Free The Year Everything Changed by Georgia Bockoven

Jessie.”
    “So I am,” he admitted.
    She folded her arms across her chest. “I’ll up the stakes. You know that chocolate cake you’re always insisting I try?”
    He’d never lacked for women in his life, but until Lucy he’d never known what it was to love one intellectually as well as emotionally. God, he was going to miss her. He glanced up and saw the waiter working his way toward them.
    “Why do you want to know about my past?” It was a meaningless proposition, a means for two old friends to pass the time. Nothing he could tell her would change anything.
    “Curiosity—pure and simple. I’ve been thinking about your girls and that they all come from different mothers. I know you’ve been married twice. . . .”
    “It’s a long story.”
    “I have time.”
    He looked at his watch. “Not that much.”
    “Then give me a chapter.”
    It was then he knew just how afraid she was that the meeting with his girls was going to turn out badly. “You want me to play your Scheherazade and spin tales for you?”
    “Maybe.”
    “It won’t work, you know.”
    “Indulge me.”
    “I’ll give you twenty questions.”
    She smiled, satisfied. “One—why did you leave Oklahoma?”
    “That’s easy. It was leave or starve.”
    “You’re going to have to do better than that if you expect me to put cream sauce in this mouth.”
    The waiter hovered expectantly. Jessie smiled. “You drive a hard bargain.”
    Lucy returned the smile before she looked at the waiter. “We’ll both be having the lobster ravioli.”
    Jessie rarely looked back. The past put too much weight on a man’s shoulders and made it harder to move through life than it needed to be. But some memories were etched in his mind like daguerreotypes. His last day in Oklahoma was one of them. Although filled with a crimson sorrow, an acorn dust, and an indigo of broken dreams, the image always came to him in stark black and white.
    In his mind’s eye he saw himself standing on the porch of his grandfather’s farmhouse outside Guymon, Oklahoma, watching his father check the knots on the ropes he’d used to secure the family’s belongings in the back of their old Ford truck. His mother stood to the side, her hand resting on the brass handle of the wardrobe that had been passed through her family from mother to daughter for six generations.
    His father had promised to make room for the wardrobe—a promise he couldn’t keep.
    Jessie looked down at his hand. “I can still feel the splinters in the porch pillar of that old house and still remember thinking how I’d sanded and painted it just two summers before. The land, the building, the trees, the wells—everything was in ruin from two years of wind and dust. And yet all I could think about was how hard I’d worked on that damned old porch pillar. . . .”
    The past took hold of Jessie. He slipped into memories of Oklahoma so vivid he wasn’t sure which he gave voice to and which he only heard in his mind.
    Jessie’s Story
    It was my birthday. September 19, l935. I was sixteen years old. Old enough to be on my own. Older than my uncle had been when he struck out on his own, and argument enough to talk my ma and pa into letting me stay behind while they went to California to be with Pa’s brother now.
    No one wished me happy birthday. I figured they didn’t remember, or if they did, Ma told them not to say anything. No sense in making the leaving any harder than it already was.
    I was careful not to let on that I wasn’t as sad as she expected I would and should be. Being on my own was an adventure I’d been living in my head for weeks, and now it was about to happen for real. I would have felt different if I’d known that they would never find my uncle and what the move would do to Pa, how all that happened to him and the rest of the family in California would drive him so deep into himself that he would stop talking two years later and stop eating the year after that.
    When Pa decided