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I didn’t want to stay away from Arthur, and he didn’t want to stay away from me either. We would sneak away whenever we could and explore the wild. The Great Depression hit really hard, and his family had to sell the plane and their automobiles. Most of their furniture was next to go, but they stayed afloat somehow. I got a job working in a laundry business, since that was what I knew and had done for Mama all those years growing up. I could even afford a little apartment over top of a grocery store with the money I was making. I didn’t have to see Willie ever again, but it also meant not seeing Mama anymore. Sometime within the following year, she passed away. It took Jonnie several weeks to tell me because she felt so bad about it. She wasn’t there when it happened. She’ was at the movie theater with Bobby at the time of her passing, but she suspected Willie had something to do with it. He disappeared right after it happened and nobody saw or heard from him again. Willie left behind a lot of money stuffed into an old mattress, so Jonnie just didn’t say anything to anyone. She buried Mama in the backyard under the oak tree and just took care of raising our sisters by herself. She and Bobby had become quite the item but knew well enough from my mistake that they needed to keep it a secret.
Arthur and I were still very much in love and planning to get married as soon as we could afford it.The Great Depression had taken such a toll on his family that he felt it best for him to stay at home for the time being to contribute to his parents not losing their mansion. I went along with it, but I wasn’t thrilled about it.
We had plans to get another plane once the Depression ended and go back into the wing walking business. We’d made so much money doing it before, surely there would be more profit in going back to that when we were able. But the Depression droned on, and so did the bread lines. Eventually, the grocer under my apartment closed up. It’s hard to sell groceries when you don’t have any to sell. We heard rumors of a man in Idaho who had planted his potatoes early and made a fortune by some stroke of luck.Still, we were a long way from Idaho and didn’t know any potato farmers with any such luck. We would just have to do the best we could.
I learned that year that the worst and best news can sometimes be put in the same package. Through everything we’d managed to survive, Arthur and I had a few more surprises coming our way. The day I told him I was pregnant and that we’d need to get married sooner than we had planned was the day his mother told him that she’d promised him in marriage to the daughter of a wealthy tobacco farmer. We would have some hard decisions to make, and his mother had no idea that we were still seeing one another at all. How would we break the news to the hateful old bat? I was overjoyed at the prospect of my new life with Arthur and also terrified of what this surprise second engagement might mean for him.
I knew it wouldn’t be easy to talk to his mother about it, but I reminded him that I was pregnant and perhaps that might help her to see the urgency of our nuptials. Maybe she would finally accept me, I urged. Or perhaps it might convince her more than ever that I was a gold digger, he reminded me. How dare this floozy trap her son in marriage by being so bold as to get pregnant with his child.
We made a plan together. The following Tuesday, the two of us would run away together and elope. We’d find a new town with a couple of jobs and find a way to get by. Things would be tight for a while when the baby came, but eventually they’d get better. The Depression couldn’t last forever, could it? Surely it would only be a few more months, and things would be back to normal. We could live our “happily ever after” finally, I promised him. Monday came, and we had all the plans made. We had a ride lined up to head north to Missouri in the morning. He would meet me at eight in the morning. We would grab our travel cases and hit the road. I couldn’t wait, and neither could Arthur. I kissed him goodnight, and he headed home.
The next day I got everything ready and packed my case. I wasn’t taking much, but I really didn’t own much. I headed to the rendezvous point early to wait for the love of my life and the father of my unborn child. I held my stomach tenderly, wondering how long it would be before I could feel it kicking in my stomach. I’d wanted to have children of my own someday, and though it wasn’t exactly a planned pregnancy, I was thrilled. I thought Arthur was too.
I waited on the park bench under a large oak, perched on the edge of the seat, jumping to look at every little branch or leaf that swayed, searching for Arthur in the movements. It was the same bench where we sat in the photo we had taken a few months before. I had that photo in my case, packed away for safekeeping. I wanted to place it carefully into my puzzle box, but I hadn’t yet figured out how to open it.
“Excuse me, but are you, Ruth Robinson?” The voice came from behind, and I jumped.
“Yes, I am,” I admitted, somewhat confused.
“This letter is for you,” the strange man responded and handed me a sealed envelope before heading on his way. I’d never seen him before, and I never saw him again after that day, but I’d know that face anywhere if he ever did show up again. The scar down his cheek stood out in a way nobody could ever explain. It would need to be seen to make sense of the half-moon shape with a constellation of the big dipper in the marks where it had healed back together. He was a frightening-looking man, but what frightened me even more was the letter in my hand. The envelope didn’t have any marks on it.
Slowly I opened the letter and unfolded it. It was Arthur’s handwriting. Not his mothers, not his fathers, not Bobby’s. It was Arthur’s handwriting. And it was Arthur who broke my heart.
The doctors think it was the stress, but I think it was the broken heart. Only a week later, I had a stillborn baby delivered at the hospital. It was swept under the rug because I was an unwed mother and nobody ever knew. I never even got to name my baby, I would have named him Arthur, just like his father. And I would have loved him just as fiercely as I loved his father, too.
That letter still haunts me. I have the whole thing memorized, but it wasn’t very long, it wouldn't have been difficult for anyone to do anyway.
In 1932 Amelia Earhart made her famous flight. While part of me wanted to celebrate what she accomplish by flying solo across the Atlantic, all I could do was mourn the life that could have been. I missed Arthur. I missed the circus and wing walking and knowing how to truly live my life. It all seemed so pointless without him. My mother was gone, Jonnie had a life of her own, my sisters didn’t need me, anymore and my only baby died before he was born. I was completely alone in the world. I tried to find Rebecca Jane then, the friend I had when I was nine, but she was married with several kids of her own, and I didn’t want to frighten her with shadows from her past.
I tried to make friends for a while, but the friendships always felt so empty. I’d lost everything and everyone I ever loved except for Jonnie, and she had eloped the year before with Bobby. Last I heard, they’d moved up to Fort Smith, Arkansas and he’d bought a chicken farm. They took my sisters with them, and they were living out their dream.
I was almost bitter and angry about Jonnie having everything, but she deserved it. She was a good kid. I came so close to having it all for myself, and then it slipped through my fingers in an instant. The good news of me being pregnant was just too much for Arthur to handle. He wasn’t ready to be a daddy, and he certainly wasn’t prepared to give up the lush and comfortable lifestyle he’d been living. He wasn’t willing to give it all up to be with the baby and me. He wanted to “do right” by his mother and father. He married the rich tobacco farmer’s daughter and saved the mansion. I ended up broke and alone in a one-bedroom apartment over an abandoned grocery store for many years.
After Arthur, I’d given up on love in general. I didn’t like it, I didn’t want it, and I certainly didn’t need it. Love could go to Hell for all I cared. I was determined to make a life for myself, come what may.
Two important things happened in 1933; I turned 21 years old, and I finally opened up the puzzle box. Inside were several dried roses, perfectly preserved. They’d been floating around inside the box since the day he gave it to me. From my best guess, they were probably fresh roses that day and just dried over the years while being kept inside the wooden box. It had acted like a dehydrator, zapping all the moisture right out of them. Since I finally figured out how to get the box open, I figured maybe I’d forget how to do it again, so I placed everything I never wanted to look at again inside the box. In it went all my photos of Arthur and me together, ticket stubs from the circus, my engagement ring, those dried-up roses, and even the birth certificate from our stillborn child. I didn’t want to ever see those things again. I didn’t want to think about them or even acknowledge they existed, but I didn’t have the heart to throw them away. I wasn’t quite ready to let go of Arthur yet. Letting go was going to take me some time. Coincidentally that was also the year that prohibition ended. You better believe I went out and got completely smashed after that. I went to the nearest bar and drank until I stumbled worse than Willie. It was the last time I ever had a drink. I swore off the stuff that next morning when I experienced my first and last hangover.
When Bonnie and Clyde were gunned down in 1934, the entire country breathed a sigh of relief, except for me. I wanted to die, too. I wanted to go down in a blaze of glory like Bonnie did by the side of the man I loved. I feel silly for having felt that way now, but I was only 22 years old and still quite romantic. That didn’t last long.
In 1939 I moved up in the world. I left the laundry to go to work in a dry cleaners. It was quieter, and I enjoyed the work. I’d pick up some housekeeping work at a local hotel when I needed a few extra bucks. Between the two, I was able to afford my first car. I tried dating here and there, but nothing really stuck. Nobody could really compare to Arthur.
By 1941 the Great Depression officially ended. And just like that, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and we were thrown into World War II. If it wasn’t one mess I was living through, it was another. I stayed home and watched all the good, viable, strong men go off to war. One day, I got a letter from Jonnie that Bobby and Arthur had gone to fight in the South Pacific, both of them as pilots. Bobby was a war hero, and Arthur was missing in action, presumed dead. I tried to believe that I didn’t care, but I still did. I took that letter from Jonnie and shoved it right where it belonged, right into the bottom of that stupid puzzle box that I hadn’t forgotten how to open.