The local paper sits on my linoleum table every Thursday morning, smelling faintly of ink and damp paper from the delivery box out by the mailbox. I usually skip right to the obituaries because at my age that is just where you check to see who is still standing. But on that particular Thursday, my finger stopped halfway down column three.
Robert Sawyer, sixty-five, of Clarksburg.
The photograph next to the text was small and grainy, printed on cheap newsprint that smudged if you rubbed it with your thumb.
But the jawline belonged to the woman who used to braid my hair by the wood stove. That left-leaning smile was the exact one I had looked at in the bathroom mirror every single morning of my life.
Three years old. That was how old Bobby was when Daddy packed the blue Ford in 1962 and drove out of the gravel driveway without looking in the rearview mirror. Mama won the divorce papers fair and square, but Daddy never stopped where the judge told him to pull over. He just kept driving until the map ran out.
Mama spent five years calling the state police every Tuesday until the sergeants stopped answering her by name. Then she quit talking about him entirely, like if she kept her mouth shut tight enough, the empty space at the kitchen table would just go away on its own. I grew up around the shape of a missing boy.
I learned to walk softly around the north bedroom where his little wooden horse stayed on the shelf until the varnish peeled.
My husband passed six years ago, and the house has been quiet since then. Too quiet, honestly. I fill my days with church committees and small garden patches out back where the clay gives me a hard time every spring.
Last Sunday was the monthly missions luncheon down at the fellowship hall. We always make chicken casseroles and green bean hot dishes for the traveling pastors, setting out the long folding tables with the blue checkered cloths. A woman named Janet brought a tuna bake right around eleven in the morning. She had short gray hair and moved with a quick, nervous kind of energy that reminded me of nobody I knew.
She set the heavy ceramic dish down on the folding table and wiped her hands on her floral apron. “I’m Janet,” she said to nobody in particular, smiling politely at Clara across the table.
Then she turned toward me to reach for the ladle, and the silver caught the harsh fluorescent light above the coffee urn.
It was an oval locket with a tiny engraved oak leaf on the clasp.
Mama had worn it every Sunday of her life until the day she was buried in it. I know because I pinned it to her collar myself with trembling fingers while the funeral home director stood by the door waiting to close the casket.
“Where did you get that?” I asked. My voice sounded thin, like dry twigs snapping underfoot.
Janet blinked, her hand hovering over the ladle handle. “Pardon me?”
“That necklace,” I said, taking half a step forward until the folding table pressed against my knees. “The locket. Where did you get it?”
She touched the silver with her thumb, a defensive little gesture that made her shoulder twitch. “My husband gave it to me. Forty years ago, when we got married up in Wheeling. Why do you ask?”
“What is his name?” I didn’t care about politeness anymore. The fellowship hall seemed to narrow down until there was nothing in the room except the tarnished silver swinging against her cotton blouse.
“Robert,” she said, her voice dropping an octave as she pulled back slightly. “Robert Sawyer. Everyone calls him Bob.”
The obituary in Thursday’s paper said Robert Sawyer had passed away on Tuesday night after a short spell with his breathing.
I stood there in the church basement while the church ladies began murmuring behind us, the smell of canned mushroom soup thick and heavy in the air. Janet was looking at me like I had lost my mind, her eyes darting toward the exit where the parking lot gravel crunched under someone’s tires.
“He’s gone,” I whispered, the words coming out before I could stop them.
Janet frowned, her fingers tightening around the silver metal of the locket until her knuckles went white. “What do you mean, he’s gone? He’s out in the truck right now picking up the extra folding chairs.”
That was the moment the floor seemed to drop three inches beneath my sensible walking shoes.
“The paper,” I managed to say, pointing vaguely toward my canvas handbag where Thursday’s Clarksburg Tribune was folded into four squares. “The Clarksburg paper said Robert Sawyer of Clarksburg passed away on Tuesday.”
Janet let out a short, sharp breath that was half a laugh. “Oh. That was his cousin. Little Bobby. Well, not little, he was sixty-five. My husband is Robert Senior. They shared a name because Bob’s father was stubborn about family monikers.”
My brain stalled out right there between the coffee urn and the paper napkins. “Your husband’s father,” I repeated, tasting the words like sour milk. “What was his name?”
“Arthur,” Janet said, her chin coming up with a defensive little tilt. “Arthur Sawyer. He moved us around a lot when Bob was little. Down from Ohio, then over the state line, keeping ahead of some trouble with a court order or something. Bob never talked about it much. Said his mother died when he was a toddler.”
Mama didn’t die in 1962. She just sat on the front porch every evening until her heart gave out twenty years later, watching the dust settle on the gravel road where the blue Ford had turned away.
“He’s here?” I asked. My throat felt like it was lined with sand.
Janet nodded slowly, her eyes narrowing as she tried to puzzle out why a stranger in a floral church dress was shaking like a leaf over a casserole dish. “He’s right outside in the gray Dodge pickup. His breathing has been bad since the cold snap, but he wanted to help with the tables.”
I didn’t say goodbye to Clara or Pastor Tom. I walked straight past the dessert table, my heels clicking hard against the linoleum floor until I pushed the heavy metal fire door open into the bright October sunlight.
The gray Dodge was parked by the side entrance, its engine idling with a soft, steady rattle that sounded like marbles rolling in a tin can. An old man with a woolen cap pulled low over his ears was sitting in the passenger seat, his head tipped back against the headrest, eyes closed against the noon glare.
As I walked across the gravel, the wind came up off the river, carrying that dry autumn smell of dead leaves and river mud.
I stopped three feet from the passenger door. The glass was rolled down halfway because of the mild weather.
“Can I help you, ma’am?” Janet called out from behind me, her footsteps crunching hurriedly on the stones as she hurried out of the fellowship hall to catch up.
The man in the truck opened his eyes. They were Mama’s eyes, wide and light blue, blinking against the sudden brightness. He turned his head toward me with that exact same left-leaning tilt of the chin that I had seen in the mirror every morning of my life and fifty times in that grainy newspaper column three days ago.
“Bobby?” I said.
The old man froze, his hand resting on the truck’s armrest, fingers twitching once against the worn vinyl. He didn’t smile, and he didn’t look confused. He just looked at me the way people look at a ghost they always knew would show up eventually.
“Who told you that name?” he asked. His voice was raspy, worn down by sixty years of tobacco and distance.
“Mama did,” I said, and for the first time in fifty years, the empty bedroom back home didn’t feel quite so big.
Janet reached the side of the truck then, her hand coming down on my shoulder, not hard, just steady enough to keep me from falling into the dust. She looked between the two of us, her mouth opening slightly as the silence stretched out between the idling engine and the church bells starting up across town for the noon hour.
“Bob?” she whispered, looking at her husband’s face for the first time with a new set of eyes. “Who is she?”
Bobby kept his eyes on mine, his chest rising and falling beneath his heavy flannel shirt in a slow, ragged rhythm. He didn’t answer her right away. He just reached down with a hand that shook just like mine and turned the key in the ignition, killing the engine so we could finally hear each other speak.
