Red, White, and True by Tracy Crow

Author:Tracy Crow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potomac Books Inc.
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

18

Memory Sky

AMBER JENSEN

“I saw him today,” I said.

I directed my words at my husband, Blake, who was driving, his eyes fixated on the road ahead. It was small talk. Sound to fill our forty-five-minute drive home. But really, I talked for my own benefit, like a child repeating new words. Processing information through recreation. As we drove I had been examining an image of my grandpa Dayton, etched in my mind since my grandma Evie’s eightieth birthday party earlier in the day. Dayton’s sharp features and the recesses of his deep, narrow eyes were shadows in my line of vision, like a photo negative held up to the light.

“He was alive and smiling,” I explained. “Something I never thought I’d see.”

When I shifted in the passenger seat to face Blake, I saw him through that image: saw the past layered over the present, the face of the grandfather I never met cast over the husband I’ve known since childhood. The two men had been connected in my mind for years, as soldiers, as husbands and fathers, as significant men in my life. I wanted Blake to understand that connection and to understand the significance of the new image of Grandpa Dayton I’d acquired that day, but I wasn’t sure he could. It was only beginning to make sense to me. Blake glanced at me from the driver’s seat, lifting his chin, and then looking back at the tar-veined hills of the highway, his way of inviting me to continue.

Blake had been home from Iraq for almost two years, but every time I received this invitation to communicate—this sideways glance of his with the inquisitive lift of his eyebrows and chin—I felt grateful. Grateful for the expressions that had been missing during awkward international phone calls: the tucked chin that signals Blake’s serious disagreement, the slight curl of lips that shows he’s preparing for a playful debate. But grateful, too, for the reassurance of his physical presence: the fingers I could intertwine with mine, the sound of his steady breathing, and the beating of his heart when I leaned against his chest. As we drove I was anxious to accept Blake’s invitation. But I was hesitant, too, afraid Blake might not understand.

Grandpa Dayton had always been a source of questions for me. I knew him from black-and-white photos and fragments of stories sprinkled here and there at holiday meals and afternoon coffee like powdered sugar over brownies; Blake knew Grandpa Dayton only from my versions of those stories. Yet Blake understood Dayton in ways I could not. Once, noticing a small black-and-white photo tucked in a china closet, Blake said, “Dayton was a first sergeant? You never told me that.” I’d never told him because I hadn’t known. “The patch on his uniform,” Blake explained. “First sergeant. That really meant something, especially in those days.” I had studied that photo for years, hoping to gain some understanding of the mysterious man who died so young, so long before I was born.

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