Oh, the roads are like ribbons. This was the thought that went through Darren’s mind as he drove hour after hour, all the way from Brownsville to Preston Mills. The roads are just like skeins of ribbon unwinding before me and behind me. Even though it had been twenty years, it was effortless, this long drive back. All day long, his heart fluttered like a little bird in his chest, and the truck glided along the roads like a bead on a string. Home, home. He would go back to the place where he had left her, and if his luck was very good, he would find her again.
(And if his luck was bad, so what? He was used to it by now. If she was gone, if she didn’t want him, who would he have to blame but himself? He would just have to take it like a man and move on.)
It is as though he has travelled both backward and forward through time when he pulls into that driveway and steps out of his truck. He steps out of the truck onto that same driveway where he had left them, his boots crunching across the gravel. In the bright sunlight before him are his two grown daughters: one in the distance, her back pressed against the front door; one standing just there, maybe twenty feet in front of him, her hair golden against the vivid turquoise of her truck. One hand on the roof, leaning. One hand on her hip. Darren pans sideways to see, between parted curtains in the front window, a small moon of a face looking out at him. Eyes dark and wide like his one true love. Possibly, this is his granddaughter.
He is weak with it. His faint hope.