Jennifer
Cletus and I spent a long twenty minutes in complete silence.
We left the auto shop in my car, but he drove. He drove north on the Parkway for about fifteen minutes. The autumn colors streaked by in a blur of yellows, oranges, and stubborn greens against a crisp blue sky. Less often, I’d spot a sourwood with leaves that appeared purple.
They weren’t purple; they were burgundy. But few people took the time to really look, so the leaves were called violet and that was that.
Eventually, he took an unmarked turnoff and another five minutes passed. At first, I was quiet because he was quiet, and the events of the late afternoon deserved contemplation. But after contemplating and finding all my conclusions reached nonsensical dead-ends, I broke the silence.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
His eyes cut to mine, then moved back to the road. He readjusted his grip on the steering wheel. “There’s this spot up here I want to investigate.”
“Oh. What kind of spot?”
“A stream. Jethro told me about it. It’s a short hike, but since you’re in sneakers I thought we’d check it out.”
“Sounds good.” Despite feeling excited, I arranged my features into a mask of polite interest. My brother and I used to go hiking when we were kids, but I hadn’t been hiking in years.
“Afterward I’ll take you home,” he said, though it sounded like he was talking to himself.
“How will you get home?” I asked just as the small paved road became a gravel one.
“I have my ways,” he said.
Cletus’s middle name wasn’t “Evasive”, but it should have been
Another few hundred feet and Cletus pulled us to one side and parked.
“Do you have any room over there? Can you climb out this side?” He eyeballed the foliage pressed against my window.
“Yeah, I can climb out the driver’s side.”
I made quick work of it, glad I was in my sneakers and jeans so I didn’t have to worry about inadvertently flashing him.
Once we were both out of the car and he’d locked it, Cletus pointed to a trailhead some thirty feet away. “It’s just there. I’ll go in first. Jethro said the ground can be uneven.”
“I see it. That’s fine.”
I walked alongside him, turning once to look back at my car and our hands bumped. I jerked mine away instinctively, earning me a frowning side-eye from Cletus.
“Are you sure you want to come along? I can come back later on my own.”
“No. I want to come. I like to hike.”
“Really? You go hiking often? It wasn’t on your list.”
“I haven’t gone in a while, but Isaac and I used to go all the time.” I tucked several strands of hair behind my ear; the bundle had been coming lose from my ponytail all day but I’d been too busy to pull out the hairband and twist it back up.
“That sounds like a good memory.”
“It is. We used to go every weekend for a few years. We’d do geocaching, where you use the GPS and write your name down on a list, or swap a trinket.” I nodded distractedly, a sudden melancholy squeezing my chest. Isaac had returned, but he hadn’t returned to me.
“When did you stop? When he left for the army?”
“No. Before that. My feet grew too big for hiking boots and my momma never replaced them.”
Cletus nodded but said nothing, frowning absentmindedly.
I should buy some hiking boots.
I wanted to, but my cash reserves were running low after my last shopping spree. I hesitated asking my momma for money. Things were strained between us recently and she’d taken to giving me the silent treatment most of the time.
Or you could, you know, demand that she pay you for working eighty-hour weeks.
My pen pal’s advice, about formalizing my employment with the bakery, was making more and more sense. I was seriously growing to resent having to ask for money I’d technically earned.
What twenty-two-year-old had to ask their mother for money? Yet worked full-time . . .
At the entrance to the trailhead, Cletus turned in first. It was too narrow to walk side by side. Jethro had been right, the ground was uneven and the path wasn’t well marked. But Cletus seemed to know how to read the way. I followed and relied on tree trunks to keep my balance as the ground shifted.
We were about fifty feet along the trail when I took a moment to appreciate the beauty around me. Light was different in the forest, beneath the canopy. And the autumn foliage created a different light than the summer forest. It was both dimmer and brighter, which made no sense. Dimmer due to the absence of indirect sunlight; but brighter because the sun’s rays were diffused by the golden colors of fall.