I turned to him. “I wish I could.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I wish I could forget your temper tantrums, Rusty. I wish I could. God, how I’ve tried.”

He shook his head. “I apologized.”

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

He took my hand. “Come on, you can fold laundry later.”

Together we walked out to the backyard.

Excerpt from Lillian Ashford’s Journal
New Year’s Eve 1961
Twenty-one Years Old

This was the year everything came together and then fell apart.

The summer started with Him as I wanted, as I knew. This summer held the most beautiful minutes of my life. Being near Him was the only time I wasn’t lonely—in my whole life this was the only time I wasn’t lonely.

I want to find the moment it all fell apart—but it must have started at the beginning—what brought us together and what tore us apart were threaded together in that one day when we were planning to meet His friends from Alabama who’d gone on a Freedom Ride. He picked me up from Tech—I’d just finished exams in May. Of course I knew these Freedom Rides were dangerous—but I only knew it in theory, just something I saw on the news. We were going to greet the bus in Montgomery—show our support with a group of friends. But by the time we got there, the beatings had already happened. The highway patrol had abandoned the bus, let it ride into Montgomery where a mob beat the riders. It was and is the most terrible thing I have ever seen. How can, Oh, how can humans do this one to another?

Nine

Nine

It was two in the afternoon when Sadie and I crossed the Alabama state line. Sadie drove behind me, and on our cell phone headsets we’d talked our way down I-85 through Peachtree City, Newnan, and LaGrange and into Auburn. Our conversation only barely kept me from dwelling on Rusty.

His fury was infrequent, but blazing like the burst of a flame in a bonfire when gas is thrown—quick, hot, and then subsiding. In the beginning of our marriage, I’d just put this anger into the “hotheaded Calvin” category. He didn’t hurt me when he got mad; he didn’t hit or call me foul names. Yes, he threw things, and sometimes he let out a stream of curses that I didn’t know could be strung together, yet … when the anger was over it was as if it had never happened. As if the kind man didn’t know the frenzy-mad man.

But of course I knew and lived with both men.

“So,” Sadie asked, and I could hear Alison Krauss on her CD player, “how did Rusty take the news about this trip?”

“Fine. Of course he didn’t want me to go, but he understands.”