Winter Loon(100)

I did not need to break the seal to see what was on the inside. “So this is it?”

Lester chucked a stone into the creek. “What did you expect, Ballot? I mean, really. You thought she’d come live here with you in that old white lady’s house while you finish high school? You thought she’d want to, what, clean up bedpans in a hospital or something? Take the letter, man. Take what you get. Be grateful for what you had. Now let’s get going. I need to be over that pass before nightfall.”

After one last cold one for the road, Lester dropped me off in front of the little house.

“See you around, Ballot.” He put both his hands on my chest, then punched my arm.

“Keep your head low, Lester.”

“It’s the Coast Guard, Ballot, not the goddamned Marines. I need to keep my head above water.” He peeled out in the Impala, which bore no signs of the damage I’d inflicted, his arm waving from the window in a high salute.

Daylight stretched long into that summer night. Somehow I couldn’t get myself into the house. It was as if opening that door would mean closing the door on the past that I’d wanted for my future. I sat on the steps, the unopened envelope in my hand, and watched the corner where the Impala had disappeared. Aveline came out, sat down next to me, handed me a glass of lemonade.

“What you got there?”

“This?” I asked, holding up the white envelope. I tried to say it matter-of-factly. “This is a Dear John letter. This is Jolene finally giving up on me.” I pursed my lips together, nodded, knowing.

“You planning on reading it?”

“Suppose I ought to.”

Streetlights flickered on. A neighbor’s bug zapper flashed purple as the mosquitoes came out to feast.

“Can I make a suggestion, since you haven’t opened it yet?”



I FOLLOWED AVELINE’S ADVICE, SET the envelope next to Jolene’s picture, and wrote a letter, one that was not a response to hers, one that would maybe be the last letter I ever sent to her, the last words I would ever say to this girl who lived so deeply in my heart. “Time to be a man now, Wes,” Aveline had said. “Time to be a man who can give this woman the gift of honesty and of good wishes. A man of courage who can love and let go. Be that man. For her and for yourself. Be kind.” I wrote long into the quiet night. When I was finished, I slipped out of the house while the others slept and walked the letter to the mailbox, the man in the moon watching my every step as I put the past in the past.



AFTER HIGH SCHOOL, I WENT to work pouring concrete. I liked driving the heavy truck, the way concrete flows and hardens, becomes permanent and solid, something you can build on. Eventually I moved into an apartment of my own close enough to Aveline and Annaclaire and Mrs. Blue that I could walk over for dinner a couple nights a week. I was Annaclaire’s date to every father-daughter banquet and dance, though she was quick and sharp to point out to the adults who plan such things that some kids don’t have fathers and ask why is it that they insist on making kids feel bad who don’t have that kind of family. I accompanied Mrs. Blue and Aveline to every recital and play that Annaclaire was in, to every art show at her school. And when Aveline started dating the new music teacher at the high school, I was the babysitter of choice, though Annaclaire hated the term. “You’re my brother who is staying home with me. How does that make me a baby?”

Over the years, I dated some nice girls, though none made me feel like that other girl had—the girl on the seesaw with the waning moon scar, the girl on a porch roof, skin like felt, who glistens in my memory like some mythical being, a kelpie in river water. Aveline warned me not to build her up so much that she became a wall between me and happiness. I did have to put away that photo of her wearing the locket for fear that my handling of it would ruin the image forever. Now I keep it, along with the pouch she’d made for me, in the tomato box with everything else. I thought about replacing that box with something plain but decided against it. In a way, it was all I had left to remind me of those people, dead or gone.



AVELINE’S STOOP IS STILL ONE of my favorite places to sit after work, to take a load off. Last October, on those same steps where Aveline confronted my father, where Annaclaire and I have watched rain turn to hail and back to rain again, and Mrs. Blue sips her lemonade, I opened a lumpy package addressed to me in a familiar, loopy script. In it was a heart-shaped talisman, a memory I could hold in my hand.

Seems Jolene had gone to the upstairs closet in search of a beaded dress that Mona swore was in the house somewhere. The dress had slipped from its hanger, lay crumpled and stiff in the forgotten corner. Jolene found it there with a thin slice of slivered wood caught in the hem. She unsnagged it, turned it over, and saw the engraved “O” and “U.” She remembered. The séance, the desperate call to Trudy and Valerie. How I’d broken the planchette from the Ouija board while fleeing the ghosts of our dead mothers. Jolene crawled back into the closet and felt around until she found the other half.

Had that call gone through after all? Had Trudy and Valerie gotten together in the Great Beyond and decided it was about damned time? Maybe our grandmothers, too, and theirs and back and back. Generations of hurt women watching me and Jolene stitch ourselves whole again, then lighting the way back to each other, wish granted.

She took the pieces out to Troy’s shop, dug wood glue from one of his bins. She fitted the snapped heart back together, the broken hole at the point made into a circle again, and thought of the boy who’d never really left her thoughts at all. She wrapped our wishful séance in layers of tissue, wrote me a letter telling me facts of her life, and waited.