The Longest Ride Read Free Page B

is not really in the car. I realize this. She died nine years ago, the day I felt my life come to a full stop. I had called to her from the living room, and when she didn’t answer, I rose from my chair. I could move without a walker back then, though it was still slow going, and after reaching the bedroom, I saw her on the floor, near the bed, lying on her right side. I called for an ambulance and knelt beside her. I rolled her onto her back and felt her neck, detecting nothing at all. I put my mouth to hers, breathing in and out, the way I had seen on television. Her chest went up and down and I breathed until the world went black at the edges, but there was no response. I kissed her lips and her cheeks, and I held her close against me until the ambulance arrived. Ruth, my wife of more than fifty-five years, had died, and in the blink of an eye, all that I’d loved was gone as well.

“Why are you here?” I ask her.

“What kind of question is that? I am here because of you.”

Of course. “How long was I asleep?”

“I do not know,” she answers. “It is dark, though. I think you are cold.”

“I’m always cold.”

“Not like this.”

“No,” I agree, “not like this.”

“Why were you driving on this road? Where were you going?”

I think about trying to move, but the memory of the lightning bolt stops me. “You know.”

“Yes,” she says. “You were driving to Black Mountain. Where we spent our honeymoon.”

“I wanted to go one last time. It’s our anniversary tomorrow.”

She takes a moment to respond. “I think you are going soft in your head. We were married in August, not February.”

“Not that anniversary,” I say. I don’t tell her that according to the doctor, I will not last until August. “Our other anniversary,” I say instead.

“What are you talking about? There is no other anniversary. There is only one.”

“The day my life changed forever,” I say. “The day I first saw you.”

For a moment, Ruth says nothing. She knows I mean it, but unlike me, she has a hard time saying such things. She loved me with a passion, but I felt it in her expressions, in her touch, in the tender brush of her lips. And, when I needed it most, she loved me with the written word as well.

“It was February sixth, 1939,” I say. “You were shopping downtown with your mother, Elisabeth, when the two of you came into the shop. Your mother wanted to buy a hat for your father.”

She leans back in the seat, her eyes still on me. “You came out of the back room,” she says. “And a moment later, your mother followed you.”

Yes, I suddenly recall, my mother did follow. Ruth has always had an extraordinary memory.

Like my mother’s family, Ruth’s family was from Vienna, but they’d immigrated to North Carolina only two months earlier. They’d fled Vienna after the Anschluss of Austria, when Hitler and the Nazis absorbed Austria into the Reich. Ruth’s father, Jakob Pfeffer, a professor of art history, knew what the rise of Hitler meant for the Jews, and he sold everything they owned to come up with the necessary bribes to secure his family’s freedom. After crossing the border into Switzerland, they traveled to London and then on to New York, before finally reaching Greensboro. One of Jakob’s uncles manufactured furniture a few blocks from my father’s shop, and for months Ruth and her family lived in two cramped rooms above the plant floor. Later, I would learn that the endless fumes from the lacquer made Ruth so sick at night, she could barely sleep.

“We came to the store because we knew your mother spoke German. We had been told that she could help us.” She shakes her head. “We were so homesick, so hungry to meet someone from home.”

I nod. At least I think I do. “My mother explained everything after you left. She had to. I couldn’t understand a word that any of you were saying.”

“You should have learned German from your mother.”

“What did it