Chapter 22

Anmoore, West Virginia

April 1947

Pilar’s husband Jim could have taken a job at the Union Carbide plant in Anmoore along with his brothers-in-law. Pilar had pressed him to, so they could live near her mother, but he loathed the idea of being confined in the factory. He gleefully applied for and accepted a job as a truck driver with a new long-haul company in central Ohio when a friend told him about an open position.

Pilar missed her family. Jim was glad to live six hours away from them. He got on well with Pilar’s brothers, but Julia and her son Richard daily tested the limits of his patience and his generally cheerful demeanor.

Advancing to junior high had liberated Richard from the close oversight of the elementary school principal and his threat of banishment to the reform school at Pruntytown. Physically, Richard took after his uncles Luis and Manuel. Over the summer after elementary school and during first months of junior high, he grew a head taller than the other boys. He became more muscular and broad-shouldered with each passing month.

For Richard, his new found freedom and physical domination finally provided an outlet for his years of suppressed anger and frustration. He became one of the worst bullies in the junior high school. He joined the football team and quickly gained a reputation for leaving opponents writhing on the ground in pain. Richard balked fiercely at every remonstration from Julia and Jim, who had unwillingly been drafted into the role of surrogate father.

The atmosphere frequently was tense at the little house in Anmoore after Pilar and Jim moved away. Mercedes, Julia and Richard survived mostly on the charity of Mercedes’ sons. Julia still worked only part-time at the laundry. She spent most evenings at the roadhouse, leaving sixty-two-year-old Mercedes to deal with Richard.

“Beer and a bump, Dave,” Julia said as she climbed onto her usual stool at the end of the bar.

“Hard day?” the bartender asked as he set the frosted mug of beer and the shot of bourbon on the bar. “You look beat.”

“Hard day. Hard week. Hard month. Hard year. Hard life.” Julia threw back the shot and took a long swallow of the beer. “My kid’s driving me nuts.”

“Boys his age can be tough,” Dave said. “Especially without a man around to knock some sense into them every now and then.”

“Tell me about it,” Julia said. “You know he ran off again last week? He was gone for two days, and when I asked him where he’d been, he told me it was none of my goddamned business.”

“He said that?”

“Yep. ‘None of your goddamned business.’”

“My old man would have beat the shit out of me for that,” Dave said. “My old lady, too.”

“Well, he’s too big for me to thump, or I would have, trust me,” Julia said. She took another long swallow of the beer.

From a booth table along the wall across the dimly-lit roadhouse a man said: “Like Dave suggested, you need a man around.”

Julia thought she recognized the voice, but it could not be. She turned on the barstool and looked into the shadow. “Art?” she asked. He slid out of the booth and walked across the room. “That it is. How are you, babe?”

Julia nearly fainted. “Wha … How … Whe … ,” she sputtered.

Art Kelley laughed and slung his arm around her shoulder. It was less lanky than she remembered. “I just got to town this afternoon, and I figured you’d show up here sooner or later.”

Julia looked at him, and then at the bartender. “Dave, you knew he was here?”

“He did,” Art said. “But I swore him to secrecy. I wanted to surprise you myself.”

Julia finished her beer in one more gulp. “Well, you certainly did that. Jesus, Art. What the hell are you doing here. It’s been … it’s been—”

“Five years and four months.”

“A lot of water under the bridge,” Julia said, though suddenly it felt as if he had never left. She was at once comforted and confounded by his reappearance.

“A whole world war,” Art said.

“And a lot of other shit,” Julia added. She thought of Art’s baby, John Goad’s baby, Richard, her father’s death. “It’s been a tough five years.”

Art nodded and ordered a beer for himself and another for her.

Julia looked him over. Had she not been on her first beer, she would have sworn he was a hallucination. “You still haven’t told me why you’re in Anmoore, Art. I assume you haven’t come for a job at the carbon plant.”

“Christ, no,” Art said chuckling. “Actually, I’ve come for you.”

“You’ve done what?” Julia said. Surely she misheard him.

“I still think about you all the time, Julia,” Art told her in the most sincere and tender tone she ever recalled hearing from him. He put a hand over hers that was resting on the bar. “I’ve regretted more times than I can count how things ended with us.”

Julia did not think about Art all the time, though he did pop into her mind occasionally. It always made her sad. She had loved him, and he was the only man she had known who actually made her feel loved.

“But what do you want, after all these years?” she asked, indignant. “You think you can just waltz in here and back into my life, into my heart, because you want to? You don’t get to do that.”

“I was hoping we could try again,” he said as calmly and sweetly as he could. “You know, if you’re not with somebody else, which you don’t seem to be.”

“Oh, Artie, I don’t know.” Separating from him had been one of the most painful episodes in her life. Julia was not eager to risk that agony again. “How am I supposed to trust you now, after what happened before?”

“I’ll make it right this time, Julia,” he said. “I promise. I was a mechanic in the army, and I have a regular job at a garage in Cleveland. I’ve even rented a little apartment of my own. I’m as domesticated as a Labrador retriever. We’ll get married and do it right.”

Julia was exasperated. “You have no idea how many times I’ve wished for that, dreamed of it, that you would come back and want to marry me. But now, I just don’t know, Art. It’s too much somehow. It doesn’t even seem real that you’re here. Honestly, I don’t know how I feel about you, or about us. I can’t make such a decision on the spur of the moment.”

“I understand,” Art said. “I had this image in my mind of coming in here and sweeping you off your feet—”

“Well, life’s not some fucking movie, Art,” Julia said, interjecting.

“I know, I know,” Art said. “It was naive. How about this? Just come with me now for a bit. We’ll take a drive and talk, or not talk. We’ll get some supper in Clarksburg and see what happens and how we feel.”

Julia considered it for a minute as Art stood in front of her, his eyes pleading. “Alright, Artie,” she finally said. “I have to admit, it’s good to see you. Fucking crazy, but good to see you.”

Though Julia had absolutely ruled it out in her mind as they were leaving the roadhouse, they ended up at Art’s room in the motor lodge outside Clarksburg after dinner. They lay in each other’s arms in the lumpy bed, and she began to cry. “Oh, Art,” she said, “all these men I’ve been with the past five years, I never really wanted them. I just wanted you.”

He lightly stroked her naked back, tracing down her spine and around her shoulder blades with his fingertips. He was unsure how to respond and desperate not to misstep.

“But I still don’t know, Artie,” Julia said. “You have to understand that this, tonight, it doesn’t mean we’re back together. It doesn’t mean I’ll marry you. It doesn’t even mean I want to see you again.” A tornado of competing and conflicting emotions swirled up inside her. “I need time to figure out what I think and feel and want now. Do you understand?”

He did, and he did not. But of one thing Art was certain: pushing too hard would drive Julia away. “I do,” he said. He pulled her body tighter against his own and kissed her on the forehead. “In the morning, I’ll take you home and go back to Cleveland. Then we’ll take it a day at a time.”

“Thank you, Artie.” Julia snuggled her head against his chest and drifted off to sleep.

* * *

Art was persistent. He drove down from Cleveland whenever Julia would agree to meet him. Some days were pleasant and easy: walking on Pinnick Kinnick Hill, going to eat and to a movie, drinking beer at the roadhouse. Some visits were wildly passionate and they spent the entire weekend in his shabby motel room.

Other times, Julia would be hostile from the moment Art arrived or whip from hot to cold without warning. They would be whiling away an afternoon when some seemingly innocuous strain of conversation caused her to erupt, her body rigid as she ranted and the look in her eye distant and detached. “You can’t just step back into my life like this!” she would shout and storm away, leaving him sitting alone in his car. Art would drive back to Cleveland and call her a day or two later, and she would be calm and want to see him again.

After five months, Julia—who was pregnant but not showing and had yet to tell Art—accepted his proposal. They were married at the city hall in Clarksburg. She put everything she owned into her leather duffle bag and the suitcase Mercedes had brought from Asturias but never used again, and Julia and Art drove off to Cleveland that afternoon.

Richard refused to go with them. Despite his litany of psychological and emotional troubles, or perhaps because of them, Mercedes agreed to let Richard stay with her in Anmoore.