Going Home

I passed the dead Stuckey’s at exit 179 just after 11:00, driving hard for Wentzville and the first stop on the Great Road Trip of 2017.  The tire pressure warning light flashed at me ten minutes later and I thought, Good Lord, what now.  I made the QT in Wentzville five minutes before my dead brother’s first daughter Amy arrived with her husband Harlan.

I see him in her face so clearly.  She’s got a bit of her mother Sherry in her but the stamp of pure Steve.  Corley genes will out, I think, as I wrap my arms around her.  I love this woman.  I cannot account for the thirty-four years when we did not see her but will never forget sitting bolt-upright in bed and shaking my then-spouse.  Wake up, wake up!  I just remembered that my brother Steve had another daughter, a long time ago.  He looked at me as though I had lost my mind, which, it must be said, I’ve been accused of having done enough times to suspect it might be true.

Amy and I hugged over the collage of Stephen-photos that I had brought her.  I touched the glass in front of each one, explaining the occasion, talking about the father she never knew.  I told her that I had made two of these photo journals for his memorial service.  I gave the other one to his younger daughter a decade ago, so long ago that I assume it’s at the bottom of some closet.  Then I pulled out two boxes for her.  Tears stung my eyes as I explained what I had brought for her:  Little plates that had been on my mother’s vanity dresser for years; a Lucy Corley tea cup; an angel from my collection.

I cried all the way into town and nearly wrecked the car while the GPS lady yelled at me that she would recalculate the route but please, make the next safe U-turn.

I checked into my AirBnB, a classic 110-year-old house in Benton Park, then went to meet a home girl for lunch.  Ah, Jeannie Serra.  How can it be that I do not see you for something like 40 years, only to discover sisterhood in our middle-age?  As we part, she slips a little box across the table and tells me that the card has a poem written by her husband. I try not to be too jealous as we embrace and I head for Trattoria Marcella and my dead brother’s other daughter.

Chelsea Rae glows.  She runs out of the restaurant and throws her arms around me.  I know, all of a sudden, that I will never forget this road trip.  These young women, my nieces, the children of my brothers and my sister, carry the best of us into the future.  Though their own stumbles might haunt them from time to time, they have the goodness of their Corley heritage with as little of the darkness as possible.  I know it’s hard, being related to this motley crew, the Infinity Eight.  We take no prisoners.  We spare no mercy.  But we love as fiercely as we argue and that cannot mean nothing.

We stand on the sidewalk and talk.  She tells me about her school, her mother, her grandmother, and the father who raised her.  My heart aches but I say, I am so thankful for Mike Booker, and she smiles.  Again I think:  I see my brother on your face, but I don’t say it.  She knows.  She does not remember him.  She only knows what we have told her.  I would not blame any bitterness she might feel, but I see none, not now, and I hear only happiness in her voice.  It has nothing to do with me, or her family of birth, I know; but I’ll claim a tiny bit of it anyway.

Now I’m at The Vine, and I’ve opened the present from Jeannie.  I wrap the soft scarf around my neck, and open the card.    She’s nailed it.  I let it fall on the table and stare out the window.  I don’t see the passing cars.  I see, instead, a serious girl of eighteen walking on the city street.  She’s stayed too long at the fair and missed her eight o’clock class.  Her wild hair hangs in tangled waves down her back.  She stumbles.  She might be hung over.  She could even still be drunk.  But she keeps walking, because she promised her mother that she would.

It’s the twelfth day of the forty-sixth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

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