He was driving down Route 460, the long leg of the widest road headed southeast out of Petersburg, where the dark path of the evening was interrupted occasionally by a few deep southern small towns...Disputanta...Waverly...part of the three cities named by General Mahone that included Wakefield which was his marker tonight...his last place to arrive.
It was the first weekend of fall, the evening still struggling to let go of summer. Warm ocean-tinted air flew into the windows and he kept the windows down...and the radio up, blaring Amos Lee on a satellite radio station. She was interwoven into his thoughts as deeply as the humidity clogged the air, impossible to separate and irresistible to worry.
A smattering of headlights from the opposing way illuminated now and again...but mostly he had the road alone to himself.
He was driving to apologize.
To walk up to her, perhaps reach out and grab a hand...maybe both...and just utter his repentance.
Pluck words and more words like slivers stuck in her heart and extract them...one by one. Set them aside and burn them later. Kiss the little holes they left and stop any bleeding.
He pushed the car a little faster.
Wakefield straddles 460 in an almost pentagon shaped county way, with route 603 heading due south towards the Big Woods Wildlife area...and routes 603 and 617 heading north towards the James River. He had never spent enough time down there to truly drive around and notice the names and the numbers...but 460 had always kept him company.
Well...she did too.
She was as uncomplicated as the tides on the James River...she came, she went...she moved when the moon was closer...but she sometimes kept him in her shallows...not really allowing him to plumb her depths that he knew were there...as deep as the drop off as the ledge when the James met the Atlantic out past Hampton.
Lights from a far off ship...that's what he sometimes called her. He knew she was there, far...and he could detect the faintest sign...
But unlike the horizontal metals of an ocean-bound freighter she was more nuanced with curves and angles, she shimmered like the thousand-dimes ocean top, she laughed in a deeply southern silk, and she let her bourbon-colored eyes get him drunk with infatuation.
Smitten. It was a good word...and as a few night bugs painted his windshield, drawn by the stark illumination of his headlights he vaguely empathized as he knew what it was like to chase such bright and beautiful objects.
He sliced through the evening wondering what she was doing...what she was wearing...he had called her and told her he was coming...she had been neutral...a Switzerland in this deep state of Virginia this evening.
It was like he had hit his thumb with a hammer...it was a miscue. A misstep. He had worked all his life to master words with his mouth and his pen...and he wielded them at times like a razor. Carelessly.
And he had cut her.
He hoped not too deeply. Not too scarring. But enough to draw blood, maybe more than when a splinter gets pulled out roughly.
He simply hoped that his rough hewn words could be soothed over....generally the way she had soothed his own tiny spurs.
The air smelled faintly of a dinner and he realized he was coming upon the diner at the edge of Wakefield...a parking lot filled with comfort food seekers and people content in an evening with each other.
He knew her place was coming up in a bit and shifted in his seat.
He hoped he could content her this evening just as well.
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