“You can kiss me all you want, but you still have to bring me back home.”
“Can you sneak me into your room?”
“Not with my sister there. That would be too weird.”
“If I’d known you wouldn’t stay over, I might not have driven all the way up here.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He laughed before becoming serious again. “I missed you.”
“No, you didn’t. You were too busy to miss me. Every time I called, you were always on the go. Between work and practice, you probably didn’t even think about me.”
“I missed you,” he said again.
“I know. And I missed you, too.” She reached up, touching his face. “But sadly, we’re going to have to get dressed anyway. You’re supposed to come over for brunch tomorrow, remember?”
Back in North Carolina, Luke made the decision to redouble his practice efforts. The first event of the season was less than two weeks away. The two days in New Jersey had given his body a chance to rest, and he felt good for the first time in weeks. The only problem was that it was as cold here as it had been in New Jersey, and he dreaded the chill of the barn even as he set out in its direction.
He had just turned on the barn lights and was stretching before his first ride of the night when he heard the door swing open. He turned around just as his mom emerged from the shadows.
“Hey, Mom,” he said, surprised.
“Hi,” she said. Like him, she wore a heavy jacket. “I went over to your house and when I realized you weren’t there, I figured this is where you might be.”
He said nothing. In the silence, his mom stepped into the foam-padded ring, sinking with every step until she stood on the opposite side of the bull from him. Unexpectedly, she reached out and ran her hand over it.
“I remember when your dad first brought this home,” she said. “It was all the rage for a while, you know. People wanted to ride these things because of that old movie with John Travolta, and practically every country bar put one in, only to watch the interest die out within a year or two. When one of those bars was being torn down, your dad asked if he could buy the bull. It didn’t cost much, but it was still more than we could afford at the time and I remember being furious with him. He’d been off in Iowa or Kansas or somewhere, and he drove all the way back here to drop it off before turning right around and heading to Texas for another set of rodeos. It wasn’t until he got back that he realized it didn’t work. He had to rebuild the thing pretty much from scratch, and it took him almost a year to get it working the way he wanted. But by then, you came along and he’d pretty much retired. It sat in the barn here collecting dust until he eventually put you on it… I think you were two years old at the time. I got pretty mad about that, too, even though it was barely moving. I somehow knew that you’d end up following in his footsteps. The thing is, I never wanted you to ride in the first place. I always thought it was a crazy way to try to make a living.” In her voice, he heard an uncharacteristic trace of bitterness.
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“What was there to say? You were as obsessed as your dad. You broke your arm when you were five riding on a calf. But you didn’t care. You were just mad because you couldn’t ride for a few months. What could I do?” She didn’t expect an answer, and she sighed. “For a long time, I hoped you’d grow out of it. I was probably the only mother in the world who prayed that her teenager would get interested in cars or girls or music, but you never did.”
“I liked those things, too.”
“Maybe. But riding was your life. It was all you ever really wanted to do. It was all you really dreamed about, and…” She closed her eyes, an extended blink. “You had the makings of a star. As much as I hated it, I knew you had the ability and the desire and the motivation to be the best in the world. And I was proud of you. But even then, it broke my heart. Not because I didn’t think you’d make it, but because I knew you’d risk everything to reach your dream. And I watched you get hurt over and over and try again and again.” She shifted her stance. “What you have to remember is that to me, you’ll always be my child, the one I held in my arms right after you were born.”
Luke stayed silent, overcome by a familiar shame.
“Tell me,” his mother said, searching his face. “Is it something you feel like you couldn’t live without? Do you still burn with the desire to be the best?”
He stared at his boots before reluctantly lifting his head.
“No,” he admitted.
“I didn’t think so,” she said.
“Mom —”
“I know why you’re doing this. Just like you know why I don’t want you to. You’re my son, but I can’t stop you and I know that, too.”
He drew a long breath, noting her weariness. Resignation hung on her like a tattered shroud.
“Why did you come out here, Mom?” he asked. “It wasn’t to tell me all that.”
She gave a melancholy smile. “No. Actually, I came out here to check on you, to make sure you were okay. And to find out how your trip went.”
There was more and he knew it, but he answered anyway.
“The trip was good. Short, though. I feel like I spent more time in the truck than I did with Sophia.”
“That’s probably right,” she agreed. “And her family?”
“Nice people. Close family. There was a lot of laughing at the table.”
She nodded. “Good.” She crossed her arms, rubbing her sleeves. “And Sophia?”
“She’s great.”
“I see the way you look at her.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s pretty clear how you feel about her,” his mom stated.
“Yeah?” he asked again.
“It’s good,” she said. “Sophia’s special. I’ve enjoyed getting to know her. Do you think there’s a future there?”
He shifted from one foot to the other. “I hope so.”
His mom looked at him seriously. “Then you should probably tell her.”
“I already have.”
“No,” his mom said, shaking her head. “You should tell her.”
“Tell her what?”
“What the doctor told us,” she said, not bothering to mince her words. “You should tell her that if you keep riding, you’ll most likely be dead in less than a year.”
20
Ira
“When you wander the house at night,” Ruth suddenly interjects, “you do not do as you say.”
“What do you mean?” I am startled to hear her voice again after this long silence.
“They are not like the diary you made for me. I could read all my letters, but you do not see all the paintings. Many of them are stacked together in overcrowded rooms and you haven’t seen them for years. And the ones you store in the oak boxes you do not look at either. It is impossible for you to even open the boxes these days.”
This is true. “Perhaps I should call someone,” I say. “I could hang different ones on the walls. Like you used to do.”
“Yes, but when I did it, I knew how to arrange them to their best effect. Your taste is not so good. You simply had workers hang them in every open spot.”
“I like the eclectic feel.”
“It is not eclectic. It is tacky and cluttered and it is a fire hazard.”
I smirk. “It’s a good thing no one comes to visit, then.”
“No,” she says. “This is not good. You might have been shy, but you always drew strength from people.”
“I drew strength from you,” I say.
Though it’s dark in the car, I see her roll her eyes.
“I am talking about your customers. You always had a special way with them. This is why they remained customers. And it is why the shop failed after you sold it. Because the new owners were more interested in money than in providing service.”
Ruth might be right about this, but I sometimes wonder if the changing marketplace had more to do with it. Even before I retired, the shop had been drawing fewer customers for years. There were larger stores, with more selection, opening in other areas of Greensboro, while people began to flee the city for the suburbs and businesses downtown began to struggle. I warned the new owner about this, but he was intent on moving ahead, and I walked away knowing I had given him a fair deal. Even though the shop was no longer mine, I felt a strong pang of regret when I realized it was going out of business after more than ninety years. The old haberdasheries, the kind I ran for decades, have gone the way of covered wagons, buggy whips, and rotary-dial phones.
“My job was never like yours, though,” I finally say. “I didn’t love it the way you loved yours.”
“I could take whole summers off.”
I shake my head. Or rather, I imagine that I do. “It was because of the children,” I say. “You may have inspired them, but they also inspired you. As memorable as our summers were, by the end, you were always excited at the thought of being back in the classroom. Because you missed the children. You missed their laughter and their curiosity and the innocent way they saw the world.”
She looks at me, her eyebrow raised. “And how would you know this?”
“Because,” I say, “you told me.”
Ruth was a third-grade teacher, and to her, it was one of the key educational periods in a student’s life. Most of the students were eight or nine years old, an age she always considered an educational turning point. At that age, students are old enough to understand concepts that would have been foreign to them only a year earlier, but they are still young enough to accept guidance from adults with a near-unquestioning trust.
It was also, in Ruth’s opinion, the first year in which students really began to differentiate academically. Some students began to excel while others fell behind; although there were countless reasons for this, in that particular school, in that era, many of her students – and their parents – simply didn’t care. The students would attend school until the eighth or ninth grade, then drop out to work on the farm full-time. Even for Ruth, this was a challenge that was difficult to overcome. These were the kids that kept Ruth awake at night, the ones she worried endlessly about, and she tinkered with her lesson plan for years, searching for ways to get through to them and their parents. She would have them plant seeds in Dixie cups and label them in an effort to encourage them to read; she would have the students catch bugs and name those as well, hoping to spark intellectual curiosity about the natural world. Tests in mathematics always included something about the farm or money: If Joe gathered four baskets of peaches from each tree, and there were five trees in each of the six rows, how many baskets of peaches will Joe be able to sell? Or: If you have $200 and you buy seed that costs $120, how much money do you have left? This was a world the students understood to be important – and more often than not, she got through to them. While some still ended up dropping out, they would sometimes come to visit her in later years, to thank her for teaching them how to read and write and perform the basic math necessary to figure out their purchases at the store.
She was proud of this – and proud of the students who eventually ended up graduating and going to college, of course. But every now and then, she had a student who made her realize again why she’d wanted to be a teacher in the first place. And that brings me to the painting above the fireplace.
“You are thinking about Daniel McCallum,” she says to me.
“Yes,” I say. “Your favorite student.”
Her expression is animated, and I know her image of him is as vivid as the day she first met him. At the time, she’d been teaching for fifteen years. “He was very difficult.”
“That’s what you told me.”
“He was very wild when he first arrived. His overalls were dirty all the time and he could never sit still. I scolded him every day.”
“But you taught him to read.”
“I taught them all to read.”
“He was different, though.”
“Yes,” she says. “He was bigger than the other boys and he would punch the other students in the arm at recess, leaving bruises. It is because of Daniel McCallum that my hair began to turn gray.”
To this day, I can remember her complaints about him, but her words, as they are now, had always been tinged with affection.
“He’d never been to school before. He didn’t understand the rules.”
“He knew the rules. But at first, he did not care. He sat behind a pretty young girl named Abigail, and would constantly pull her hair. I would say to him, ‘You must not do this,’ but he would do it anyway. I finally had to seat him in the front row where I could keep my eye on him.”
“And it was then that you learned he couldn’t read or write.”
“Yes.” Even now, her voice is grim.
“And when you went to talk to his parents, you discovered they’d passed away. It turned out that Daniel was being raised by an older stepbrother and his wife, neither of whom wanted him to attend school at all. And you saw that the three of them were living in what was essentially a shack.”
“You know this because you went with me that day to the place he lived.”
I nod. “You were so quiet on the drive home.”
“It bothered me to think that in this rich country, there were people who still lived as they did. And it bothered me that he had no one in his life who seemed to care about him.”
“So you decided not only to teach him, but to tutor him as well. Both before and after school.”
“He sat in the front row,” she says. “I would not be a good teacher if he learned nothing at all.”