The House I Emptied In A Day

What became of Travis

I did not go looking for news of him, but Coldwater is small and news finds you.

Travis moved back in with his mother. The career he had been two hours and one meeting away from for nine years did not arrive, because it turned out the thing that had been keeping it alive was not talent, though he had some, and not luck, though he had chances. The thing keeping it alive was me. The gas money. The hotel money. The freedom to chase a gig instead of holding a job. The clean shirts and the hot meals and the woman at home who made his whole life possible while asking for nothing back. Take that away, and a man has to get a job, and a job does not leave a lot of room for driving to Nashville to almost meet somebody.

He got on at the grain elevator. Steady work. Honest work. There is no shame in it and I mean that. But it is not the life he sold me, standing at that pie table, telling me my eyes were the color of a pond at first light. He plays the VFW dances still, I hear, and the county fair, and I am told he tells a sad song now about a good woman who got away, and I am told the women under the tent lean toward him like sunflowers, just the way I did, and I hope with everything in me that at least one of them has an aunt at the Piggly Wiggly who is braver than mine had to be.

He tried to come back twice more. Once with flowers, standing on my straightened porch, and I took the flowers because they were pretty and it would have been wasteful not to, and I put them in my grandmother’s vase and I sent him home. Once with a long letter about everything he had realized, which I read all the way through, standing at the mailbox, and it was a good letter, well written, the man could always turn a phrase. And then I folded it back up and I did not answer it, because a well-written letter is just another song, and I was done being an audience.