The road captain lowered his eyes.
She continued:
“And I was pregnant.”
“Every doctor appointment I went to alone.”
“Every time they told me the baby might need surgery.”
“Every time I signed a consent form.”
“I thought about that road.”
The captain whispered:
“I’m sorry.”
She laughed without humor.
“I know you didn’t cause the crash.”
“No.”
“That isn’t what I’m apologizing for.”
She looked at him.
He continued:
“We made him into a symbol.”
“We needed him to stay the same after he died because if he was changing…”
The captain looked toward the clubhouse.
“Then maybe we had to.”
The mother waited.
He rubbed his hands together.
“Your fiancé and I argued the week before he died.”
“About?”
“He said he wasn’t doing the Tennessee run.”
She nodded.
“He told me.”
“I called him soft.”
Her expression hardened slightly.
The captain did not defend himself.
“I told him a woman and a baby had him on a leash.”
She closed her eyes.
“Did he hit you?”
“No.”
“He should have.”
The road captain smiled faintly.
“He said something worse.”
“What?”
“He said, ‘You’re forty-eight and still acting like nobody waiting at home is a victory.’”
The mother looked toward him.
The captain’s eyes were wet.
“I didn’t talk to him for three days.”
“The memorial ride was the first time we were riding together again.”
She absorbed that.
“So his last morning…”
“I apologized.”
“For what?”
“Not enough.”
The mother shook her head.
“That’s not what I asked.”
The road captain thought.
“I said I was out of line.”
“What did he say?”
“He told me I’d been out of line since 1989.”
She laughed.
The captain did too.
Then he became serious.
“He said he had news.”
“He was going to tell me at the overlook.”
She wiped her eyes.
“He never got there.”
“No.”
For several minutes, the creek filled the silence.
Then the mother said:
“You didn’t know.”
“No.”
“Neither did I.”
“What?”
“That morning.”
She looked toward him.
“He kissed me before he left.”
“He said, ‘Tonight everything changes.’”
The road captain’s jaw tightened.
“I thought he meant we were opening the test results.”
“Maybe he meant both.”
“Probably.”
There it was.
Probably.
Not certainty.
The mother smiled sadly.
“We’ll never know.”
“No.”
That answer did not destroy them.
It connected them.
Both had spent nine years trying to finish a sentence a dead man never completed.
Perhaps they could finally let the sentence remain unfinished.
Before leaving the clubhouse, the mother made rules.
She wrote them on the back of an unused event flyer because verbal rules disappeared around men who liked improvisation.