by Scott Blackburn

Created on: January 13, 2009   Last Updated: January 19, 2009

Chapter 2 excerpt (novel not yet titled)

Mom was beautiful, innocent, and extremely vulnerable. She was the perfect target for a vulture like Ray. I guess the two started seeing each other not long after meeting. Ray was a fast-talker, drove a nice car, and his financial concerns were as small as his conscience. Mom took the easy road outta town.

A few weeks after she left she came back and tried to take me with her. Needless to say, mom and dad we're in court before long. Due to my mom's affair and her sudden departure, the judge ruled in dad's favor. She was allowed to visit every other weekend. So I guess you could say I've never really been close to mom, and we've grown even further apart through the years. As a youngster I didn't fully understand what she had done. Like I said, around age 12 I started to piece things together.

I remember seeing dad sitting on the front porch rocker in the evenings. He wouldn't say much, just quietly sit and rock. Sometimes I'd look out the window and watch him. Like most boys my age, dad was my hero. To me, he was the essence of everything manly and strong. But there we're those few minutes in the evening when he traded in his Superman cape for that old wooden rocker and actually seemed, well, human. Rhythmically the thoughts would pass with the movement of the chair. The thoughts of making a better life for us, thoughts of me growing up, and thoughts of mom, even if it was just for a second. As much as he must have hated her at that point, the look on his face told a different story. He missed his girl.

They say you can never truly hate someone unless you once loved them. This was surely the case with dad. Mom was the love of his life. Even in those last weeks before she left, I'll bet he still got butterflies looking into her dark brown eyes, as wandering as they had become. Then, POOF, she was gone, like a shooting star in those night skies. There one second, then gone forever. After she left, dad never said much about her. And if he did, it was brief and lacked any emotional substance.

I remember finding a picture of him and her in the bottom of his dresser drawer one time. In the picture mom was smiling from ear to ear holding up a fish she had apparently caught, beside her on the dock was dad looking at her and grinning. This was the only picture of mom in the entire house and I never mentioned that I found it. To this day I still can't shake that look on dad's face in the picture. I think that's why he kept it. To remind him that maybe love isn't some abstract idea. That love was his. He lived it, breathed it, and held it as it slipped through his fingers like fine sand on a Carolina shore.

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