The next morning, Abigail awoke feeling restless with a splitting headache. Her best friend, Shelly Spencer, sits on the edge of her bed, repeatedly nudging Abigail’s shoulder while perusing a newspaper sales insert she swiped from the Saturday morning newspaper belonging to Abigail’s dad. It takes a moment for her room to come into focus, and when it does, Abigail realizes what is going on. She furiously scoffs, burying her head under her pillow and pulling it tightly down over her head with both hands. This only provokes Shelly further, and she quickens her nudges, never taking her eyes off the insert.
“I’m not going anywhere. I feel like a crud, and I didn’t get any sleep,” Abigail protests from under her pillow.
“Sure you are, sweetie. You just don’t know it yet.”
“No, I am not.” Abigail arises from under her pillow and piercingly glares at Shelly.
“You might as well get your bony butt out of the bed and take a shower. We have things to do today—like shopping,” Shelly says, ignoring Abigail’s spiteful glare. Something on the newspaper page suddenly catches Shelly’s eye, and she excitedly arches an eyebrow. She stands up, letting the insert drop in front of her lanky curves, and deliberately poses for Abigail. “What do you think? I could rock this bikini?”
“Sure. Whatever.” An irritated Abigail rolls her eyes.
“Yeah, you’re right. I think so too.” Shelly flips the page and points to a pair of denim cutoffs. “What about these?”
“Shelly!”
“Wow… is someone in a bad mood?” Shelly sits on the edge of the bed next to Abigail. “Still no letter from Bill?”
“No, but that’s not the point. Like I said, I was up late last night. The storm kept me up.”
“Umm… what storm, sweetie? It was hot and humid last night, just like it was the night before and the night before that and the night before that and—”
“I don’t know,” Abigail snaps at her. “I guess I dreamed it. It doesn’t matter. I still didn’t get much sleep, and I’m not going anywhere, especially not shopping for some stupid bathing suit.”
“Don’t be a b—. It’s another lovely day in Derrylin, and you and I are going to make the most of it. Get your butt up, take a shower, and meet me downstairs. I want to get to Sharpe’s before all the good stuff has been picked through.”
“Fine, whatever.” Abigail stands up, storming out of bed. “You want me in the shower, I’m in the shower. You want to go shopping, we’ll go shopping—WHY NOT? It doesn’t matter to you that I have a headache or I feel like a crud.”
Without hesitation, Abigail then stomps down the hall toward the bathroom, snatching two towels from the nook next to the bathroom door. Shelly pokes her head out of Abigail’s bedroom, smiling, and then leans against the frame of the door while addressing the newspaper insert. Abigail doesn’t look back and disappears into the bathroom.
“It’s another beautiful day in Derrylin!” Shelly yells, paying no mind to Abigail’s foul disposition.
Abigail slams the bathroom door behind her, sarcastically mumbling, “It’s another beautiful day in Derrylin.”
After a moment to herself, Abigail sighs and sits herself on the edge of the bathtub. She pulls back her long hair with both hands as she stares across the bathroom to the door. It’s another beautiful day in Derrylin, Bill.
Derrylin is beautiful despite Shelly’s unwanted intrusion and Abigail’s obvious foul mood. What you could always count on is Derrylin’s notably unmoving sense of self-preservation. The town is quaintly located at the southwest corner of the Oklahoma Panhandle and the Kansas state line, and it has remained austere in the sense that the entire layout of the sleepy little town encircles a picturesque town square reminiscent of a Thomas Kinkade painting. Filling in the yolk of this odd, egg-shaped gathering of merchant shops and municipal buildings is a cozy park evenly covered with Bermuda grass and peppered with typical park toys as well as an intricate white gazebo standing at its center. A wide row of brick pavers run through the center of the park, forming a curved flight of stairs that led up to the whimsical gazebo. At the north end of the park, centered near the street and beyond two columns of spaced royal red maple trees, a marble pilaster street clock commemorates the town’s founder, Eli Willem Colden.
* * *
Eli, Bill’s great-great-grandfather, was an immigrant drifter from Derrylin, Northern Ireland, who came into a little scratch betting on dog races in New York City. Whether it was due to intentional translation or just a simple oversight, the original spelling of the Colldin Irish name was lost in the crowded immigration lines of the city’s harbor. Merchants, politicians, men, and women of diverse stock-in-trade, and the Five Points Gang all struggled for freedom and control during that time. Like most immigrants arriving in New York for the first time, the hustle and bustle of the vastly growing city quickly filled Eli’s rapt eyes.
As Bill’s family explained it, Eli was far from a dark horse. In fact, he was a passionate man unwilling to let the world get the better of him. It just so happened that fate and luck were on Eli’s side the day he emptied his pockets on a fifty-to-one greyhound named Carolina’s Sweetheart and came out $300 richer. It was no little feat that Eli managed to found Derrylin. He spent his first seven years in America as an indentured servant working a tobacco field for a tireless shrewd boss named Bartholomew Fold.
However, in the spring of 1887, after Eli’s contractual release and after trekking across much of the eastern seaboard and the Midwest, Eli finally laid down roots at the age of thirty-eight. Eli used a portion of the $300 he always kept in a sock inside his boot, away from Bartholomew’s plump grubby hands, to purchase a meager five acres of land along the Southwest Kansas border. By the sweat of his brow and his stubborn Irish perseverance, Eli transformed thick brush, crowded trees, and rough terrain into a small farm and trading post—a consummate location for traveling merchants transporting furs and silver from the Texas and New Mexico territories.
During the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889, immigrants and would-be landowners came from all across the United States, flooding by the hundreds into Kansas hoping to stake a claim on a piece of untamed Midwest land. As the government came to agreements with the Native American tribes over reservation rights, established land-runs began and continued over the next five years. The money Eli made from these spangle-eyed homesteaders was more than enough to expand on his original plots tenfold. With an unquenchable fire that burned passionately in his veins and without rest or end in sight, Eli set out for Dodge City to secure a loan from the bank against his fifty acres of land.
The money purchased lumber supplies, farm equipment, and even managed to employ a few workhands. By summer’s end, he had built a saloon, general store, and a small hotel. By the end of the year, with the establishment of the U.S. Postal Service, the support of fast-growing political ties out of Dodge City, and a gathering of merchants eager to work for him, Eli finally dubbed his little township Derrylin, Kansas, naming it after his hometown in Ireland.
He met and fell in love with a young French woman during the Cherokee land grab of 1893, and shortly thereafter, they got married. Her name was Altona Beatrice Masse. Altona gave birth to only one son, and that son had only one son himself—Ted Willem Colden, who was only remembered for two things: one of the most generous men in Derrylin’s history and one who unintentionally drove his only son, Bill, away.
Like most fathers, Ted loved his son but to the point that it put dire strains on their relationship. Derrylin had always been under the financial guidance of a Colden since Eli founded the town, and it was Ted’s every desire to see Bill take over when he retired. Ted pursued this tirelessly until reaching the breaking point; Bill endured enough of his father’s threats of withholding financial support and left Derrylin in the late summer of 2008, joining the marine corps. It was a rash decision after an intense argument with his father, yet Bill walked squarely into the marine recruiter’s office in Garden City and pointed at a satiric hand-drawn portrait of bin Laden with a target sketched over his face and simply said, “I want a ticket to the show.”
The recruiter smiled devilishly, revealing an uneven row of cigarette-stained tombstones. “Hell, son, I don’t even have to lie to you. Take a seat.”
Never fully understanding who had just walked into to his office that fateful afternoon, the recruiter signed Bill up for four years as an enlisted man in the marine infantry with at least one tour guaranteed overseas in Saudi Arabia. Bill’s three months of basic training took place at Camp Pendleton’s Marine Recruit Depot in San Diego, California, followed by one month of military combat training and eight weeks of grunt school. After a mere ten days of sanctioned leave of absence, Bill joined the First Battalion Ninth Marines of Alpha Company at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. After another few weeks in the fleet as his recruiter had promised, the war in Saudi Arabia called upon the Ninth Marines. Nevertheless, that was then, and this is now, and now Abigail waits patiently for Bill to return home to her.
* * *
Out of the shower and into a pair of denim shorts, a plain white T-shirt, and her teal green and purple Skechers, Abigail skips down the stairs feeling refreshed—the pulsing migraine still lingering. Bill was on her mind the entire time she was in the shower, and he is the only reason she is smiling now, as she is dreading going out into the heat to go shopping, even though she usually loved doing it. It is unknown to Abigail why she woke up with dark clouds looming over her, or why she had a headache for that matter. She couldn’t seem to put her finger on it. She just keeps circling back to the storm that did or didn’t take place the night before. For some reason, Abigail’s mind is now entertaining thoughts of fire as well.
As soon as she walks out of the foyer and into the kitchen, Abigail sees her mom, Jeannie Lux, unwinding the vacuum cleaner cord, readying herself to vacuum the kitchen walls with painstaking reverence. Walter Lux, Abigail’s dad, is nowhere in sight. She assumed he is in the living room, reading the Saturday paper and is probably wondering why the rubber band is missing and his paper has been rifled through. Shelly sits at the kitchen table, nibbling on a piece of toast while collectively adding up all the things she intended to buy from the insert she has already viewed numerous times. Abigail immediately heads to the refrigerator, retrieving a carton of grapefruit juice and pouring herself a glass before sitting down to listen to Shelly’s plans for the afternoon.
“Morning, sweetie,” Jeannie plugs the cord into the outlet over the counter next to the sink but refrains from turning on the vacuum. Instead, she makes Abigail a plate of breakfast, intending to join the girls at the table.
“Has the mail arrived yet?” Abigail asks.
“I don’t think so,” Jeannie says with a smile as if she expected the question to be the first thing out of her daughter’s mouth.
It has been more than a month since Abigail heard from Bill, and she was steadily going out of her mind and driving everyone else crazy along with her. At times, when Abigail thought she would be unable to handle Bill’s absence, she visited Bill’s mother Maggie. She loved spending time at Ted and Maggie’s; that much was clear. Abigail had probably spent more time at Ted and Maggie’s than at her own house that summer.
“So what are you girls up to today?” Jeannie places down a saucer of buttered toast and crisp bacon down in front of Abigail and then takes a seat next to her at the table.
“Not much, Mrs. Lux. We’ll probably go shopping, but after that, who knows?”
“How are your mom and dad doing, Shelly? Everything is fine?”
“You know, same old, same old. Dad is always working, and Mom is working hard in spending Dad’s money.”
Jeannie giggles. She turns to Abigail with those prying eyes of hers. “Are you going over to Mr. and Mrs. Colden’s again?”
“Mom, you can call them by their names, Ted and Maggie, and I don’t know. I haven’t gotten that far into my day.”
“Snappy this morning, aren’t we?”
“You said it.” Shelly is quick to agree.
“Do we have any ibuprofen?”
“You have a headache, sweetie?”
“Yeah, she got it during the storm last night.” Shelly giggles.
“What—”
“Nothing, Mom, just a weird dream. That’s all,” Abigail says and rolls her eyes.
“If you say so.” Jeannie dismisses the conversation. “Well… I thought I’d have you around the house today. I could certainly use your help.”
“Good luck with that. I could barely get her out of bed, and all I have planned for us is a little light shopping.”
“Maybe tomorrow then. Are you feeling okay?” Jeannie touches Abigail’s forehead with the back of her hand as Abigail bites into a strip of bacon.
“Mom…” Abigail shrugs her mom’s hand away.
“Well, you’re certainly not running a fever.”
“I’m okay. It was just some weird dream. That’s all.”
“About what? Do you remember anything?” Shelly pries.
“I don’t know. Bill, I think.” She pauses, trying to remember; however, the details are foggy. “I remember a storm and a lot of lightning, and I thought Bill was in the dream, but that’s it. Oh yeah, and there was something about fire. Everything is fuzzy.”
“It sounds sizzling and romantic,” Shelly says dramatically.
“Shelly, there will be no sizzling romance in my home, dream or no dream.”
Walter Lux walks into the kitchen to pour himself another cup of coffee at about the same time as Jeannie’s misinterpretation of Shelly’s statement. Both Shelly and Abigail giggle, and Walter shakes his head, walking over to the coffee pot next to the refrigerator.
“Oh, stop it. You know what I meant.” Jeannie blushes.
“Of course, we do,” Shelly teases.
“What exactly did you mean, Jeannie?” Walter smiles, sets the coffee pot back on the burner, and takes a sip from his mug while looking to his wife for an explanation.
“Nothing, Walt. I just meant to say… oh, damn it.” Flushed, Jeannie then blurts out, “It was just some silly dream Abby had about Bill last night.”
“Mom… jeez…” Abigail blushes. Shelly bends over in her seat, erupting into laughter.
“I’m sorry. It’s okay, sweetie,” Jeannie snickers, placing her hand over Abigail’s, embarrassed for her daughter.
“Well, that’s breakfast for me.” Abigail drops the slice of bacon on her plate and slides her chair out. “You know, this is exactly why I didn’t want to get out of bed.”
“I thought it was because of the storm,” says Shelly.
“Bite me.”