The year I turned fifty, my husband, David, died in a car wreck. Suddenly, my unremarkable, ordinary marriage was over, and I was left alone in my unremarkable, ordinary life. I had spent my adult life taking care of a man I wasn’t sure I had ever really loved.
Ever since David and I had graduated from high school in the Bay Area, we had moved around from city to city, following David’s long career in the military. He was gone a lot, and since we never had children, I was alone a lot. I would think of Jax often—his sweet face and the hope he had in his eyes as he pleaded with me to leave it all behind that night in Ohio. I walked through life with that guilt, wondering if he had ever forgiven me. I prayed he had moved on and that he had found peace out there on the long dirt road.
I couldn’t bring myself to call or write to him because I was afraid that he hated me. If I knew he hated me, I wouldn’t be able to go on. All I could do was hope he understood that I did what I did for him . . . so that he could rise to his potential without me weighing him down.
Later that same year, my father died in jail. The bill I received for his cremation costs was my only notification that the whiskey monster had been laid to rest. I didn’t even know what he had died from, and I didn’t attempt to find out. I sent a check and breathed a sigh of relief. It’s easy to let yourself become the burden of your own life, especially when you were given the label of being a burden by your parents before you could even reject it. I was technically free—of the husband I had settled for, of the father who had sent me down this life path. But I didn’t feel free. My adult life wasn’t tragic, but I could never allow it to be extraordinary either. My self-imposed penance kept me from the bliss that Jax and I dreamed about finding together as we lay in the fields near the creek all those summers ago.
I regretted not looking for my mother, Diana, and making peace with her, but more than anything, I regretted a life without Jax. I would have taken the hardships on the dirt road just to be with him.
Three years after David passed away, I moved back to Ohio, to New Clayton. I didn’t have much to retire on, so I had to get a job at a diner in town, waiting tables. I was at the Salvation Army looking for a pair of comfortable shoes to work in when I passed the used books section. There, front and center, almost placed purposefully for me, was a book with a couple embracing on the cover. The title was First Love Never Dies. But what really caught my attention was the author’s name. Jackson Fisher.
Suddenly, I was fifteen again. It had been thirty-eight years since I’d said his name out loud. “Jackson Fisher,” I whispered. My hand shook violently as I reached for the book. It had an old picture of Jackson on the back, maybe in his twenties. It had been published more than twenty-five years ago. I felt gutted—