When Ghosts Come Home

by Wiley Cash

But those things—shame and grief and fear—still overtook him sometimes and fell upon him like a weight that wanted to remind him of its heaviness at the very moment he forgot to stoop beneath it. He found that the weight kept him hidden from people, certainly from Marie and Colleen.

“Don’t look down, don’t look back. Just look where we’re going.”

They were two people constructed of pain and grief, and, in spite of that, the world would not be making allowances for them, so Colleen believed they had to make allowances for one another when they could.

He felt something familiar, something he had felt more often over the past couple of years; it was the knowledge that he could walk away from this job right now and go on about his life.

She was a librarian, and throughout his life Jay would think of libraries when he thought of his mother: the

fresh, clean smell of books in their bindings; the whispered voices; the confidence that whatever you needed or wanted could be found provided you had the time and the patience to wait for an adult to find it or to look for it on your own.

As to her father coming to get her, that seemed to imply a rescue, and she would have to admit her father did have a history of rescuing her.

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Don’t ever be sorry. You needed me, and I came. I’ll

always come when you need me.” And here he was, on his way once again.

“I’m glad to see you eating,” her mother said. “It doesn’t matter how old you get, you’re always happy to see your child eat the food you’ve made for them.”

He didn’t want to talk about

war any more than anyone else who’d ever been through it.

Colleen wanted to stay in the car with her mother, their windows rolled down, the radio on, their conversation moving freely and loosely among topics that were connected by memory and shared history and kinship.

She was worldly, educated, and enlightened, and all these advantages had landed her here, back home, feeling very much like the same adolescent she was before law school, before traveling, before marrying Scott

and moving to Texas and losing her baby.

No, she wasn’t like her parents, but maybe...