The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,181

you.” He nodded toward the cash register and left to join a thin, ancient woman in the checkout line. They had the same forehead, the same square chin.

Suddenly, I realized how I looked to them—a gawking, haggard woman.

I wandered around the back of the nursery near the potted fruit trees until the man and his mother drove away. I left without buying any flowers.

Shame tightened like a crust on my skin.

I gripped the steering wheel at the first light. The world slipped, angling off away from me. The light was green. The driver behind me honked. I went on to the next red light. Stopping at the intersection, I made myself take deep breaths. I looked around at the people. Boys with their loud stereo in the next car. A young woman pushed a stroller across the street. In the noon light, everyone seemed outlined, purposeful, and new. The world overflowed with people. All of them were going to or from the people or places they loved. Just as A. had come to me. I remembered lifting my Aunt Eva’s quilt to see his strange face for the first time, before he was Addie, before he was anyone.

Something broke in me. I could feel it, the precise moment of surrender, like a bone snapping. A sudden, terrible miracle. Any one of them could be Adam. Old, young, male, female, black, white.

He was gone. Not forever, not from everything. But from my life. All my questions about him would remain unanswered. Forever.

The car behind me honked. I drove on. I wept, for the first time as a widow.

The next day, I pulled out an old WWI army-issue metal box that one of my uncles had given me when I was a girl. Inside, I placed a lock of A.’s hair, a perfect, glossy, brown C-curve from the seventies, when he let it grow a little longer. Five other locks of differing shades of auburn and red hair nestled in the box. I added copies of my favorite photos of Adam: a snapshot Momma had taken of the seven of us, the girls in their Easter dresses squinted at the spring sun; a black-and-white of Momma and Adam at our wedding, their shoulders touching as they leaned toward each other, smiling; the photo of me and Addie that Momma gave me the day she told me about my father; a shot Sarah took of Adam on horseback, crouched forward gracefully over the horse’s withers, mid-jump; and, last, the photo of the burned Japanese woman Frank had left at the farm years before. On top of them, I placed Adam’s copy of Song of Myself that the girls had given him a few years before. The last thing to go in the box: a jar of Florida’s sandy soil.

Then I drove north, straight to the farm.

Bud, Wanda, and their kids weren’t home. A privacy hedge now separated the yard from the field, but the decayed stump of the apple tree was still there and I could easily locate the spot where I’d found A. I sank down onto my knees. I kissed the earth that had given him to me and tasted the clay grit on my lips, bringing him into my body one last time.

He was gone.

I dug, and the opened earth exhaled a feral musk. I wrapped the box in plastic, then in an old oilcloth. A gentle rain began to fall as I shoveled, burying the box.

The land, level and empty, seemed to stretch out endlessly in the twilight. Gradually, I realized that the pale lumps in the distance were earth-moving machinery. Then I remembered hearing that the fields had been resold and were being cleared for a new mall. The oaks still buffered the land where it dropped down to the railroad tracks. The Starneses’ land was split; the half near the highway was now a subdivision. Cole and his brothers had held on to the house and southern pasture. I took a perverse pleasure in thinking of all those future shoppers coming and going for years near the spot where A. had last come into this world, ignorant as we are in Florida of the rivers that vein the land below us. I imagined Adam watching. The sky seemed to hang directly above me, low and mobile.

The rain began to fall in earnest as I dropped the final handful of red clay.

Car wheels whispered on the driveway behind me. I heard Bud and Wanda get out of their