Arthur knew he was second best from the very first Sunday we walked out of St. Jude’s in matching white gloves and a borrowed corsage. He was a quiet man who worked the parts counter at the Ford dealership down on Fourth Street, and he never asked me to empty that little locked box I kept in the back of my mind.
He just gave me a steady porch, two children who grew up and moved to Albany, and thirty-four years of quiet dinners where the only sound was the refrigerator humming against the linoleum. When he passed away four winters ago, I didn’t cry the way people expected me to cry. I just folded his flannel shirts into cardboard boxes and kept the house at sixty-eight degrees because that was where he liked it. I thought my ledger was closed. I thought people like Ansel only existed in sepia-toned photographs tucked between the pages of old recipe books.
My daughter Clara had been after me for months to get out of the house. She said the walls were closing in, though to me they felt like armor. Last Saturday she finally cornered me, handed me my good cardigan, and practically marched me out to her Buick for the monthly social down at the VFW hall.
The place smelled exactly like it did when Eisenhower was in office, a heavy mix of cheap floor wax, stale draft beer, and winter cabbage boiling in the big aluminum pots out back. Clara went straight for the dance floor to twist around with some retired machinist she had met at the community center. I found a folding metal chair near the emergency exit, tucked my paper cup of decaf between my hands, and watched the crepe paper streamers sway lazily from the ceiling fans. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted my kitchen sink, my radio tuned to the local news, and the quiet dark of my own hallway.
Then the three-piece band hit the opening notes of a slow tune I hadn’t heard outside my own head since the summer of sixty-two. It was “Harbor Lights,” the exact song Ansel and I swayed to behind the old roller rink down by the river the night before his transport train rolled north.
I could still smell the Brylcreem in his hair and feel the brass buttons of his wool blouse pressing right through my ribs. He had held me so tight my feet barely touched the cinders, and he swore up and down he was coming back to build that house with the wraparound porch he had drawn on the back of a cigarette pack. Three weeks later the telegram arrived, cold and neat, saying he was missing in action somewhere in the dense green tangle of Southeast Asia where names stopped mattering. My father burned my letters from him in the trash barrel out back and told me to put on a fresh dress for church.
I sat there in the metal chair with my teeth sinking into the soft rim of my paper cup, letting the old memory ache behind my ribs the way it always did when the dish soap got too hot.
The hall was loud with shouting men and women laughing over the clatter of ice in plastic tumblers, but the noise seemed to pull away from me in layers. That was when I heard the heavy, uneven drag across the floorboards. It wasn’t the light-footed shuffle of the dancers or Clara’s quick steps coming back to check on me. It was a slow, deliberate cadence coming toward my corner. Thump-scrape. Thump-scrape. A shadow fell across my laminate table, cutting off the yellow glare from the overhead bulb. I didn’t look up right away because I figured it was just someone looking for an empty chair to rest bad knees or an old man asking if I had seen his coat.
“Excuse me,” a voice rasped.
It was dry as corn husks in January, cracked right down the middle, but there was a strange old bell tone buried underneath it that hit me straight behind the breastbone. I lifted my chin, my eyes tracing upward from scuffed orthotic shoes, past baggy gray trousers held up by wide elastic suspenders, past a red plaid shirt buttoned all the way to a wrinkled throat. Time is a brutal carver, but it can’t quite chisel away the bones of a twenty-year-old boy if you spent forty years tracing them in your sleep. The high slant of the cheekbones was still there, though sunken now. The heavy brow ridge above the eyes was just as stubborn as it had ever been, framed by a thin fringe of white hair instead of the thick brown cowlick he used to brush back with his palm. His eyes were what stopped my breath dead. They were still that same startling, pale glacier-blue, looking down at me with an expression so wild and terrified I thought for a second I was having some kind of stroke right there by the emergency exit.
He was leaning his full weight on a carved walnut cane, his knuckles swollen up like walnuts under skin scarred by an old engine burn across the back of his hand. He didn’t smile. He just stared at me like a man who had wandered out of the desert and couldn’t quite believe the well was real.
“I’d know that face anywhere,” he choked out, his hand shaking so hard the cane rattled against the metal leg of my table. “Sue Ellen, do you have any idea how long I’ve been…”
His voice cracked right down the middle, snapping like an old guitar string in the damp air. The room around us kept spinning, people laughing and the saxophone squealing a sour note, but the sound was muffled behind thick glass. I didn’t cry. My eyes stayed dry as bone because my brain had simply stopped knowing how to process what was standing six inches from my knees. I had knelt beside a dummy grave in the military section of the town cemetery back in sixty-four. I had watched the honor guard fire three blanks into the grey autumn air while my mother handed me a folded flag that smelled of mothballs.
“Ansel?” I managed to get the word out, though it tasted like metal in my mouth. “Ansel, you aren’t… they gave us a box. They told us the unit was overrun.”
“They lied,” he whispered, his chest heaving under the red plaid as he hauled himself down into the empty metal chair opposite me, letting his cane drop hard onto the linoleum. “Or they didn’t know. We were running black-bag stuff off the grid, deep in the hills, no tags on our collars. I took shrapnel through the spine and woke up in a labor camp hospital four provinces north with a guard who didn’t speak English. By the time I crawled back across the border after the war finally ground to a halt in sixty-eight, I didn’t have papers, I didn’t have a name, and the Red Cross told me my family had already buried me.”
He reached across the sticky plastic table, his fingers trembling so hard they missed mine twice before he finally managed to catch hold of my wrist. His skin was burning hot, dry as old paper, pressing against my pulse point with an urgency that made my stomach turn over. He didn’t let go. He leaned in close, his face working through a dozen different griefs that had no names, looking for the girl who used to wait for him by the rusted-out tractor in the south pasture.
“I stayed away,” he sobbed, the tears finally cutting tracks through the dust on his cheeks. “I found your address three states over back in the seventies. I sat in a rental car across the street and watched you walk out to the driveway with a little girl holding onto your skirt. You looked… you looked like you had made a life. You had a good husband who looked steady and kind. I couldn’t walk up that sidewalk and blow your whole world to pieces just because I crawled out of a hole ten years too late.”
I looked down at his hand on my wrist, at the ragged silver scar across his knuckles where the manifold had burned him the summer before he left. The whole world I had built, the brick ranch, the Sears appliances, the thirty-four years of quiet Sunday roasts and Arthur’s slippers by the heater, felt like a house of cards someone had breathed on. I thought about all those nights standing at the kitchen sink with the yellow Dawn suds up to my elbows, humming *Harbor Lights* into the empty dark because I didn’t know how to stop loving a ghost. Arthur was a good man, but he was a ghost-breaker who lived in the shadow of a man who never came home, and we both knew it every time the wind rattled the back door.
“You think I was happy?” I said, my voice dropping down to a hard, flat whisper that cut right through his crying. “You think having a quiet kitchen meant I forgot the way you smelled like gasoline and river mud? Arthur knew. He knew the day he put the ring on my finger that my real heart was sitting in a shallow grave twelve thousand miles away.”
Ansel dropped his forehead down onto the corner of the laminate table, his shoulders shaking with great, dry heaves of air that sounded like a engine dying out in the cold. He didn’t try to defend himself. He just kept his fingers locked around my wrist like a drowning man holding onto a root over the river bank. Clara was heading back toward our table now, wiping a bit of punch from her chin and laughing with the machinist, her eyes bright and unbothered by anything the world had ever taken from her. She hadn’t seen him yet. She was still ten feet away, humming along to the band’s last shuffling notes as she spotted me sitting across from a stranger in a plaid shirt.
I didn’t pull my hand away. I didn’t stand up and run to the ladies’ room or pretend I didn’t know him. I just sat there in the yellow light of the VFW hall, feeling the old pulse beating hard against his palm after sixty-four years of silence.
