Sunday was our day.
Mine and Rose’s.
Sunday dinners at Earl’s ranch—every week without fail, from the first month we were dating until the last week she was alive.
Pot roast or brisket or tamales during the holidays.
Earl at the head of the table.
Rose in her mother’s chair.
Me across from her, stealing bites off her plate because she always made her portions too big and I always made mine toosmall and we’d been doing that dance so long it was part of the meal.
Bex was there sometimes.
Not every week, but enough that Earl set a permanent fourth place.
She’d blow in from wherever her jobs had taken her, all wind-burned and loud, and the energy in the room would shift—louder, faster, Rose laughing harder because Bex pulled things out of her that nobody else could.
I’d sit there watching my wife light up for her best friend and think: good.
Rose needs that. Rose needs someone who matches her energy in a way I never could.
I haven’t been down this road since my wife’s funeral.
The county road from the ranch to Earl’s place is fourteen miles of two-lane blacktop through rolling limestone and live oak.
I know every curve. Every fence post. Every cattle guard and low-water crossing and the one spot by Miller’s Creek where the road dips and floods every time it rains hard enough.
This road is in my bones.
I used to drive it with my window down and my arm out and Rose’s hand on my thigh, country radio turned low because she said my singing voice was “charming enough to forgive.”
Today the truck is quiet. Window up. No radio.
Just the road and the memories and the growing knot in my stomach that tightens with every mile.
I pass the turnoff to the old Whittaker place.
Pass the Baptist church with the marquee that always has some vaguely threatening Bible verse on it.
Pass the spot where the highway department put up a guardrail three years after Rose died—not on her road, but on this one, same kind of curve, same kind of danger.
Earl’s mailbox appears on the right.
Same dented aluminum box on a cedar post, same hand-painted address numbers that Rose redid every spring because Earl’s handwriting was “a crime against literacy.”
The numbers are faded now.
Peeling. Nobody’s repainted them.
I turn up the drive.
The ranch hits me in waves.
Each one is harder than the last.
The fencing first.
