by Scott Blade
Suddenly, the hospice nurse came in from the hallway and asked, “Is everything okay?”
Her clothes smelled of cigarette smoke, not overwhelming, but beyond faint. She had been here all day. I couldn’t expect her not to take a smoke break here and there and I doubted that my mother could smell it. Still, a nurse who smoked and dealt with cancer patients seemed downright peculiar to me.
The nurse was perhaps 30 years old, shaped like a raindrop—small top and heavy bottom half. She had short blond, slightly curly hair and piercing blue eyes, her most noticeable physical feature. They must’ve been colored contacts on top of her real blue eyes because they were unnaturally blue like the Pacific Ocean—not that I knew at the time what the Pacific Ocean looked like because I had never been there—but they were the color blue that I imagined it to be.
She had a pleasant, comforting demeanor like a monotone clock that ticks back and forth in a subtle, hypnotic, soothing sensation. This quality was an asset in her line of work because calming people was surely something that boded well for hospice staff.
I said, “Everything’s good.”
The hospice nurse turned back to the hallway and left the room.
I looked at my mother with the gentlest expression I could make.
She looked back at me and smiled wider. Her hair was black, peppered with long gray strands, and thick; it was inches thick. For my entire life, she had had long, thick hair. The shortest that I remembered it was two feet long and it probably weighed about two pounds. Now it was draped across the pillow that propped her up. Her hair spilled over the fluffy layers like black lava pouring out over hills and crevices and rocks.
She looked at me and struggled to sit upright. I reached down and held her hand in mine. It looked like a tiny little thing held in a giant’s palm. My hands were like frozen turkeys.
She asked, “How are you?”
I said, “Save your strength.”
She sat upright anyway. I grabbed a couple more pillows and layered them behind her. She fell back against them and rested there.
She said, “I’m fine. Your mother was a Marine, remember?”
I smiled at her, but gave no response.
She coughed for a minute and then relaxed.
I asked, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Listen to me. I’ve got to tell you something.”
“You really should save your strength.”
“Listen to me. Okay?”
I stayed quiet. She paused and the room was filled with a heavy silence. Then she said, “You’re a good man. I was a Marine for 16 years of my life and I’ve been the sheriff for this community for the rest of it.
“I’m a proud woman, but the hardest job that I’ve ever had was being your mother. Raising a boy without a daddy is a hard line of work. But I did all right. I taught you about weapons. I trained you how to fight like a Marine. How to speak like a Marine. How to treat a lady. How to take care of yourself. Most importantly, I taught you how to think for yourself.
“And on top of all that I’ve been so thankful that you turned out so naturally gifted.”
She coughed again for a good few minutes and then she righted herself and said, “I raised you to do the right thing. But there are things that you do, things that you naturally are, that I never taught you. You are the smartest person I’ve ever known. You’re honorable. You’re going to be a great man. The only other man I loved almost as much was your father.
“Use your talents for good. I want you to help people, the way that your father helped this town.”
I had no idea what she was talking about because she had never spoken of him before.
She began grasping at my arm like she was having a quick attack. She coughed some more until it subsided, which was almost as fast as it had come on, and then she began breathing normally.
I breathed in and breathed out.
We were both quiet again for a long moment until she said, “Since the day you were born, I’ve had two missions. The first was to raise you the best that I knew how.
“I’m only one parent. I tried my best to be your mother and father, but there’s no real substitute for a real father.”
She paused a beat, swallowed hard, and then she said, “I want you to understand that I had my reputation to think about. I left here when I found out I was pregnant with you. I drove down to the Gulf Coast. You were born and we lived there for almost a year, but I didn’t make enough money to stay there. Biloxi didn’t have a lot of jobs. It was all hotels and casinos. I worked in one of those resorts for months, working security. Imagine, I had been a cop in the U.S. Marine Corps and there I was a single mother working security in a casino.”
She chuckled lightly and then she continued. She said, “I never made enough money for us. So we returned home and we’ve lived here ever since.”
I followed her as best that I could, but I wasn’t quite sure what she was driving at. She took me to the Coast and I was born there. That was something that I never knew, but what was she getting at?
She paused again. I thought that she was about to have another coughing attack. Instead, her voice cracked and went up in pitch and her eyes brimmed with tears and she started crying. I was 18 years old at the time. I had graduated from high school and I had known my mom all my life. I had seen her enforce the law, beat up guys three times her size, take down criminals, solve murders, look at the most vile things imaginable done to cadavers, and I had never seen her shed a tear or break a sweat, but right then she was crying.
She said, “Please don’t hate me. I don’t want you to hate me. That’s why I’m trying to explain my reasons. I want you to understand.”
I reached out and brushed her forehead in a slow, loving motion. I squeezed her other hand and tried to speak, but she went first.
She said, “The voters in this town can be judgmental. This is the South. And I needed my job back in order to give you the best life that I could.
“So I lied to you. I lied to everyone. I didn’t want them thinking that I had gotten knocked up by a drifter. I didn’t want them thinking that your mom was a slut and that’s exactly what they would’ve thought too.
“But mostly I didn’t want to lose you. I started lying and lying and the years rolled by and before I knew it I had lied so much that I started to believe the lie more than the truth.”
She paused again. I saw the thought process sparking behind her eyes and I saw the hesitation like she had a long-held secret that she was reluctant to share.
She closed her eyes for a moment and breathed deeply; then she let out her secret. She said, “I don’t know why I lied to you for so long. Really I don’t.
“Your father’s alive. He’s not dead and he never abandoned us, not really, not on purpose.
“Truth is that he doesn’t know about you, but not because he left. Because I never told him.”
She paused longer, like she was waiting for some kind of emotional outburst from me. She waited for some kind of sign that I was furious with her like she had expected it or like she had wanted it or like the guilt had torn her up so much that she needed it.
I stayed quiet. No reaction, no outburst, just calm silence. To this day I think that my silence stung her worse than any outburst of rage or anger or spite that I could’ve expressed. There aren’t many things that I regret because I’m not that kind of guy. Regret is something that simply isn’t in my nature because regret is like a sponge; it will soak up all your time and thoughts. But the one thing that I think about from time to time is that moment with my mother and I feel a little guilt about not easing her burden of remorse when I had the chance.
She said, “I wanted to tell him. I looked for him when I was pregnant. You see, he was in the Army when we met, but they said that he was out right after. I wanted to find him and tell him about you, but I didn’t have the chance. Not when I was pregnant.”
She stopped cold and stared at me with those huge pleading eyes. I could see tha
t she didn’t want me to hate her. It broke my heart to even think that she believed that I would.
I said, “I don’t care about him. I only care about you.”
She breathed a long sigh of relief that could’ve extinguished a candle from across the bed and then she said my name. I cocked my head and stared into her eyes, thinking to myself that this might be one of the last times that I ever saw life in them. Only I was wrong. It would be the very last time.
“I was so afraid of what you would think of me. I meant to tell you so many times.”
I felt my heart wrench and twist like it was in a pair of vice grips.
I said, “I love you.”
She smiled. Then she said, “There’s more.”
I nodded.
“The second mission that I set out for myself was to find him. To tell him about you. About us. He deserves to know you and you deserve to know him.
“Your father is a drifter now—completely untraceable, but when I met him he was a soldier, a military cop like I was. He was undercover at the time posing as a drifter.”
She smiled and chuckled warmly at the memory and then said, “He didn’t own a thing. Not one item to his name except for some stupid clothes and these idiotic shoes and a toothbrush that he kept in his pocket.
“A toothbrush,” she repeated and then her chuckle slowed and vanished. A moment later, a hearty smile cracked across her face like she was remembering a lost love. Her eyes stared past me into the corner of the room and up to the ceiling.
Then she said, “I’ve tracked him over the years after I learned that he’d left the Army. I know that he travels with no attachments and I know that he’s helped people all over the place. Tracking him was very, very hard and sometimes impossible. I never could predict where he’d turn up next. But eventually I could figure out where he’d been because he was a drifter. Yes, he most definitely was. But most drifters are poor, dirt poor. And your daddy, he liked to stay in motel rooms. Hell, the first place I ever saw him was in front of a motel.”
I hadn’t seen my mom smile so much, not since we learned of the cancer.
She said, “And eventually I learned that your father had a thing about anonymity. He’d never check into a motel under his real name. So when I started calling motels; I’d ask for management and give them my name with the word sheriff out in front of it. I found that most times they’d fax me a copy of their guest registries. Of course, I never saw his name on one of them, not once, but I did start to wonder how Chester A. Arthur and Zachary Taylor and Dwight Eisenhower were renting rooms because I found all of their names registered.”
She stopped for a second and stared at me, waiting for confusion on my face, but there was none and then she asked, “Do you know who those guys were?”
“Presidents,” I said.
She smiled, still quizzing me even on her death bed.
“So I figured that your father was using the names of dead presidents every time that he had to fill out a registry. Then at some point I couldn’t track him that way anymore. He must’ve started using some other names. Combining them maybe.
“But basically that is your father. A drifter with nothing to lose who wanders aimlessly and helps everyone who crosses his path, anyone who has a problem that requires his kind of help.”
He sounds like a warrior monk, I thought, but I stayed quiet. And as if she knew what I was thinking she said, “He’s like that old show that we watched on late night TV. You know the one about the traveling stranger who helped people along his path.”
I said, “Kung Fu with David Carradine. But he wasn’t actually a wanderer because wander implies that he walked aimlessly through the Wild West, but in fact, he was on the run. So actually David Carradine’s character was an innocent fugitive avoiding persecution. He was also searching for his lost brother.”
She said, “A man on a quest.”
I nodded.
She said, “Now you will be a man on a quest like Kung Fu.
“Take my phone. In it you will find detailed notes, files, police reports, court documents, news articles, videos, photos, and anything that I could find out about your father.”
She opened her right-hand palm, handed me her cell phone, and then said, “Find him. His name is your name. That’s why I always call you by your last name. Not because I am a Marine. It’s because it’s his last name and the only name that he’s known by. He was in the Army. He was a military cop and his name is Jack Reacher.”
She struggled to sit up straight without the pillows. She reached out her arms to me like she wanted a hug. I leaned forward and hugged her tight. She felt delicate in my arms. I tried my best not to crush her.
She pulled me down closer to her and whispered in my ear.
She said, “I love you, Reacher.”
Later that night, my mother died in her sleep. I never bothered to get the hospice nurse because I couldn’t let go of my mom’s hand. She died as peacefully as anyone could and I sat with her, never moving, not even budging, not once. I watched her fall asleep. After she was asleep, I sat back and thought about my happiest memories of living in Carter Crossing, of my mom. I’d lived a good life here. And then halfway through the night she coughed in her sleep, only a few times at first and then the cough grew louder and louder. I felt her hand squeeze mine for a moment and then she was gone. Every part of her was completely still and her hand had gone limp in mine.
I leaned forward and brushed her hair from her face with my fingertips and combed it downward and to the sides. I reached up and felt her face. Her skin had turned cold and the lines in her face relaxed and her chest stopped rising and I knew that my mother had passed on.
Chapter 2
Carter Crossing was a small town, but like many towns it had a lot of lawyers. Most of the county lived within the town’s limits and so all of the court’s business was handled here. On Main Street, past the sheriff’s office, there were four low buildings. In the back of one of them, the one on the corner with odd red and yellow awnings that hung over the sidewalks, was the law office of Chip Weston. His walkway was around the side, past some small shrubs. I followed the stone path back, naturally skipping over the gravel and placing each foot on the stone.
He waited outside his door to greet me.
Chip was a 40-year-old man with an average build, average height and weight. He had a reader’s stare like he went through stacks of books a week. I imagined that when he left his office he probably went home, poured a scotch—neat, and sat back to read a book.
Another remarkable feature about him was his hair. He had thick, curly hair, black and graying around the sideburns.
Chip had been my mother’s attorney and they had been friends for many years. He had learned of her death the same way as the rest of the town. It was the front page of the tiny, little newspaper that a local guy named Robbie Mile ran out of his tire shop.
Robbie had inherited his tire business from his father. Tires were the only thing that his father had ever done. Robbie had gone to school for two semesters to be a journalist. It was rumored that he wanted to leave Carter Crossing and move to New Orleans to work for the Times-Picayune, but that dream was stomped out about four years ago when his dad passed away and left him a small business to run and a mountain of debt to manage. He could’ve turned down the business, watched the bank foreclose on his dad’s building, and let the IRS seize everything else, but that was not something that sons in the South did.
Since Robbie would never have the chance to write for a major paper, he decided that our community needed a publication. He started his paper and it did reasonably well. He charged nothing for it. The people here picked it up at the local diner and a few other places. He turned a small profit off the advertisements.
It was usually boring and only one page in length—front and back, but the townspeople talked about it all the time. It was the only real news that any of them cared about knowing.
Today’s issue read: “Chief Gone.�
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I had glanced at it in a pedestrian’s hand on my way through the town to Chip’s office. I didn’t need to read it because I already knew what it would say. It’d announce my mother’s departure and funeral arrangements, set tomorrow morning, and it had probably talked about her many years of service to the community and her dedication to her job and to her son, name not given. I knew that because everyone loved her.
Chip had called me early that morning after he heard the news of my mom’s passing.
He said, “I’m so terribly sorry for your loss.”
I replied, “Thank you.”
“I need to see you today. I know that you’re dealing with a lot, but it’s important.”
I asked, “Can it wait until tomorrow? After the funeral. Or the next day?”
He paused and breathed heavy on the other end of the line. His voice resonated a kind of regret like he hadn’t wanted to be in this position, but had no choice. With my mother, that was probably true.
Then he said, “Your mother insisted that you come to see me as soon as possible. She left some instructions for you regarding her burial. Unfortunately, I must see you before that. Today.”
I held her cell phone to my ear and looked up at a ceiling fan. It whirred and spun and shook under the ceiling.
I said, “One hour.”
Then I clicked the end button on the phone.
The paramedics had taken my mother’s body away early in the morning. They drove her to the only funeral parlor in town, the Ford-Elder Funeral Home.
The oldest son of the Elder family had gone to school with me. He was about my age. He’d gone off to college after he graduated last spring. He was majoring in business administration so that he could take over the family business. That sort of thing was common practice here. Sons took over their fathers’ businesses. One generation followed the next and the cycle of small-town life continued.
I walked into Chip’s office. He held the door open and greeted me with a warm look on his face and a hot cup of coffee in his hand.
