We talked all night. About everything. About nothing. About Rooster. About the porch swing.
Around three in the morning, he got quiet.
“I’m scared, Belle,” he said.
“I know.”
“I’m really scared.”
“Me too,” I said. “Courage is being scared out of your wits and going anyway.”
He looked at me.
“Where’d you get that?”
“I made it up. Just now.”
“That’s good,” he said. “That’s really good. Can I keep it?”
“It’s yours,” I said.
He held both my hands. Because they wouldn’t stop shaking.
“No matter how long it takes,” he said, “I’ll come home to you.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
He took the photograph out of his shirt pocket. The one Danny had taken that afternoon, the one where Danny dropped the lens cap. He’d had it developed at the drugstore that same day, one-hour service.
He wrote on the back of it, leaning on his knee, in that terrible handwriting.
Isobel, I will come home to you.
“So you don’t forget,” he said.
“I’m not going to forget.”
“So I don’t forget, then,” he said.
He put it back in his shirt pocket, with the ring. He said he’d carry them both. He said they’d keep him safe.
At six in the morning, he walked me home. He kissed me on my front porch.
At eight, his uncle drove him to the bus station.
I didn’t go. He asked me not to. He said he wanted to remember me on the porch, not crying at a bus station.
So I stood on my porch in my yellow dress with a carnation behind my ear and watched his uncle’s truck go down the street.
He wrote me eleven letters.
They came every few weeks. Then less often. They were short. His handwriting got worse, if that was possible. He wrote about the heat, and the bugs, and a boy from Tennessee named Earl who snored like a freight train.
He never wrote about anything bad. Not once.
At the end of every letter, he wrote the same thing.
Still coming home. — B.
Eleven months after he left, his mother came up my front steps.
It was eight o’clock in the morning. I was at the kitchen table eating toast. I heard footsteps on the porch, and I looked through the screen door, and there she was.
Mrs. Hale. In her housecoat. Pink, with little flowers on it. Her hair was still in curlers. She was holding a piece of yellow paper in both hands.
I knew before she opened her mouth.
I dropped my toast.
“Isobel,” she said through the screen. Her voice was very quiet. “Isobel, honey.”
Missing in action.
Then, after a stretch of months I only remember in pieces, a second telegram.
Presumed dead.
I was nineteen years old.
And something in me simply decided.
It wasn’t dramatic. I didn’t make a vow. I didn’t throw myself on a grave. There wasn’t even a grave. There was nothing to bury.
I just kept waking up every morning and not being able to imagine anyone else in the chair across from me.
And then thirty years went by. And then sixty.
Mrs. Hale and I had tea every Sunday after that. For five years. We’d sit in her kitchen on Pine Street and talk about him. She’d show me his baby pictures. She’d tell me about the time he got his head stuck in the banister.
She died in 1969. Her heart.
At her funeral, Benjamin’s uncle shook my hand and said, “You were good to her, Isobel. You were the only one who still came by.”
Somebody bought her house that fall. Somebody else bought it again three years later.
And a letter from the army, in 1971, with a stamp so faint you had to tilt it toward the window, went to that address. And somebody who didn’t know who Benjamin Hale was threw it away.
My father worried about me. He never said it out loud, but he worried.
In 1972, a nice man named Gerald Pruitt asked me to marry him. He was an accountant. He was kind. He had a good laugh and a station wagon and he brought my mother roses on her birthday.
I said no.
My father sat me down at the kitchen table that night.
“Isobel,” he said. “Benjamin’s gone. You know that. Gerald is a good man. You could have a good life.”
“I know, Daddy.”
“Then why?”
I looked at him for a long time.
“Because when I picture the chair across from me,” I said, “it’s still Benjamin in it. And it wouldn’t be fair to Gerald. To spend his whole life sitting in somebody else’s chair.”
My father didn’t argue. He just nodded. He patted my hand.
Gerald married a woman named Barbara two years later. They had four kids. I went to the wedding. I was happy for him. I really was.
But here’s the part I always want people to understand. Because they hear “she never married,” and they picture a woman sitting alone in a dark room with the curtains closed.
That was not my life.
I poured it out sideways.
I taught Sunday school at First Methodist for twenty years. I ran a food pantry out of the church basement for eleven years. Canned beans and boxed macaroni and diapers, every Saturday morning.
When my sister Carol’s marriage came apart in 1998, I helped raise her two girls. Wren was fifteen. She slept in my spare room for two years of high school. She’d come home from school and sit at my kitchen table and tell me about every boy who’d ever been mean to her.
Now she’s forty-two. She calls me every Sunday with forty-two-year-old problems. Her mortgage. Her boss. Her son’s driving test. I enjoy every one of them tremendously.
And in 1984, I started volunteering at the children’s hospital downtown.
It was the old brick wing back then. With the radiators that clanked all winter like somebody was hitting them with a hammer.
I read to the kids on Thursday afternoons.
I’ve done it every Thursday I’ve been physically able to, for forty-one years. Through two new buildings. Through four different volunteer coordinators. Through a broken wrist in 2006, when I read with my left hand holding the book and a nurse turning the pages.
I’ve read Charlotte’s Web out loud about two hundred times. I know exactly which page to slow down on. I know which children need you to hold the book so they can see the pictures. And which ones need you to hold their hand instead.
There was a boy named Teddy, in 1991. He was eight. He had leukemia. He made me read Charlotte’s Web to him eleven times in one month.
Every time we got to the part where Charlotte dies, he’d say, “Wait. Stop. Go back.” And I’d go back to the beginning of the chapter. And he’d listen to it all again, holding his breath, like maybe this time it would end differently.
It never did.
He didn’t either.
I still have the bookmark he made me. It’s a piece of construction paper with a spider drawn on it in purple crayon.
