The One Who

The one with the daughter in the hospital. The one who can't stop drinking. The one who followed her kid out to Chicago and stayed. The one who checked in from Vancouver. The one who sent her kids off to college and broke up with her boyfriend as soon as she got home. The one who cut her own hair. The one who had a heart attack and retired from teaching early. The one whose wife took their kid and their dog and moved back home to her mother up north. The one who buried her husband. The one living in a tent in her own front yard somewhere outside of Lawrence. The one who moved to Oregon. The one who sat with her dad in the chemo ward, watching TV. The one who's chasing a woman who's not his wife. The one who felt a lump in her breast. The one with the ashes in the urn in the closet, beside the shoes. The one driving back from Atlanta. The one sleeping in his father's old bed. The one who promised. The one who swore and promised. The one who tried, the one you never would have thought. The one you never would have figured.

Cody

When I was just a kid, my parents - who had a habit of picking up sticks relatively unannounced and moving around - moved us from Chicago to Seattle. We'd already been in New York and then back to Kentucky by then. We didn't have any money, but we moved all the time and our credit was good, so usually my dad would drive the U-Haul and my mom would follow behind in the mustard yellow Plymouth Valiant.

I took turns riding with them. I really liked watching my dad shift through the gears with a cigarette hanging down below his moustache, navigating the twists of the Black Hills carrying everything we had behind him, but back in the Plymouth my mom was funny and kept the radio on.

Chicago, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington State. All drawn out on a Rand McNally map with a purple crayon. Wind storms in Cheyenne. Walls Drugs. The Corn Palace. Little Bighorn. The Irma Hotel. I can still recommend a couple of pretty good motels from Helena to Bakersfield to Lordsburg. When we finally got to Seattle it was raining, and after all that prairie dust and sun and rocks and wheat and corn, that rain felt like Oz.

I remember we stopped off for a rodeo in Cody. There was a rider there from Lexington and we cheered him on. Lexington was our home town. The horse was named "Roosevelt" and we were just chasing our luck.