Summer Avenue

The Habit

Chapter 14: Summer Avenue

He left Knoxville at 5:40 on a Saturday morning and pointed the truck west.

The city was still half asleep. Magnolia nearly empty. The interstate ramps carrying that gray first light that makes all exits look provisional. He drove with coffee in the cupholder and the school picture in the passenger seat, tucked inside the envelope because putting it in his wallet had felt too close to imitation.

Past Nashville the state opened up.

East Tennessee is all insistence. Ridge, river, slope, turn. West of Nashville the land relaxes. The fields widen. The sky remembers horizontals. Towns stand back from the road instead of pressing up against it. Noel had not driven to Memphis in twenty-nine years because he had never had a reason to go where his father had gone. Now he drove through the flattening country with the curious feeling that geography, like injury, becomes less absolute when you cross enough of it in one sitting.

The diner was off Summer Avenue because Renee said it would be easy for him to find and because she did not trust downtown parking on a Saturday, which was the first thing she said when she slid into the booth across from him and it did more to make her real than any family resemblance could have.

She looked like Elton around the mouth.

Not enough to be startling. Enough to create an intermittent dislocation, as if certain expressions arrived from a file Noel had not opened in years. She was smaller than he expected, with close-cropped hair and a green blouse that had been ironed in the practical rather than decorative sense. A woman who had made time for neatness because she preferred the world to know she had chosen it.

"Traffic all right?" she asked.

"Fine."

"I got here early and ordered coffee because I figured if you didn't show up, I could pretend that's why I came."

He looked at her. She shrugged.

"I planned for several outcomes."

"That seems fair."

They sat with the menus longer than the menus required. Then they ordered pancakes they were not especially hungry for and eggs they mostly pushed around the plates.

The first fifteen minutes belonged to biography. Ages. Jobs. Memphis neighborhoods. Ruth's death. Elton's death. Renee had worked medical billing for eleven years and could explain exactly why every person in the country hated their insurance company. Noel told her about city inspections. She laughed once and said, "So your whole life is people calling too late about water damage." He said, "More or less," and that became, unexpectedly, their first shared joke.

Then the talk moved, as talk eventually does when two people share a wound and not much else, toward the wound itself.

"He didn't leave us like he left you," Renee said.

Noel waited.

"He stayed in the house," she said. "But he had a way of going absent while sitting ten feet away. He could fix the garbage disposal and miss a recital in the same afternoon. He was good at repair when the repair had edges. Not so much when it had people."

Noel cut his pancake into quarters he did not eat.

"My whole story about him is that he left."

"Mine isn't." She looked down at her coffee. "That's the problem with mine."

The sentence settled between them cleanly. He understood it at once. A clean abandonment can be hated from a distance. A partial father has to be measured in fractions, and fractions are harder to carry because they shift in the hand.

"Did he talk about Knoxville?" Noel asked.

"Only in pieces. Your mama's name once. Your street one time when he was giving me directions to something else. He said East Knoxville like it was both a place and a mistake." She looked up. "I don't mean that ugly."

"I know."

"He said you liked marbles."

Noel stared at her.

"One night when I was maybe nine," Renee said. "He emptied change out of his pocket onto the table and I asked if he ever played marbles, and he said, 'My first boy did.' That was it. Then he went outside to smoke."

The waitress refilled their coffee and the interruption helped. Some truths need a ceramic mug set down between them before anyone can look straight at the table again.

Later, when the conversation had gone thin from use, Renee reached into her purse and slid something across the table.

It was the original school picture.

"I know I said I was keeping the originals," she said. "But not that one."

He put his hand over it without picking it up.

"Thank you."

"You don't have to say thank you every time I hand you proof you existed."

He looked at her. Not offended. Steady.

Renee lifted one shoulder.

"Sorry. That came out sharper than I meant."

"No," Noel said. "It came out right."

They talked another half hour, now easier because the structure had survived its first real load. Before they left, Renee stood in the parking lot with one hand on her car door and said, "If you ever want to come back, Lila would like to meet you. She thinks everyone I talk to on the phone becomes a permanent feature of the house."

"I might," he said.

"That'll do."

He drove east in the afternoon sun with the school picture on the seat beside him and the odd, disorienting sense that his father had become both less mythic and less excusable in the span of a single breakfast.

That night, after Knoxville and the porch and the familiar kitchen had closed around him again, he wrote:

Took I-40 west and met Renee in a diner off Summer Avenue. She said he could disappear without opening the front door. I understood her too quickly to pretend otherwise.

He closed the notebook and sat with his hand on the cover.

The sentence did not feel like resolution.

It felt like corroboration.