Page 18 of In It for the Long Ride

One would think that was something a woman would get used to.

It wasn’t.

I woke up to his distant drawl. He was purposely keeping his tone low, but it still lured me from my slumber. I stared at the door as words slowly started to become clearer.

I heard my name once or twice and I was sure I heard him speak of Blaze, but I couldn’t determine exactly what he was saying. I quietly slid the covers off my legs and followed the sound to the living room. He was standing just beyond the archway that led to the kitchen, rummaging in one of those duffle bags I’d seen earlier.

He used his shoulder to pin his cellphone to his ear and continued in that quiet, bassy tone.

“Boy is fine. Taking a walk in the woods with his Uncle Easy right now while she sleeps.”

I decided not to interrupt him and remained in the back of the room until he moved deeper into the kitchen.

“Oak, I can’t promise you anything. You know I can’t. I kept it from Mark and Mak, but who knows how long that secret will remain, you know? These young bloods ain't the same, brother. Their definition of loyalty never was the same as ours. Now we’re asking them to split what they know of it and redefine it again.”

I quietly moved to the arch and watched as he pilfered in the pantry, throwing out expired canned goods. Each time he pitched something toward the trash it made an awful bang. I shifted, trying to remain in the shadows, but something in the bag caught my attention.

Beneath the scattered boxes and loose rounds of ammunition, was something with my handwriting on it. Something stained with time. The envelopes weren’t tea colored, they weren’t that old, but they had a dinginess about them that betrayed their agedness.

I squinted in confusion, my mind slowly processing how bizarre it was. There was a pile of envelopes, banded together with the type of string a person might have put on the end of a balloon. The string secured a skeleton key to the top of the stack.

I recognized it at once.

I gave that key to him on a simple snippet of rope on the day he deployed. The memory was still fresh in my mind. The way he’d held me and kissed me goodbye. I told him it was the key to my heart, and he promised to wear it like a cross, as closely as he could to his own.

I didn’t know I could be struck senseless by the sight of something so small, but damned if I didn’t stare at it until Carl cleared his throat behind me.

“Oak, I’m gonna call you back,” he awkwardly announced.

“Put those back…” he quietly urged.

“They’re not open.” I turned the package over in my hand and verified what I already knew to be true.

Open letters didn’t sit that neatly atop one another.

“Carl, they’re not open.” I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

He left for the war, and I never heard from him again. My young brain had processed that a thousand different ways over the years, but even as a grown woman, I could not compute the fact that he had mentally shut me out from day one.

“I wrote you every fucking day. Every fucking day for…”

“Daisy,” The bass boomed in his voice, snapping me out of my spiraling thoughts.

“Why…?” I whispered, unable to stop searching his face for something, anything.

I needed to understand how a man who spoke of the things we spoke of, and shared the moments we did, could climb onto a war bound bus and never look back.

“Carl,” I implored, almost inaudibly.

He inhaled and shifted, clearly unsettled by the confrontation.

“It’s not something I can easily explain.”

“Well, fucking try.” I blurted out, suddenly finding my voice.

He stepped back and swallowed hard. The way he looked at me, it was as if he desperately wanted to be anywhere else.

“I hate you,” I hissed, from the bottom of my soul.

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