The grassy fields were full of wildflowers he couldn’t identify-purple, yellow, pink, and white ones. Red-and-white Hereford cattle dotted the fields on one side of him; black-and-white cattle, a Hereford and Angus mix, grazed on the other side. Every now and then his wheels scared birds out of the grass on the shoulder. The birds-meadowlarks? Mitch almost remembered what they were-fluttered up and away from him.
He found himself regretting his urge to come now, when the Flint Hills were at their most stunning, especially now in the fresh light of a spring morning. He’d forgotten how gorgeous this area could be at certain times of year, in certain light, in pleasant weather. Maybe he hadn’t even noticed the beauty when he was a kid. Maybe it had been something he had taken for granted, like fresh eggs, rodeos, and dogs that were allowed to run loose. But now, seeing it so many years later, and through adult eyes, it struck him that he had lived his childhood in the heart of an impressionist painting. It galled him to have to admire it. He wished he had come, instead, in the midst of harsh winter or searing summer, when only a diehard Kansan could have loved the daunting landscape.
Mitch rolled his car windows down to let the fresh air flow through.
His ears ate up the sounds of his wheels moving over gravel, of wind through grass, of birds and insects singing. He stopped the car in the middle of the road and turned off the engine, craving to hear more.
After a few moments, he started the car again.
In the few hundred yards since he had turned off the highway, he had learned that the trip was going to be painful in ways he hadn’t expected. He had forgotten how much he had loved a lot of his own childhood, how good it had felt to live in the heart of a huge country, with land spreading out in every direction. He had forgotten what it was like to climb to the top of one of the high flat hills and be able to see into four counties, what it was like to be able to walk or ride anywhere for miles around, and always run into people who knew him. He had forgotten what it was like to feel safe. He had forgotten what it was like to feel loved, if not convincingly by his own parents, then by an entire community.
It was too painful. He nearly turned the car around to go back to the city.
But then he saw a second small green-and-white sign with an arrow pointing north.
He already had on dark sunglasses. Now he reached across his car seat to grab his Kansas City Royals baseball cap and put it on. He felt slightly idiotic, like a spy in disguise. But the last thing he wanted was a sudden meeting with the girl he’d left behind. If “Abby’s Lawn & Landscape” was that Abby, and she happened to be driving down this road going the other way, he wanted to be able to sail past her without being recognized.
The girl he’d left behind…in bed.
Cut that shit out, he told himself. But not before an image of a naked sixteen-year-old girl flashed through his inner vision, making him feel like a dirty old man.
Mitch tugged the brim of his cap down tighter over his forehead.
He realized he was there. Just ahead on his left, there was a fenced property on which he saw a small white house with green shutters, a screened-in porch to one side, and a front porch with a white swing on it. He also spotted a barn that had been converted into a plant nursery. He saw an entire field of young trees and shrubs, and what looked like a field of wildflowers that had been planted on purpose.
It was attractive, in a rural, struggling kind of way.
The house and barn could have used a coat of paint. A black truck parked at the side of the house looked the worse for wear, though there was a shinier, bigger, newer red truck parked beside it. It looked like the kind of place where the owners had to work their tails off to keep it going.
He had slowed down as he approached it, and now he stopped.
Just as he was about to speed up and move on past quickly so that he could turn around and leave, the door of the side porch flew open and a man came barreling out of it, and let the screen door slam behind him. He had the look of a cowboy, down to the boots in his hands. He was a good-looking guy, tall and muscular. He looked like he had some miles on him, as Mitch remembered his father used to say of men who drank too hard and traveled too fast. He was walking in his stocking feet over the gravel in the driveway as if he was too pissed off to feel the rocks. Suddenly, Mitch recognized him. Jesus Christ, it was Patrick Shellenberger, Rex’s asshole of an older brother.
Abby had married Patrick?
Before Mitch could even consider what that might mean, the screen door opened again and there she was. The sun had come up just enough to illuminate her face.
Mitch’s heart stopped in his chest.
It was Abby, almost exactly as he remembered her.
She yelled something after the departing Patrick, who raised an arm in reply.
Mitch saw her grin behind Patrick’s back, and pain shot through him.
She was still as pretty as she had ever been. And judging from the way his heart was pounding, it seemed to think it still belonged to her.
Damned, stupid, foolish heart, he thought.
Quickly, he stepped on the gas so he could glide as unobtrusively as possible past the entrance to their property, before Patrick had time to steer the red truck down the drive.
Mitch drove for several miles, not paying attention to where he was going, or how long it took him to get there. As his wheels bumped over the rough roads, all he could think of as they turned was what he had lost, lost, lost. Everything, he had lost it all. His dreams, his expectations, his hopes, his illusions. He had lost his home and family, his friends, his high school, his college, his girl. He had lost his innocence and his childhood. He had lost faith. He had lost trust. He had lost hope. Over time, through the years, he had regrouped, tried to rebuild a life, to make it all up to himself by gathering around himself the things and people who might do, instead. But here he was, after all of that, and the only thing he felt was the bitter loss of it all. Maybe he would never have married Abby. Maybe he wouldn’t have stayed in Small Plains anyway. Maybe he and his parents would have ended up estranged from each other over something else. But he would have had some choice in those possibilities, he would have had some power over them.
Finally, he stopped, turned around, and drove back the way he had come.
When he passed the green-and-white house again, there was nobody in sight.
Mitch drove through the dust that Patrick’s truck had raised.
Back at the highway, he looked northeast toward Kansas City and then south toward Small Plains. Again, he thought about turning back. What difference would it make for him to see his mother’s grave? What was a five-minute visit going to satisfy in him that still needed satisfying?
“You can’t know until you get there,” he reminded himself.
He had not grown up to be the man he had thought he would be. Events had changed him, or he had allowed them to change him. It hadn’t even occurred to him before this morning that the same thing might have happened to Abby. She, too, must have hardened and coarsened over the years. The girl he had loved could never have grown up to marry someone like Patrick Shellenberger. It just couldn’t have happened, not the way their lives had been going back then, not as the people they were growing up to be, back then. The old Abby might not even like the present me, Mitch realized, as his hand hovered over his turn signal. The Abby he remembered might not want anything to do with the ambitious, driven man he had become. But then, she wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with Patrick, either, and yet there he was. So, okay, she wouldn’t like me now…but why would I want anything to do with that disappointing woman in the doorway?