Buckeye

by Patrick Ryan

“Is the future knowable? Will our older selves be anything like our younger selves thought we would be? We can only find out by writing it down and then putting it out of our minds and letting life take its course. The unraveling of time should be mysterious, don’t you think?”

Time was like a rock bed with a lot of layers, she said, then took a moment to find the word she wanted: strata. Even the most unbearable things became fossils, after a while.

But you don’t have to care about every dumb thing he says, because I can guarantee you, tomorrow he’s going to say something dumber.” Becky’s eyes widened at the irreverence of that. “It’s not just Cal,” Ida said. “It’s all of them. They think they’ve got all the brains, but if they did, they wouldn’t walk around sounding like idiots half the time. When you give Cal a hug, squeeze extra tight. That’s what I do with your father. He says I only know how to give bear hugs, and I want to say, ‘That’s because I’m trying to squeeze the stupid out of you, honey!’ ” She waved that away. “It doesn’t work, but you’ll feel better.”

‘The things that we love tell us what we are.’

The things that we love tell us what we are.

“Yes, I’m glad I stayed. The whole reason you build a bridge together is so the water can run under it, right? And not wash the two of you away? Sometimes one of you makes it flood, and then the water recedes.

Forgiveness, the way her mother had described it, wasn’t something that shot up out of the soil; it had to creep in over time, like a vine.

The anger and resentment he feels toward all of them won’t go away anytime soon—not only because he feels entitled to it, but because he cares for and tends to it like he would any other part of himself.

She’d gotten no explanation, but the truth couldn’t be more bluntly obvious: her mother didn’t want to be a mother, and so had stopped being one. Margaret had removed herself from Tom’s life because she was dissatisfied with her own, and because she’d screwed everything up in such a way that she couldn’t bear to be around when it all came crashing down. What she wanted from her mother was remorse. What she wanted—she didn’t fully understand this until she was looking into her son’s eyes, her own eyes—was for her mother to tell her she was sorry. Deeply, truly sorry.

Throughout all the joy and bickering and betrayal and abandonment, all the wars around the world and in America, all the human hardship, messages of love and forgiveness were being sent back and forth, across the divide between the living and the dead. Those messages meant everything; they counterbalanced the world.

This is why old people seem distant and distracted, he thought. We aren’t living in the past; the past is living in us. And it’s talking. We get old to be able to recalibrate everything we thought was going to be important. We get old just to hear it. It says, the days, the days, the days.