by William Snyder
my
father said, but he’d made his case
to
the Air Force—seniority, specialty—for
Cape
Canaveral. So we drove, in 1963,
from
upper New York state, my father, two
brothers
and me in the Olds, and finally,
Florida’s
east coast, early morning,
and
the bridges across the Indian River,
the
Banana—drawbridges then. Florida
damp
and flat and shimmer, and three boys
and
a man alone from Plattsburg
in
the blue and yellow light, the water
like
rippled mercury beneath the bridges.
My
father, a Major, on the business end of
missile
into space—how he
felt
then, arriving with three boys—he’d
been
in Florida alone for months away from
home,
away from kids, away from wife—
my
mother—my mother who stayed in
Plattsburg
with a lover, with a job—her first—
nightshift
waitress at a roadhouse.
We
boys quiet as we rolled across
those
bridges, down this morning,
no
boats sailing, sunlight shifting onto
wave-face
and trough—it hurt my eyes—lidless
they
seemed. Me, seventeen, who would
discover
Dylan soon—an LP
in
a record bin in the air base store—
me,
who knew Baez already, who knew
much
much more about my mother, more
than
my father knew himself, my father
who
I hated for it all. He hadn’t had
an
inkling of what she’d say when he returned.
Goodbye,
she’d said. And in that car, as we
turned
south on A1A, beach and sea
on
our eastern horizon. I didn’t think about
him—who
he could have talked to,
explained
to, confessed to after his trip to
claim
us, after he heard my mother.
And
how his heart might’ve broken even
more
there, in Florida, with just the slightest
extra
flex—a drop of rain, a slow flat tire,
a
son who would never ask his father’s heart.
