 

Phoenix, crushingly hot, but Wally wasn’t playing anymore. He got a motel room and slept the afternoon away with the shades drawn. Near sunset he sat on his backpack at a gas station at the city limit, looking for a ride. A man with a shopping cart full of clothes and garbage bags approached him and snapped, “This is my corner, old man. Git.”

Suddenly, the California border. A middle-aged businessman in a linen suit: “You don’t say much, do you.” Wally wondered whether he’d ever heard that before. “It’s been a long trip,” he replied. “I guess I’m tired.” The man took this as an invitation and told Wally everything he ever wanted to know about oil fryers, his company’s business. French fries, chicken, fish, donuts – there wasn’t an American food unconquered by his fryers. As Wally watched the brown hills out the window, he detected anxiety behind the man’s confident pitch. Maybe a little sadness. By the time the car stopped, he felt truly sorry for all the working souls he’d left behind.

 

San Diego, California

Of course one day the sun came up on Robinstown itself. Wally got there just after eight in the morning. He wouldn’t go straight to her apartment because he learned from a stranger that it was Tuesday, which meant she would be at work. That gave him all day to get his head straight. Though it was early, he took a cab to Sunset Cliffs and walked the beautiful banal morning a few hundred feet over the sea. At a cluster of benches, he sat down and looked at his shoes, which had turned a dun color and were separating from the glued soles. How to explain this behavior to Robin, these last forty-something days? In all the walking, he hadn’t come up with an answer, though he imagined an eloquence that left her wanting to be closer to him. But nothing came in words. There was no real content to the vision.

Near lunch he took another cab to Pacific Beach and walked the edge of the water. That felt manageable. Gulls chased by the waves, surfers bobbing out there in the late morning sun. When he came up to the pier, there was a teenage boy sitting with a skateboard who asked him for money. He put a few dollars in his hand, then dropped his backpack and sat down. 

After considering the pier, Wally said, “You know, it’s taken me some time to get here.”

“Welcome,” said the boy, stuffing the money in his pocket.

“You do a lot of walking around here?”

The boy shrugged. “Got no car, so yeah. Walking is pretty much all I do. And boarding.”

“Is that thing hard to ride?”

“Probably for you.”

Wally squinted out at the water and sighed. “Maybe I’ll take it up while I’m out here.”

“Mister, I’d say you can do whatever you want.”

Wally turned to the boy. His hair was bleached over a sun-streaked forehead. “Do you live out here on the beach?”

“Sometimes.”

“You got parents?”

“Ma’s up in Riverside.”

Wally whistled. “It must be nice, living by the water.”

When the boy pulled out a joint, Wally decided it was time to move on. He wished him well and went up to the boardwalk and bought a coffee at a window. He continued on to all the shops and houses along Mission Boulevard. Small yards and short fences. Quite a few people coming and going. Surely there were worse fathers and husbands, he thought. In truth he didn’t know anything about what he was doing or what his trip was about. No wonder he couldn’t think of anything. Every day he knew less, it seemed. He knew real estate, of course, and how to take care of clients. But there were no more clients. They disappeared in a single act. It was over, and now he was left with nothing, which, he decided with a smirk, was probably his true state.

By late afternoon he was in her neighborhood. He circled the block around the building until a little before six. While walking, he passed an older man who reminded him of Bill Thune, and a police car drove by without even a glance his way. There was a little girl playing in a yard who could have been every girl playing in a yard, including his own. A mailman said hello, but Wally found that he had gone mute. He came finally to her apartment building as the California sun began its evening decline. A three-story structure with about 35 units, mid-sixties build, he decided, no central air but in good repair. Robin Dunn, right there in the middle of the list. With a weathered finger, he reached and pressed the button. He put his hands behind his back and waited, a bit nervous but ready for the first time in years to listen.

 

Image by Karla Hernandez on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.