to the creek for some water, but he was too tired.
Dew wet his bare feet as he passed the far edge of the homestead and then to the woods’ edge where the ginseng was. He sat down, and in a few minutes felt the night’s chill envelop him. A frost warning, the radio had said. He thought of how his great-aunt had taken off her clothes and how, despite the scientific explanation, it seemed to Jesse a final abdication of everything she had once been.
He looked toward the eastern sky. It seemed he’d been running a week’s worth of nights, but he saw the stars hadn’t begun to pale. The first pink smudges on the far ridgeline were a while away, perhaps hours. The night would linger long enough for what would or would not come. He waited.
FALLING STAR
She don’t understand what it’s like for me when she walks out the door on Monday and Wednesday nights. She don’t know how I sit in the dark watching the TV but all the while I’m listening for her car. Or understand I’m not ever certain till I hear the Chevy coming up the drive that she’s coming home. How each time a little less of her comes back, because after she checks on Janie she spreads the books open on the kitchen table, and she may as well still be at that college for her mind is so far inside what she’s studying. I rub the back of her neck. I say maybe we could go to bed a little early tonight. I tell her there’s lots better things to do than study some old book. She knows my meaning.
“I’ve got to finish this chapter,” Lynn says, “maybe after that.”
But that “maybe” doesn’t happen. I go to bed alone. Pouring concrete is a young man’s job and I ain’t so young anymore. I need what sleep I can get to keep up.
“You’re getting long in the tooth, Bobby,” a young buck told me one afternoon I huffed and puffed to keep up. “You best get you one of them sit-down jobs, maybe test rocking chairs.”
They all got a good laugh out of that. Mr. Winchester, the boss man, laughed right along with them.
“Ole Bobby’s still got some life in him yet, ain’t you,” Mr. Winchester said.
He smiled when he said it, but there was some serious in his words.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I ain’t even got my second wind yet.”
Mr. Winchester laughed again, but I knew he’d had his eye on me. It won’t trouble him much to fire me when I can’t pull my weight anymore.
The nights Lynn stays up I don’t ever go right off to sleep, though I’m about nine ways whipped from work. I lay there in the dark and think about something she said a while back when she first took the notion to go back to school. You ought to be proud of me for wanting to make something of myself, she’d said. Maybe it ain’t the way she means it to sound, but I can’t help thinking she was also saying, “Bobby, just because you’ve never made anything of yourself don’t mean I have to do the same.”
I think about something else she once told me. It was Christmas our senior year in high school. Lynn’s folks and brothers had finally gone to bed and me and her was on the couch. The lights was all off but for the tree lights glowing and flicking like little stars. I’d already unwrapped the box that had me a sweater in it. I took the ring out of my front pocket and gave it to her. I tried to act all casual but I could feel my hand trembling. We’d talked some about getting married but it had always been in the far-away, after I got a good job, after she’d got some more schooling. But I hadn’t wanted to wait that long. She’d put the ring on and though it was just a quarter-carat she made no notice of that.
“It’s so pretty,” Lynn had said.
“So will you?” I’d asked.
“Of course,” she’d told me. “It’s what I’ve wanted, more than anything in the world.”
So I lay in the bedroom nights remembering things and though I’m not more than ten feet away it’s like there’s a big glass door between me and the kitchen table, and it’s locked on Lynn’s side. We just as well might be living in different counties for all the closeness I feel.