The Quiet Rescue Down The Road

Home, Wherever That Turned Out To Be

People ask me sometimes, when I tell this story at the VFW hall or over coffee after church, whether I was angry. At Dwaine, for the lie. At Rosalyn, for the two weeks of silence that took ten years off my life in worry. The honest answer is that I was, for about as long as it took me to walk from that porch to that kitchen table and see what my wife had actually been doing with her missing days.

You cannot stay angry at a woman for disappearing into somebody else’s need. Not when you have spent thirty years of your own life doing the very same thing, running toward houses on fire while your own family waited up wondering if you were coming home. I understood, standing in that kitchen, that I had married a woman built out of the same stubborn material I was, and that the two weeks she never really came home from were not a betrayal of our marriage at all. They were the plainest proof I have ever gotten of exactly who she is.

We drove back to Bethel Springs together that following Sunday, her Buick trailing my truck the whole three hours home, and I will tell you the truth, the house felt different walking back into it. Not because anything there had changed. Because I had. I keep a spare charger in my glove box now, the kind that fits any outlet a house might throw at you, an old wiring or new. Rosalyn keeps a change of clothes in the Buick, just in case. And every few weeks, when the ladies’ circle schedule up in Clinch Gap runs a little thin, my wife still drives those three hours to sit at a kitchen table that was never ours, holding a hand that was never mine to hold, and I have stopped needing anybody to explain to me anymore where she has gone.

I just pack her a thermos, kiss her goodbye in the driveway, and start watching the clock for nine o’clock, same as always. Some nights the phone rings right on time. Some nights it does not. I have learned, finally, after forty one years, that the second kind of night does not mean something has gone wrong.

Sometimes it just means somebody, somewhere, finally has help.

I think about Mr. Harlan more than I probably should, for a man I have now met exactly twice. He did not know my wife well. He did not know me at all. But he stood on that road and made a choice that most people would have talked themselves out of, to tell a frightened stranger the truth instead of letting him keep knocking on the wrong door. That is the part of this whole two weeks I keep coming back to when I tell it. Not the propane bill, not the ramp I built, not even the son who finally drove down from Ohio. Just an old man in suspenders who refused to let another person stay lost a minute longer than he had to.

That is the kind of town Clinch Gap turned out to be. I suspect, if you looked hard enough, it is the kind of town you are living in too.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.