We returned to White Pine and stayed in a motel. Tess was tender with me, but very quiet. In the evening we got pretty drunk and then drove over to Lester’s to meet Seymour, we took the same old booth.
I saw him come in with a large box under his arm. He was bald now, and had lost a bit of weight. I watched him make the rounds. It was still a guard bar so he knew everyone there.
It was hard to imagine him then as anything else, but once, I swear to you, he had been so entirely different.
He made his way over and sat down next to Tess.
“C,” she said, and began to cry.
He put his arm around her and she slumped into him, pressing against all that soft flesh.
He reached across the table and shook my hand. “Joe,” he said. “I’m sorry, brother.”
I was glad he spoke that way, still a bit of the young soldier left, my long-gone friend.
We shared a pizza and drank too much. There was little talk of the past, and certainly no mention of Sam Young.
Seymour pushed the box across the table. In it were packets of my mother’s letters. Four of them. From me, from my father, from Tess, and then from her fans, Marcy Harper among them.
Her wedding ring. Some clothes.
And my mother herself, who’d been burned to ash and poured into a plastic bag, which had been sealed and fitted into a small white cardboard box. There was a printed label stuck askew to the top of it: Anne-Marie March.