Authors: Howard Owen
“But what are you going to do with yourself?” his mother asked him. He felt he was too old to go back to school, too old to do anything that didn't involve making money on a regular basis. Any dreams he might once have had were out of the question.
He knew a couple of long-distance truckers whom he'd met through the farm. One of them had told him one day, when Jack confessed to him just how much he truly disliked farming, that he should go to school, get his commercial license, and hit the road.
“Nothing like it,” the man had told him. “You can go everywhere, be your own boss, make damn good money.”
Jack Stone, who had seen his hopes of a college education twice thwarted, finally got his diploma from a truck-driving school in Oklahoma City. It wasn't that hard. He was bigger and stronger than almost all of the mostly young men there, and he was capable of driving large trucks hundreds of miles at a time without experiencing much physical or mental discomfort. He had, in the words of one of his trucker friends, an iron butt.
And he'd learned in the Navy that he didn't mind travel or solitude. He'd always been able to put himself into a zone, to drift into daydreams while still focusing another part of his brain on the task at handâin this case, keeping an 18-wheeler from killing someone.
And, he has to admit now, some of it was that he just wanted to get away. The loss of Carly hadn't made him and Brady any closer. The boy seemed to actually blame Jack for his mother's absence. He was prone to throwing tantrums that would force Jack to spank him. Ellen was the only one who seemed capable of keeping her grandson in line without at least the threat of corporal punishment. Even when he was three years old, Brady was, all agreed, a handful. And when Jack looked at his young son, he saw, beneath the Stones' reddish-blond hair, Carly Hamner's eyes looking back at him.
And so, Ellen kept Brady while Jack crisscrossed the country, seeing very little of it.
The money was good, though, and in January of 1982, with his 30
th
birthday approaching, he was close to buying his own rig.
Ellen wanted to throw him a party. It wasn't a surprise, because she knew her son was very tired of surprises, had never liked them that much in the first place.
She invited Milo and Cully, and Ray and Martha Sue Bain, Susan Edmonds, and a couple of other friends who had not left Speakeasy. His sister and her husband came, but Mike had to work.
Milo was between marriages, and he brought a date.
She was going by Gina Royal again. She told friends that at least she wouldn't have to be Gina Freemason for the rest of her life, although that was all she'd planned to be when she was in high school.
They threw the party in the back room at the Speakeasy Inn. Almost everyone bought the kind of gifts Jack would have expected from his old buddiesâalmost all of them dealing in one way or another with bodily functions. Nothing cost much more than $10, and most of it would be in the trash can out by the road the next morning.
Gina Royal was the exception, though. She'd wrapped her present in shiny silver foil, and when Jack opened it, expecting the worst, there was an emerald-green crewneck sweater.
She said later that nobody said anything about bringing a gag gift, and Jack supposed it was Milo's own little joke, not telling her.
She was the youngest one at the party, 22 and a couple of years out of junior college. Milo had hired her to run the office in the insurance agency he was still sharing with his father, and he had told Jack how sexy she was, and how horny he was for her. This was the first time he'd taken her out, although he'd asked twice before.
Jack had seen her around town, between cross-country hauls, at the grocery store or the McDonald's. She always nodded and smiled, so he did, too, without ever really introducing himself. He knew, because Speakeasy wasn't that large, that she and her family had moved there in the late '60s. Her father ran the pharmacy on the north edge of town, the one that eventually would be done in by the Revco on the south side. She had been Miss Gladden High of 1977, and she was already divorced.
She told Jack later about Skip Freemason. He'd been the star of the basketball team, they'd gone steady for three years, and they got married the week after they graduated.
They both went to a junior college in the foothills, where, with their parents' money, they rented an apartment. The plan was that they would transfer to a four-year school later, but by Christmas of their freshman year, he'd fallen for a blonde sophomore from Lynchburg and moved out. He and the blonde transferred to James Madison after spring semester, leaving Regina Gay Royal Freemason abandoned and soon to be divorced.
“You know,” she said once, after she and Jack were engaged, “I probably would have dropped out after the first semester and just gotten a job if it hadn't been for Skip leaving me. I never liked school, but I was damned if he was going to make me skulk back here like some loser.”
Two years were enough, though. She moved to Richmond and worked for a year and a half as a secretary, and then she came home. She didn't really mean for it to be permanent. She was visiting one weekend, and her father told her about the job that Phil Wainwright was advertising for at the insurance agency he and his son ran. She went by that afternoon, and the job was hers.
If I hadn't met you, she told Jack a year later, I'd have taken a job in Washington or Norfolk, somewhere. She knew almost as soon as she returned and rented a small apartment a couple of miles toward Richmond that Speakeasy would always be better for her as memory than as reality.
Four days after the birthday party, Jack was pulling into the Giant parking lot when he saw her again, carrying two grocery bags across the pavement.
He waited until he saw where she was headed, a burgundy Honda with dealer's tags still on it, and he eased into a space one down from her.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey, birthday boy,” she replied, smiling when she recognized him. “I'm glad to see you survived the party.”
As he and his mother were the only teetotalers at the event, he said he supposed his chances of survival had been pretty good.
“My biggest challenge,” he told her, “was staying clear of Milo.”
“I hear that.”
Milo had decreed that, since the birthday boy wasn't drinking, he would take it upon himself to down a shot of Jack Daniel's for every one of Jack's 30 years. He made it to 23, just into the second fifth, before he fell backwards off the stool, tumbling Ray Bain to the floor with him.
“Oh,” Jack said, when he realized he was wearing the green sweater. “Nice gift. You shouldn't have, though.”
“It goes good with your hair. That's why I picked it out.”
They talked for 20 minutes, until Gina realized she had ice cream in one of the bags.
“Listen,” he said, “are you and Milo dating or anything?”
She smirked.
“Why would you want to know that?”
“Because I don't try to snake my friends' dates.”
She laid the bags in the trunk and moved close to him.
“What makes you think I'd go out with you anyhow?”
He said he was damned if he knew, that she'd have to be an idiot to do such a thing. He said he guessed he was hoping she just wasn't very smart.
“Hey, Class Dunce, class of '77,” she said.
“OK, then, how about a movie tomorrow night?”
She stepped back a half-step. “Well, I'll have to ask Milo.” She paused a beat, then added, “Just kidding.”
He realized, driving home that day, that he should call Milo and ask his permission to date the woman Milo referred to as “the raven-haired beauty.” But he didn't. He mentioned to Milo, after he and Gina had gone to a basketball game on their second date, that he had dated “the RHB,” and Milo laughed it off, told him he wished him better luck than he'd had.
She
was
a beauty. She was five-feet-nine and weighed no more than 125 pounds. She had then and still has the most hypnotic eyes Jack has ever seen. He imagines that even in old age she'll still be captivating men with those emeralds.
What happened in the Giant parking lot, they both agreed, was kismet. It made them both feel a little easier about Milo, who in any case was married again within nine months, and divorced again two years after that.
The only time Milo has ever mentioned any of it with anything approaching seriousness was one night at the diner, after he had drunk a few beers and he and Jack had listened to too many songs of their youth.
“The only girl I think I ever could have stayed with,” he said, “was the RHB.”
There were a few seconds of nothing but “Brown-Eyed Girl” on the jukebox, and then Milo laughed, “But you know, I'd have fucked that up, too. Everybody's better off. Right?”
“Right,” Jack said, not knowing whether to agree or shut up.
The marriage was in August of 1984.
Gina tried to get along with Brady. Jack really believes that. But there was too much there. She was impatient. And the boy was fond of reminding her, any time she tried to make him do something he didn't want to do, that she wasn't his mother. He had been a sweet-natured if headstrong child, but neither he nor Gina was prepared for the step-ness of their relationship.
“No,” she told him one day, when she'd had enough, “I'm not your mother. I didn't run off, so I must not be your mother.”
She had regretted it, the way he looked, like he was going to cry even though he was almost 10 years old by then. She wished he had cried, because then maybe she could have held him and sought his forgiveness, and maybe they would have turned some kind of corner.
But he didn't. He pulled his mouth into a tight little line and walked out the door, slowly, stopping down the hallway and turning to utter one word, in a voice barely over a whisper: “Bitch.”
Some of Gina's favorite memories from that time are of being on the road with Jack. With her at his side, he finally saw some of the sights just beyond the interstates. In the first two years of their marriage, she crossed the country eight times with her husband, and they delighted in keeping count of the number of states in which they had made love.
She was always a fast typist, capable of 70 words a minute. It was a limiting talent, she knew, but it enabled her to get work as a court reporter, and she could hammer away in the little room they fixed up for her at the farmhouse, then go away for a week at a time, leaving Brady with his grandmother.
She made her last trip with Jack in November of 1986, four months before Shannon was born. They both agreed she would resume traveling with him, after things settled down, but she never rode cross-country with him again. After a while, Jack stopped asking. It wasn't as if she weren't busy, working part-time and raising a baby.
The attention she lavished on their new daughter only made things worse with Brady, who ran away from home that spring and almost had to repeat the sixth grade. Gina knew she was failing him, but she was so busy and so tired, and in the end she was more than willing to let Ellen continue to do most of what rearing Brady would get, along with Jack when he was, as she put it, “actually around.”
On Carly's one and only visit, she just showed up.
She told her parents in Fredericksburg, still in shock over her surprise appearance, that she was going down to Speakeasy to look up a couple of old friends, but she went straight to the old farmhouse where she had spent her brief sentence as Mrs. Stone.
That August, it was over 100 degrees six days in a row. It was the year Jack would finally have central air-conditioning put into the old house.
Saturday, the sixth day, he had taken the lawn mower to a little shop on Third Street. As was its custom, it had died on the hottest day of the year. Jack spent five fruitless, stroke-inducing minutes trying to start it.
Gina had taken little Shannon to the community pool. Only Ellen and Brady were home, watching television in two of the three rooms cooled by window units.
Brady answered the door. The woman standing there, wiping sweat from her face, was wearing a thrift-shop dress. She was barefoot. Her hair was in bangs and appeared not to have been professionally cut.
“Brady,” she said. “I'll bet you don't remember me.”
He didn't say anything, but he knew.
She asked him if she could come in, and he stood aside and let her.
He showed her to his room. They both walked quietly. Ellen, whose hearing wasn't the best, never knew her ex-daughter-in-law was there until the sheriff's deputy came by later.
She sat on the edge of his unmade bed; there was nowhere else to sit. She asked him how he was doing, did he have a girlfriend, what college he wanted to go to, was he going to church regularly. He could barely make out any trace of a Southern accent. She might have been born in London.
He answered her as tersely as possible.
Finally, he asked his question:
“What are you doing here?”
He had always known she would come back some day, no matter what they told him. He had imagined a thousand times what he would say to her. He would make her ashamed, or he would let her take him away with her, or he would just pound the crap out of her for leaving him. The last one had become his favorite in the last couple of years.
“You know I never stopped thinking about you,” she said, trying to take his face into her hands as he backed away. “I never even had a picture to remember you by.”
He didn't remind her that she could have taken one if she had wanted to. There were plenty of his baby pictures around the house, in frames and albums.
There were even pictures of Carly, in old albums nobody ever bothered to throw away. He had torn her likeness out of a large family-picnic photograph when he was nine; he still had it hidden in the back of his sock drawer.
He asked her again why.