Our mother hadn’t grown up in the mountains. She was from the fourth-largest city in the state, a fact in which she and her family took a good measure of pride. Whenever we visited her parents, our mother’s mother made sure to point out that in the city (in the civilized world, she wanted to say), fluoride was added to the tap water for free, that sidewalks, not weeds, bordered the roads. They got reception for three television channels, instead of just one. Out from the bathroom came the latest catalog from the department store downtown, a pale brick building with crystal chandeliers and marble floors and a giant indoor fountain gleaming with coins.
It was here in this fourth-largest city that our parents began their romance. Just out of high school, she worked in a cafeteria, tallying the various dishes on each person’s tray––pulled pork in vinegar, collards seasoned with ham hock, a brick of orange Jell- O, a cornbread square––and presenting the ticket to be settled after the meal. She wore a burgundy shirt-dress that snapped up the front, red lips, nude stockings, and a powder pink apron around her waist. A pair of clip-on rhinestones served as her pièce de résistance, as her mother had forbidden her to pierce her ears. “That’s for the lower classes,” our grandmother airily told us, as if both she and our grandfather didn’t work split shifts at a tobacco plant, weren’t in terrible debt, and hadn’t dropped out of school the moment they turned sixteen.
Our father was enrolled in his first semester of college when they met. Although the GI bill covered tuition and books, a staggering number of expenses remained, and so he drove a Greyhound bus from midnight to six, snatching a couple of hours of sleep before class each morning and again before punching in each night. He didn’t mind. It did him good, he said, slipping safely from town to town in the cool of the Carolina foothills––a balm for the year he’d endured overseas.
The cafeteria, a shabby brick building with windows so old the glass practically rippled, crouched directly across the street from the bus depot. It was the only place open when his shift ended at dawn, so each morning, he would change into a fresh shirt in the men’s room, polish his shoes with a scrap of newspaper, and walk over to grab a quick ham biscuit or pecan roll. Within a week, he boasted, our mother stopped charging him for his coffee, saying it was on the house.
“She made the first move,” he told Nate and me, still tickled by his good fortune. “She always did. Why, if it weren’t for your mother’s bold nature, you two probably wouldn’t even exist.”
And now she’d made another bold move, one he had not dared predict.
No other woman existed for him. As he huddled on that rock in icy darkness, I understood he could never replace her––he would always be alone. This knowledge, unfortunately, didn’t prove to be the comfort I’d expected, but felt like some vast, freakish monster––one that threatened to unhinge its jaw and swallow our family whole. Everyone suffers from their own particular brand of madness, I’ve come to discover, and that night I was forced to admit our father had been struck down by one of the world’s more perilous strains. As I sat there, helpless, watching him struggle, it took everything I had not to succumb to my own grief and despair.
A graduate of Warren Wilson College, Karen Tucker is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant for Emerging Writers. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.