When Hector finally left, I stood in the middle of my living room. Alone and empty. But the solitude no longer refreshed me, and my emotions slunk through my heart like the wispy clouds of an early morning fog. Gray and silent, they obscured all that was real in my world, and the details of my life blended together into a haze of uncertainty.
I blinked, chiding myself for being melodramatic, and then I padded into the kitchen and opened a bag of pretzels. My shift at the diner started in an hour, and Dixie was running out of options. So what if I was suspected of killing my husband? More than likely he was murdered by my ex-boyfriend. But either way, I still had to go to work. I snickered at the absurdity of it and shoved a pretzel in my mouth. I chewed, but the salt had little or no taste, and the gummy texture on my tongue repulsed me. Spitting the pretzel in the sink, I cupped my hand and drank a swallow of water to wash it away.
I stomped to my bedroom, sick and tired of feeling sorry for myself, fed up with wallowing in pity, and past ready to get on with life. I jerked the remaining letters from the drawer of the nightstand, then fell to my knees and reached far under the bed for the metal firebox, whose contents I dumped on the rug. I shuffled through papers and trinkets. A tiny card that had come on a delivery of flowers from Neil when we were dating in high school. A newspaper blurb from the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal about a little-known citizen of Trapp who had been convicted of rape and sent away to prison. A paper lunch sack on which Hoby had scrawled a love note one morning before he left for work. The bulletin from that Sunday morning, the week the church asked me to worship someplace else. And one more item that I fingered carefully. The program from my parents’ funeral.
When I had it all piled in front of me, I realized I was breathing hard. I settled back against the side of the bed and stuck out my tongue at the pile. Clyde was right. I had been holding on to this junk too long—psychological tokens, as he called them—to keep myself locked away from the world. I nudged the papers with my tennis shoe. Maybe I didn’t deserve better … but maybe I did.
Pushing the box back under the bed, I lifted each of the papers, one at a time, and laid them across my palm. Then I stood, walked to the kitchen, and dug through a drawer for a lighter. Such an obvious thing to do, and I wondered why it had taken me so long to think of it. It wasn’t as if destroying these tokens would erase my past, but in a crazy way, it might release my future. Or at least open my mind and my heart.
I stepped onto the back porch, closed the door behind me, and eased down to lean against it with my bottom on the cement. Stretching my legs out in front of me and crossing my ankles, I peered at the sky. Cotton-ball clouds dotted a blue background, but I knew it wouldn’t last long. Clyde had said another storm would be blowing in tomorrow, but that was Texas weather for you. Calm one day, wild the next.
Sort of like my life.
I reached for the paper sack and held it by its bottom edge, and then I cranked the lighter until a flame leaped forward and nicked at the bag. Soon the rich gold ate away at Hoby’s words, leaving a line of black ash that gradually gobbled the memory and dropped it in pieces to the ground. I released the last corner to the porch before the heat touched my fingertips. And Hoby’s love note was gone.
Seven years of my life—rocky, beautiful, married years—were now placed in a closet in my heart. A closet I could visit occasionally, but not one I would ever want to hang out in. It wasn’t warm or welcoming, not a home, merely a functional storage space for items I no longer needed. I reached for the funeral program.
That one was harder. A part of me felt as if I was denying my feelings for my parents, rejecting them. But a bigger part of me—a healthier part—knew I would never forget them, never completely let them go, and my mind would be cleansed by this simple action. That’s all it was. An action. An exercise. A way to grieve and heal and move on. More ashes fluttered away on the breeze.
Already I felt release, but the feelings of liberty were so foreign, they frightened me. I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around my shins. That felt better. Safer. And I knew if I rolled tightly into a ball, it wouldn’t seem as though I were about to crack. But I had more work to do.
As I watched Neil’s letter disappear, I heard a muffled knock in the house, and then the doorbell. It would be Clyde wanting to know what had happened with Hector, wondering why I had never made it to the sheriff’s office. I started to boost myself up but changed my mind. I didn’t need him right then. I needed to finish this once and for all, a personal funeral for all my regrets.
As the front door opened, the back door rattled from the suction, and I heard Clyde’s heavy footsteps creaking through my house as I held his burning newspaper article in my hand. It sounded as though he opened and closed a few doors during the time I calmly destroyed a short note Neil had written, and by the time I held the last corner of the florist’s card, the door rattled again, and Clyde had gone.
My gaze returned to the sky, where the cotton balls had shifted to the right, constantly moving, floating, changing, and I wondered if I would ever feel normal again. Whole.
Without looking, I reached for the last item in my stash. The bulletin from the church. My fingers automatically worked to open the fold, as they had done so often in the past, but I stopped myself before my eyes scanned the words. I had read that blurb too many times already. Good grief, the wording and the font would be etched in my brain until the end of time. The folks at church had turned their backs on me when I needed them most. They had hurt me almost beyond comprehension, but maybe … just maybe … I could forget.
Ruthie forgave them, and she had read that stinking bulletin more than I had. She used to keep it in her room, but she threw it away after she married Dodd. When I found it there, what once had been her token then became mine.
I cranked the lighter again. For all I knew, this was the last remaining copy. The last physical proof that those people had done such a hurtful thing. The last evidence justifying my bitterness toward them. But wasn’t that what all these papers had been?
I waved the bulletin slightly, and the flames flared up, engulfing the folds of paper, then dwindled down into nothingness. Along with the words. They were nothing now.
My head thunked against the door behind me, and I tapped it twice, a gentle reminder of the sturdy things in my life. Like Clyde. Clyde Felton was solid.
I considered the men I had loved in my lifetime. All three called themselves Christians, yet each was so very different from the others. And each had treated me differently, too. Neil and Hoby had hurt me. Would Clyde eventually do the same?
I didn’t want to think so, and I shoved the thought high above my head toward the cotton-ball clouds. Clyde was a good man, and he loved me. He wanted to make something better of himself, and he said he wanted me to tag along while he did it. But even if he never changed a thing, even if he worked at the Dairy Queen for the rest of his life, even if someday he hurt me … even then … I would want to be with him.
I shook my head and smiled. He was such a fool about that old shack of his. The thing was worthless, but he hung on to it because it reminded him of Fawn and his grandpappy. But mostly Fawn. It was silly, because the girl had lived there less than a year and never fully moved back up there after Nathan was born, but Land sakes, the place must have been nice in its day. Even though the house was small, the views from the front windows would have kept anyone from caring about the cramped living quarters.
I found it ironic that Neil, one of the wealthiest men in Garza County, had clearly been envious of my boyfriend’s real estate. Then again, Neil Blaylock had always scorned anything he couldn’t get his hands on. In fact, Clyde had said he was surprised Neil hadn’t torn the place down already. I squinted, remembering Neil leaning against the porch railing on the other side of the screen door, and then my mood faltered.
Neil had called Clyde’s old shack a love nest. He had said Clyde and I should be hiding out there. That seemed strange. The house had been abandoned for a year, and Clyde and I had only been up there one time in the past two weeks.
Two weeks. Had everything between Clyde and me happened in only two weeks? A charred paper fragment tumbled across the porch, the words still visible in the black ash, and I smashed it with my thumb, marveling at the way my opinion of Clyde had changed in such a short time. When he came back from prison, he was little more than a pitiful drunk, and at that time, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be his friend. But he had proved himself to the people down at the church, to me and his other friends, and most important, to his daughter. Now Fawn needed him more than he knew.
He was hanging on to the shack because of her, so I could hardly ask him to tear it down, even for something as life changing as opening a restaurant. Pushing myself to my feet, I brushed my hand across my bottom, hoping I hadn’t dirtied my work uniform. I reached for the door handle, but then I froze, piecing together tidbits of memories not unlike how Hector was piecing together evidence from my past. Both of us were working our own jigsaw puzzles.
The sun must have gone behind one of the cotton balls, because a shadow swept across the porch, darkening the steps where ashes had made their way to the ground. My body went cold as all the pieces came together to form a complete picture, a vision from the past. I realized I wasn’t the only one who had been hanging on to a psychological token.
I lowered myself slowly to my hands and knees, and then lay down on my side and curled into a ball.
But only for a minute.