The Empty Chair

“The Empty Chair”

It was an invitation that I had ignored every five years when it came in the mail; the request for me to go back home for a reunion with my classmates from Greenville High School. It was an ongoing chance to revisit my youth but I’d always given it a pass. Every time I’d opened past envelopes addressed to Ronald Wayne Hastings, which no one ever called me, I simply checked the RSVP box that read “Sorry, I will not be attending”, added the words “And my name is Ronnie” and sent it back. Every time I’d checked that box I did it with mixed emotions. Except for a few Facebook and Instagram friendships I’d lost touch with some people I was really eager to see again.

Growing up the way I had wasn’t the same way as the other kids. My mother was a loving, hard working woman who’d somehow managed to give me a good life, or at least the best one she could afford. Even during times when she was working two jobs she still had time for me. Being a kid is hard enough at any age and the high school years are the hardest even under the best of circumstances. But I had never lived one day under the best of circumstances because of one thing; I’d never had a father.

Of course there was a man in the equation somewhere but my mother had never told me who it was. Whenever I’d asked her about my father she’d just sigh and look away with words like, “It was a long time ago and he just wasn’t ready for a family” or “He wasn’t the marrying kind”. Nothing else. No name, no details and no more questions, please. My father was an empty chair at our dinner table. I’d finally reached an age and a point where I just stopped asking. Since my home life had only ever consisted of me and my mother, that was a normal life to me. It was a kind of normal that I’d accepted and didn’t think about except for those times, every once in a while, when a friend would invite me to dinner and I’d sit around a family table that included a man in one of the chairs. It was always something I’d think about for days afterward. And when I’d gotten divorced a few years ago I’d wondered how my empty chair at the table would be seen by my own son.

The invitation to this class reunion had felt different though. It was my twenty-fifth, the one that people say, “If you miss all of the other ones make sure you go to the twenty-fifth”. While that made the sense of obligation feel stronger than in past years, it wasn’t by itself enough to change my mind but still, I’d stalled and ignored answering the RSVP. Then, just a week before the deadline for replying I received a notice that would take me back home after all. My mother had unexpectedly passed away two months before and it was a lot for me to deal with. If she had been ill she’d never said a word about it to me on our regular Sunday afternoon calls and I’d never even said goodbye to her. There was a brief trip back for her very simple funeral and I had taken care of as many of the details of her meager estate as I could do over the phone and on email. But death isn’t that simple and there were some things that required a signature. I just wanted to wrap the whole thing up once and for all. Since I had to be in town anyway I caved in and checked the “I will attend” box and mailed back the reunion RSVP.

The drive from Charleston to Greenville takes a traveler completely across South Carolina. It’s a three hour drive through two hundred years of history, a drive through familiar scenery that I’d made dozens of times over the years. This time the scenery was a blur, lost in the distractions of saying a legal and official goodbye to my mother and the mixed emotions of reconnecting with people from my past. A call on my cellphone was a welcome distraction. “Hey, buddy, what’s up?”

“Hi, Dad, are you in your car?”

“Yeah, I left a little early because it’s supposed to be rainy up in Greenville.”

“I guess that means you’re gonna miss my game tomorrow afternoon. Coach just told me I’m gonna be the starting pitcher.”

I paused. Having to be away from my son only made my mood worse. “I’m sorry, pal, I wish I would have known you were starting but you know I have to take care of Nana’s funeral stuff. I’m the only one that can do it.”

“I know, I was just hoping you could get back in time, that’s all.”

“Ronnie, this is a trip I wasn’t planning to take but it’s something that I just have to do. I’m going to pop into my class reunion tomorrow night but I’ll be back on Sunday and we’ll get together for dinner at Hunter’s Inn. Call me tomorrow and tell me how the game was, okay?

Even with the road noise I could hear him sigh. “Okay, Dad, I’ll call you.” Another sigh and “Love you.”

“I love you too, buddy.”

It was raining when I got into Greenville and I went straight to the lawyer’s office. It only took twenty minutes to sign the estate documents and write a check. With the legal part of my task completed the next thing on the list was to finish clearing out the last few things left in Mom’s house. The job was easier because I’d already given her furniture and clothes to Goodwill. The only thing left to do was to box up some of her smaller possessions and personal items even though I had no idea what I’d do with them. It was going to be an emotional job.

Every drawer I opened, every box I looked into brought back some kind of memory. Mom had never made enough money to accumulate a lot of jewelry or anything close to being valuable. I’d brought along a couple of corrugated boxes to fill with the things I wanted to keep but after two hours I’d only gathered half a boxful. When I stacked the boxes and items to be discarded by the back door I noticed one small white box on the shelf of her bedroom closet. It was well worn, as though it had been handled and opened many times for many years. When I pulled it from the shelf I saw her handwritten label on the lid: Photographs and Memories.

I carried it to a spot near the picture window then sat down and placed it on the floor between my legs. I ran my hands over the label then slowly pulled off the lid. The contents were a mixture of old photographs, newspaper clippings, letters and even my senior class yearbook. I spent a lot of time flipping through the pages, enjoying pictures of myself on the basketball team, in my role of Homecoming King and my favorite one, my claim to high school fame as a guitarist and singer for a band that we’d named “Rebel Yell”. Years of memories take a long time to revisit and by the time I’d separated things into a keep pile and a toss pile it was getting dark. The only thing left in the box was a large manila envelope with the word “Personal” written on the front.

In a strange way I felt like I shouldn’t open it. If the contents were important enough for her to keep them separate from everything else and label them “Personal”, maybe I’d be invading her posthumous privacy. It took me a moment but I knew I’d regret it if I never knew more about the things that were so important to her. I undid the metal clasp and dumped the contents in front of me. There were letters that I decided not to read, a small book of poems with a dried flower squeezed between the pages, yellowed newspaper stories and photos of me with her over the years. Those photos told my history with her and brought tears to my eyes and a lump to my throat.

The last item in the bottom of the envelope was a small stack of Polaroid photos wrapped in a dried out rubber band that broke when I tried to slide it off. There were ten photos altogether and they appeared to have been taken all in one night. There was Mom in a group of people hanging out at The Roadhouse where she tended bar. I’d forgotten how beautiful she was when she was young, There were several shots of a group of seven men, all young, with long-hair and a few with black, brimmed hats. They somehow looked familiar but I couldn’t make any kind of connection. The last two photos showed Mom with one of the guys. In the first one he was standing behind her with his arms around her waist. She had labeled it “Ronnie and Me”. In the second one she was sitting on the same man’s lap with a smile bigger than I’d ever seen on her face. On the back of the photo was written “Crazy about Ronnie”. Besides noticing my mother’s big smile I’d also noticed something that gave me a chill. The man in the photos, Ronnie, looked just like me; the same hair and eyes, even the smile. He was a slightly younger version of me.

It was hard not to stare at the photos as I sorted through the stack three more times. On the margin of each one was the date 10-19-77. It didn’t mean anything to me except that it would have been a week before Mom’s twenty-second birthday. My curiosity was growing and it was getting late. I put everything back into the envelope, tossed it into the box of items I wanted to keep and then carried everything out to my car. There were two boxes of things I’d planned to get rid of but I knew I’d be digging through them at least one more time before I’d part with anything else.

Back in my hotel room I pulled a small flask of rye whisky from my overnight bag and sat down on the bed, the manila envelope beside me. I spread the contents out with a plan to study them more carefully, beginning with a closer look at the Polaroids. My resemblance to the man named Ronnie was interesting and unsettling. I kept the photos in front of me and began digging through the rest of the contents. When I unfolded a page from an old issue of the Greenville News I was startled by the photos. The paper was dated October 21^st, 1977  and the entire front page reported the crash of a plane carrying the rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. Two photos of the crash scene were accompanied by a larger picture of the band. I froze when I saw it. The man in the middle of the group was Mom’s friend, Ronnie. The story said the crash had happened the day before on a flight from Greeneville to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Three people had been killed including lead singer and guitarist Ronnie Van Zant. Another page was from the Jacksonville Daily Record and showed the obituaries for the three local band members, including Ronald Wayne Van Zant.

The whole thing really hit me hard and I leaned back against the headboard, trying to grasp everything I’d just seen. Some quick math in my head told me that my birthday, July 12th, 1978, was roughly nine months after the crash, or more importantly, after the party at The Roadhouse. My full name, the timing of my birth and the physical resemblance could only mean one thing: I was the illegitimate son of a rock and roll legend.

There were so many questions that I knew would never be answered. Why had my mother kept it a secret for all those years? Why hadn’t she ever told me? Was it an embarrassing youthful indiscretion or a romance? Was she ashamed? Did anyone else know the truth? Was she going to tell me before she died? Would I have been better off not knowing? One thing I knew for certain was that my father’s legacy was his music not a son in South Carolina that he didn’t know about. My own legacy was a work in progress and it wouldn’t include him.

 I couldn’t help but wonder what had gone through my mother’s mind every time she looked at the empty chair at our table. I sat there, my flask in one hand and the photo of them together in the other. It was hard to know how to feel or what to do next but, on an impulse, I lifted my flask, touched it to the photo and said, “Mom and Dad, here’s to you.”

Saturday included a long drive around town looking at the places where my youth had played out; my elementary school, the grocery store where I’d gotten my first job and the other grocery store where I’d worked after I’d been fired from the first one. I sat in the parking lot of my high school reliving the good times and bad times that I knew would be remembered aloud at the reunion, more than likely exaggerated and altered with time. After a long phone conversation with my son about his winning performance I ate a small dinner in the hotel café and then headed to the festivities.

Maybe I should have attended a previous reunion so the shock wouldn’t have been so great. Struggling to recognize friends and classmates that you hadn’t seen in twenty-five years is almost painful. Some people age better than others but they still age and twenty-five years is a quarter of a century. The jocks had gained a lot of weight and the cheerleaders had had a lot of work done. Thankfully, the nametags they gave out were large enough to read at a discrete distance, before I’d have to exchange any greetings.

The first half hour was spent at the cash bar where I enjoyed drinking a reasonably good Scotch and playing “Who the hell is that?” as people walked by. In the process I’d reconnected with a few friends who shared with me a promise to find each other on Facebook. I wondered how many of them would actually follow through. I’d just ordered another Scotch and was prepared to wade into the crowd when a voice behind me called out, “Hey, Ronnie, my man!”

I turned and, without even looking at his nametag, recognized an old friend and bandmate. “Hey, Scott!” His red hair had turned mostly gray but his toothy grin and freckles gave him away.

“I’m good. When I heard you were finally coming to one of these I told my wife, “I’ll believe it when I see him.”

“Well, they say everyone should go their twenty-fifth so here I am.” I noticed he was holding an empty glass and asked, “What are you drinking, it’s on me?”

“Well, I’ve graduated from beer like we did back in the day to whatever Scotch is on hand.”

“Me too.” I hoisted my glass to the bartender and pointed to Todd. A moment later we were drinking together for the first time in twenty-five years. Even though thoughts of my Mom and my newly discovered father never left my mind I’d definitely started to relax. I looked around and noticed everyone was milling around the quiet ballroom. There wasn’t the music and dancing I’d expected and said to Todd, “It sure is dull in here. I thought the invitation said there’d be a band.”

Todd smiled. “There is, but we’re on a break.”

“You mean you’re still playing? I’ve always wondered what happened to everyone after we broke up Rebel Yell.”

“Well, after graduation when you left for college Dean, Marty and I kind of went our separate ways but we all stayed in town. We got together at the tenth reunion and decided to put a new band together. We’re The Locals, kind of a mix of Country, Americana and Roots Rock. We even do some of the same stuff we did when you were with us.”

It was like an omen of something that was meant to happen. I threw back the little bit of Scotch in my glass. “Do you still play with an extra guitar like you used to?”

“Oh yeah, we all like to mix things up, why?”

I hesitated, thinking about everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. “Well, I’m pretty rusty but if you guys wouldn’t mind I’d like to get up there and play something with you.”

Todd looked excited. “Hell yeah, what do you want to play?”

I smiled and answered, “How about “Free Bird”?