Dad started the next week. Three days a week, eight hours a day, pulling orders for contractors and loading pickups with lumber and drywall.
He came home with sawdust in his collar and his face red from the cold. And he looked ten years younger.
The second week, Mom made him a lunch.
She didn’t say anything about it. She just set a brown paper bag on the counter next to his truck keys. A ham sandwich. An apple. And a thick slice of the persimmon pudding she makes every October from the tree in June’s backyard.
He looked at the bag. He looked at her back, standing at the sink.
Then he picked it up and took it to work.
I want to say something about Tammy Reese, because I don’t want anybody to think she was the villain in this story.
She wasn’t. She was a woman who believed a man she cared about. And he hadn’t told her the truth.
About a week after the truck, Dad drove out to her sister’s place in Bedford. He didn’t tell us he was going. He told me about it later, at the lumberyard, while he was loading drywall into the back of my truck.
“I told her all of it,” he said. “The apartment. The couch. The VFW parking lot. June’s house. Your mother’s money. The gas bill. Every bit of it.”
“What did she say?”
He set a sheet of drywall down very carefully, like it was glass.
“She said she wished I’d told her in March, because she’d have liked me anyway.”
He wiped his hands on his jeans.
“And then she said she’d still like to go to the fish fry on Fridays. If I was buying.”
Tammy and her boys rented a three-bedroom house on the north side of town the first of November. Dale at the lumberyard knew the landlord, and Dad put in a word, and that’s what it took. $1,150 a month, split three ways. Kyle got hired on at the same lumberyard in December.
Dad and Tammy go to the VFW fish fry every Friday night. She lives in her own place. He comes home by ten.
Mom leaves the porch light on for him and pretends she doesn’t.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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