Surely my father knew that about Jean Timms and Kepper’s Woods. I wonder now whether he had any thought at all of what he might find there.
“Might as well,” Bill said, and off we went.
Marathon Oil had a lease road running through those woods, and that’s where we came upon the car — Mr. Timms’s Olds ’98 — nosed deep into the shade offered by the hickories and oaks and ash trees and sweet gums.
A flash of my mother’s red sundress caught my eye first — just a quick glimpse of red as she came around the front of the Olds — and then, just like that, the whole picture came into view: the dark green Olds with road dust coating the top of the rear bumper, the gold of Mr. Timms’s Ban-Lon pullover shirt, the bright red of my mother’s sundress. She walked a few steps behind the car, back down the oil lease road, and that’s where Mr. Timms caught up to her. He took her by her arm and turned her around to face him. He put his arms around her, and she put her arms around him, and they held each other there in the woods on that road where they thought no one could see.
“There’s Mom,” I said, and as soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t.
When I saw her with Mr. Timms, I found the sight to be so strange and yet somehow familiar, mixed up as it was with what I felt about Connie, that I couldn’t help but say what I did.
I imagine my father would have eventually spotted them, and what took place next would have still been the thing that happened, but even now I can’t stop myself from believing that if I’d kept my mouth shut, perhaps we would have veered away from that oil lease road, and Bill and my father never would have seen my mother and Mr. Timms. I can’t keep myself from thinking that maybe there was that one chance that we would have gone on, maybe found some squirrels, maybe not, and then driven back into town, and our lives would have gone on the way they’d been moving all that summer. Maybe there was that one possibility of grace that I cost us because I spoke. There’s Mom, I said, and Bill and my father stopped.
We were hidden in the woods, maybe fifty yards or so away, and my mother and Mr. Timms had no idea we were there.
My father said to me, in a very quiet, very calm voice, “Go back to the car, Roger.”
But I didn’t move. I was afraid that if I did, my mother and Mr. Timms would hear my footsteps over the twigs and hickory nut husks on the floor of the woods. The thought of my mother’s face turning in my direction, her eyes meeting mine, was more than I could stand to imagine, because what Bill and my father didn’t know was that one day that summer my mother said to me, “You like Connie, don’t you?”
We were alone in the house. My father was at the courthouse in Phillipsport. It was a hot, still afternoon with storm clouds gathering in the west. Soon there’d be a little breeze kicking up — enough to stir the wind chimes my mother had hanging outside the back door, the ones I’d brought her from my class trip to McCormick’s Creek State Park. They’re pine cones, she said when she saw the chimes. Little gold pine cones, she said, and even now, whenever I want to feel kindly toward her, all I have to do is call up the memory of how she held the chimes up and blew on them to set those pine cones to tinkling, how she looked at them, amazed.
I’d just come in from mowing the yard, and when my mother asked me that question about Connie, I was about to take a drink of grape Kool-Aid from the glass I’d poured. I stopped with the glass halfway to my mouth, and then I set it down on the kitchen counter.
Soon the thunder would start, at first a low rumble in the distance, and eventually the lightning would come and the sky would open up, but for the time being it was as if there wasn’t a breath of air to be found. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table writing out a grocery list on one of my father’s notepads that had his name stamped at the top — Roger Thomas Jordan, Phillips County Tax Assessor. She hadn’t made much progress. Eggs, she’d written. Milk. Then she’d stopped and the rest of the note page was covered with her name, written in her beautiful hand again and again. Annie, Annie, Annie.
“I mean you really like her,” she said. “It’s all right to like someone that way, Roger.” She looked up at me then, and there was such a sadness in her eyes. I’ve never been able to get the memory of that moment out of my head. “It’s the way I felt about your father,” she said, and then she ripped the sheet of paper from the pad and wadded it up in her hand.
Somehow I knew that what she was telling me with all that talk about Connie was that she and Mr. Timms didn’t like each other in quite the same way, that what they had going on between them was very different from what had brought her and my father together. I think that she was telling me that if she’d had her druthers, she would have felt that way about Mr. Timms — she would have liked him, and he would have liked her — but what they had between them was something very different from liking someone. It was something born out of loneliness and desperation. I want to believe that she was trying to tell me that what Connie and I had was special and that she wished it would last.
“You know I’m an old woman, don’t you?” she finally said to me.
She was forty-one that summer. If she were alive today, she’d be seventy-nine. I like to think she’d have become an elegant woman, well suited to her age, happy with what she had left in her life, but that Sunday when she clung to Mr. Timms in the woods, no one knew she’d only live ten more years, or that my father, who divorced her, would come to the hospital and sit by her bed and hold her hand as she was dying.
“You’re not that old,” I told her that day in the kitchen.
She looked at me, shaking her head, her lips turned up in a sad grin. “Oh, honey,” she said. “You just wait.”
So there we were that Sunday, Bill and my father and me, and my father said again, “Roger, go back to the car.”
When I still wouldn’t move, he said, “We should all go back. We should go home.”
That’s when Bill said, “Jesus Christ.”
And then he was tromping through the woods toward that lease road where my mother raised her head and pushed away from Mr. Timms and saw that they weren’t alone.
“I don’t know who you think you are,” Bill said when he got to where they were standing. “How can you live with yourself? And you, Annie.” Here Bill shook his head, took a long breath and let it out. “I thought you were better than this.”
There comes a moment when all that’s been denied rises up and leaves you raw and trembling. That’s what I was learning that day as I stood there — my father and I hadn’t moved — listening to Bill’s loud voice ringing with accusation and judgment.
Now I find myself wishing again and again that it would have been possible for me to tell him something that would have made a difference. Something about how broken we were. Something about how a time comes when it’s best to just walk away, even if it means leaving behind someone you swore you’d love the rest of your life. Maybe we thought we could save ourselves, but it was too late.
Although I felt all this inside me, I couldn’t find anything to say that would matter. Even now I can’t put it into words. I can only remember the way it felt in the woods in the moments after Bill shouldered his twelve-gauge, and I knew that all of us were about to move from this world into another one that would hold us the rest of our days.