With blacktop disappearing under our car, I turned in my seat. “Listen, I talked more to Birdie this morning. She said that after the bus beatings, they mainly helped locally with voter registration, lunch escorts, and such. But after 1961, Mother went home, married Dad, and … had me. So really this event might be all you can find.”

“It’s like this tiny slice of her life that she deleted.”

“Exactly. I wonder if she ever told anyone.”

Water dripping down his face, his hair wet with rain, he looked straight out the windshield. “I doubt it. Your mother chose what she did and did not want people to know.”

“We all do, I think.”

His face changed; a flinch. “Ouch.”

“Huh?”

“You meant me.”

“Oh, God, Hutch. No, I didn’t. That’s not what I meant at all.”

“It was our problem, Ellie. It was what started … the end—me not telling you was the start of the end.”

“But that’s not what I meant right now. And it was just as much—”

“Stop. We aren’t going to talk about this. It’s been a perfect day.” He smiled at me and looked back to the highway.

I leaned into his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Please don’t be.” He placed his hand on my damp hair, and I was content. For that moment, I was content.

And maybe, I thought later that night, that is all we can ask for: moments to be content.

Sixteen

Sixteen

I stood at the window, watching as the crowd gathered on Birdie’s dock in the twilight. Laughter flowed toward the guesthouse through the open windows and screen’s spaces, and then into the living room, a comforting sound.

I opened Mother’s journal and flipped pages to these words: “This is the year I met the man I will love forever.”

Love. Maybe there should be a hundred words for that one word. It seems too complex a thing to write in four letters. We have it; we don’t have it. We need it; we lose it. We win it; we want it. We weep for it; we let it go.

When I was with Hutch, I’d loved him so completely that I couldn’t have imagined any other man entering my heart. We were complete in a simple way, just wanting to be near, our voices within range. Before cell phones, before texting and e-mail, we found a way to find each other in every spare moment between classes, obligations, and other friendships.

So our breakup was like ripping skin from bone.

All breakups are awful, just by definition—the word break defines this, as if it couldn’t be anything but awful. And ours—Hutch’s and mine—wasn’t any different.