Out Of The Blue
Grant Rogers contemplatedhow best to tell his girlfriend, Faith Williams, of his decision. Maybe now wasn’t the best time for startling revelations. He settled the wool blanket over Faith’s shoulders. Despite the lengthening light that accompanied the longer days of early summer in the mountains, the night’s cool breeze raised goose bumps on her skin. Grant had grown up in the Colorado mountain town of Lark, and the low temperatures that accompanied the sun’s disappearance, even in June, didn’t bother him. Faith had moved to the mountains from Florida, though, and it seemed to take her two weeks into July to escape the winter’s freezing clench. Grant couldn’t help but smile. A cold girlfriend meant more time with her body pressed against his.
Faith hugged the blanket around her, the scent of campfire smoke, pine trees, and Grant’s woodsy cologne exuded from the blanket’s thick fibers. She leaned against him in the bed of his truck, just like she’d done most weekend nights in the spring and summer since Grant got his driver’s license two years ago. Above their heads, swirls of the Milky Way flowed like cloudy water, with stars shooting across the night sky.
“Have you given your grandfather an answer yet?” Faith asked. Her heart pounded as she asked, anxious for Grant to commit to a life in Lark. “About the job?”
Grant nestled his chin into the crook of Faith’s neck. He smoothed her hair down her back, curling the thick ringlets around his fingers. He loved how long her hair was when he unspooled the curls that wound like ribbons down her shoulders. He loved how her hair was as dark as shadows in the densest forest at dusk. He loved how it felt like silk. He loved how she felt in his arms, curvy as rolling hills. He kissed her ear.
His grandfather had offered him an assistant manager’s position at his hardware store. He intended for Grant to one day become the owner. Grant had worked at the store all through high school as a stock boy and clerk, using part of the money he earned to take Faith to the movies, camping, dinners, prom. Whatever she wanted, he got for her. The rest of the money he saved for a rainy day, though whether that rainy day included an engagement ring for Faith or something else entirely, he hadn’t decided. Until now.
“I’d be dumb not to take the job,” he said, though he knew that wasn’t what he intended.
“I’ll come home on weekends,” Faith said. “There’s no way I’ll do laundry in the dorms. I heard your clothes smell funky if you wash them there. I’ll be home every holiday and in the summer so we’ll see each other all the time.”
“I don’t think pre-med leaves a lot of downtime,” Grant said, kissing her. “I don’t want to distract you from your classes.”
“You sound like my mom. Everyone’s so worried about my ability to keep up with school. I understand my classes will be grueling but I’ll manage just fine.”
“I don’t doubt it for a second. And I like your mom. She’s right about a lot of stuff. I think she likes me.”
“She likes you as long as you don’t make her a grandma too soon.”
Grant leaned Faith back onto the bed of the truck. “Aren’t I always careful?”
Faith kissed him. “Too careful. I want all of you.” She hoped he wouldn’t be put off by what she really meant: she wanted all of him, forever. To be Mrs. Rogers. To come home from stitching people up at the hospital and find him there, tinkering with his truck in the garage. Watching football games. Spoon feeding their baby. She wanted all of it and all of him. Grant was always vague when they talked about the future. Faith chalked it up to Grant’s lingering grief over his father and brother’s untimely deaths, and apprehension about his own future. She wished he would worry less, or at least let her in to the part of himself laden with grief, closed off to others. He said it was to protect her. She wasn’t fragile. She could be strong for him, if he let her. She tried to be patient for now. Being strong meant not pushing him to open doors he wasn’t ready to unlock. His kind heart and caring nature made him worth it. It sure didn’t hurt that he was the most handsome boy in Lark, too.
She pulled his arm across her chest, squeezing his hand. She’d spent most of the past four years with Grant, ever since he first asked her to the Lark High School homecoming dance their freshman year. Faith wagered over fifty percent of their time together had been spent in the cab or the bed of his truck – depending on the season – their arms wrapped tightly around each other, articles of clothing dropped under the dash or down into the dirt.
Everyone had warned Faith that if she broke Grant’s heart after he’d fallen in love with her, she’d be unwelcome wherever she went in the small mountain town. Faith was in eight grade when her parents had moved here from Key West, Florida, where flamingos took over the ponds every summer.. Her father, James, had decided year-round heat and office air conditioning would put him in an early grave and took a job at the Lark lumber mill to work outside and with his hands. He thought the mountain air would be good for all of his girls – not a bikini in sight in Lark. He hadn’t counted on ski jackets and pink ear muffs being no less enticing to hormonal teenage boys when Faith wore them. He’d resigned himself to her intense relationship with the boy, but only because Faith and her mother, Linda, had assured him that Faith and Grant were destined to be married. Have kids. Take care of them when they were old. It helped that everyone in town liked Grant.
Grant had grown up in Lark, as had his parents, and grandparents, and several generations before that. When his mother up and left him, his father, and his older brother when Grant was only three years old, it wasn’t a surprise to anyone who’d known her – Teresa Rogers had talked about leaving Lark for bigger cities and lower elevations since she was a girl, but getting pregnant with Grant’s brother, Eric, had curtailed those plans. Teresa had married Grant’s father, Walt, begrudgingly, though she’d sworn she loved him. She left Walt, anyway. Grant didn’t hear anything about his mother until his junior year of high school, when his grandparents got a letter from a coroner in Ohio, letting them know Teresa had died in a car accident. She’d been working as billing clerk in a lawyer’s office in Toledo. She had an apartment and two cats. She’d tried her hand at modeling for a local agency and the newspaper used one of her headshots for her obituary.
Even though Grant knew that Faith loved him, in his heart, he questioned whether he was the right man for her. Faith was ambitious. Brilliant. Beautiful. She could do a thousand times better in life than to be the wife of the hardware store manager in a town that would never attract a Starbucks.
“There’s your constellation,” Grant said, tracing a line of stars in the sky. “The Faith.”
“That’s not a constellation.”
“Sure it is. Look.” He traced it again with his finger in the air.
“You’re just drawing a heart.” Faith turned her chin to kiss Grant. Her lips grazed the auburn stubble he’d let grow after last weekend’s camping trip. She tilted his chin to meet her mouth. His lips were always soft.
“So what if I am?” He kissed her back, tightening his grip around her waist. “I see a heart up there.”
Faith giggled. “Alright.”
Grant slipped his hands under her shirt, pressing his fingertips into her stomach. He’d taken her too many times to count on the bed of his truck, and still he could never get enough of her. That realization made his blood run cold as he thought about what he had decided for them.
Thoughts of his mother flooded his mind. People in town blamed Teresa for his father’s early death. She hadn’t caused it directly, but Walt had enlisted in the army less than a year after she had left. Some said it was to get over his heartbreak, but others said it was to save face after being made a single dad in a small town that liked to gossip. Grant knew the truth, though. The hardware store his grandfather owned had hit a rough patch, but his grandfather was too proud to ask for help. Walt left Grant and Eric with their grandparents so he could join the army and send money back to help support the family and save the store. Though, looking back, Grant figured joining the army didn’t hurt with getting over the heartache. The military was never meant to be a permanent career.
Then, the Gulf War broke out, and Walt died in a helicopter crash in Iraq. Eric joined up three years ago, as soon as he turned eighteen. He had died in Afghanistan last winter. Grant kept both of their purple hearts in a box in a dresser drawer. He took them out some mornings, when he did not want to get out of bed. The reminder of their service – their sacrifices – gave him the extra strength he needed to brush his teeth, get to school, get to work, put on a smile for Faith. She was the anchor that prevented him from sinking deep into grief and despair. The best he could do was to visit this darkness whenever he touched the grain of the purple heart ribbons, acknowledge it, and put it away for the rest of the day. He didn’t tell Faith these things. He didn’t want her to worry or feel sad with him. He wanted to protect her from anything in the world that wasn’t bright or joyful, including himself.
Both Eric and Walt had received hero’s welcomes when their remains were returned to Lark for their burials. The splendor of the ceremony had made the acceptance of their deaths a little easier, but both losses had carved out permanent holes in his soul. Grant couldn’t help but think he owed it to them, and his country, to take their places. Whenever Grant considered the hardware store as his life’s career after graduation, the thought left him as cold as the fear of loosing Faith.
Faith opened the blanket to wrap Grant inside of it with her, pulling him down onto the truck bed. Her mother warned her almost daily about the dangers of getting pregnant before graduation, but Faith wasn’t worried. Grant would always be there for her, no matter what. Faith also knew that she’d get her degree in chemistry and come back to Lark to save lives at the county hospital. Nothing would stop her from that; not even a baby, should they have one. She wanted one – or many – with Grant anyway, so what did it matter whether the first came sooner or later? Her friends had made bets on how quickly Grant would propose after graduation, or if he’d even jump the gun and do it before. Graduation loomed the next morning like a bridge with the other side shrouded by fog. If he was going to propose before, it’d have to be tonight. Faith knew Grant wasn’t a morning person, so he wouldn’t be doing it over donuts before they donned their caps and their gowns.
She’d tried not to look too anxious that evening when he picked her up from her house, idling the pickup truck’s engine in the driveway as he knocked on the storm door on her parents’ front porch. He’d taken her to a local diner, then to a pre-graduation party, but they’d left early to look at stars and have privacy here, on a dirt road enclosed by an aspen grove with a view that looked over the Rockies. The young aspen leaves rustled as winds from the tops of the mountains swept down through the trees and the meadows. Twigs snapped as deer and raccoons began to emerge for the night.
