He never realized he was going to leave until one night when he left.

They’d been together forever, through most of high school, after. She took some classes at a local college, he picked up construction work. And it was all ok with him. But he knew she wanted more. She wouldn’t say it. She wouldn’t ask. But he knew. And he wouldn’t give it.

He couldn’t.

That’s what he believed and that’s what he planned on believing his whole life.

He left a message on his boss’s machine, threw some clothes in a duffle bag and told his mom to pick up his last check. And he took off.

It was probably a year and a half before he’d let himself come home to visit his mother — and then only when she had a health scare.

He’d been traveling, picking up work, bumming around. He was out of the habits of society. He visited his mother for a few days until he was convinced his little brother had things under control and his mother was getting better and then he headed back out to a pipeline construction project he had a line on. A guy could make enough in two months to travel for a year, if he played it right.

Then his mom did get sick and he went home. His little brother was falling apart, trying to work and take care of mom. He stowed his duffle in a closet and took over his mother’s care, patiently nursing her back toward a health she would never completely reclaim.

He stayed around the house most of the day, seldom going out, but, later, when his brother was home, often after everyone else had gone to sleep, he would go out, walking through the darkened, now strangely unfamiliar streets of his hometown.

One afternoon his mother needed a change of medicine. He took the bus to a pharmacy far away from his neighborhood. It was in the new subdivisions where the soy fields used to be. He hoped that by going there he would be avoiding old memories — and the possibility of a chance encounter.

But he read somewhere that we’re drawn irresistably, mysteriously toward that which we fear most.

He was sipping bitter coffee in front of a chain coffee shop when he saw her.

He really felt like his heart stopped.

She was loading a couple of kids in an older, white Volve. She looked only a few moments older but the kids were maybe two and three; he was no good with kids, guessing ages, that kind of thing. They made him nervous and apprehensive. But these kids were different. They were beautiful. He felt instantly protective, as though he was a distant, but all-seeing guardian angel.

And she… she was so hearbreakingly lovely. The sunlight came through tall, crooked rows of eucalyptus and lit her hair.

He sipped the coffee, its cool, acrid rasp on the back of his throat. He pulled his head down a little bit. But he knew he didn’t have to. He knew he was already invisible.

previous AYoS version

She’d Be Mine

Last time I saw her a couple years ago
she was shovin a couple of kids in a white volvo
the sun came down through the eucalyptus trees
it made her hair just glow like it always used to be

just then I wish I could have said the words
that I could never say
cause if I’d told her baby I’ll be yours
she’d be mine today

the pool house the beach house the boat house by the lake
I’ll be damned if I can remember a thing
yet everytime I think about holding hands in school
my heart just pounds like it always used to do

right now I wish I could have said the words…

sometimes when I sleep I call her name
a thousand girls have told me so
I threw it all awaly and now I want it back
and I know it can never be so
[I know it can never be so]

and right now I wish I could have said the words
that I could never say
cause if I’d told her baby I’ll be yours
she’d be mine today

(C)1998 TK Major
October