Where home should be

Rick went to Nashville with a notebook full of songs and his uncle’s old Martin. When he came back eight months later he’d left the notebook in a motel and the guitar was cracked.
“It’s just a lot different there,” he told Alan during their break, picking bits of sawdust out of his coffee. Rick felt the silence almost pressing into his head now that the machines weren’t screaming, ripping trees into sheets of wood.
“You tried. And you’ve got Linda. How’s she like it here?”
Rick didn’t know.
They had made it through winter, the part he thought she'd find hard. In May he’d borrowed a tiller, carved out a garden behind the trailer. She stopped him when he went to lay on the RoundUp to kill the weeds.
“No. We’re going natural.”
He’d been right. The thistle had outpaced the vegetables, until in five weeks they were waist high and her hands were laced with thin red scratches from pulling weeds.
He tilled twice more so she could start again. Most mornings when he left she was out pulling weeds. By night she fell asleep in front of the little TV, while he drank and watched her breathe.
The drive home usually took 40 minutes, over the river and then west on gravel roads. Rick liked it, especially when the sun sent long shadows across the fields.
But this night he could see dark smoke where home should be.
When he skidded into the driveway, almost hitting the ditch, Linda was standing in the blackened garden, a red plastic gas container at her feet. Rick went and stamped out some of the flames that were creeping across the grass, kicked dirt on a small fire.
Then he saw the green suitcase at her feet, beside the gas can.