Chasing Pavement

Chasing Pavement [ 2o ]

Chasing Pavement

[ 2o ]

Solemn, that was the only word I could think of as the car pulled off the interstate. I knew that Kaylie was quiet, letting everyone else have their way in their minds. Anna was quiet because she didn’t really know what she should be doing. She was capping and uncapping her pen nervously in the back seat and I think that I kind of understood where she was coming from.

     When Anna was ten, she lost a father that had never been around. I knew that he had sent her gifts, ones that she practically shrined in her room. But, she told both Kaylie and I that she didn’t remember the ceremony other than a few snippets and a few instances of remembering a memory, whether it be her own or not. But now that she was seeing her father’s grave again, after all this time, I knew that she was going to be uncomfortable.

     After the Mitchell’s family moved up from Florida, only a year after they lost a father and a husband, they made a new life in gloomy N. Carolina. And then, just four years later, I met Anna. I knew that their family didn’t talk much about the man because his wife was still weak kneed by the situation. So, I only gained a few details about his death from Anna on bad nights. He was a decorated sergeant for the Army. He was brave and gallant and in his last hour he saved five lives of his unit in exchange for his own. Anna told me that he saved five other fathers. His picture adorned most of the house and I couldn’t help but see the striking resemblance to Liam. With the broad straight nose and curved eyes. The easy smile lines around his eyes and lips. In one picture where their father was smiling, he even had that same dimple on his lower lip. The only noticeable difference was the ten year age difference that gave their father a more knowing a sturdy look and the color of his eyes. While Liam’s was a green that was interlaced with gray, their father’s was a light brown.

      I looked to Liam once again, comparing his worried and thoughtful profile to the photo that I remembered. I couldn’t imagine what Liam was thinking behind that strained expression. But, if it were me who had a father like that, I would be close to tears seeing as I hadn’t been to his grave for so long. He moved up to the boarder of N. Carolina which was really far from here. I wondered when the last time was that he visited this place. He was fifteen when it happened. Long enough ago to have become accepting but a short enough time to still cherish his life and morn his loss. I wanted to hug him and never let go until it was all over and we were driving home. I wanted to tell his to put that worried face away and bring out his other one. But, that seemed to intimate. Too close and too personal. And then sensations of being on my back with the itchy cold grass underneath me flooded my mind. I turned my face quickly, feeling the blush come about. I tried to push down the memory but I could. So, I let the warm feeling enclose around me momentarily and I closed my eyes, imagining myself kissing away his pain and strain. I wished so deeply that I could actually do that for him.

     By the time I pulled myself out of the memory, we were coming up on a white gate about twenty feet high. It was intimidating and a sense of the pearly gates to heaven flickered through my mind. If anyone deserved to go to heaven, it was the men and woman who had lost their life in war. It was their time to take a much needed rest from the devious and the destructive. I felt the air get thinner as we passed through the gates at a crawl. And white stones upon green plots ensued in front of the hood of the car. Row after neat row went up and over mounds creating an allusion of forever. There were a lot of people that died, I thought morosely.

     The car wound down the aisles, weaving this way and that way at a slow cruise. We past names, faces, flowers, tears, and finally made it to a stop at a farther part of the cemetery where the open space arose empty in front of us. Only a few white, perfectly manicured stone slabs littered the green every now and then. The car suddenly tensed more than it had as a sigh quietly whispered about us. This was actually it. I looked to Liam’s retreating form as he stepped out of the car before I stepped out too. The door slammed and the heat quickly consumed my body. It felt like it literally took a hot leap down the front and back of my shirt and right up my shorts. The humidity that filled my lungs made it more difficult to breathe as I tugged on the hem of my shirt. But, no one commented on the heat or anything as they walked throughout the plots, following Liam closely. I brought up the rear.