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CHAPTER EIGHT
ABRA’S THEORY OF RELATIVITY
1
The last run of the day on The Helen Rivington was called the Sunset Cruise, and many evenings when
Dan wasn’t on shift at the hospice, he took the controls. Billy Freeman, who had made the run roughly
twenty-five thousand times during his years as a town employee, was delighted to turn them over.
“You never get tired of it, do you?” he asked Dan once.
“Put it down to a deprived childhood.”
It hadn’t been, not really, but he and his mother had moved around a lot after the settlement
money ran out, and she had worked a lot of jobs. With no college degree, most of them had been lowpaying.
She’d kept a roof over their heads and food on the table, but there had never been much extra.
Once—he’d been in high school, the two of them living in Bradenton, not far from Tampa—he’d
asked her why she never dated. By then he was old enough to know she was still a very good-looking
woman. Wendy Torrance had given him a crooked smile and said, “One man was enough for me,
Danny. Besides, now I’ve got you.”
“How much did she know about your drinking?” Casey K. had asked him during one of their
meetings at the Sunspot. “You started pretty young, right?”
Dan had needed to give that one some thought. “Probably more than I knew at the time, but we
never talked about it. I think she was afraid to bring it up. Besides, I never got in trouble with the law
—not then, anyway—and I graduated high school with honors.” He had smiled grimly at Casey over
his coffee cup. “And of course I never beat her up. I suppose that made a difference.”
Never got that train set, either, but the basic tenet AAs lived by was don’t drink and things will
get better. They did, too. Now he had the biggest little choo-choo a boy could wish for, and Billy was
right, it never got old. He supposed it might in another ten or twenty years, but even then Dan
thought he’d probably still offer to drive the last circuit of the day, just to pilot the Riv at sunset, out
to the turnaround at Cloud Gap. The view was spectacular, and when the Saco was calm (which it
usually was once its spring convulsions had subsided), you could see all the colors twice, once above
and once below. Everything was silence at the far end of the Riv’s run; it was as if God was holding
His breath.
The trips between Labor Day and Columbus Day, when the Riv shut down for the winter, were the
best of all. The tourists were gone, and the few riders were locals, many of whom Dan could now call
by name. On weeknights like tonight, there were less than a dozen paying customers. Which was fine
by him.
It was fully dark when he eased the Riv back into its dock at Teenytown Station. He leaned against
the side of the first passenger car with his cap (ENGINEER DAN stitched in red above the bill)
tipped back on his head, wishing his handful of riders a very good night. Billy was sitting on a bench,
the glowing tip of his cigarette intermittently lighting his face. He had to be nearly seventy, but he
looked good, had made a complete recovery from his abdominal surgery two years before, and said he
had no plans to retire.