BooksBarbecue
Back At Dawn
Chapters (39)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
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  39. Copyright

We’d talk about giving New York a try, her first tour, my second. We’d talk about buying a country home with a wraparound porch and a white picket fence in some sleepy New England town. We’d talk about moving to Iowa to be near her parents, but I never had the heart to tell her that rabid warhorses from hell couldn’t drag me to Iowa. But we knew we’d leave Chicago. I didn’t think I could survive another winter, regardless of how gorgeous she insisted the summers were. We talked about traveling far and wide, about having cars in the driveway, a fat bank account, carpeted floors, guest rooms, dinner parties. We talked about dancing barefoot in the cool grass on warm summer nights. And we talked about love, sweet and pure, such an innocent love that it’s all there is and all that matters. A love that makes you believe there’s nothing else.

10

On the better nights when Carolyn worked, I’d sometimes walk to the lake and sit with my legs dangling over the break wall while watching the waves and the windswept ice to the east. I’d think about winters in Ohio, about my little hometown of Spencer. I wondered how much had changed since I’d left, if my parents’ home was still there, if somebody now lived in it. Did the town shrink, or did the farmers sell their land so that new houses could be built? Was the White Elephant Saloon still open? How many of my friends still lived there? Were there still signs at the town borders that read:

Home of Stratton Brown
2002 Ohio Wrestling State Champion
and National All-American

It’s funny now to think of myself as an All-American, and I wonder if I’m still remembered as such, if anyone remembers me at all. Would I recognize any of them if I were to venture back? I knew I never would, but I still wondered, anyway.

11

The days pass. They’re in no great hurry to pass but they pass all the same. I write. I think of Carolyn. I sit in my quiet apartment and watch the world in a rush beyond these walls, while within them, little changes. I sit and I wait for the trains and the vibrations. Sometimes Thomas sits with me; sometimes he does not. We’ve become a family. Like the one I was born into, it’s not a perfect family. But it’s a family all the same.

twenty-one

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