I wasn’t broken up by their reunion. I was focused on my life goal then—getting out of Millerton. I didn’t want to be a farmer, didn’t want to work in a factory, didn’t want to stay a day longer than I had to in Podunkville. Without money for college, I found my solution at Career Day.

  All the military branches were there. I chatted with each of them to find the perfect fit. I ruled out the marines before they could reject me. The guys signing up with them were a little too gung ho. The navy was out. I wasn’t a big fan of the water except for fishing. I’d only seen the ocean a few times in visits to Myrtle Beach. The army seemed okay, and I almost did that, but then the air force recruiter promised me the moon.

  Promised might be a strong word. In fact, thinking about it, I might have mentioned the outer space stuff first, mesmerized by Arthur C. Clarke’s writings. I thought all astronauts were from the air force. The recruiter didn’t try to dissuade me. I signed up with literal stars in my eyes. Goodbye, small town. Hello, world.

  Hello, Lackland Air Force Base was more like it. My assigned specialty was far removed from the glories of the heavens. I was assigned to materials management. Nowhere close to being in the CIA either, despite what I let the guys think back in Millerton. I did, however, rise to the exalted rank of airman first class, E-3, pencil-pushing specialist. Might have made E-4 if I had stuck around longer. And if I hadn’t been involved in some unofficial forklift racing.

  Mostly, though, I was homesick. I missed football Friday nights, hanging out with my friends at the Point, going to the drive-in. Every time I sat down in the mess hall for a meal, I missed my mother’s cooking. I wanted the fresh air rolling off the mountains in the morning, the rain drizzling down my back on a hot summer day, and the icy water of a trout river. Put a mountain boy in Texas, and all he wants is to go home.

  In my free time, I wrote letters, a funny thing for a guy who was more interested in reading a book than finishing a book report. I wrote everybody in Millerton I could think of. Some people responded. Some didn’t. This was long before email and social media, so it took a while for the replies to come. When they did, I snuck off and read them, devoured every word.

  They described the mundane parts of mountain life. Crops coming in. Layoffs at the factories. Who died. Who was dating whom. Who wrecked a car or flipped a tractor. Who got into a fight or got arrested. Who got married and was having kids. And even more scandalous, who was having kids without getting married, not a common thing back in the day.

  As soon as I consumed someone’s letter, I hurriedly scribbled out another missive. With each round, though, fewer people replied, and they took longer to do so. They weren’t being mean, just busy with their own lives.

  Shelby responded every time.

  The guys in my barracks thought she was my girlfriend. I didn’t tell them otherwise. I let them think the letters were steamy and romantic. They weren’t at all. They were routine descriptions of errands and chores and friends.

  We weren’t in love. We were friends who became good friends. Maybe that was enough. I had certainly grown to love her over the years since. It was why I went to have dinner with her every night, even if she wasn’t always inhabiting her own mind sometimes.

  I had often wondered what would’ve happened if either of us had met someone else. If Horace hadn’t broken up with her again and again. If she had simply stopped writing like all the others. If I hadn’t gotten caught racing a forklift and written up by some NCO. If I had reenlisted. If I hadn’t gone back to Millerton, would we have each found someone else to love?

  The question was moot because I did go back.

  After all my bragging in high school about leaving and never coming home, I worried what people might say. Rather than returning with my tail tucked between my legs, admitting the world had beaten me, I needed to strut. For a young man, that meant I needed a car. I bought a Chevy Nova. Slightly used. Yes, the same one.

  That was a huge purchase on an airman’s pay, but I wanted all my old friends, the ones who had written a few times before they stopped, to see me driving it. The best place to be seen, at least as a young adult in Miller County, was the old drive-in theater out on Hilltop Road.

  It was sad to see that old field overgrown now, the screen little more than a frame of wood standing like a skeleton. Back then, teenagers crowded into their cars on Friday and Saturday nights, watched movies, and made out. When the wind shifted, the smell of cows from the neighboring Hickman farm cloaked the area. Sort of a scratch-and-sniff effect for the bad flicks on the screen.

  Of course, I couldn’t go to the drive-in without a date riding in my new car. I decided to ask Shelby. And, for some crazy reason I can’t explain, I decided to do it face-to-face on my very first day back from the military. Unannounced.

  I drove up in front of her house, my hands all sweaty and my body shaking, far more nervous than I expected to be. I didn’t realize how much of a terrible idea this was until I shut off the engine. I went up and knocked on her door. Her dad answered and looked at me as if I was crazy. He called her downstairs despite how insane I must’ve appeared. Or maybe because of it.

  I had everything rehearsed but stammered along until I finally just blurted it out and asked her on a date to the drive-in. She stood frozen like a statue. Her mouth opened, hesitated, and closed again. I was sure she was going to turn me down, but after several painful seconds that seemed like hours, she asked me what movie was showing. I didn’t have a clue. I hadn’t bothered to check. I hadn’t even been home yet, though my parents were waiting for me. When I told her I just wanted to go with her, she smiled and said yes.

  For the record, I still couldn’t tell you what movie played. We didn’t make out or anything like that, but we sat in that car, talking about our hopes and dreams, about what we liked and didn’t. We discovered more in common than not. We both wanted to live in Millerton forever, even though it took me longer to figure that out. We wanted big families with a house filled with noise and chaos. We wanted someone to grow old with, to rely on, to trust. We wanted to be the grandparents that spoiled the grandkids rotten.

  When we returned to her house, we parked at the curb out front. We talked some more. We laughed. We kissed. We sat out there so long, her father finally turned on the porch lights to make sure we knew he was sitting inside waiting on her. I walked her to the door, knowing I was going to marry her. And the next summer, I did.

  With a steady paycheck from my office job in one of the factories—that air force materials management training turned out to be more valuable than I thought—we bought that big house. It had enough rooms for all the kids we wanted. We picked the one closest to our bedroom to be the nursery. Once a kid grew out of the nursery, or was forced out by another baby coming in, they would move upstairs to one of the other rooms. The children would spread in the house—the oldest farthest from our room and the youngest near. They would double up as needed.

  With everything ready, we finally got busy with the fun part. Making babies. Lots of babies. Big family. And some day, we dreamed, we would rock in the chairs on that front porch as grandchildren played in the tree.

  Only that never happened.

  The only baby who lived in that nursery was Jessica. When she became a teen, she moved to the most distant room, the empty rooms between mocking us and our quiet house. It had stayed that way until that fateful day when it had grown even quieter.

  What does this have to do with finding my car?

  Nothing.

  Everything.

  11

  C.J. had waited for me to finish at the nursing home and was taking me home, saving Wyatt an extra trip. He spent the time rattling on about what a bad idea going to Knoxville was.

  I finally interrupted him by blurting out, “Did you know Shelby kept every letter I sent her when I was in the air force?”

  Startled, and probably trying to figure out what this had to do with anything, C.J. slowed the truck to take the next turn. “She told you that?”

  “After they diagnosed her with Alzheimer’s and she went to live at Mountain View, I was organizing her stuff. It was hard to look at her clothes every day when I knew she wouldn’t ever come home. In this one drawer, she had all her, you know, delicates. I guess she figured I would never look in there, and she’s right, I didn’t until she was gone. When I pulled the clothes out, I found all these envelopes bundled together with lace strings.”

  “Your letters.”

  I turned my head to look out the window and sniffled. I hadn’t planned on telling him any of this, but it suddenly seemed important. “Every one of them. At least I think it’s all of them. It’s not as though I remember them all, but she had the letters she had sent to me too. I knew I had brought them home but just figured I’d lost them or something. She had organized everything in order—her letter to me, my reply, her reply, and so on. They were worn and faded as if she had pulled them out over the years and read them. I never knew she did that.”

  My friend nodded. “Women are so much more romantic than we are. When Wanda died, I found all sorts of things I didn’t know she had kept. She even pressed flowers I had given her in her Bible.”

  I felt a tear slip down my face and kept my focus on the passing tobacco field. “When things went downhill, she remembered less and less about what she had for breakfast. The nurses suggested I read to her—a favorite book, journals, her old letters. After dinner now, I’ll sit beside her bed and read them to her like it’s a novel until she falls asleep. It’s like reliving an old conversation just on paper.”

  “She must really like that.”

  “When she knows they are between us, yes.” I sighed. “I must’ve read them a hundred times by now. Probably more. And I figured something out.”

  “What?”

  “I love her like crazy. I don’t know if she knows it.”

  He startled, his eyes growing wide in disbelief. “Of course she knows it. You two have had a long, happy marriage.”

  “We had our rough times.”

  “Everyone does.”

  I didn’t want to dig into all that. I told C.J. almost everything about my life. Almost. “Sometimes she doesn’t realize they’re our letters. She doesn’t remember my name or who I am. She thinks I’m just an employee or a volunteer reading her a Nicholas Sparks novel or something, just letters back and forth.”

  “That must hurt.”

  More than I could explain. “But I go for the nights she remembers some. Sometimes, she can say the words of the letters along with me, her eyes closed and conjuring up the memory somewhere from that fog. And I don’t just mean her letters. She quotes my letters too. That means she read and reread them all these years until she memorized them.”

  “Those must be the best nights.”

  “They’re good but not the best.”

  C.J., bless him, waited on me to explain rather than asking. It gave me the time I needed to choke back the emotions. “There are nights when I go inside, and she recognizes me but not the now me. She’ll be back in the days Wyatt first came to us, or maybe before Jessica left, or just some random day in between that was good. But the one that happens a lot is she thinks it’s the day I came back from the service, knocked on her door, and asked her for a date. I’ve pulled up in front of her house in the new-to-me Nova, my discharge papers still wet with ink, and asked her dad to let me take her to the movies.”

  “And you play along, like that’s what’s happening?”

  I nodded. “I get permission from the nurses to take her onto the grounds, outside the security doors. We wander around the parking lot, hand in hand like it’s our first date. She asks to see my new car. Asks if it has a radio as if she’s never seen the inside of it. I guess, in her mind, she hasn’t. I take her over to that old clunker, but she thinks it’s smelling clean and new. I open the passenger door and hold her hand as she sits down. I cross around the front, watching her watching me, and then get in behind the steering wheel. I don’t even start the car because it’s like halfway between being real for her and being a dream. We pretend the car is new, and we’re watching the movie. At some point, just like on that first date, she’ll slide across the front seat and rest her head on my shoulder.” My voice failed me. I studied my gnarled fingers in the silence.

  C.J. pulled a red handkerchief out of his overalls’ pocket and blew his nose with a loud honk. “Damn allergies,” he muttered as he gazed out the windows at the mountains rising like hulking shadows against the evening sky.

  “I know I’m lucky she’s still alive. It’s not fair because you don’t have Wanda around anymore, but I get to relive the best night of my life over and over because of that car, only it took me a lifetime to figure out it was my best night.” I turned to my friend. “What if tonight had been one of those nights? What if she was ready to go on our date, and I had to tell her I’d lost the car?”

  C.J. wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. “That can’t happen. We’ll get that car back.”

  Sunday

  12

  Sunday morning dawned in typical August fashion. Large, fluffy clouds floated through the hazy sky. Mist rose over the fields. The sticky air hinted of the thunderstorms to come rolling across the ridges later in the day. The smell of tilled dirt from the surrounding farms filled my lungs.

  Once upon a time, I had loved summer. A boy free from the confines of school could run through rows of corn taller than himself and roam the acres of trees growing on the hillsides. Farmers still raised the old staple crops—corn, apple trees, beans, and tobacco—in the lower fields of the valley, but the best cash crop for the steep slopes were the Christmas trees that took years to grow. The vastness of the tree farms created perfect playgrounds for kids, at least until someone spotted us and shooed us away.

  After I returned to Millerton as a young man from the military and worked full time, the long hours of daylight gave me time for leisure after a day of labor. Shelby and I could go for an evening walk through the fields or sit on the porch and watch the sunset.

  Now that I was retired—and with Shelby living at the nursing home—leisure time was all I had. Mornings started early—long before sunrise—because my body no longer let me sleep through the night. I bustled around the house in the dark, doing my best not to wake Wyatt, until it was time to venture to Abe’s Market and hang out with my friends. Once breakfast ended, dangerously close to lunchtime most days, I headed back to the house, did a few chores, and napped in the hammock with Belle by my side until it was time to leave for dinner with Shelby.

  When I returned home in the evening, I ate my own dinner and waited for the sun to set so I could go to bed and sleep until it was time to do it all over again. What good were the extra hours of the day if I did the same thing no matter what? I had grown to prefer the shorter days of spring and fall. It was dark when I awoke, no matter what the month, but at least those seasons brought an earlier start to the evening.

  My complaint with summer wasn’t limited to hours of light. The summer heat was tough on an old man. I scratched Belle’s ears as she snoozed in the shade of the sprawling maple tree and thought about how the hot weather was tough on old dogs too. This was probably her last summer. I had no idea how I would handle next summer without her. I had resigned myself to the fact that Shelby and I would never sit under this tree again. It seemed unfair that I would lose Belle too.

  The old dog snorted in her sleep, her nostrils flaring and her back legs kicking on the ground as she dreamed. She shifted her head in my lap and resumed snoring contentedly. I leaned back against the bark of that broad trunk of the old tree, a protruding root poking me in the butt, but I wouldn’t move until I had to. Belle deserved her cuddle time.

  A plume of dust rose to meet the rising sun, the first hint of C.J.’s approaching truck. The sound of the tires crunching through the gravel road brought Wyatt from inside the old clapboard house, mercifully dressed and not still in boxers like yesterday. The screen door banged shut, a rifle shot across the yard. Belle opened one eye and scanned the horizon. She must have decided nothing needing chasing, sniffing, or barking because the eye drooped closed, and her steady breathing resumed. I ran my hand down her side, stroking her warm fur.

  C.J. stopped the truck in front of the house and waited for the dust cloud to settle before creaking open the door. He stood, placed his hands on his back, and stretched as if he had been driving all day. We mumbled our “good mornings” to each other, a quiet familiarity of old friends between the three of us. The breeze rustled the tree’s branches, and birds called in the distance as we chatted about nothing.

  Once the sun rose fully above the mountain range, I disturbed Belle’s morning nap long enough to usher her for a pee in the yard and into the cool interior of the house. She curled up on a tattered rug in front of the dark fireplace and resumed her slumber, no protest that we were leaving her for a few hours. I pulled the front door closed quietly so as not to disturb her.

  The choice of which car to take was easy. I didn’t have one. C.J.’s pickup truck would have required us to sit shoulder to shoulder on the bench seat. We piled into Wyatt’s SUV, the most comfortable option by default. C.J. sprawled across the back seat and sipped his coffee. I settled into the front passenger seat. Wyatt started the engine and did his best to get the meager air-conditioning blowing before driving down the gravel road that bisected the sprawling cornfield.

  Nothing had changed in this part of the county for years, but I rarely had a chance to just sit back and watch the scenery flow by the car windows. An old barn sagged in the middle of a field. Houses and trailers were scattered along the road, old properties like mine that farmers had carved out from their land and sold to raise cash in one of the common bust years of agriculture.

 

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