by Keith Hornback

Created on: June 13, 2009   Last Updated: June 24, 2009

She turned and drove down past the old Southside School where the creek bed widened and became a trickle, white and stony and dry. Ruined pilings and concrete piers from the old bridge stood out in the weedy arroyo and gathered rust and graffiti. She remembered when she'd first seen what they'd done out there. She remembered how she thought of him then and how she hurt and thought it was so hillbilly of them and uncaring. My son's name on a crappy old bridge! Get it off there! But now when she saw it, she always pictured one of those friend's of his or all of them standing on top of a dusty truck with spray cans, painting each letter of his name, eyes red in disbelief, shaken like lost hikers or boy soldiers, and she relented and let it stay.

This whole week, each time she passed, she looked at it but it didn't make her think of him, only of those boys, his friends, and how they were that day like orphans. She knew they would come today too and they would try to put their youthful grief into words. She also knew, 10th grade vocabulary what it is nowadays, they would be unable; emotion would drown the words while still in their stomachs. She pictured them filing quietly into the hall in baggy jeans, make-do dress shirts and bulky tennis shoes, completely unprepared for something like a funeral.

Beyond the bridge the road became forked and she turned up toward the foothills, passing a family walking on the pedestrian nature trail. A mom and a dad, a boy, maybe 12 or 13 years old, and a grade-school girl. And for just a snapshot moment something symbolic descended on them as they walked in that light. As if they became the image of family, a picture, for no special reason, just his fatherly walk and the girl gleefully pointing at something and how relaxed they all looked. So that's it then, she thought.....right there, that's a family. Did we ever look like that when someone drove past us in their minivan?

Driving, as an activity in itself, had never really held any strong appeal to Laura, she was ambivalent towards it. No big deal, just getting from here to there. But lately she found some comfort in it. Must be the silence, she told herself. She knew it was the kind of silence it held, not as if she could hear better, more like deeper, into the very things she thought of. Her pulse slowed and she took deep breaths. It felt refreshing in the most private way, like the way the cold side of the pillow feels on the face on a hot summer night, like when you slide your leg to the corner of the bed, down nearly to the very edge of the mattress where some unguarded coolness still pools, and finding that soft cold place hastens slumber's sleepy drip. When before she enlisted the teenagers to run to the store for lunch meat she now found herself volunteering, anticipating the subtle tonic, escaping whenever she thought she could, even if it meant being late to her own son's funeral. Just grab the keys, and 'I'm going to pick up some milk' she'd say, and off she would go in circuitous route to some store she didn't care ever to reach.

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