A Perfect Day - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard Paul Evans is a number-one New York Times bestselling author. He lives with his family in Salt Lake City, Utah. A Perfect Day is his eighth novel.

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Prologue

Outside my hotel window the world is snow. All is still and white or on the way to becoming so. Only the street lamps show signs of life, changing colors above barren streets that look more like tundra than asphalt. Even the rumbling, yellow snowplows that wake me from my thoughts cannot keep up with the storm.

This snowstorm seems as relentless as any Ive seen in Salt Lake City. Salt Lakers are particularly proud of their blizzards, and every native has a story of winterstories that usually begin, You call this a storm? and grow in the telling like battle tales shared by graying war veterans. Its a peculiar character flaw to those of us from cold climates that we feel superior to those who have the sense to live elsewhere.

I remember a Christmas night, when I was a boy, when there was a great blizzard. My father was always through with Christmas weeks before it arrived, and by Christmas night he had already undressed our tree and dragged it out to the curb for the municipal pickup. A storm came that same night, chased by the plows, and the next morning the tree was buried beneath a five-foot snowbank. We forgot about the tree until April, when a thaw revealed an evergreen branch poking free from the melting snow. It was the same Christmas that my mother left us.

* * *

Tonight, from my seventh-story window I see a man in a parka and a bellmans cap shoveling the walk in front of the hotels entrance. The snow returns nearly as fast as he clears it. Salt Lakes own Sisyphus.

Its a night to be home. A night to be gathered with loved ones around brick hearths and hot drinks warming the days memory. It is a night to bathe in the pleasant aftermath of the seasons joy. So why am I alone in a hotel when my wife, Allyson, and my daughter, Carson, are just minutes away?

I see a car below. It moves slowly up Main Street, its headlights cutting through the darkness. The car slides helplessly from side to side, its wipers blurring, its wheels spinning, correcting, grasping, connecting then slipping again. I imagine the driver of that car; blinded, afraid to stop, just as fearful to proceed. I empathize. Behind the wheel of my life I feel like that driver.

I couldnt tell you my first wrong step. Im not sure that I could tell you what Id do differently. My mind is a queue of questions. Most of them are about the stranger. Why did the stranger come to me? Why did he speak of hope when my future, or whats left of it, looks as barren as the winter landscape? Some might think that my story began with the stranger. But in truth it began long before I met him, back on a balmy June day eight years ago when Allyson, not yet my wife, went home to Oregon to see her father. This is strangely ironic to me, because it all began on a perfect day. And here it ends on the worst of days.

I should say begins to end. Because if the stranger is rightand Ive learned that hes always rightI have just six more days to live. Six days that I will live out alone, not because I want to, but because its the right thing to do. Perhaps my loneliness is my penance. I hope God will see it that way, because there is not enough time to heal two hearts. There is not enough time to make right one broken promise. There is only time to remember what once was and should still be. My thoughts wander, first to the stranger then further backback eight years to when Allyson went home to her father. Back to the beginning of my story. Back to a perfect day.

Chapter 1

EIGHT YEARS EARLIER. JUNE 10, 1992.
MEDFORD, OREGON.
Allyson Phelps closed her eyes as she rocked in the saddle to the swing of her Morgans gait. She rode with her father, Carson, who had grown quiet in the last hour, and the only sound they contributed to the mountain was the steady clop of hooves, the sharp metallic click of horseshoe against rock and the creaking of leather.

The trail they climbed was beaten and as familiar to the horses as to the riders. Without coaxing, they plodded along, scaling the top of a ridge that broke along a line of aspen and cedar. It was the hour before twilight, and the setting sun tinged the edges of the ragged peaks in pink and sage. The pinking hour Allyson always called it. Allyson shouted back to her father. Its been too long since weve gone riding together. When was the last time?

Been two summers, her father said without hesitation. Lets stop up ahead and let the horses rest.

She rode thirty more yards, to a small clearing, then pulled back the reins. Whoa, Dolly. She leaned forward and rubbed Dollys neck above the shoulder. The bay was damp with sweat from their ride.

Her father tapped his horses flanks with his stirrups and moved up alongside Allyson. Is this okay? she asked.

He glanced around. Its perfect.

They had stopped on a ridge overlooking the lush, velvet lap of the Rogue Valley. Gods backyard, her father called this country, and as a child and full of faith she had fully expected to run into God someday out wandering His back forty.

To some of Allysons friends at college this expanse of wilderness would have been a frightening place, but to her it was safe and nurturinga place she could run to when the world outside became too complex. It was a place that had opened its arms to her when her mother, who had no business dying, died out of turn. In such country it was possible to believe that no one ever really died, they just came here.

They dismounted and Carson took the horses reins and led them over to a blue spruce, where he tethered the straps to one of its limbs. He took from his saddlebag a small knapsack then found a flat-topped granite boulder half-buried in the mountainside and brushed the dirt from it with his hands. Come sit with me, girlie.

Allyson smiled. She was twenty-four-years old and would forever be girlie. She walked over and sat down next to him. She pulled her knees up against her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs.

From where they sat the only sign of mans trespass was four hundred yards below them, only visible through the thick foliage to someone who knew what they were looking forthe weathered obelisks and crosses of an overgrown pioneer cemetery, choked and dying itself. Allyson, like her father, had been raised in this country and while she had left it behind for school, he belonged to it still and always would. He owned more than a thousand acres of the raw land, but she knew that the opposite was truethat the land owned him.

Its good to be home again, she said. Sometimes I forget how gorgeous it is up here. Almost as pretty as you, he said then added, Pretty lonely too, sometimes.

His loneliness always made her feel guilty. I wish youd find someone.

Too late for that, he said. She felt traitorous to suggest such a thing to a man who still loved the only woman he had ever lovedalmost twenty years after she had been buried.

I dont need nobody. I have you.

She leaned into him. Thanks for bringing me home for the weekend. Its been a good day. Its been a perfect day.

He nodded in agreement, though his eyes, sometimes as deep and dark as a well of ink, held sadness. The steady rush of the Rogue River rose from the valley below them.

About Robert ...

She looked up. Yes?

Is he good to you?

Hes really good to me. Didnt you think he was sweet to me when he was here last Christmas?

He seemed nice enough. But with your old man an arms length away, hed be a fool not to be.

He treats me just as goodwhether youre there to scare him or not. She could tell that he wasnt satisfied. Really, Dad.

Youre sure you want to marry him?

I do. She turned to look at him. Youve always said I could marry anyone I chose as long as he loves me as much as you do.

Does he?

Its a pretty high benchmark. But I think he comes close. With one hand Allyson brushed her...