“Liam.”
“I know.”
“You could at least hear what she has to say.”
“I could, but we also don’t need the money, Jojo. You have a thriving business. We have all the rental properties. I could retire.”
“Will you?”
I listen to the bus engine idling beneath me. The vibration travels through the mattress and into my shoulder blades, a low tremor that never quite stops.
“I’ll think about it.” I don’t say which part of my ramble I’ll think about.
“That’s your way of saying no while leaving yourself a door.”
“You know me too well, Jojo.”
“A lifetime,” she says. “Go to sleep. I love you.”
“I love you. I’ll be home soon.”
She hangs up, and I hold the phone against my chest for a few seconds before I set it down.
I lie in the dark. The bus shifts as Paulie puts the bus into drive. In a few minutes we’ll pull out of this lot and drive overnight to the next city and the next room and the next crowd that will or won’t fill it.
The word “legacy” keeps circling back. It’s persistent, and makes me restless, and I can’t settle.
I’m a husband, father, and grandfather. I play guitar in a band that once sold-out arenas two nights running. Tonight, wedrew five thousand in a nine-thousand-seat theater in a city I’m already forgetting, and my drummer could barely walk off the stage, and my guitarist was somewhere else the moment the last note rang, and a woman with a leather portfolio wants to package us with bands carrying the same diagnosis.
And somewhere in Beaumont, my son is pushing around a triple-seated stroller with my two grandsons and granddaughter. He probably smiled each block he walked between his mom’s flower shop and his house.
The bus lurches forward. I close my eyes and feel the distance between where I am and where my life actually lives, and I don’t have a name for the feeling except that it weighs more than it did last year.
TWO
Beaumont looks exactly the way I left it.
The brick storefronts on Main Street haven’t changed. The cracked sidewalk in front of the hardware store hasn’t changed. The hand-painted sign above the Pizza Parlor has been peeling since I was a teenager, and it’s still peeling now. The barbershop still has the striped pole that doesn’t spin anymore. The dry cleaner still keeps its door propped open with a cinder block, even when it’s cold out.
All things I’ve tried to change with endless council meetings. My concerns go in one ear and out the other. They sit with leaders who the people of Beaumont continue to re-elect, yet the officials never follow through on their campaign promises. Josie and I have offered to donate the initial fund to start a small business loan program. Rejected.
So, Josie and I buy properties when they fall into foreclosure or go up for sale, and we revitalize. We love Beaumont, and we want others to love it. We want families to raise their children here and be proud of where they live.
At the stoplight, I look at the park. There are people there, sitting on the benches and kids playing on the new equipment Josie and I paid to have replaced over the summer. As soon asNoah and Peyton—Noah’s wife, mother of triplets, and warrior—told us they were coming back here to raise their kids, I wanted the park to be a safe and enjoyable place for them. Sure, they have a backyard, but it’s important for them to be out in the community.
I drive past Whimsicality. Josie’s car isn’t there, which means she’s gone home for the day. She knows she doesn’t have to work and knows she can quit anytime she wants. I think part of her remembers a time when I wasn’t around, when she struggled because I wasn’t here to take care of her and Noah.
Whimsicality is something she did on her own, building it from nothing and turning it into Beaumont’s premier florist and café. The weekly lunch rush is out the door and down the block, and with that comes Whimsicality delivery service. At last tally, I believe Josie employs over fifty people, with a handful of them being from our elderly community.
The window display has changed since I left — dried lavender sprays in copper vases, staggered by height, the tallest one catching the last of the daylight through the glass. She has an eye for this. For all I regret about not being here for her when she was pregnant with our son, I wonder if I had been here, would she have gotten a part-time job at a florist? I don’t know if she would’ve or if we would’ve even been in Beaumont. Had I known she was pregnant that night when I stood at her door and told her I couldn’t be with her anymore, I likely would’ve told her to pack her shit and come with me.
Leaving her was the biggest mistake of my life. It also wasn’t because it shaped who we are and showed us that we are grateful for our lives. Even our mistakes.
My frenemy Nick Ashford, town pediatrician, high school football coach, and the man who raised my son for the ten years I was gone. He asked Josie to marry him, too, back before I got myshit together and asked her myself. Frenemy is the kindest word I’ve got for him, and most days I mean the friend half.
Nick says it best, you can’t live with regrets.
I turn toward home and press the gas, pushing my truck to ten over the limit to get to my wife. This tour was short, only a few months, and she chose to stay home. With Paige in high school, we don’t like to interrupt her routine. But now, being a grandma is top priority to her. I don’t blame her. I miss the triplets and the only saving grace is, Harrison was with me, so he isn’t getting more time with them than I am. I don’t blame my wife for staying home, but I missed the ever-loving shit out of her.
