Page 126 of Now to Forever

She smiles, and it’s sad. “Wasn’t a Joplin, Scotty Ann. I was a Watkins.”

The tablecloth of my life is snatched right out from the dirty dishes stacked on top of it.Archie Watkins was my grandfather.

“I made my choice, you paid the price.” We sit in the enormity of that for seconds or minutes or hours. “You and Zeb both.”

Archie was my grandfather, and Lydia my grandmother. Her behavior at his cremation. The A-frame. Bailing Zeb out. All of it there, making sense, clear as a sunny summer day. I press a hand to my chest as if I need to feel my own beating heart to know this is real. As robbed as I was from years I never knew them, there’s a wave of relief. A feeling of being loved out of nowhere. Archie didn’t show up to watch Wanda remove metal pins and hips, he was there for me. Because he cared. Because we were family.

Another cardinal lands, this time, I wonder if it’s Archie. If all of them have been.

“One of these months I expect you’ll stop showing up here,” Glory says, matter-of-fact. “Wouldn’t blame you.”

It’s the closest to an apology I’ll ever get from my mother, and I take it.

“I’ve thought of it,” I admit, glancing at her sideways. “But why deprive myself of the warm, fuzzy feelings you give me?”

She snorts a laugh, takes another drag.

“You ever think of talking to your parents after Dad died?”

She shrugs. “Made too many mistakes at this point. Wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

Another car drives down the trailer park lane and I feel her flawed mentality rattle my bones. A bullseye mark of my very own thoughts.

“Archie was pretty incredible,” I tell her.

She makes an agreeing sound. “You still planning on selling that house and moving west?”

I blow out a long breath. Before right now, as much as I had grown to love it, it was just a house. That simplicity has been shattered. It’s not just some house on a lake anymore; it’s a family house on a lake. From my grandparents I never knew about. Selling is wrong; staying is complicated.

In my silence she adds, “You still seeing the Callahan boy?”

“The one who’s only with me because he felt guilty?” I raise my eyebrows, and her lips twitch. “His kid hates me, and I got in a bar fight last night. Not sure how well that fares with a cop.”

She looks at me with what I would dare call admiration. “You win?”

“Can’t remember.”

Her eyes dart around my face. “Probably means you won.”

A laugh tickles my chest but doesn’t meet my lips. We sit long enough for her to smoke another entire cigarette, in silence.

“You really were a shitty mom.”

“Meh,” she says, looking at me with a small smile. “You didn’t turn out half bad though.”

On the side of the road where the bridge starts over Crow Creek, I park the Bronco. For the first time in twenty years, I squat in front of the abandoned cross, pulling at tangled vines, which have long since wrapped around the near rotted wood.RIP Lyle Armstrongis all that’s written in faded and chipped white paint.

My dad drove off the bridge, my brother washed away forever. Lyle got a funeral, a headstone, and a cross memorializing his stupidity; Zeb got erased. Staring at the cross, it strikes me that maybe it’s why my records are his, my car is his, my job is his. Everything I’ve done in the last twenty years . . . it’s been to remember him because nobody else will.

Except now I know: Ford has. In his own way, he’s lived and breathed Zeb’s loss as much as I have.

With a sniff, I wrap my hands around the arms of the cross and tug. The earth releases it easy, like it never wanted it to begin with.

I walk to the bridge and watch the water rush under it, the current steady and swift around the boulders. The trees on the bank are bare now; they would have been thick and bright greenthat spring twenty years ago. Swap Shop was probably on the radio. The box holding Zeb was probably in the passenger seat. My dad was probably smoking a cigarette. I’ll never know if he was drunk because he’d lost a son or if he was drunk because that’s simply who he was.

“Dad,” I say, hoisting the cross up to the guardrail. “I wish you would have loved us better.”

Before I talk myself out of it, I toss the cross over the edge and it hits the water with a splash.

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