the ears and cause the skin to prickle. But it never did, instead reminding me of bells. They shook their heads as tears sprang from their eyes.
They are the Trio, and they are mine.
But it was the last woman who was laughing at me that meant the most. The last woman, who I had not heard laugh in what felt like ages. Hers was a loud thing, a big thing. She laughed big for a woman her size. It was almost hard to believe that such a great noise could come from someone so small. It was wondrous to behold, like finding a treasure once thought lost.
Her name is Lola Green and she is my mother.
So I rolled my eyes up at them as they hooted down at me, asking me if I felt like such a big man now standing in a pool of my own cooling vomit. They asked if I had learned my lesson. They asked if I would ever do something like that again.
I didn’t tell them but I told myself: yes. I would do it again. If it meant they would laugh, then yes. If it meant I could hear my mother laugh like nothing in the world mattered but that moment, then yes. Of course, yes. I would do anything just to hear her laugh like that.
My aunts—Nina, Mary, and Christie—moved in the day after my father left.
I was sixteen when they pulled up in Christie’s big, loud SUV. They descended on our home, buried in grief at the sudden loss of Big Eddie, scooping up the pieces of me and my mother that had shattered to the floor. They tried to put us back together, holding the pieces in place until the glue they had placed upon us had hardened. But we were fragile still. My mother’s sisters knew once something is shattered, it can never be put back together in its original shape. Undoubtedly some pieces are lost or fit into incorrect places. The whole will never be as strong as it was once before.
So they never left.
The road is bumpy on Poplar, as I said. You’ll see storefronts, lit up in the
gathering dusk, and see a few people walking on the sidewalk, some glancing at your unfamiliar car as it bounces down the road. You’ll think that Roseland looks like a place that time has forgotten, and you won’t be wrong. I wouldn’t call us stuck per se; I just think the rest of the world tends to move a bit faster. We’re not forgotten. We’re just behind.
I don’t think I want it any other way.
As you enter the main drag, you’ll see a banner across the road announcing the “Jump into Summer Festival” and think how quaint it looks, how fitting for a little place such as this. You might feel like going for a drive. You want to ignore how a passenger in your car snorts with laughter, joking about how creepy the sign is, that it’s probably just a way for the town to get unsuspecting outsiders in to sacrifice them to the local god. You want to ignore it, but it is kind of funny, so you don’t. You chuckle and continue on, the banner disappearing overhead.
Driving down Poplar Street will eventually take you past a gas station with a single gas pump at the front. In Oregon, you’re not allowed to pump your own gas, so a thin black cord stretches out next to the pump, causing a bell to ring every time it’s driven over. Inside the store, there are a couple aisles of chips and Twinkies. Suntan lotion, hot dogs rotating on a silver cooker. Coolers with beer and soda. Ice cream, if the mood should strike. There is a garage next door that can handle small repairs like oil changes and windshield-wiper replacement. And there is a sign that spins above the station slowly, one that lights up when darkness falls—Big Eddie’s Gas And Convenience.
My father. Big Eddie.
But he’s not here at the station. Not this spring eve. Not anymore.
If you continue up Poplar Street, past the old mill that sits crumbling like a giant who left behind its playthings, past the empty fields that used to belong to the Abel family before the bank foreclosed on their house, over the Tennyson Bridge, the Umpqua River roaring underneath, and hang a left onto Memorial Lane, you’ll find my father.
You’ll pass under an old stone arch emblazoned with the legend LOST HILL MEMORIAL. No