The Quiet Rescue Down The Road
I have been a lot of things in sixty six years. A husband for forty one of them. A volunteer firefighter for thirty. A father who did not always get it right. But I had never once, in all that time, been the kind of man who drove three hours not knowing whether his wife was alive on the other end of it. Until the two weeks I am about to tell you about, the two weeks my wife never really came home from, not the way she left.
Two Weeks and One Suitcase
Rosalyn and I have lived outside Bethel Springs, Tennessee, since the year after we married. It is not a big place. One stoplight, a Piggly Wiggly, a Baptist church and a Methodist church glaring at each other across the same intersection, and a VFW hall where I have spent more Friday nights than I can count. You know the kind of town. Everybody’s business is everybody’s business, and most of the time that is a comfort and not a complaint.
Our son Dwaine grew up in that town same as I did. He married a girl named Lorene from two counties over, a nurse with a laugh you could hear through a closed door, and for the first few years of their marriage they lived in a rented duplex in Bethel Springs, close enough that Rosalyn could still get her hands on our grandbaby whenever she wanted. Then Lorene got offered a position at the clinic up in Clinch Gap, better pay, better hours, and Dwaine found a rock rancher house up there that needed work but had good bones and a yard big enough for a garden. They bought it in June. They planned to move in by the first of the month.
Rosalyn was the one who packed the truck. Rosalyn was the one who wrapped every dish in a bath towel and labeled every box with a marker even though I told her nobody reads the labels anymore, they just open boxes until they find what they need. Rosalyn has always been like that. She cannot walk into a house that is not finished yet without wanting to finish it. It is not a flaw. It is closer to a calling.
“They’re overwhelmed,” she told me, the morning she left, standing at our kitchen counter with her readers pushed up on top of her head the way she does when she has already made up her mind about something. “Lorene starts Monday. Dwaine doesn’t know a soup ladle from a spatula. It’s two weeks, Orville. I’ll get their kitchen running and their boxes gone and I’ll be home before you’ve worn through your good shirts.”
I did not fight her on it. I never do, not really, not when she gets that particular look. I walked her out to the Buick, put her suitcase in the back seat myself, and watched her pull out of our driveway with a casserole dish riding shotgun and enough energy in her to light up the whole county. That is the last easy memory I have of those two weeks. Everything after it got harder to hold onto.