I’m standing beside 301 Highway with my brother, Michael. He’s five, I’m four. We wave good-bye to our father as he drives away in his new red Ford.
See you boys soon. Those are Dad’s last words to us.
Every day for the next three weeks I look out the front window of our apartment, hoping to see my father’s car pull into the driveway. Each time I see a red Ford coming up the highway, I think it’s him. I’m wrong every time.
Four, five, six weeks go by and my father still doesn’t return. Moma won’t talk about him. When the divorce papers arrive in the mail, Moma celebrates with a drink. I can tell she’s in pain when I ask about him.
She says, He’s gone, Pat, and he’s not coming back. Try to forget about him.
I say, How come and where did he go, Moma?
I don’t know and I don’t care. Just forget about him.
Our apartment building is on the corner of 301 Highway and Hawthorne Drive. At night, the tractor-trailers scream through the intersection when the light is green and screech to a halt when it’s red. Sometimes they don’t. It’s the spring of ’57 and already this year Michael and I have witnessed seven accidents at the intersection. Seven accidents, and in every one of them a casualty. I ask Michael if he thinks God uses the traffic light to call people to heaven or send them to hell.
Michael says he doesn’t know.
Every evening before we go to bed, Michael and I kneel at the windowsill and watch the traffic go by. One night we see a sixteen-wheeler slice a red Ford in half in the middle of the intersection. Michael and I put on our sneakers and run to the scene in our pajamas. Michael stops at the edge of the highway. Not me. I dart around the debris and men who have come from Mr. Mack’s Shell Station to help.
I can tell that the driver of the car is as dead as a stump. His right leg is hanging from the driver’s seat and there are bloody cords hanging from it. I’ve never seen so much blood. I call for Michael to come and see, but he won’t.
The dead man is lying in front of the car. A burgundy wing-tipped shoe is beside him. They’re the same kind of shoes our father was wearing when we last saw him. Carroll Simpson, who is the captain of the Charles County Rescue Squad, is working frantically on the man.
I maneuver close enough to see that he is a white man. His eyes are wide open and they’re as blue as our father’s eyes. His hair is parted on the left side just the way our father parted his, and there’s a diamond ring on his left pinkie. What if this is him? What if God worked that traffic light to send my father to hell for playing such a bad joke on us?
I start to cry. I yell for Michael.
That ain’t him, Pat.
But the car’s red and he’s wearing the same shoes and diamond ring and—
That ain’t him. Now come on.
We walk back across the highway. Michael sits in the fork of the oak tree, which also serves as the crow’s nest of a pirate’s ship we have captured over and over. I want to go back and look at the man one more time. Michael says no. Tears are streaming down my face as I watch Carroll Simpson pull a stiff white sheet over the man’s face.
It’s him. I know it’s him.
It is not.
But this is one time I refuse to believe my brother. I’m glad my father is gone, and I don’t have to wonder about him anymore.
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