Half a Flat

Two flats of lantana, three garden tools, a small trowel, gardening gloves, and a commemorative plate, wrapped in bubble wrap. The plate is a gift for his cousin; I found it on a thrift-store run. If I happen to see him, I will keep a promise I made and give it to him. It’s a commemorative centennial plate with pictures of Hell’s Gate right above Devil’s Canyon, Lover’s Leap, and other places I know by heart around Possum Kingdom. I learned to water-ski there one summer before he came along.

My daughter refused to go with me so I had to trick my boyfriend into coming along.

“I’m going whether you come along or not.” I was discontent and inconsolable on the phone.

“It’s hot, and this is so spur-of-the-moment! I would never ask you to go to spend your Sunday afternoon going to see my ex-wife.”

“Debbie didn’t die. C’mon!”

Emotional blackmail seemed justified. What could I have told him that would make sense? That I’ve lost someone I can never get back? That someone who once meant the world to me is gone and I don’t know what to do with my heart anymore?

The first time I ever saw him, he was on a dirt bike. My best friend and I were playing cat-and-mouse, chasing him in her car through the back streets of our home town. She had only been out with him a few times and he had come to the restaurant where we worked to spy on her. When he was found out, he ran. It was a pattern he repeated for as long as I knew him. And now he had run as far away as you can run. He was found out for the last time.

Years ago, he had taken me out there for the first time. It was a lazy day and he wanted me to see his family’s “farm.” In Texas, anything less than 250 acres is referred to as a farm—it’s Texan modesty. But the farm was, in reality, over 320 sections of beautiful, prime land with oil and cattle and the muddy Brazos River running through it. The three city blocks his mother’s family owned in a nearby town completed the circle of his heritage.