“I hate to ask,” he said on the phone.
“You already asked me to say it.
He laughed, but he was tired. “I have to go back.”
“I’ll get the truck.”
I spent nine days in Chattanooga helping him lead a life that hadn’t worked. We loaded boxes into my trailer, carried furniture down narrow apartment stairs, argued about whether a fallen reclining armchair was worth it and ate takeaway food on the floor because their dishes were already wrapped in the newspaper. At night, he slept on a mattress and I slept on a borrowed couch with a spring trying to tunnel through my ribs. He kept apologizing. I kept telling him to shut up and get up.
Caleb was raw in disappointment. I knew that feeling. I had used my own version after my wife, Rebecca, left seven years earlier. She didn’t go with drama. That could have been easier. He left gently, with tears and exhaustion, saying he couldn’t spend the rest of his life competing with ghosts, earth and pain. My father had died the previous year, my mother two years before that, and I had been buried at work because fences, wooden blueprints, livestock leases and tractor repairs did not ask me to explain. Rebecca wanted a husband. I became a caretaker of the surface and memory.
