Free I Want to Show You More (9780802193742) by Jamie Quatro Page B

became Lookout Mountain, Tennessee.
    It was here, at the border, that Eva usually turned around, so that by the time she came home to the Adirondack rocker on her front patio, she had covered just over a mile of ground. Today would be different. The post office was on the Tennessee side, 1.7 miles from her front door. She’d had Quentin look it up on his laptop computer. Round trip: 3.4. She had not walked this far in twenty years.
    She stood and, clutching the handle of her umbrella, again began her slow, measured steps. With her free hand she brushed off the backs of her pant legs and adjusted her top. She was wearing a threadbare sweater with an orange “P” knitted into the black fabric. It had been a gift from her son Thomas, who, after one semester at Princeton, joined the Army and was killed in a village in the Batangan Penninsula when he went into the jungle to relieve himself and stepped onto a booby-trapped 105 round. One arm was found hanging by its sleeve from a branch twenty feet above the ground. At least this was the story she heard coming out of her mouth when people asked about the sweater. Sometimes she forgot and said she didn’t know where the sweater came from, and when she said this, it was as true as when she told the story about the dead son. She wasn’t always sure if the thing had actually happened or if it was just something she read in a book. When she told the story, she felt she had not even known the boy in the jungle; she told it without emotion, as if describing a scene from a stage play, the boy who stepped onto the booby trap just an actor who was now carrying on another life somewhere.
    When she finished telling the story she would berate herself. “His own mother,” she would think. What kind of mother stops feeling grief for her son? What kind of mother must I have been? She could not remember. And there was no one left whom she could ask.
    But no one talked to her about the sweater anymore. If anyone spoke to her at all, it was, “Miss Eva, why must you take your walk along this busy road? You know when the fog sets in we can’t see you coming or going. Miss Eva, you’re going to get yourself run over.” But most people in town could not imagine what it would be like to drive along Lula Lake without watching for Miss Eva. Single-handedly, between 7:30 and 8:45 A . M ., Eva Bock kept the speed limit in check.
    The truth was she could no longer remember why she walked this road. “It’s the way I know,” she said when people asked. When she’d formed the habit, Lula Lake was not paved. Where the gas station and pharmacy stood had once been a grove of peach trees. But these were details that, most of the time, she could not recall. This morning, for example, she could think back only as far as yesterday’s walk, when Phyllis Driver came out of the convenience mart and offered her a cup of Barnies coffee. She turned it down. The cup was brown with a picture of a man wearing glasses drawn in yellow lines. Phyllis was wearing a watch for people with vision trouble, large black numbers on an oversized white face. It read 8:10. Eva could remember these things—the time, watch, cup, “Barnies.” She could not remember her own son.
    Sometimes she did remember things, usually when the season was in a time of change, but they were memories from her childhood. When one of these memories broke over her she would laugh and clap her hands against her thighs. One October morning, she stepped into the Mountain Market, flushed and shaking. Lorna Ellis, the cashier, put out her cigarette. “Gambling!” Eva shouted. “At the college!” Except for smears of red in the corners, her lips were colorless and wet with saliva. The skin on her face was like a delicate system of roots. Miss Eva beckoned and Lorna followed her out onto the stoop. With her umbrella, Eva pointed to the ridge above the Methodist church, where the