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.