Traveling Light

by Lynne Branard

  “He was okay when they took him in; I just talked to your sister a little while ago. She’s there.”

  “You talked to Sandra?”

  “Dixie gave her my number last night; she knew I was going to see you so she called with reports every couple of hours. I just talked to her about an hour ago when I was at the truck stop and she said he had been taken to the operating room for surgery, that they had finally stabilized his blood pressure and the doctors were pretty sure he was in good shape for the operation.” She waits. “You okay?”

  I look down to see her hands on mine. I nod.

  “You want to call her?”

  I nod again.

  Blossom reaches in her back pocket, takes out her phone, touches the screen, and hands it to me. I hear it ring and then I hear my sister’s voice.

  “Sandra?”

  There is a sigh. “She found you,” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is your phone not working?”

  “It’s in—” And I stop; these are not the details that interest me. “How is Dad? What happened?”

  “He was at some silly town meeting and got all upset about something, and just passed out. They rushed him to Raleigh, and, well, it’s his heart.”

  “And he’s in surgery?”

  “Yes, they took him in about an hour ago. We’re at Rex on the seventh floor in Raleigh. There’s a blockage, but they think they’re going to do bypass surgery—open it up or put in a new artery, whatever it is that they do. Are you coming home today?”

  How do I get home today? “I’m in New Mexico,” I explain.

  “There’s not an airport there?”

  “I . . . I . . .”

  “Look, never mind. Just get here when you can. I’ll call you when he’s out of surgery; but I have to head back to Asheville tomorrow. I’ve already missed getting Kaitlin to camp. I need to be home, so you need to get back here as soon as you can.”

  “I will,” I reply, feeling guilty and punished at the same time.

  “All right. I’ll call you later. Or I’ll have somebody call you.”

  She says good-bye. And the line goes dead.

  I turn to Blossom.

  “Well, at least we know who got the charm in your family.” She smiles.

  I start to cry. I slide off the bed and land between Blossom and Cass. And I cry because my father has had a heart attack and I am not there and I cry because I’ve driven all the way to New Mexico with the ashes of a stranger and I have just been told that there will be no happy ending and I cry because my sister is with my dad and not me and I cry just because that’s all I can let myself do.

  Instantly, there is an arm around my shoulders and a furry head in my lap.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Blossom says, comforting me. “He’s going to be okay.”

  Why I think a seventeen-year-old can read the future and give me something to hope for and believe in, I don’t know, but for right now, it’s her words and her prediction to which I cling.

  chapter forty-three

  THERE were thirteen messages on my phone, most of them regarding Dad; but there was also one from Georgia, the hospice nurse, who called me just before Blossom arrived with the news about my father.

  Dusty Lennon picked up the remains of Roger Hart fifteen days after they were returned from the crematorium to the mortuary. Harold gave them to him because the three contacts he had listed as next of kin didn’t want the ashes, and he was just glad that someone cared enough to pick them up. Dusty, it turns out, is the same friend who was deeded Roger’s trailer and the same friend who decided to drive to North Carolina, get a boat, and—well, after that we don’t really know what Dusty Lennon was going to do because he never told anyone his plans.

  He died on a dock at a harbor near Wilmington, from a stroke or aneurysm, something quick and fatal, and in his belongings there was a card from the Serenity Mortuary, where Dusty had prepaid his funeral. Unclaimed by anyone in the southeastern state, he was, therefore, shipped back to Harold, who had forgotten by that time, a year after the first death, that he had ever given him Roger Hart’s ashes. Dusty had started payments on a sailboat and had been working on it for months, Harold told Georgia; but no one, it seems, knew about a storage unit rented by the New Mexican when he arrived in North Carolina.

  Dusty Lennon had a daughter in Albuquerque and there was a service in Grants for the Vietnam vet and recovered alcoholic, friend to Roger Hart. Harold said that it was held in the chapel at the mortuary a couple of years ago and he recalled that it was a well-attended and polite service that included the local honor guard playing taps and presenting Dusty’s daughter with an American flag. Georgia was also given Lennon’s daughter’s phone number and address, which she included for me in her message.

  I can call the daughter if I’d like to see if she knows anything about the ashes, and I suppose I can send her the other things I found in the storage unit and placed in my garage if she wants them. There isn’t really anything of value in there; but I don’t know, maybe she’d like her father’s tools and books and the blankets, tent, and few pieces of camping equipment. I suppose, thinking about it now, that Dusty was living on the boat he’d bought while he was making repairs. Makes sense that he’d have left the bulk of his possessions somewhere else.

  “I’ll go down with Casserole while you check out,” Blossom tells me from the hotel bedroom while I am listening again to Georgia’s message. “Let him walk around a little before we head out. It was a long drive this morning.”

  We are going to scatter Roger’s ashes at the place he called home, the spot I visited yesterday, and then Blossom will drive her father’s truck back to Amarillo. Casserole and I will hitch rides with truckers back to North Carolina, all arranged by Blossom and her grandmother’s husband, Tony, hopefully making it home by tomorrow evening. The part where I am reunited with my dear old Volkswagen, Faramond, has not been worked out.

  Jumping trucks from Texas was how Blossom got to Grants, and she knew she would find me at the Holiday Inn because she’d added the “locate friend” app to our smartphones after the near arrest in Little Rock. She told me about it at the time—we were almost to Fort Smith by then—but I’d forgotten all about it.

  • • •

  “WOW, you’re right, it is beautiful out here.” Blossom has her head stuck out the window, right next to Casserole’s, who is sitting in her lap. Both of them have their noses in the air; the wind is blowing back her hair and his fur as I speed along the state highway. They’re so cute together like this, my two passengers, that I am given a moment of mercy and I feel almost light and unburdened.

  “I wonder why his friend thought he would want to be near the ocean.” She’s pulled her head in from the car window and slid over toward me, giving Cass his own place on the seat.

  “Maybe he was just taking him for a trip—you know, sailing for a year or something—and then he was planning to come back to New Mexico.”

  “I guess,” Blossom replies.

  “Maybe it was something they had always talked about and never got around to doing.”

  “Do you think that happens a lot?”

  I turn to her. She is so young it breaks my heart. “I do,” I answer, suddenly thinking about my father. He has always planned to go fly-fishing in Idaho, talked about it every spring and forgot about it by the end of every summer.

  I face the road again, determined to get him there next year. I will make all the arrangements and I will drive him there myself. That is exactly what I will do.

  I see the turn to Roger’s property now, and slow down, make a right, and head west on the forest road I traveled yesterday and ran all last night in my dreams.

  “It’s only a few miles,” I say to Blossom. “But you might want to roll up your window; it’s dirt all the way and it’s pretty sandy.”
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  “My dad always says a dirt road is a good teacher of patience,” she informs me as the truck cab starts to fill with dust.

  “And my dad says taking a dirt road is a sure way to lose your lead.” I look over at my passenger. “He doesn’t like to be slowed down.”

  “Then I guess a heart attack will really be hard for him.”

  I think of my father lying in a bed held down by tubes and surrounded by IV poles and monitors, and I speed up, the moment of mercy and relief I felt earlier now gone. Even though my first pickup toward home isn’t for another couple of hours, I feel the need to hurry.

  I make it to Roger’s driveway and up to the corral and stop. I kill the engine and we all four get out—Cass, me, Blossom, and Roger, who she is carrying close to her chest. The dust from our arrival settles and we just stand for a few minutes near the truck. Once again, I am startled both by the stark beauty and its silence.

  I watch as Blossom looks around, her first experience in the Zuni Mountains. She catches my eye. “Sweet,” is all she says, and she holds the box of ashes in both of her hands like she is offering a gift.

  “So, where do you think we should do this?” I ask her.

  She takes in the view for a few more moments. “What do you think, Cass?”

  And my dog turns to her and then starts walking in the same direction I went yesterday. Blossom looks over to me and shrugs and we follow. The sound of running water I heard earlier is still there.

  We have walked just a couple of hundred yards when Casserole stops and sniffs the air. Blossom and I stop and wait behind him. The thought crosses my mind that he doesn’t actually have any real inside spiritual knowledge about the right place to scatter Roger’s ashes, he’s just trying to find a good place to poop. But when he starts walking again, like a good soldier I remain in line.

  When we arrive at the narrow creek whose presence explains the sound of running water I could hear from where we parked, I turn to my dog. “Good job,” I say. Then I notice a butterfly, a monarch, flitting about near him and it makes me think of the carving on Roger’s box, the one that started me off on this pilgrimage.

  “Well, I guess this is it,” Blossom says. She looks over to me. “Do you want me to leave the two of you alone?”

  I walk over to her as she holds out the box and I touch her hands and shake my head. I open it and take out the bag of ashes. I remove the tab that keeps the bag locked and hold it open. I pause because I’m not quite sure what to say.

  “Roger Hart,” I begin, “thank you for bringing me to this place. Thank you for your service as a veteran and for being with Dusty when he died. Thank you for sending me Blossom and Dillon, and for keeping us safe in our travels. May you be free and at peace.” I wait a second to see if Blossom has anything she wants to say, and it looks like she does.

  She clears her throat. “I don’t know anything about you, Roger, except what I’ve learned from traveling with you. I think you were a good man, and that you were kind, and I hope that wherever you go from here, you find your friend. You shouldn’t be alone.” And she nods at me to let me know she is finished.

  I hold the bottom of the bag and let the ashes drop. A breeze picks up just as they are falling and takes them toward the creek; and somewhere off in the distance I hear the howl of a wolf.

  “Welcome home,” I say and I feel Blossom’s hand as she slips it into mine.

  chapter forty-four

  IT is two o’clock in the morning and I am somewhere between Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee, in my third vehicle since I started off from Grants. It’s the last leg of my journey back to North Carolina, and I’m riding with a man named Milton. He’ll drive me all the way to Raleigh, where I will meet Ben, who will take me to the hospital and bring Casserole back to Clayton. I haven’t quite worked out how I’m going to get home after I see my dad, but if I’ve managed to hitch rides with strangers all the way from New Mexico to North Carolina, I shouldn’t have too much trouble getting a twenty-minute lift home.

  Milton drives a semitrailer. His vehicle is tandem axle with a sleeper behind the cab, where Cass and I are riding; and connected to the fifth wheel hitch behind us is an oversized load on a lowboy trailer. Milton is from Jacksonville, North Carolina, a retired Marine who likes the old R&B classics and driving at night. He has a shiny brown bald head, a broad frame, and a wide smile. We met in Russellville or Conway, I can’t remember exactly, but somewhere in Arkansas in the diner at a big truck stop off the interstate.

  The waitress at the diner let me bring Casserole inside, even though it’s technically against the rules, because she claimed she had a three-legged dog once when she was a girl. She slipped him leftovers from the plates of her customers and bagged up pieces of hamburger and pork chops for us to take on the rest of our trip. She even refused my tip, handing me instead a roll of one-dollar bills. I’m pretty certain she thought I was homeless or lost, and she’s a sucker for women traveling alone.

  I had been dropped off by Clyde Tessler, the trucker who drove us from Oklahoma and who was heading north to Belvidere, Illinois, where he was returning from a trip to California. He had dropped off a load of new Jeep Patriots to a dealership in Los Angeles and was in a bit of a hurry to make it home for his granddaughter’s sixth birthday. He apologized for not staying with me at the diner until Milton showed up; but I knew he didn’t want to wait and I reassured him that Casserole and I would be fine.

  As I sat in the Arkansas diner with my dog and the minutes ticked by, I did wonder what might happen if Milton didn’t make it. Cass and I were stuck in a town where we didn’t know a soul. But Luna, the waitress who gave me the doggie bag and her tips, also slipped me a number for a women’s shelter nearby; and I was certain that as long as we stayed during her shift, she wouldn’t steer us in a wrong direction or even leave us alone.

  Before Clyde picked us up, I rode with Tony, the husband of Blossom’s grandmother; and we talked about Newport, summer construction, the decline of Western civilization, and how Casserole and I would be in the safest hands and best-maintained rigs on the road. Tony made all the arrangements for us to get back to North Carolina. He was easy with his promise that both of the others offering us rides were kind and courteous and longtime big-rig drivers. The three of them had started trucking at the same company years earlier, and although they went in different directions over the years, they were all still driving rigs, and all still friends.

  So far, I have learned about the Motor Transport Workers, the union for drivers; laws regarding the required weight and inspection of loads; and the names of different tractors and rigs; as well as what it’s like to own your own fleet. I found out that truckers still use the CB radio occasionally, but rely more on smartphones and social media to stay informed about traffic and road construction.

  I also learned about open-heart surgery since both Tony and Clyde had stints and bypasses, Tony a triple and Clyde a quadruple. Both of them claimed that the surgery is a piece of cake and that my dad should be fine. Better than fine, actually, since a person’s blood flow is so much greater after the operation. It turns out that a lot of truckers have heart problems, which I’m sure has to do with their lack of physical activity and the really bad food.

  Milton tells me that we should be in Raleigh by noon. He’s encouraged me to sleep, but I’ve been having trouble stilling my mind since we left New Mexico. I’ve talked to Dixie and Ben. And Sandra gave me the report after the surgery, saying that everything was fine, that the doctors were pleased with how things went and that she was leaving to go back to Asheville just as soon as Dad was out of recovery. Dixie was planning to stay the night, even though I know that must be terribly inconvenient for a single mother with small children; but she insisted she’d worked it all out. I could hear more concern in her voice than in my sister’s. I feel lucky that we have such dedicated employees at the Clayton Times and News.

 
I texted Phillip somewhere in Oklahoma to tell him what has happened and he finally replied as I crossed the border into Arkansas, interrupting a conversation I was having with Clyde about electric cars and whether or not there will ever be a truly viable option to gas-powered motors.

  So sorry about your dad, Al, he wrote. Have you heard anything about how the surgery went?

  He’s in recovery, seems to be okay, I typed.

  Good to hear.

  I didn’t reply.

  Are you driving back?

  Riding with truckers, I answered, glancing over at Clyde, who had quit talking about hydrocarbons and filtering the fats in biodiesel fuel. I guess he figured it made sense for me to have only one conversation at a time.

  I can’t wait to hear about that! Phillip wrote.

  And I read the sentence over and over before knowing how to respond.

  Interesting, for sure, I finally decided.

  Call me when you get to NC.

  K

  And I stared at my phone like it was my life unfolding in my hands.

  “Must be your fellow,” Clyde said, taking his eyes off the road for just a second and looking over at me. He had a big grin plastered across his face.

  “Just an old friend,” I said, but I knew I didn’t sound very convincing.

  “I have a lot of old friends,” he said, “but never one to make my face turn that shade of red.”

  Then he winked at me. And went back to talking about biodiesels and how he had invested some of his earnings into soybean and safflower farms, hoping that someday the popularity of alternative fuel sources would make him rich.

  I close my eyes now, throw my arm over my head, and listen to the road passing beneath me. I think about my day. It started with Blossom and me saying good-bye to Roger, tossing his ashes high along a winding creek in northwestern New Mexico. And now I’m somewhere in Tennessee, sleeping in the cab of a rig owned by a trucker whose last name I don’t even know.