Buckeye

by Patrick Ryan

Life chewed you up and spat you out, but it didn’t often spit the same way twice.

The things that we love tell us what we are.

Therein, she thought, lies the unbearable solitude of a lie: you’re alone when you tell it, alone when you live it, alone when you try to dismantle it.

Feeling sorry for yourself in a cemetery was a peculiar kind of callous. If all the bones and hair and nails and dust of each of the departed could come together into their respective bodies again, and their spirits return, most of them would probably trade places with you and your troubles for a little more time topside. Here was Lemuel Pickett, born in 1922, died in 1944 defending his country in France. He’d probably welcome your troubles for a few more years. Here was Baby Pickett, so much a baby that it hadn’t even been named, so short a life that the only thing on the headstone was Baby Pickett, Died 1917. Surely Baby Pickett would want your life with your troubles—unless, like Mrs. Dodson, Baby Pickett found death to be wonderful.

When things happened matters far less than how things are, and for Tom, things weren’t good.

“You’re both still alive,” Everett said. “It’s possible.”

“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. Your father could infuriate me, but I loved him, and he was always going to be the one I gave it a go with. So, no, I don’t regret it. I’m glad I stayed.”