Is Hope an Illusion That Lets Us Tolerate the Destruction of Who and What We Are? – A short story by Michael Fine

Is Hope an Illusion That Lets Us Tolerate the Destruction of Who and What We Are?

By Michael Fine

©2026 by Michael Fine

–

She was out of his league.  Above his pay grade.  Not anyone he should ever think about, because she was never going to notice him even if he was standing next to her.  Standing near to her would only happen by accident — if they were in the same room at school or happened to walk down the hall at the same time or were at the same football game or concert, a place crowded with people.

It was summer.  School had just let out.  The sun was strong and the air was hazy with heat.  Everything was green or flowering. The forsythia was covered with yellow flowers. The cars were coated with pollen.  The air itself tasted sweet, perfumed by those pollens, and by the scent of all that greenery, the pine sap, new, pale green maple leaves — and the humus now percolating at their feet, rich and earthy and pulsing with dark life.  Insects flitted in the sunlight, completely uninhibited.  Tree frogs croaked and groaned in the woods, calling to one another, yearning for one another, wanting one another all night long, their lust so thick you could almost feel their hearts pounding and their eyes opening wider in the darkness.

The end of school felt like falling off a cliff.  You were in prison one day, just one more rat in a maze, told where to go and what to think by bells that clanged every fifty minutes, which made you get up and get down and walk to the next class, all your energy consumed by jostling, by carrying books and by locker doors slamming, by the people around you who jostled you from place to place.  And then suddenly, silence.  Suddenly there is nothing to do and no place to be.  Boredom.  Days that stretched for hours and nights that had no logic, where you did something just to do something. Hot days, so all you wanted to do was lay around.  Days and nights of suspended animation.

–

She sat at a table in the back with an adding machine, receipts spread over the table. She punched in numbers and then pulled the handle that totaled the numbers and advanced the paper roll on which those numbers were then printed.

Jack Shandy walked by her when he came in, headed to the back, sweaty from walking over, the skin on his neck and face red from the heat and the sun.  He was in time for his shift but just barely.  He knew her from school, or at least, knew who she was.  He didn’t know she worked in the restaurant.

“You,” she said, as he walked by, not even looking up.

“What?” he said.

“I’ve seen you before.  You work here?”

“I do now,” he said. “Washing dishes and sweeping and stuff.  Just for the dinner rush.  For the summer.  I’ve seen you at school.”

“I graduated,” she said.  She punched in a few more numbers and then pulled the handle.  The adding machine sputtered and clicked.

“I’m Amy,” she said, still not looking up.

“I know,” he said, and she raised her eyes a little but not enough to look at him.

“Jack,” he said.

She entered more numbers and pulled the handle again.

He put his head down and walked through the swinging half doors into the back, into the bowels of the place, where all he ever did was lift, wash, and sweep.  They left him alone with his thoughts, unless someone needed something, unless someone started yelling at him to do this or that.

No one knew he existed.  No one knew he was there.

–

A week later, she was at the table again when he came in, working with the adding machine, her back facing him.  She didn’t see him.  He wasn’t even sure it was the same girl until he drew even with the table.

He walked past her.  She didn’t look up this time either.

She was wearing a red print sleeveless top that had ribbony shoulder straps and was made of a gauzy fabric you could almost see through. Cool in summer.

There was an old black fan on the table that rattled as it turned from side to side.  The wind rustled the edges of the receipts she was working on, which she kept wrapped in red rubber bands. Her copper-colored hair was up in a ponytail.  The back of her neck was white and there were beads of sweat on her neck. A strand of hair had escaped from the ponytail, so she looked a little flustered from the heat but she still gave all her attention to the receipts, so they didn’t get blown about by the fan.  Her shoulders were brown. The skin under the shoulder straps was paler than the skin on her shoulders.

–

He saw her again a few days later.

She was sitting facing the door when he came in.  The bells over the front door jangled as he opened the heavy glass door which slammed shut with a whoosh.  The restaurant had a cat that came in with him, an old grey-green tabby with orange eyes.  The cat arched its back and rubbed up against the girl’s legs.

So she looked up. She had dark brown eyes, almost black. He had never noticed them before.

“Skinny, ain’t you?” she said, when he got close to the table.

“I dunno,” Jack said

“What grade you in?” she said.

“Tenth. Was. Gonna be a junior next year.”

“Got it.  A kid.  Well.  Tall though. Have a nice day,” she said, and she went back to her little adding machine.

He walked by, feeling like the smallest human who was six-foot-one in the history of the universe.

 

–

About three weeks later, as he was walking on Smithfield Avenue, walking home from the Fairlawn pool, Jack heard a thin, high-pitched car horn from the street, which he ignored.  He was wearing a t-shirt and raggedy cut-off jeans, and he carried his bathing suit wrapped in a damp gray towel under one arm. It was 7 p.m. on a Thursday. The sun was setting but the day was still hot enough for the heat to rise in waves from the asphalt.

Jack walked quickly, knowing he was late for dinner.

He didn’t think anything of the honking horn.  People beep at one another all the time, particularly on Smithfield Avenue, where the road is straight but there are lots of school zone signs, so some people drive too fast and some people drive too slow. People  try to turn around in the middle of the block and other people honk at them. That’s all.

Jack was thinking about how his mother was going to give him the cold shoulder when he got home. They would have started dinner without him. Always with your head in the clouds, she’d say.  But it wasn’t my fault, he’d say back.  The clock at the pool was broken.  Even though it was his fault.  He had been in a pickup game of three on three.  He was tall but he wasn’t that good, so he made up for his clumsiness by playing hard, by shouting on the court and fouling shamelessly. He got involved in the game and just lost track of the time.

The horn honked again.  He turned to look.  There was a sky-blue Volkswagen on the street next to him, windows down, its hazard lights blinking. It drove slowly alongside him as he walked.

“Hey tall kid,” a voice yelled.  Jack bent down to see who was driving.

The car stopped and Jack went over to it.

It was Amy.

“Want a ride?” she asked.

“I’m just… sure, I’ll take a ride,” Jack said.  “It’s just a couple of blocks.  Across Mineral Spring and then left.”

Jack opened the car door, climbed inside and pulled the tinny door shut.  The door felt like nothing when it closed, like tissue paper.  No resounding thud.  Jack closed the door hard enough that the VW shook a little when he closed it.  He put the wet towel on his lap and looked straight ahead. He was tall enough that his head almost touched the roof of the car when he sat up.

“Seatbelt,” the girl said.

“Oh yeah,” Jack said.  “These cars have seat belts?  I’ve never been in one,” Jack said.

“I bet there are lots of things you’ve never been in,” she said, as she shifted and pulled the car away from the curb.

Jack turned to look at the girl, incredulous.  He looked at her copper-colored hair, which was again in a ponytail.  This time her hair looked as if it had just been brushed.  She wasn’t sweating.  She was wearing a white peasant blouse and blue jeans.  She kept her eyes on the road and didn’t see Jack looking at her. But she was smiling, just a little.

“Jack.  I’m Jack,” Jack said.

“Okay tall kid,” the girl Amy said.

The light on Mineral Spring was red, and she slowed but it turned green as soon as she stopped.  She shifted and pulled across Mineral Spring.  After about three blocks, Jack pointed to the side of the road where there was a little playground just across the street from the white Congregational Church.

“This is good,” Jack said.  “I live just around the corner.”

“Anything you want,” the girl Amy said, her eyes still straight ahead, with that hint of a smile still there.

She pulled over.  Jack got out and closed the door, not slamming it this time.

“Thanks,” Jack said.

“My pleasure, tall kid,” the girl Amy said.  She turned to look at him for one half second, and smirked as she put the car back into gear and drove away.

–

That was all it took.  The ride that changed Jack’s life forever.  The same heat that was rising in waves off the asphalt now rose inside Jack, from his feet and legs through his pelvis to his chest and back, arms, neck, mouth and throat, all the way to his hairline.  It made the back of his neck and his face red.  It made his hair stand on end and it made him sweat.

She was something, that girl.  Hot without trying to be, or that was how she made it look. Always playing with him.  Always there, tempting him, not exactly ignoring him ever but never giving him the time of day.  Hinting but never promising.  Present but never available.  Around but always moving away whenever and however he tried to get a little closer.

Which he did clumsily. and with so much trepidation that no one other than himself could possibly tell what was on his mind.  You don’t ask a girl like that out.  You don’t even talk to her.  You hang around and hope she says or does something.  Jack didn’t even know what kind of something he was hoping for.  Maybe she notices you.  Maybe she talks to you again.  Maybe not.  Probably not.

That summer, he dropped out of the basketball league that he was in so he could pick up more hours at the restaurant.       

But he didn’t see any more of her.  She did that little piece of bookkeeping on Fridays and played hostess for breakfast and lunch during the week, which was not when Jack worked.

So he’d forget about her for days at a time.  Or pretended to.

–

But then she’d reappear.  She’d walk through the kitchen when he least expected her, when he had on a work apron and his arms were full of dishes or he was pushing a mop.  She wore those skimpy tops that were thin so you could see her bra underneath them, so you couldn’t miss what the bra contained, and she wore tight shorts or sometimes, short culottes.

Or she’d drive up behind him, just after he finished working, and offer him a ride.

Vito, the owner, made Jack into the restaurant whipping boy.  He seemed to love yelling for Jack when there was a spill to be mopped up, when a toilet overflowed, or when someone puked in the hallway where the bathrooms were and it needed to be cleaned up. “Hey white boy,” Vito would yell, even though everyone except Claud the line cook was white.  Vito was short and swarthy, with thick eyebrows, a big nose and big shoulders.  When Amy walked through the kitchen, he’d like as not pat Amy’s ass as she walked by, looking right at her, right into her eyes, and she’d look right back, right through him, and smile her little smile, which usually made Vito turn to Jack and find something new to yell at him for.

–

One Saturday in August, after the evening rush, Jack was on his break, sitting at a picnic table at the edge of the parking lot and feeling a little lost, like there were places to go and people to see out in the world, but he had no understanding of how he would ever get anywhere besides Pawtucket.  People went to Narragansett in the summer.  Sometimes they went to the Cape.  Some people even drove up to Boston.  But not Jack.  He hung around.  He worked at the restaurant.  School would start up again in three weeks and it would be back to the same old grind.  Basketball practice was starting the next week and he’d do that, again, because he was tall, but the truth was he wasn’t very good, and maybe he’d play JV or maybe he’d make varsity if they needed a body, but he’d likely spend the most of the season on the bench.  There was college, maybe, looming someplace in the future, but people in his family didn’t do college.  They were firefighters and cops.  The women were nurses, so they did nursing school. His people worked at Coats and Clark or Carol Cable, at Fruit of the Loom, Standard Box, Hope Webbing, Fram in East Providence or Sylvania up in CF.  One or two, the smart ones, worked at Brown and Sharp.  There was a war on in Vietnam, and Jack didn’t like one thing he heard about it, but he’d probably end up going.  That’s what everybody did.  You go, you keep your head down, you see and hear bad stuff, and you hope like hell you don’t come back in a body bag.  None of this “My country Love it or Leave it stuff” for Jack, and none of that crazy hippie stuff either.  It was what it was.  Life happens.  There just wasn’t anything for Jack to look forward to, right at that moment.

Which was when that girl appeared.

She walked out of the back door of the restaurant carrying a cake box and looked left and then right, as if checking to make sure no one saw her, as if she was pretty sure that no one was there.  The screen door of the restaurant banged shut behind her.  She was wearing sunglasses.  Her copper hair was pulled into a ponytail again and swayed in rhythm to her step.  Her hair almost glinted, catching the spectacular wise light of the setting sun, which also illuminated her tanned skin, accentuating her green eyes and the proud hollows made by her cheekbones.  She was wearing a yellow sundress.

“Hey,” Jack said.

Amy started.  She looked up and Jack realized she hadn’t seen him yet, that he was invisible, sitting still in the shade of a scrawny, misshapen parking lot tree.

“I didn’t…oh, it’s the tall kid,” she said. “My car’s out front.  This is a private entrance, kind of,” Amy said.

She walked over to the table, put the box down, brushed off the bench across from him, and sat down.

“Jack,” Jack said. “I’m Jack. What’s in the box?”

“Cookies and donuts,” she said.  “But you didn’t see anything, alright?  Vito gives me the day-olds.  But he doesn’t want the kitchen staff to know.  People get ideas.”

“That all he give you?” Jack said.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Amy said. “You’re just a kid.  None of your business.”

“Why do you let him treat you like that?  Vito.  He’s married and has kids.”

“What do you know?” Amy said.

“I know what I see,” Jack said.” What everybody else sees.”

“You don’t know nothing,” Amy said. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

“See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” Jack said.

“Say what?  You don’t know what you are talking about.” Amy said.

She stood up and brushed herself off.

Then she sat down again.

“What does it matter to you, anyway?” she said.

–

And there it was.  The relationship they would have for the rest of their lives. Jack, tall and naive, in a certain way, with an open place in his heart for this girl, even though he didn’t know yet that he had a heart.  And Amy, with a thing for men who would use or abuse her, always on the lookout for a certain feeling, a certain twist in her gut that she got from a certain kind of man, a twist that was always associated with disappointment. Pheromones, she would call it, much later, after lots of bumps and bruises. Something she couldn’t see or hear or even taste, but felt.  Either it was there for her, or it wasn’t.  And with Jack, the tall kid, it just wasn’t.  He was a kid, not a man. Even after he became a man, which he did, eventually, after he went off to war and became more of a man than either of them expected he could ever be.

That said, Jack was something to her that she wanted as well, but wanted in a different way, like a doll she liked to hold, that she loved and gave her comfort — and so she never wanted to put Jack down.  He could ask her hard questions about herself.  He listened.  He didn’t judge anymore but weighed and measured in a way Amy couldn’t do for herself.  She’d see herself as she was, for moments, when they were together and knew he heard her, he listened, to who she was without conflict or even anger, which she deserved.  Unconditional love.  Open.  But smothering, all at the same time.

He learned to stay away from her, after many failed attempts to get closer, after she squirmed away, every time, after he knew he didn’t see the light that was in his eyes and the attachment that was in his heart in her eyes or heart.  That wasn’t happening.  It just wasn’t.  He would have to move on with his life.  And he did.

But Amy never let him out of her sights.  She’d disappear for days, weeks, or months at a time, and Jack, in his resignation and quiet heartbreak, only knew enough to let her go – that chasing her would only drive her further away.  But then, just when he’d buried it, she’d reappear, a finch that fluttered in front of a window after having escaped its cage months before, a lone coyote howling at the moon on a moonlit winter night.  A postcard. A phone call.  Then later, a one- or two-word text.  He learned to wait before he responded, to calm himself, and remind himself about what it was, which wasn’t what he wanted and wasn’t ever going to be what he hoped for, despite himself, all these years later.  She was gone, most of the time, by the time he called back.  Later, they left one another messages on voice mail.  That was about it.

–

There was a moment, when Jack came back from Vietnam on leave in 1969, that he thought things might change.  Nixon had become President in January and US policy started to change.  The US began to lean into the Vietnamization of the war.  There were half a million US troops on the ground there, but all that seemed to be happening was a constant drumbeat of deaths, of kill or be killed.  No one in the US or in Vietnam wanted the US there, not really.  The war had become unpopular at home, so Jack and everyone else there felt abandoned, unmoored, and uncertain. In front of you was an enemy that would spring from behind a      cart or a hut shooting or lobbing a grenade. Around you were people whose language you didn’t speak and whose culture was different, try as everyone did to learn it.  And behind you was a country that felt like it was coming apart at the seams.

Jack was lucky.  He was signal corps, which meant logistics, not a grunt in the bush or in the jungle.  But he was at Dầu Tiếng Base Camp , restocking and doing inventory, when the base came under fire.  He grabbed himself an M16 and hunkered down during the firefight, ready to fight for his life if the base were overrun.  She’ll be impressed, he thought, thinking about Amy.  How I’m a man now and ready to fight.  Not just a tall kid, not anymore.

You look at your life differently, though, after something like that, when you are ready to kill or be killed, but also ready to die.  He discovered that his illusions didn’t matter, that all that mattered was what he could see, taste, and touch. Amy mattered too, even though she wasn’t there, as he was telling her, in his own mind, what he was seeing, thinking and feeling.

Then he pulled himself up short.  Give up on her, he told himself.  Stop talking to her in your own mind.  That ain’t happening. Give that up, he told himself.  She still doesn’t know you exist.  Not really.  Walk away in your own mind and never go there again.  You are wasting your life.

–

When the firefight ended, he saw the VC bodies on the ground, and some hung up in the barbed wire in the perimeter fence.  The American dead and the American wounded went out by helicopter first.  A few, compared to the VC.  But too many.

They dug a trench and piled the VC bodies into it.  Then they flew his unit out, back to Da Nang.

–

He thought he was a changed man.

He wasn’t.

–

He got a postcard from her, with a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge.  She was in San Francisco now, the city of love.

–

Which was where he went when it was his turn to rotate out, when Melvin Laird sent 25,000 Americans home, as if that was some kind of victory.

But there were no victors in Vietnam.  Not then.  Not ever. Only dead men.  And women and children, just sayin’.

–

She had a little place on Telegraph Hill, more a room than an apartment, the fourth-floor servant’s quarters of one of those ramshackle wooden houses with gable roofs that had been built into the hill itself, more invented than designed.

He flew in overnight to Travis Air Force Base, got bused to Oakland, got a shower and a clean uniform, and took the ferry across the Bay.  Then he walked to her place from the ferry terminal.

It’s also impossible to picture what it was like then to be in San Francisco after eleven straight months in Vietnam.  San Francisco was still a working city then, with a busy harbor, shipyards and a little fishing fleet, a few canneries, a glass factory, truckyards, oil refineries, steel smelters, bakeries, and a garment industry, and they had just started building the TransAmerica Pyramid then.  The skyline was punctuated by smokestacks belching thick smoke, and cranes lifting girders thirty stories above the earth.  What Jack heard was the clamor and struggle of a place that seemed to have infinite energy – the clatter, crash, and crunch of big machines, train whistles, boat claxons, horns and whistles, the cawing of sea birds, car horns and truck horns, people calling to one another, whistling at one another, and yelling to one another, all at once, and all different from Vietnam, which was a quiet place, which seemed empty by comparison, even as it teemed with people.

He wanted to take it all in. To think. Ready for his life to turn. To make a life at last.

Jack was still tall.  His shoulders had broadened.  He’d grown a little mustache. He’d put on weight and was now as solid as a rock.

San Francisco itself had become unbelievable, a place of unbelievable sights and colors, once you left the harbor and started to climb the hill.  It was a bright day in summer, not hot but breezy.  There was a warm wind off the Bay, so all the flags and many-colored banners slapped and shook in the wind. There were signs everywhere, some carefully painted, some hand lettered, and people of all sorts, colors and descriptions, hanging out on the street.  Fantastic smells – cooking oil, frying potatoes and hamburgers; oleander; fresh basil; the smell of fish and fish heads drifting up from the port, the smell of diesel exhaust and of baked goods and of eucalyptus, which got stronger, as Jack climbed.

He worried about walking in uniform in San Francisco at that time in history when some guys in uniforms got spat on, sometimes, but there was none of that as he walked.  People playing bongos. Fortune tellers. Chinese people.  Pot smoke. Cable cars and their clanging bells.  All mixed together.  As he climbed, the Coit Tower in front of him, he began to see the bay and the land and mountains around the bay, scattered around him like jewels in a jewelry store, one feature more beautiful than the next – the bridge, the bay, the ferries on the bay, the mountains and the sun.  It was like he had ascended to heaven and was looking down on the earth and all its riches, which were laid out at his feet, close enough to touch.

–

Amy hugged him, open to him as never before, when he came through the door.  He dropped his duffle.  He lifted her off her feet, and spun her around, sensing, even certain, that things between them were going to be different, that this was his moment.  He felt the heat of her body against his as he had never felt it before, not from her or from any woman, and it was different from anything he had ever known when he was home in Pawtucket, with girls who were younger than he was, the one or two who noticed him and would, and the more than one or two in Vietnam, their bodies thin, spare, angular and worn, despite how hard they might try to please.  He felt her breasts against his chest for the first time, felt their softness and their expanse, and it felt to Jack as though he had inherited a new world of delight, of limitless possibilities.  It felt to Jack as though he had come home.

Amy got out a bottle of cheap Italian wine, the kind that came in bottles that nested in a straw basket and poured them each a glass, her glasses being old jelly jars pressed into this new role.  Then she put on a record, on one of those record players that had speakers on each side, speakers you could detach and move five feet away.  Otis Redding.  Sitting On the Dock of The Bay.  Scratchy but soulful.  She sat him down on an old couch that had a thin red and yellow Indian print bedspread thrown over it, sat next to him, kicked off her shoes and put her feet on his lap.  Then she reached over, took a tightly rolled joint out of a yellow ceramic bowl on a coffee table, found a lighter in that bowl and lit the joint. She took a long deep drag and handed it to Jack, who took a long deep drag as well and handed the joint back.  Amy stretched her toes and wriggled her feet and before he knew it, Jack was massaging those feet.

“That’s good,” Amy said. “Really, really good.”  She put her head back and took another really deep drag.  Then she put the joint into an ashtray that was on the coffee table, and learned her head back in a way that showed Jack all the outlines of her body, all those curses, all that softness, that rose and fell with each of Amy’s long, slow, deep breaths, as if she was feeling her body and the whole world around her for the first time ever, as if there was nothing standing between Amy and the universe.

Then Amy fell asleep.

–

The sun had set when Jack awoke.  It was dark in the apartment, dusk, but dark, with a line of light on the horizon.  Jack saw the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge and heard the distant port noise, the clanging of bells, the distant ringing of the harbor buoys, the ferry whistles,  and he heard the cawing of seagulls as they drifted about the hill, and the cackling and chattering of the parrots that lived next to Coit tower and congregated in the trees around Amy’s place.
Amy was gone.  There was a crook in Jack’s neck from sleeping sitting up on the couch.  Jack threw his shoulders back to stretch.  He yawned and then he stood up.

The breeze blew through the open windows.

Jack stumbled in the dark and felt around on the wall until he found a light switch, which turned on a light over the kitchen sink.

His duffle had disappeared.  It wasn’t where he’d left it, near the door.

Then he heard footsteps on the wooden stairs.

–

Then Amy was inside.  She carried a large shopping bag, which she dumped onto the kitchen table. She turned to Jack, hugged him, and kissed his cheek.  Jack felt that warmth again, which spread over his chest like butter.

“Fresh mussels and pasta for dinner.  In a white garlic sauce.” Amy said. “I’m so glad you are alive.”

“Me too,” Jack said. “Though I wasn’t planning to be otherwise.”

“I really love you, Jack,” Amy said.

Jack just stood there.  He had no idea what to say.

–

Amy unpacked the shopping bag and moved a few cans and boxes to the counter next to the sink. Then she pulled a chair over to that counter, stood on it, and opened a kitchen cabinet and began to put the cans and boxes away.

When Amy turned, before she stepped down, she was at eye level with Jack, perhaps for the first time ever, and she just looked into his eyes with her brown eyes that were almost black, the pupils still wide, and Jack felt like he had died and gone to heaven.  He had never looked into anyone’s eyes before, not like that, so close up and so personal, into eyes that seemed to admit him to her soul.

“I put your duffle in the room next to the stairs,” Amy said.  “That way you can come and go as you want.”  She put a hand on Jack’s shoulder, to steady herself as she hopped down.

“Ian’s coming for dinner.  You’ll like Ian.  He’s a gearhead.  He fixes bikes.  The Harley kind.”

And there it was.  Jack’s truth laid out for him.

Amy loved him like a brother.

–

The rest of Jack’s life followed without incident, one foot following the other, as he lived the life that fate or God or nature had laid out for him, without interruption.  He extended his tour and went back to Vietnam for six months.  Came home alive, not in a body bag.  Bounced around working this job and that – first as a roofer, then at Owens- Corning until it shut down.  Then he got on at the ACI as a guard, worked there for a year or two but hated it, so he pulled some strings and got hired as a Pawtucket cop, did that for a few years, and then moved to Providence.

He married.  Had five kids.  Got divorced.  Bought a little place in Bonnet Shores.   Then a condo on the west coast of Florida, near Venice Beach. Got a gig running security for RIC, so, not that intense.  Retired.  Played golf.

–

One August late afternoon in 2006, after 9/11 but before the Great Recession, after Kuwait and during Operation Iraqi Freedom, so-called, while the war in Afghanistan was still going on but before Operation Enduring Freedom, so called, Jack drove down to Misquamicut late in the day, after traffic, to walk, sit on the beach, maybe swim a little, watch the sun set and then, he thought, go over to the Ocean Mist for dinner.  He parked his car in the Roy Carpenter’s parking lot and walked over to the beach.  It was still hot but there was a good wind blowing off the ocean.  There were plenty of people around: people at Roy Carpenter’s sitting outside in front of their cabins, trailers and bungalows, grilling sausages, burgers, and fish; people in t shirts and bathing suits, in convertibles and on bicycles and motorcycles, and plenty of people walking on the seawall between the Mist and the little ice cream place close to the beach, which had yellow and blue banners that waved and snapped in the evening sea wind.  Kids.  Hot shots. Teenage girls in bathing suits that were smaller than maybe they should have been.

–

A car horn sounded behind him.  He didn’t think anything of it, so he kept walking. It sounded again, high pitched and tiny.

He looked to his left.  There was a sky-blue Volkswagen driving behind him, its windows rolled down.

“Hey tall kid,” the voice inside yelled.

But it wasn’t any voice.  It was Amy.

–

“What the…” Jack said.

“Hop in,” Amy said.  “Wanna ride?”

“I’m just going to the beach,” Jack said.

“Two blocks.  Hop in anyway,” Amy said.

Jack opened the door and swung in.  He was a big guy now, maybe 230 and now back to 5’11” and a half.  The car groaned and sunk into its springs when he dropped into the seat.

“I can’t believe you’re back in Rhode Island,” Amy said. “I thought you’d be running the Pentagon by now.”

“Say what?” Jack said. “I have enough trouble running my own life.  One war was more than enough for me.  I thought this car would have been through a crusher a hundred years ago.  What are you doing back in Rhode Island?”

“My dad put the car in storage when I went west.  He died last year.  So I’m back to break up the house and settle the estate.  I got a guy in North Providence to bring this baby back to life.  It was in pretty good shape.  Mostly dusty.  89,000 miles on it.  A real flash from the past.”

Amy’s hair, pulled back into a ponytail again,  was now brown with streaks of grey, the copper color long gone.  Her skin was puffy and wrinkled, and she hunched over a little, time having worn away the bones and joints that had once carried her, pert, passionate, and uncompromising, never second-guessing herself, back in the day.

But she hadn’t let herself go either, like some women do when they discover that nothing they do or think ever works out.  She ran or hit the gym.  You could see it.  She was wearing a purple running suit, and she sat up straight in the driver’s seat, compensating for her bent shoulders.  She wore glasses now, bifocals, and she squinted a little when she looked at the road, the crow’s feet around her eyes narrowing.

Same woman though.  To Jack, she was still a beauty.

She pulled into the driveway of the South Kingstown Town Beach and parked just off the beach itself.  It was late in the day.  The parking lot was empty. The setting sun sparkled on the beach.  Seagulls drifted overhead,  squawking and crying.  A few boats bobbed up and down in the waters offshore, and a guy on jet skis splashed over the waves, the whine of his engine mostly drowned out by the smashing, growling surf.   The Block Island Ferry, coming into Point Judith, sounded its foghorn.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess,” she said.

Jack sat for a moment, gob-smacked, as if he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing, as if he couldn’t even remember his own name.

“I still think about you,” he said.  “I still talk to you in my own head, even though I know you aren’t there.”

“Huh,” Amy said.  “You were better off without me. I’m pretty fickle.  Shallow, selfish and vain.”
“I would have put up with that,” Jack said.

“I know,” Amy said.  “But I would have broken your heart, either way.  I get bored.  And impulsive.”

“You didn’t feel it, did you?” Jack said. “Feel it like I felt it.  It was so intense.  That’s what’s hard to believe.”

“I felt it, sure,” Amy said.  “In San Francisco.  And before that.  The first time I saw you in the restaurant, to tell the truth.  I knew.  But it comes and goes for me.  And I knew I would do you more harm than good.”

Huh, Jack thought.  Life was ending for him, and it was sweet, but could have been so much sweeter.

The Block Island Ferry sounded its foghorn again, a long, low blast.

Jack opened the door.  He turned to Amy at the same time.

“But I never understood why you didn’t try harder,” Amy said.  “If anyone had ever been able to tame me, to settle me down, it would have been you.”

She loved me, Jack thought to himself.  She was trying to protect me from herself.

“I could buy you an ice cream,” Jack said, as he reached out to her.  “The ice cream at that place over there is pretty damned good.”

Amy put her hand on Jack’s cheek and looked at him, her eyes into his eyes.  She looked into his soul the way she had in San Francisco, and he looked back and touched her soul with his.

“I love you Jack,” she said. “Always have and always will.”

Then she kissed his cheek.

“And I love you back, more than you know,” he said and started to reach around her.

But Amy straightened, reached for the floor shift, and put the car into reverse.

“Got to see a man about a horse,” she said.

Jack turned, stood and closed the car door.

Then Amy put the car into gear, backed up, shifted into first, and the sky-blue Volkswagen pulled away.

–

Jack stood on the beach, looking at the sea wall and the waves hitting the breakers and throwing up spray which caught in the red light of the setting sun.  The seagulls cawed overhead as they drifted in the ocean breeze.  Tiny little beach birds, piping plovers, scurried about the beach, running toward the ocean when the waves receded but running back up the beach when the sea came flowing back.

Feelings are just visitors, Jack thought.  They go and come like the waves.  It never would have worked out between us.

But there it is.  She got away from me again.

I should have tried harder.  Been better.

But I’m lucky, so damned lucky, he thought, to have lived on this earth at all.

–

Many thanks to Jack Nolan for editorial support and information about serving in Vietnam, to Carol Levitt for proofreading, and to Lauren Hall for all-around help and support.

You can find Jack Nolan’s excellent Vietnam Memoir Vietnam Remix on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-Remix-Jack-Nolan/dp/1543031102

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