Sunnydale Academy

I can see that my mother-in-law called. But it's Sabbath afternoon, and I don't want to throw myself into anything that will make me feel bad. My dad left a message, too. But I can't let that call go unanswered—my parents have both been in the hospital too many times in the last months. So I call him back.
"Do you have a minute, son?"
"Yeah, dad."
"How's your Sabbath?"
I feel like he's avoiding something. If he had bad news, he would have said it already. Anyway, I'm fine. He asks after Amanda and Russell, and they're fine. The cats are fine. The kitten is weird, but she's fine regardless. I've left the house to have some quiet, and the wind is flying across the open fields and filling my hammock with leaves, pushing it out to one side like a misshapen kite. One-handed, I shake the leaves out and load myself in.
"What's up, dad? Your message said you had some news?" Regardless, I can't imagine it's good.
"Well, we heard from Linda, you know, your mother-in-law." My breath catches. "Well, she said Delight is going to file papers. She's looking for an address for you so she can initiate a divorce."
There's a long silence on the line, filled by the screaming of the wind in the oak trees above me.
Dad starts talking about something, I'm sure. It's information, or sympathy, or concern, or advice. It's a human connection, but I can't remember it. I hear his low voice, calm like normal, two thousand miles away and right in my ear, trying to make things okay where he can't make things right.  He's my dad. But at a certain point, I don't listen to him anymore.
I didn't think she had it in her. She was always too afraid of change, always too willing to let uncomfortable things fester, always afraid of paperwork. I guess this time, she realized how easy divorce has become. Or maybe the minor inconvenience of putting my name on her taxes is more onerous than the paperwork. Or maybe she found someone. But this last idea dies as it's thought.
"Where did she send it?"
"I'm not sure. I think her mother said the last address she had for you was Curtis. Have you talked to her?"
"No, dad. We don't talk." And that's the truth. The last time was April.
Dad prays with me. I should crave it, but this time, it's just words between me and silence. All I want is the wind.
He hangs up and I briefly battle a desire to throw my phone from me. It belongs to Philip. I put it carefully in the pocket on the ridgeline.
I cry, only for about five minutes, the wind drying the tears off my face. It's more of a betrayal than an injustice. I didn't expect it.

The last time I cried about her was this summer at camp. Things were normal. Nothing was stressful in a new way, or damaging to my self-esteem, but about tween week, I was feeling extremely laggard. Things weren't easy, and I couldn't put my finger on why. So I just kept plugging away, expecting revelations. A full week of feeling like something was wrong and the universe was against me and Friday afternoon came around. You don't know me at camp, probably, so suffice it to say I am in übermensch mode from Friday at noon until Saturday at ten, when the kids go to bed. Every weekend is like throwing myself from a precipitous cliff, and this Friday was no exception. But this time, around one, I walked into the props closet and, without obvious reason or meaning, slow-motion collapsed on the floor and closed the door behind me. I flicked my radio off, and heaved three or four gargantuan sobs.
I don't know what made her come to mind. I couldn't share that secret if I wanted to, but there she was, dominant and oppressive. My whole self fixated on her for two minutes, crashing and letting a handful of tears fall past my ears to the floor. Then I stood up and went on as if the whole weekend was my responsibility and there was only me to do the work. Because, if we're honest, that's approaching true.

I wake up from my nap in the hammock. Dad left me with a single admonishment: be sure to talk about it with Russell and Amanda. That responsibility feels more oppressive than a full weekend at camp. I put it off until the hour I leave, but I follow that fifth commandment. I hate it. Neither of them know what to say. There probably is nothing to say.

I thought she would put it off, that I would get to choose my day. This trip is quickly becoming about losing control, not gaining it.

The Big Muddy

N38° 40.830' W091° 16.927'
There is something entirely inexplicable about rounding a corner and seeing a diamond-shaped hunk of metal and wood screwed to a post and being so elated that you burst into song. Nothing I do or say can possibly communicate to you what a channel marker means after the MR340. Every mark is another mile or two towards your victory, towards proof that you've got more grit than a lesser you.

When Russell and I set out to run the Missouri from Kansas City to St Louis, we knew a little of what we would face. Neither of us are strangers to a paddle, and we work together well as a team, I think. Maybe I grate a little on his nerves, sometimes, but the least he can say is that I make the time fly by. I remember the river, which turn hides a tricky tree, which corner has a good swimming hole. He makes runzas: a sort of dumpling-out-of-broth situation that reminds me of a homemade hot pocket. He keeps the calm. He paddles relentlessly. We make a good team.
We've done thirty miles runs of creeks near the old house on 124. We've spent days together with no other humans in sight, keeping a running tally of the animals we've seen, scudded over, or touched. We've heard the utterly unearthly hum of a swarming beehive filling the air from all directions, coursing through our blood and stopping our breath short. We've seen deer, shocked that we found them so deep in the untrodden paths of earth, jump up and bolt to the bank. We've fallen out, gotten scraped with mud, named unmarked sandbars and slogged through endless gravel bars. The world's longest uninterrupted (an important caveat) river race seemed like the next logical step.

When we passed this particular channel marker, I was asleep in the bottom of the canoe on Russell's mad scientist invention of a pool noodle bed. It will be remembered in the annals of history as one of those discoveries that was only a hair's breadth from a Nobel. If only it were easier to categorize.
I caught a cold on the plane ride to Kansas City, and the combination of camp stress, poor sleep, and an upcoming race converged in my chest as a tightness and a deep muscle ache. By day two, I was downing ibuprofen at the limit on the bottle. By day three, I nearly fell out of the boat somewhere between Washington and Klondike. I slept for thirty miles—a near tenth of our total race—while Russell paddled alone in the gathering, moonless dark.
What comfort must it have been, pulling out the spotlight and raking it across this very spot, only to see the red corners of the diamond shine back brilliantly in the night? What reassurance that his skill is rewarded, that the river is still just exactly where he left it, that the boat is still safe? I don't expect he'll ever be able to fully explain this marker to me, just as I can't explain it to you. I can get close, but you'll never quite know the instantaneous euphoria of rounding a corner and seeing a reminder of the sixtieth hour, the unbidden shout, the heedless song of joy I yelled as I rolled past on my bike.

Cave-in-Rock

N37° 28.029' W088° 09.590'
"So, are you homeless?" His rough voice rings out across the still morning. But he is immediately doubtful of his question. "Or are you traveling?" He eyes my bike over the hood of his truck.
I laugh. "A bit of both, really. I'm traveling across the United States."
"Oh, wow! So, what? You just camp places? Like, is this normal?" He walks around the front of his truck, which is sitting forty feet from my hammock, door ajar, hood unlatched.
I tamp down my curiosity about his situation and answer the questions he has about mine. "Listen, I'm going to make breakfast here in a minute, and you can sit with me and chill."
"Of course, yeah. You want a beer?"
"No, thanks."
"Yeah, man. I'm just sitting down here by the river, drowning my sadness. Drinking in the morning; how sad is that?" I don't comment. He sits down opposite me at the park bench. "So why are you going across the country like this? What's your deal?"
"I got my own sadness, you know? Something like a year ago, my wife left. When she left, I didn't get a say in what happened. She didn't want me anymore, and that was that. I guess this trip is about me being the hero of my own story again, you know? I want to make choices about what happens to me. I want to do something epic to remember that I'm worth something without her."
"That's huge, man. And I'm just down here because of my own relationship. Yeah. My girlfriend—do you know Hog Rock?"
"What?" I've got my stove out, and I'm trying to light it so I can just get my oatmeal. "No, what's that? Hog—?"
"Hog Rock. It's a bike festival just up the road. Me and my girlfriend were there yesterday, and I found her surrounded by dudes, and they're all touching her chest, and I mean, she's got such a hot body I can't blame them, but it made me feel like shit, you know? I thought she was with me, and here she's messing around with these other dudes, drunk and she got all mad at me when I said something."
I'm a little stunned. Delight left, but she didn't cheat on me, not unless she's stranger and more foreign than I thought. This guy's got a terrible morning on his hands. I don't deny: if I drank, this would be a good enough reason.
"So we got in a big fight last night. I drove down here just to clear my head, and now my truck battery died. I gotta wait for a jump, and who knows what she's doing. Maybe she's packed up and ridden her bike all the way home. It's the sort of thing she'd do; she'd ride a few hundred miles just to spite me."
"So, wait." I'm curious now. "You met at this festival?"
"No way, man. We were together for a long time, but we split—I think maybe because of her cancer—and now we're trying it again."
"But you're together? You weren't ambiguous? It's just the two of you?" The water in my pot has started to boil.
"Yeah!"
"Then, she shouldn't have. It's pretty simple to me. If she's messing with other dudes, she's breaking that promise."
"That's what I said! So what should I do?"
It's a strange light that struck the two of us there, filtered through the oaks that line the Ohio, dusted with the haze of the ferry in the background, cutting through the cool morning and heating my shoulders. This fifty-year-old biker just asked advice of a twenty-five-year-old vagrant. "Well, you have got to tell her this. You know; how it feels. Why you think it's wrong. You can't control what she does, but you can watch out for your own back. You've just got to be honest about it." It's old advice, but it seems like the best. Ramona had just three days ago told me that honesty—raw, unfiltered, unapologetic honesty—was the only worthwhile life policy.
"I already told her. That's why I'm down here. I don't know. If you were me, what would you do? If you saw your wife doing this?"
"My wife? I'm not sure we'll ever be together again. I always say 'ex for a reason,' but in your case there's something else, too. You're together for a reason. There's got to be something there worth fighting for. It's not an easy situation."
"So, wait. You don't think you'll get her back? But you're riding all the way to Oregon just to see her, and that won't impress her?"
My oatmeal is cool enough to eat, and the morning is still just chilly enough that the heat of it feels good through the cup. I take a bite and think. "I don't think she cares about grand gestures. And so she won't take me back for this. And if she tried to get back with me? I'm not sure I could be with her. There's no trust there anymore."
"Wait, how old are you?"
"Twenty five."
"Oh my gosh—" he rolls his eyes and his head into a smile. "You're so young. You're talking like this is the last thing that happens to you before you die. You'll find someone. You've got your whole life ahead of you." This rolled-eyes, rolled-head smile becomes my favorite thing about Beau.
He's from St. Charles near St. Louis. He offers me a couch to crash on when I get to Missouri. He shares my enthusiasm for adventure. He has a deep romantic streak he doesn't reveal, but which reveals itself. He has a tiny touch of gravel in his voice, and his face is dominated by his smiles. Before long, somebody drives up and gives him that jump he was needing. By that time, I've eaten and packed, and he's ready to go find Jacki, if she's still at the festival. We shake hands and part ways, one phone number each richer than when we sat down.

When I get to St. Louis, I text Beau.
"Beau! This is Robby, who is biking across the country, chasing his wife. While we were waiting for your truck to get a jump, you offered me a place to stay? I'll be in/around St Charles tomorrow night. Will you be back from Hogrock?"
"Yes I will b. Let me know a round about time you will here."
"Fantastic!"
When I texted again, I was on the southern bridge into St. Charles. He panicked and gave me slightly wrong directions to his house, accompanied by a totally correct address. Jacki forced him to text me correct directions, thinking I had gone astray. When I finally rolled up his drive and knocked on the door, she was astonished to see I was on a bicycle. They both thought this was a riot, and explained twice how Beau had said "He's biking here," and Jacki assumed—well, her four motorcycles speak to her prejudice. She is tiny; Beau wasn't lying. Her short hair didn't shock me; it suits her, or she wears it well, or both. I suppose I had been picturing a woman who didn't mind being butch, but her hair length isn't a choice.
"I've been taking about my cancer. Other people, when they learn about it, they tend to tiptoe around the words like they'll hurt me if they say it. I have cancer! It's not hard to say."
Beau is making pasta ("I hope you'll like it!"), but every now and then he'll drift back over to the table and join the conversation. "My daughter was born with incomplete separation of the fingers on her hand. She takes a different approach to her condition, even though she's had surgeries and she can use the hand. The way she stands and acts, she draws attention away from her hand."
"I didn't even know, for a while! It's basically invisible!" Jacki interrupts. "I mean, she hides it well."
"And on the other end of things," Beau continues, "Jacki doesn't have to hide her hand or her cancer. It's just the life she has, and she's gotten past needing to fit in." I glance down. The disease in her lymphatic system must lead to fluid retention in her arm; her hand is about the size of Beau's. It's subtle. I wouldn't have noticed, but for the two of them drawing attention to it, but I'm not sure I agree 100% with his analysis of the situation. She leaves her hand conspicuously on the table, and to my mind, she's making it nonchalant where she might otherwise prefer to be inconspicuous. I don't look at her hand again. It's not conscious; I just don't.
Jacki apologizes for not being more active in the kitchen. She fell on her shoulder when she was fooling around on a pole dance at Hog Rock. She talks about being drunk enough to buy Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them at Walmart. She talks about her trouble holding an apartment because of a thousand conflicting factors, and having to move twice before being able to unpack. She talks about her appointment with the oncologist the next morning. I get the impression that she's coping, but not flourishing. She's not living the life she wants, yet. Maybe the motorcycles are her way of taking hold, just like my bike trip is supposedly about me doing something I want, about me being in charge.
The pasta has chicken and bacon in it, but I eat it anyway. There's no way to explain I'm a vegetarian now. It matters less to me that they know this quirk of me than that I show my gratitude. These two have got garbage they're trying to work out, and they're trying to do it together. I value that.

The next morning, I'm packed to go and I find Jacki in the living room. Beau is gone to work. After I eat a fast breakfast and re-befriend the chihuahua (the terrier needs no such effort), I get my uke because Jacki was interested in hearing me play. She records the song on her phone. "Is it okay? I know Beau would want to hear it. He would want to be here."

Who knows how long I've loved you;
You know I love you still.
Will I wait a lonely lifetime?
If you want me to-- I will.

For if I ever saw you,
I didn't catch your name,
But it never really mattered:
I will always feel the same.

Love you forever and forever.
Love you with all my heart.
Love you whenever we're together;
Love you when we're apart.

And I choke. This isn't the first time I have played this song since she left, and it isn't the last I'll play it, but I can't remember the next verse, the next chord, the song. I'm in my head too much to be in the room. I look up at Jacki.
"I'm sorry. This is a pretty powerful song for me. I played it at our wedding, and the next few lines are the best."
"No, you're fine!"

I strum into the song again, and I pick up where I lost it.

And when at last I find you,
Your song will fill the air—
Sing it loud so I can hear you,
Make it easy to be near you,
For the things you do endear you to me!
Oh, you know I will.
I will . . .

When I first played that song, I was only dating Delight. I had loved it for a long time, but all love songs gain some ephemeral something when you've got someone you think the world of. All songs become about them. Delight, always a polymath, picked up my extra uke and bent to learning this one song. She never learned another, but she did well with this one. I played I Will when I proposed under a spreading oak tree in Red Clay state park, with a small wooden box full of our memories and with The Question written on the inside of the lid. She said yes. I still have that box, somewhere in my piles of boxes. It's stuffed to bursting with letters and memories I couldn't destroy of our time together. I sang I Will at our wedding, too. This was after she had forgotten the fingerings of the chords and probably many of the words, but it had a significance to me that was enough to push me to include it. It's a song I associate with our time falling love, with our happiness, with a hot sunshiny day in late July when we danced and ate peach pie and had all our friends around us. It's a song I associate with the embarrassment and heartbreak of loss, loneliness, and the public-private end to our marriage.
And I played I Will for Jacki in the living room of Beau's home in St. Charles. Now, more than ever, I'm trying to reclaim the words and the meaning, to snatch them from the jaws of my heartbreak and give them new life. There, in the home Jacki calls temporary, a place of their relationship's start and end and start again, a place for trying something crazy with someone else because life is short and feeble and cancer or a collision on a bike may take us at any moment, I played a song about forever.

Sometimes, I wish Delight had found me worthy of forever. Sometimes, I'm glad she recognized that I'm not. Mostly, I wonder if she'll remember this song years from now, if she hears a corner of it floating through closing elevator doors, or a bar or two tinny and small on a sidewalk cafe's veranda, or a cover by a band she's never heard of before in a crowded room full of strangers or friends. I hope she will hold on to some part of it this, my song for her, forever.
You know I will.

Hopkinsville, KY

N36°50.766' W087°29.090'
I drank three glasses of Sprite before my meal arrived. The speakers in the strange double-vaulted ceiling blasted trumpets, and the air conditioning chilled me through my still-wet shirt. Cancun Mexican Restaurant was about two miles out of my way, but it was probably my best option for a sit-down establishment where I could charge my rapidly dwindling battery. Plus, Mexican is almost always kind to a vegetarian, even in the south. When my burrito+quesadilla+chalupa arrived, I tucked in with extreme relish.

My day began in Hendersonville at my Aunt and Uncle's house outside Nashville. Everything was charged up, and I left with an extra jar of peanut butter and three apples (one of these apples led to me biting my lip three times and the third so violently that I swelled and bled, but that was days later). I practically sailed along the rolling country hills towards the Kentucky border. For great stretches of time, I was able to abandon Google maps and just roll peaceably along one road without worrying about turns. I prefer it, actually. I hadn't had such freedom on my whole trip until I hit the Blue Ridge Parkway, where the main concern is going South instead of North and where the next food is coming from. It's so nice to be able to ignore my phone and focus on the squeak of my bike chain and the shudder of the tires on the asphalt. It's freedom to be able to look at the close-cropped corn fields and the yellowing beans, to see the trees on the distance and measure your speed as you close on them. Before I quite knew how far I had gone, I realized I was exhausted.
Stopping at a church parking lot and lying down for a rest, I tried to plan where I would eat. I just fell properly asleep for about two minutes. My shoes chinched down on my feet, my helmet cradling my head as a sub-standard pillow, my shirt evaporating as I slept until the thuddering cacophony of a semi-truck brake basically lifted me back to my feet. I suddenly panicked about where I wanted to eat. Why did I waste so much time asleep?
I checked a map, but things didn't look exceptionally promising. A string of tiny towns lay between me and Hopkinsville, where, my phone promised, there was a lot of food.
On days like this, I achieve ridiculous mileage because I don't pay attention to how far I'm going while I'm doing it. I drove towards a goal I want, like my first 100+ mile day to Collegedale. I just do the miles. Well. Burritos are like Odysseus's sirens after a while.
Despite literally having fallen asleep in the sun outside a church, I rode another twenty miles, capping my day at seventy six at the Cancun Mexican Restaurant. I ate in peace and blaring trumpets. When I finally gathered my things to find a cemetery or a park or a roadside somewhere in the darkness outside, I was stopped at my bike by a man.
"That your bike? Where are you going tonight?" He had fashionable glasses and short greying hair. He looked to be gracefully leaving his forties, and his collared shirt was rolled up at the sleeves.
"Yeah, I'm just going to find some park somewhere. I'm not sure; I haven't checked my phone."
"If you need a place, you could stay with us, my wife and I. We're going to eat, but we'll be right back out. Maybe a half hour."
"Oh, that would be great! I have a hammock, I could even throw up in your back yard."
"You can even stay in a bed, take a shower."
Seventy six miles seemed like an exactly perfect number of miles, all of a sudden.
Eventually, Luke came back out with Ramona, a small woman with well-kept straight blonde hair and a ready smile, and they helped me load my bike into a trailer and drove me the only mildly-cheating thirty miles to their house on the lake. Luke and I gabbered about bikes and falling down and riding back roads for the miles to his house. When I told him about my siblings, he said his son also studied for a doctoral degree in San Bernardino.
"Wait--at Loma Linda?" I asked.
"Yeah. Have you--"
"Are you an Adventist!?"
"Yeah. I'm an Atheist, now."
"That's wild! Never in a hundred years."
We both laughed, me from shock, him from confusion, maybe. Adventists and ex-Adventists don't get on. There's something about having a close-knit community that drives the fringe away. Familiarity breeds contempt and all.
When I dragged my bags into the house, Luke warned me "Hey, my brother-in-law will be in the house. He's doing some work for us and we're letting him stay in the house while he does it.
Joe could not have been more different from Luke and Ramona. I rounded the corner as Luke called out "We have a visitor!" and Joe shifted see me.
He sat, shirtless and bristled in a barstool. Where Ramona was feline, Joe was ursine. Where Luke was refined, Joe was rambunctious.
"Woah!" He roared. "You weren't supposed to bring no giants in here! This guy's seven foot!" He insisted on me standing against the wall and getting measured after I explained I couldn't be more than six foot two and a half. Turns out only one member of their extended family is taller than I am. I think it's the doctor, but I'm not sure, now.
The second point of contention soon exploded. Luke leaned into the admission, almost begging for a reaction. "Joe, you'll never guess: this kid's an Adventist. Struggling." I did admit to that, but I didn't immediately see how that made a difference. It did.
"An Adventist! And seven foot! You should have told me: the cross I built today is only six foot tall. He'll sit on the ground when I hang him on it!"
I've never been threatened with death sooner into a relationship than in my new friendship with Joe. Nor more frequently. I thought when I turned down the gin I had done him a serious hurt. He really wanted to see if he could push me off my pedestal. "You're sure you don't want a shot!?"
"No, I just can't. My family has alcoholism--"
"Well, hell, I'm an alcoholic!" He said it like an invitation, but I laughed like it was a joke. "No shot?"
"Couldn't."
I left Joe at the counter to consider why I didn't like Ellen but still wouldn't drink. Ramona was inside the spare bedroom, changing the sheets. She looked up and smiled when I came in. "Is that a ukulele?" I nodded. "My nieces just came back from Hawaii not long ago with ukeleles. They call them oo-koo-le-le now. I guess Hawaii got into their blood. Do you play?"
We talked a bit about choirs and camp. We found a point of connection in the choral director at Andrews university. And I picked up my uke for the first time since i had torn my fingertips. I played Rocky Raccoon. While I sang, Joe rolled into the doorway, and Ramona fiddled with the sheets.
It's hard to gauge how well they liked it.

When I awoke the next morning, Luke had already gone to work, and Joe was up and rambling through the kitchen with his shirt still off, trying to find some coffee. I scrabbled together some breakfast from what Ramona had said I could eat and what I'd brought with me and returned to my room to throw everything back into my bags. When Ramona finally woke up, I had packed and was ready to go. I joined her and Joe on the porch to say goodbye, but it didn't happen. I didn't leave immediately. I talked with Ramona about why I was on my trip. For what might be the hundredth time, I confided in a complete stranger the terrible trouble with my wife with an intimacy I wouldn't dare use on an acquaintance.
"Ramona, I've been running from this for a long time, now. Maybe I should have divorced her a long time ago, I don't know. I feel like a coward." I felt like Ramona can come at this with exactly the attitude I need her to. She's from the same world as I am: the close-knit conservatism of The Church. She has to understand what it would mean to my relatives and friends if I initiated the divorce. But she's not in that world anymore; she's traded its prejudices for a different set. Ramona may see this the way I need to hear it. I wanted to know if I'm wrong.
"Oh, my gosh, no!" The sunlight slid through the distant treetops on the other side of the lake, and the side of the house where she sat beamed out in reflected glory. "You're doing what's right for you." I can't see how this negates cowardice, though. Because of the sunlight, she's hard to look at. I turn away again. My brain was rumbling with everything I could say about Delight to convince Ramona that we needed to be apart: how she became only self-motivated at the end, how she lost interest in me, found me a bother, thought I was in her way, how she closed up and left our relationship. My brain was rumbling with everything I could say about why I can't divorce my wife: how I feel about promises, how I don't have a biblical release until I know she's with someone else, how I sometimes still negotiate her return in my head.
I've come five hundred miles since I talked to Ramona on the porch on the lake, since Joe shuffled around shirtless, since she said goodbye with a hug that felt more like a mom's than a friend's, since she took a photo and ran up the drive and kept running up the hill to make sure I was safe, to make sure as long as I was in sight of her home, I was one of her boys. It's been five hundred miles and now I can't remember what she said to me. I could make it up, I suppose. Her perspective felt as conflicted as mine, and really all she said of substance was designed to make me feel adequate, safe, alive, alright. I don't want to do her the disservice, though.
I have Luke and Ramona's address. I intend on sending them a letter when this is over. Maybe it's because I would never have met them if I hadn't pushed so far that day, or stayed so long in the restaurant, or put my bike on the north side of the building without hiding it in the bushes, but I think more, somehow, of meeting them. Maybe because a thousand small things would have kept us from each other, I feel an inflated value to our hasty, one-night relationship. Maybe it's because Luke didn't turn away from a stranger. Maybe it's because Ramona, who didn't know me, thought I was valuable. Maybe I'm spinning gold from straw. I don't know.

This post has taken me the longest to write. Make of that what you will.

Hendersonville, TN

"I know two things. First, you're an excellent young man, and life has kicked you pretty hard. You've had a hard disappointment. I don't know, and I don't need to know everything about it to say that for sure. Secondly, you've got a family around you that loves you and they hope for the best for you." My uncle Don sits across the table from me, his plate untouched. His stare is intense. "Listen, I haven't been through what you've been through, Robby. I haven't. But I still know a little of what you're feeling, and I've gotta let you know: if you need anything, anything at all, we're here for you."
I hadn't seen my uncle in more than a year, and he was now trying to remind me why that didn't matter. His left hand is calm, still and quiet, on the table top, and his right circles in the air, emphasizing his point. It's strange, looking at him. He looks like my father, more grizzled but no less gray, beardless and tall. His eyes bore into me. I look away, I can't stand it. I know he's telling the truth, but we've never been close.
"Robby, that room you're in can be yours if you need. I know you're off across the country and all, but if you find yourself back in this area, you can stay in the room while you get your feet. I can get you a job—it won't pay well, but I can get you a construction job tomorrow. You don't have to say anything now, and you don't have to decide now, but I want you to know you've got options."
I nod. I'm not choked up but I feel like it. I turn back to face him. "If there's one thing I've learned in this trip," I begin, voice a little rusty, "It's that I've got people everywhere."
"That's true. Listen, i just need you to know: if you need a place to get your feet under you, just let us know. We're here for you. Maybe I'm preaching too much, man. Just let me know if I need to stop talking."
We continue in this vein for five minutes before aunt Lovell cracks open the bedroom door. It's half ten; I had assumed she was already asleep. Uncle Don jumps up and walks over to her, and I'm left contemplating all he said. It's terribly kind of him to offer, even though we both feel I probably won't need it. He returns and thumps down into the seat again. "Your aunt says I gotta stop preaching. Just remember what I said." He finishes his meal and we talk a bit about a show he's enthralled with called The Last Alaskans. When he goes to bed, he leaves me with a head full of thoughts. Tomorrow, my uncle Dan, who lives thirty minutes up the road, is coming to give me a lift to Grandma's nursing home. Don has already warned me that she's not conversant. I assumed she wouldn't recognize me, but he disabuses me of that thought quickly. "Oh, she'll know you. But she won't have much to say."

The next morning, I sleep in and make a few sandwiches for breakfast while the tiny dogs of the household watch. Tanner is skeletal and prancing, and is forced to wear a sanitary pad under an elbow wrap for his bladder control issues. Sadie Mae is the same breed, but pleasantly fat. She likes to sit on laps like a cat, and she was Grandma's favorite when she lived at Don's for a year or two. By the time afternoon has rolled around, I'm wearing my collared shirt and a clean pair of pants. I don't think Grandma will remember it, but I will. Dan rolls up and smiles at the door. Tanner and Sadie Mae go nuts. Dan is the most soft-spoken of my uncles by far, but even he manages a "Cut it out! It's me, you knuckleheads!"
In the car on the way to Grandma's, he repeats the warning that she's not very talkative. "She can't verbalize what she's trying to say, really, unless it's negative, if she's complaining about how she can't talk. So don't expect a two-way conversation." I'm not.
When we arrive, uncle Dan opens the door and she's already up, trying to get out of bed, which she's not supposed to do on account of her hip. He rushes over and calls the nurse. I stand outside awkwardly as the nurse makes my grandma presentable. When I finally get into the room, she's smiling away and stammering out half-formed sentences. I get the feeling that she knows what she wants to say, but she's like an aphasic. There's no connection from her thoughts to her words unless she's saying something familiar, something she's said a hundred thousand times before, the one phrase she won't lose until the end, I think.
"He's he's he's—a w- w- wonderfu-l boy." She says this as Dan comes in the room and sits near her. She says this when he turns off the t.v. She says this when he's outside the window, filling the bird feeder with sunflower seeds, and she says this when he returns. He's a wonderful boy, isn't he? I remember a year ago, when she still had language, though it was slipping from her like fog burns away in the sun. I remember she would say this whenever she came back from a reverie and saw dad or Dan sitting near her. It's a refrain, a reminder, an apology, a thanks. Now, it's near enough all she says. Once, as she points vaguely at something on the wall or the other side of the room, she stumbles halfway though a sentence, utterly loses the thread of it, and gives up. As she turns away, she says "I can't say it," just as clear as you like. I think it's an old, rutted memory, an automatic response. I'm not sure it's language anymore.
But she smiles.
This is a change from a year ago, when she cried to see us go, though we knew she wouldn't remember why she was sad in the space of an hour, if she was sad at all. My family has always seemed to have a deep pessimistic tendency, and grandma harbored it deepest. As she got older, she complained more and smiled less. This blissful senility, therefore, is a bit of a shock, but I'm not afraid of what it means. I take her hand and look her in the eye when she speaks like I know every word. I talk to her about setting a bear in the Shenandoah National Park, about swimming in the Ocoee, about working at camp. But when my uncle leaves to fill the bird feeder, I turn to a different subject.
"Grandma, I have some news about me. Maybe you remember Delight? She's my wife; you came to our wedding. Anyway, she's in Oregon right now. I don't think she knows where I am." I pause to collect my thoughts, but huge bombs are planted in most of what I intend to say, so I walk past it all. "I don't know what's going to happen to us. We're not very close."
"He's a a a w- wonderful b- boy." She's now looking at my uncle, who smiles and waves as he tips the seeds into the yellow plastic feeder. I let the topic die, and i hold her hand in silence as she stops taking and falls asleep.
I never would give up or trade my uncles, though they're staunch in their views and they tend to talk over each other. I wouldn't give away my family, though I don't see them nearly often enough and I don't really know their lives. It's enough that I have them, somewhere, and they're happy to see me when I do drop in. I have piercing regrets from time to time that perhaps I never built the connections I should. But with or without meaning to, my family has become a nation-wide support network. I have people everywhere, and they're all wonderful boys.