It Was Easy to See What They Saw in Each Other

The gold wedding band lay at the bottom of the drawer, covered by brown and blue socks, neatly folded boxers, and a small stack of dingy t-shirts with the arms cut out. Daddy never talked about their marriage. All I knew was the stories I made up from the two photographs he also kept in the drawer. She was fourteen when they married; he was twenty-four and in the Army Air Corp. He must have looked a lot like the picture: green eyes that shot off the page, a crooked cocky smile. It was easy to see what they saw in each other. She had a wild look, excited, self-assured in a way that you wouldn’t expect from someone so young, someone born and raised in a town of 300 where the churches outnumbered the stores.

I want to know how they met. He was probably stationed somewhere nearby, Abilene or Anson? Maybe she hung out in honky-tonks near the base. She could easily pass for drinking age in that war time atmosphere. Tall, angular, long auburn hair swept to the side like a movie star.

There’s a story that floats around in my head, more dream than reality, about a marriage even before she met my father, a marriage when she was only thirteen. Maybe I made it up. Maybe someone told me the story, sort of an insurance policy just in case I ever had any admiration for my mother. That was a dangerous possibility. To me she was beautiful, and glamorous, and, well, so sad, all at the same time. She broke my heart, again and again but I loved her all the same.

They must have moved around after they married. I was born two years later in Lubbock. They were settled enough to take me in for studio photographs, not just once but several times. And then the pictures ended, replaced by snapshots.

SMARTZ