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It was a few weeks after our night in the back of his car, and one day less than that from when he asked me to prom. I spent all month telling everyone I knew that he was my date, bragging about it to people who had no clue who he was and making Wendy absolutely sick of hearing his name. Wendy and I spent the entire day together getting ready, and when Wendy’s date showed up, I stood in the hallway of her parents’ house, waiting for Hawk.
I was still standing there when Wendy and her date left so they wouldn’t miss the dinner reservation.
I was still standing there an hour later when she called me to tell me that they had wine in the limousine.
I was still standing there when night fell and I came to grips with the reality that Hawk wasn’t coming. He wasn’t answering his phone, and the limo had been rerouted to drive by his place, but his car wasn’t there. He was gone.
Maybe he hadn’t even come back for it. That was how much it meant to him. I was thrown away without even a text message.
I didn’t cry at Wendy’s house. I waited until I got home, got undressed, and laid the gown on the bed. Then I put on the fuzziest pair of pajamas I had, curled into the bed with the phone by my side just in case he called, and cried myself to sleep.
5
HAWK
After graduating from college, getting the job with the federal government was a no-brainer. It was reliable and paid decently, and best of all could be done from anywhere I wanted to work. Which meant I could move back home to Ashford and be close to my family. It was ideal for me since it meant I could spend my mother’s last months with her taking care of her and doing what I loved to do most as a job.
It helped to be able to get outside and escape it all, mostly tracking hawks and tagging other animals and wildlife that I was keeping a close watch on. It was fitting that my nickname, given to me as a middle schooler, had become part of my identity and wormed its way into my work. Following the noble hawks as they soared through the mountains connected me with the spirit of the earth and grounded me.
It also helped me cope when my mother passed.
My senior year of college, I got the call that she was not going to make it much longer. My sister, Kimberly, called me to let me know that the doctor told her she had weeks to live. Taking a sabbatical from school, I came home, helping my mother and my sister as my mother slowly faded away.
Mom was a tough woman. She had dealt with cancer twice, the first time when I was small. When it came back, she refused to feel sorry for herself or ask why her. She just accepted the new fight and went to work. My father had been killed in a work accident when my sister and I were very young, and the settlement money from it had bought our spacious house in Ashford. As Mom got worse, she talked often about selling it and using the money to help and my sister and me establish ourselves. She said it was the best way she and our father could take care of us after they were gone.
Mom was very open and matter of fact about the end of life. It was part of how she had raised me too. Life was a cycle, and from the earth she came and to the earth she would return. But our memory of her would never fade. I made sure she knew that. She told me she knew. That wasn’t her worry.
Her worry had been my future. She worried that I wouldn’t go back to school. That I would let Ashford become the quicksand that it was for so many others, pulling them down and rooting them in place without accomplishing anything. I promised her on her deathbed that I would go back, that I would get my degree. And that I would take care of Kimberly.
It was a rough time for both my sister and me. In the two years since, Kimberly had grown distant and almost like another person. While she was never the most focused person in the world to begin with, her attraction to rough-and-tumble guys and partying got much more intense as a way of dealing with our mother’s death. I sold the old house right after Mom died, helping us pay for her funeral expenses and giving us both a little money to establish ourselves with.
I spent mine on a down payment for a cabin at the very peak of one of the north mountains.
