I'm Coming Home

“Mom, what is the name of that bird again?” my daughter Shannon asks me from the passenger seat to my right.

“It’s an egret, sweetheart” I reply with a slight smile, thinking of how many times I have answered that exact same question while we made this familiar drive.

“That’s right. I don’t know why I can’t ever remember that. They sure are beautiful”

Majestic is the best description of the bird off to the right side of the car in the middle of the flooded rice field looking for it’s dinner, craning it’s long S-curved neck toward the water with enviable concentration.

We are driving ten miles above the speed limit, through the back roads of the rural county bordering the county in which I was born and raised. The sun is low, about an hour from setting, meaning that the number of bugs out must number in the trillions and at least two hundred have met their end on my windshield since we left the freeway ten minutes earlier. The road is straight and deserted for the most part, with an occasional twist and turn as we pass ranches where the farmers are returning to their homes. They say Montana and Texas are big sky countries, but the large open valley in northern California between the Sierra Nevada's and the Trinity Forest can easily rival.

Shannon returns her air-pods to her ears, signaling that the short conversation about the beautiful egret has finished, and within seconds she is singing along to the familiar song coming from her playlist. She is dressed in short cotton and Lycra running shorts and a yellow t-shirt with small multi-colored flowers dotting the front. She is twelve years old, though it often seems as if she is much older, especially when she shares insightful thoughts about the world and shows deep empathy and compassion for others. Earlier that day when we had finished packing our belongings into the small rented moving truck and hitching up our small, old sedan to the back, she had looked at me and taken my hand in hers and said “it’s ok Mom, everything will turn out alright, you’ll see”. I want to believe her, but my thirty-eight years of life experience allows skyscraper sized glimmers of doubt to constantly creep into my head. 

Life changed dramatically for us just a month ago. After dropping Shannon off at school I made the twenty minute drive to my job at the small accounting firm where I had been a clerk for the past five years. Most days I enjoyed my job despite finding the work fairly repetitive and mundane. My co-workers were pleasant and the pay and benefits afforded me, as a single mother, the ability to feed and clothe myself and my only child. When the firm was doing well financially there were bonuses handed out and money was saved for Shannon and I to have a small vacation to the beach or the mountains. Lately though, business had slowed since one of the partners had left to start his own firm. Two months ago Diane, the founding and remaining partner, had brought me into her office and asked about my plans for the future. She knew I had finally obtained my bachelor's degree through an online program that took me three years to complete. Diane encouraged me to consider studying and sitting for the CPA licensing exam. After contemplating the idea for a few days I made the decision that this was not the time for me to take on such an endeavor. Shannon was in middle school and playing a different sport each season. Between her sports schedule and the usual challenges of parenting a middle-school aged girl, I felt like I had enough happening and could not stretch myself further. 

“Laura, can you come in here for a moment?” Diane said as I was setting down my purse on the grey desk in my grey-walled eight foot by eight foot cubicle that was positioned fifty feet from her office door. 

“Sure” 

When I saw the look of dismay on her face I knew something was very wrong. Diane was in her early fifties,her hair styled in a short blonde bob with light brown highlights. She was a stunning woman, always perfectly put together down to eye shadow that matched the color of her blouse each day. She was petite, no more than five feet two, but a force to be reckoned with. Her clients knew she was a bulldog with her accounting skills and possessed integrity that she refused to compromise for any reason. At the same time she had a friendly face that put people at ease. Seeing that her usually bright eyes were clouded and sad, I knew in the pit of my stomach I was about to hear bad news. 

Entering her office I sat down gently in one of the burgundy colored fabric office chairs across from her desk. The rest of the office suite was silent, we were the only people who had arrived for the day.

“Laura, I am so sorry, I don’t know how to tell you this so I am just going to get to the point. I have to let you go. Since Dan left and took his clients with him I can’t justify employing two clerks. Lisa has been here longer so the fair thing to do is keep her. I was so hoping you would reconsider the CPA exam as I do need another accountant. I feel awful, I am so sorry”

I heard the words coming from her mouth and saw her lips moving and I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. She said more words and I felt as if I were underwater; my ears plugged and nothing was making sense. As if in a trance I reached out my hand, took the check she held extended to me and made my way from her office to my desk. I went through the motions of packing up my few personal belongings and made my way back to the front door and to my car. Once inside, reality hit me and I was glad I had parked so far away so that no one in the office suites in the complex could see me sobbing. After a few minutes I pulled myself together enough to drive home, though I have no recollection of the drive.

The decision to move back home was not an easy one but with no income and the first of the month fast approaching it quickly became clear that it was the most practical one. School ended for the summer and our landlord let us out of our lease early, he was an older man with a kind heart who must have taken pity on me. The initial plan was to stay with my Mom until I could find a job and a place of our own. Shannon and I are both dreading the living arrangements though we accepted we had few other options. As the moving van rounded the last curve the farmland disappeared giving way to the familiar sights of my hometown. 

“Mom, I’m hungry. Can we please stop and eat before we get to Grammy’s house” Shannon asks from the passenger seat, now aware we were in town. 

“Sure, but I will have to find somewhere that it is easy to park this thing. Let me think about it.” As I turn left onto one of the one-way streets going through downtown I catch sight of my favorite pizza place. In high school my friends and I, usually with my boyfriend Shane in tow, had spent hours at Rico’s Pizza eating, listening to the old jukebox and being carefree kids. “Pizza! I’m gonna find a place to park”. 

I round the corner onto a side street that runs perpendicular to the main road. Luckily the street is practically empty with a line of open sidewalk adjacent parking spots. Pulling the truck up along the sidewalk, I occupy four parking spots and hope I will not be ticketed. It was after six o’clock in the evening so I feel pretty confident about my chances. Shannon and I hop out of the truck and make our way down the street. As we round the corner, the familiar smell of pepperoni,  cheese and red pepper hit my nose and immediately transports me back twenty years in my memories. I am continuously amazed that a smell can have such a connection to a feeling and evoke such vivid memories that can cause such immense pain.

Shane and I had dated for most of high school, though we had known each other since we were toddlers. Our houses were across from each other on the same small culdesac and as an only child I had regularly been included as part of his family to swim, play and eat meals. His mom, Margaret, had been like a second mother to me my entire life and it seemed inevitable to most who knew us that Shane and I would end up together. When middle school puberty hit the friendly feelings began to change into something deeper very quickly. I began noticing Shane as more than my best friend, mainly how his brown eyes twinkled when he talked to me and the definition of his abdominal muscles when he wore swim trunks, and initially I felt very shy. One warm summer evening before the beginning of our sophomore year we were outside after a day of swimming, laying on the grass exhausted, when he reached over and gently touched my hand rubbing my fingers with his in a rhythmic calming motion. We stayed there in silence, hand in hand, for almost an hour until Margaret called us in for dessert. From that moment on, through high school graduation three years later, he was my everything and we were inseparable. 

Shane decided to join the military after high school. There were a total of five children in the family, Shane being the youngest, and there was no money for college when his time came. The military seemed the most logical idea to support paying for his education and Shane shipped off for basic training a month after graduation. Two months later I left the state for college. Shane and I had initially kept in contact through regular letters and phone calls, this was long before the days of more convenient modes of communication like smart phones and social media, which were rare due to his deployment to Korea in his first year. Recalling my first semester of college is a struggle; the deep level of grief I experienced from his absence in my life consumed every ounce of my being. My body ached as if I was ill with the flu everyday. Moving through life as if in a fog was the essence of my freshmen year. I went home for the Christmas break and I saw the For Sale sign in the front yard across the street and was devastated to learn that Shane’s parents, with all of the kids out of the house, had decided to sell their home and move to Florida. Their move from my parent’s neighborhood ended my last last connection to Shane. For the remainder of the winter break, I cried in my room and moped around the house making my parents miserable. January arrived and I returned to school determined to move on with my life and by March I was making friends and finally enjoying the promised college social life. Before the end of the semester I had met my future husband, he was a junior at the time, and when he graduated a year later I followed him to Atlanta to start his career in one of the big five accounting firms. Regardless of how happy I was in my new life there was a hole in my heart that never healed and I still found myself thinking of Shane and wondering how his life had turned out.

The restaurant is exactly as I remember; dark wood paneling on the walls and counter, red Naugahyde booths lining the edges of the large dining room and the old jukebox in the far corner. I imagine they still have the same playlist and plan on playing some songs from my glory days to embarrass my daughter. Standing at the counter placing his order is a man and a teenage girl. Shannon grabs a paper menu from the clear plastic holder on the wall and we start talking about what we should order. The customer in front of us finishes placing his order and turns to his left and towards us and looks to be around my age. Each time I come home to visit I find myself scrutinizing people trying to place them in my mind and determine if they are someone I knew so many years ago. The man in front of me is about three inches taller than me, about fifteen pounds overweight with a “dad body”. He has a full head of brown hair cut very short and deep brown eyes that twinkle with familiarity when they meet mine.

“Laura!” The voice enters my ears, triggering a physical reaction throughout my body; my cheeks flush, my heart rate quickens and my stomach feels like it is doing somersaults.

“Shane?” I reply in a sound that is more like the croak of a frog than a human voice. My brain is wrestling to comprehend what my eyes are seeing. In front of me is the man version of the teenage boy I had loved without limits twenty years before. He is flesh and blood, holding a beer in one hand and an empty salad bar plate in the other, looking at me as I assume I am looking at him; in utter disbelief. “What are you doing here?” I stammer.

At this point Shannon is trying to nudge me toward the counter to place an order and getting frustrated that my feet seem to be super glued to the floor. 

“I live here” Shane replies. “Just arrived about a month ago. Once I retired from the Army it was the only place that felt like home. What about you?”

“Mom, come on, I’m hungry” Shannon is saying as she grabs my hand and tries to direct me forward, but I am frozen in place. The boy I had loved and lost, cried over, grieved for and worried about, was in front of me and I can’t move. 

“Go ahead and order, I will be right there to pay.”

My eyes float back to Shane’s face, those beautiful brown eyes meeting my slate blue ones create a sense of longing that has been absent from my life for the ten years since my divorce. Shannon’s father had walked away when she was two, saying he was not cut out to be a father after all and there has been no time for anyone else in my life. 

“I am moving back myself, in fact we just drove into town, the moving van is around the corner”.

“Are you staying with your Mom?”

“Yes, hopefully just for a little while. It’s a long story” I say with one of the deep sighs that has become part of my communication pattern in the past month as my eyes return to the floor in embarrassment.

“I would like to hear it sometime,” Shane says and the corners of his mouth turn up gently into that familiar warm smile. “Maybe we can have dinner?”

Reflexively my eyes dart to the ring finger of his left hand, it’s empty, and back to his face.

“Yes, I would like that. Right now I need to feel my pre-teen before I have a mutiny on my hands” being acutely aware of Shannon just a few feet away finishing up placing her order. 

“Oh, I understand that, I have two teenagers. Laura, I know where to find you, can I come by tomorrow?”

“Absolutely”