Coming Home Read Free

think this time would be different? she wondered now.
    Bits and pieces of last night’s conversation continued to play over and over in her mind. But none more than “You need help,” and she felt a renewed sting of regret. Yet deep down hadn’t she sometimes wondered this herself?
    “No,” Jessie whispered. “He’s wrong.”
    Thinking of Oregon in general and men in particular, she wondered how she’d ever start over again: The first shared smile. The first date. The first flowers—maybe roses, maybe carnations. The first “our song.” (How many “our songs” did she have?) The first kiss—and that was the most painful to imagine.
    I’m a good person, she argued to herself. Worth dating. I’m a lot of fun. I have a sense of humor. I’m supportive. I’m generous. I’m …
    It sounded like a personal ad. She turned the rearview mirror so she could see herself and cringed at the sight of her swollen eyelids. On a good day, I’m passably cute .
    “You need help,” he’d said. “Psychiatric counseling. The full meal deal … therapy … drugs.” He might as well have added “shock treatment and a tight-fitting straitjacket. And don’t forget the padded walls.”
    She gritted her teeth. “I’m a good person,” she said aloud. She repeated it until the tears came again, and it occurred to her that beginning again was pointless. Hadn’t she learned her lesson? Some things just didn’t work out.
    I’m done, she thought, trying it on for size, and it seemed to fit. But Darlene would have said, “Yeah, right.”
    The interior car temperature was stifling under the noontime June sun. The air-conditioner struggled to keep up, but she barely noticed. At about two o’clock, she reached Limon, Colorado, and saw the sign for Highway 24 leading to Colorado Springs.
    “Will you be seeing your grandmother?” Darlene had asked.
    Jessie’s grandmother lived in the Springs, but Jessie had grown up about a half hour to the north in the small town of Palmer Lake. She pulled onto the shoulder and gripped the wheel, taunted with indecision. This is ridiculous, she thought. I’m not going back… .
    She took a look around. Limon appeared to be the capital of fast foods. She hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. What would it hurt?
    Inside a burger joint, she sat at a warped Formica table and ate a chicken sandwich while she gazed through the smudged window. From where she sat, she could see busy I-70 as well as the exit sign for Colorado Springs. She smiled wryly— the road less traveled .
    Back in the car, she twisted the key in the ignition. The music came alive again and an old memory surfaced. Brandon had told her he would never have pegged her as a country music fan. She’d asked him why, and he’d shrugged. “It’s so hokey.”
    When she’d later related the conversation to Darlene, her roommate was quick to fill in the blanks. “Hokey is just the first rung, honey. Climb a little higher and you get sappy, silly, annoying … shall I continue?”
    “It’s a-wink-and-a-nod music,” Jessie had argued. “Like an inside joke… .”
    “It’s awfully optimistic,” Darlene had replied finally, and what she’d really meant was: It’s awfully optimistic … for you.
    Jessie’s ruby-red-slipper key chain clicked with the motion of the idling car, and for a few sways at least, it matched the rhythm of the beat. The sound triggered a sudden mysterious dread within her, like the rapidly fading echo of a door clicking shut and opening again, or maybe a door locking and then unlocking … and she had a clear sense that some decisions alter the course of your life and others don’t, and perhaps right now she had one of those lifechanging decisions to make.
    A scattering of faint images came to her, seemingly out of nowhere. Tall pine trees, towering over her … a little boy standing at the grave site beside her … a lifetime ago. What was his name? And why was she even thinking about him ?
    She