The Mother at the End of the Bleachers

Thursday

The mountains in North Carolina were foggy, just like Ron said. I took Interstate 26 down out of Asheville with my headlights on in the middle of the day, and then the road opened up and flattened out, and the trees started changing.

By Columbia, there were pines. By the time I turned off toward Beaufort, there were palmettos, and Spanish moss hanging off the live oaks like old lace curtains, and the air through the vent smelled like salt and mud.

I got into Beaufort a little after five on Thursday afternoon. Fourteen hours, with gas and the rest stop and one wrong turn outside Columbia.

Thursday was Family Day. I knew that. I had read everything the Marine Corps puts out for families, twice. In the morning there’s a run, the new Marines going by in formation, and in the afternoon they get a few hours of liberty on base with their families.

I had missed it. Somewhere on that base, my son had spent the afternoon walking around with his father and his father’s wife, eating a cheeseburger and showing them the barracks, believing his mother was at work in Indiana.

The motel Dale had booked was full. So were the next three I tried. Graduation week in Beaufort, every room in town is somebody’s family.

I finally found a room at a little place in Port Royal for a hundred and thirty-nine dollars, with a window unit that rattled and a bedspread older than Tyler. I did not care. It had a bed.

I ate one of my sandwiches sitting on the edge of that bed. Ham and cheese, the same thing I’d packed for Tyler every day of his senior year of high school. I couldn’t finish it.

I laid out my clothes for the morning on the other bed. Jeans, a white blouse, and my navy windbreaker, because the weather on my phone said it would be bright and breezy, sixty-some degrees, and the parade deck has no shade.

I set two alarms. I lay there with the window unit rattling and thought about the first time I ever drove Tyler anywhere, home from the hospital in Bedford, nineteen years before, twenty miles an hour the whole way with Dale laughing at me from the passenger seat.

Dale was a different man then. We were both different. He used to sing to Tyler in the truck. He used to fall asleep on the couch with the baby on his chest. I have never wanted to forget that. I don’t think it helps anybody to forget the good parts.

I fell asleep around eleven and woke up at four, and lay there in the dark until it was time.