The Man Who Slipped Away Each Night

I never expected to love anyone again at sixty seven least of all a man who vanished every night after supper

My daughter Jenny booked the trip without asking me, which is the only reason I went.

If she had asked, I would have found a dozen reasons to stay home in Ardell. The garden needed me. The church needed somebody to run the Wednesday fellowship coffee. Raymond’s brother Dale was going to need a ride to the VA in Grand Island, and who else was going to take him. I had spent six years perfecting the art of being needed in small ways, because being needed in small ways keeps you from noticing the big empty place where a husband used to be.

But Jenny did not ask. She drove down from Kearney on a Sunday in June, sat at my kitchen table, and slid a folder across the oilcloth like she was serving me divorce papers.

“A week,” she said. “Larksong Lodge. It’s up in the Sandhills, Mom, on Ewell Lake. A little cabin all your own. I already paid. It’s not refundable.” She let that sit. “You’ve never taken a real vacation in your whole life. Daddy’s gone six years. I am not watching you turn into one of those women who dies in the same chair she was born in.”

“I wasn’t born in a chair,” I said.

“You know what I mean.”

I did know what she meant. I was sixty seven years old. I had cooked for the Ardell Public School for thirty one years, ladling hotdish and sloppy joes to three generations of farm kids, and I had retired with a sheet cake and a gift card and a silence in my house so complete that some nights I turned the radio on just to have a voice in the kitchen. I had buried my husband on a cold April morning with the whole county standing in the churchyard, and I had come home to his coffee cup still in the drainer, and I had not cried until I washed it and put it away and realized I would never fill it again.

So I went. I packed a suitcase that had not left the closet since Raymond and I drove to Branson in 1994, and I drove four hours north and west into the Sandhills, into that strange rolling country where the grass runs on forever like a green ocean somebody poured and forgot to level, and the meadowlarks sit on the fence posts and sing like they are the only birds God ever made.

I want to tell you about the man I met there. But first I have to tell you I almost let a woman named Darlene Fisk ruin it before it began.