Listening to Dust (11 page)
Chapter 20
The Diner
Stephen remembered word for word the journal entry he had made the day Dustin left. It reflected nothing even close to the devastation he felt as he sat in the diner. Nor could it reflect what was to come.
Can a cowboy tremble? I asked myself that as he left me, as he walked away with my heart in his pocket. And now, as I write this, I wonder when this wretched body of words will end. When will I be as breathless as this misery written all through these pages?
When will I stop being as desolate and un-alive as I feel at this very moment?
When?
“What do you want me to do?” Stephen asked as Robbie stood to help Miss Emily to her feet. He was still numb from what Robbie had told him, but the sudden commotion of the diner had registered on him, brought him halfway out of his shock.
Robbie glanced down at Miss Emily for a moment before he answered. When he looked back at Stephen there were tears brimming in his eyes again. “Don’t forget him,” Robbie said. He looked around the diner. “For these folks here, our family wasn’t nothing but fuel on the gossip fire, but you’re the only one that got to see the real Dusty. He wouldn’t even let me in that far. Don’t forget that about him. Don’t forget that he’s up there right now with the Lord Jesus and a big old handful of balloons just grinning like an old hound dog.” He looked down at Miss Emily again. “That’s all we got left of him now.”
Stephen sobbed and broke, tears scathing his face as his breath came in a hard, blue gasp. He didn’t care that the diner silenced itself again before they all rushed out, or that he looked ridiculous, or that he was probably hated and despised in this place. He only felt the emptiness of Dustin’s permanent absence. He only knew that Dustin would never return; that all the months waiting for his return, all the useless letters he had sent had not brought him back. And now, it was too late. “I can’t forget him,” he sobbed. “Ever.”
“Don’t let it be a painful memory, Mr. Stephen,” Robbie advised. “Let it be in love, what you had, what he gave you, let it be that. There weren’t no time in Dusty’s life that he weren’t in pain ‘cept when he was with you. That’s what you hold. That.”
That silent love, yes
. He looked up at Robbie as he heard muttering from one of the tables behind him. He watched as Robbie’s face turned to stone and his gaze hardened into malice. The murmurs stopped immediately. “Miss Emily,” Robbie said as he held his hand out to help her up, keeping his gaze steady on the now silent voice.
Miss Emily stood, put her gloves on, and scrutinized Stephen for a moment before she put her palm to his cheek and wiped away his tears with her thumb. “I can see why he loved you,” she told him quietly. She pulled her hand from his face and looked around the diner with flat black accusation in her eyes.
After the door closed and the small bell jingled their departure, the only sound was Stephen’s quiet sobbing.
*****
“Mr. Stephen?”
Stephen looked up to find Robbie standing over him; he glanced quickly out the window and saw Miss Emily waiting outside. With confusion on his tear-streaked face, he looked back up at Robbie.
“Miss Emily said to give you this, says it’s rightly yours. Said she
found
it out at Dustin’s place. If it’s what I think it is, they been looking for that.” He handed Stephen a sealed envelope, gave him a gentle squeeze on the shoulder, and turned to leave again. “May want to take that with you before you open it, Mr. Stephen. Folks ‘round here don’t know much about minding there own p’s and q’s,” Robbie said as he glanced around the diner one last time.
Stephen looked down at the envelope, in no rush to pick it up and yet desperate to find out what it said. A note from Dustin perhaps, a letter never sent?
He stood as Robbie and Miss Emily disappeared from view and threw some American dollars at the table. He saw a fifty in there and some other bills but he couldn’t have cared less. He wanted out of this dank place and away from its prying eyes. But where would he retreat to now that Dustin was gone forever?
As he went to the door he heard some muffled hostility and sniggering, but when he turned every eye in the place was looking elsewhere, not one quite brave enough to step into his misery. But he didn’t need the eye contact; their half-hidden smirks were enough. He turned and left the diner and made the quick walk to his car.
He looked at the envelope when he got there, stood in the sun feeling the beige reflection coming off of it, and only then noted Ms. Emily’s monogram embossed on the flap.
“Please,” he whispered aloud as he slid his finger under the flap and tore the paper gently, praying that Dustin had left him something. Anything.
But when he peeked inside, he knew; everything came back to him. Every word in the diner, every hate-filled smirk, every unuttered grievance. He felt them all and collapsed to the ground on his knees, wailing as the letter he had written four months earlier spilled to the pavement.
Chapter 21
Dustin,
I am thinking of you, thinking of the last night we spent together.
Do you remember that night? Me loving you against the cold floor while the wind howled and you clutched at the damp tiles, our bodies ripe with discomfort and heat?
It was the very first time you asked me to take you, voiced a need buried so far in your heart that I never thought to hear those words on the corners of the wind.
I remember how you wept after those words; how you looked at me in terror; how you folded back in on yourself and sent that need deep back down as your tears leaked out.
You trembled when I stopped, when I let your legs down and rose up to your face, pushing that one unruly red curl from your forehead.
I can still feel your smile on my heart; how in that one simple gesture you finally realized that I would never hurt you, that in my arms and my heart all those dark fears didn’t matter. Even now I can feel the heat from your palm as you cupped the back of my head and pulled my lips those last few inches, how you opened your body and begged me with your soul.
You were so silent until that final cusp, until that last breech as you rose to a new plateau of being.
“Please.”
You whispered it in my ear, Dustin, and I finally understood, for the very first time, how hard it had been for you all those times before; how much you had lived in all your past tragedies to get to that point.
I shrunk inside at that moment, collapsed in on myself when I recognized all I had put you through with my own selfish desires. It shamed me when I understood that I been something you suffered, instead of something you loved. It still does.
In that shame I tucked myself in the crook of your neck, ready to break away from you as I desperately tried to hold back the dam threatening inside of me. But you saw that within me, saw what I had just clutched and forced me to open my heart as you had only a moment before.
“Please, Stephen.” I can still hear you repeating it a second time.
When you pulled me back and put our foreheads together I saw you naked, without all those fears, saw your heart swell with the reflection you witnessed in my eyes; and seeing that in your face made me understand that your pain had been necessary, that it had been both river and raft.
And in that I witnessed your understanding and your love for this inept ferryman.
I have never seen that in another’s eyes, Dustin. Never witnessed what all the poets and bards could only hint at with their prose. It shook me to my core.
And so when you left the next day, when you told me you would not return, I fell back in upon myself. I fell back into that black pit and finally understood that terrible poverty you lived with for so long; how much that awakening had scared you in the cold light of the day.
I know I should understand how those long taunts will always be with you; how they will push your instant reactions and make you run from that very thing that heals you.
But I am your willing sacrifice, Dustin; I am the one willing to let you go in the deep hope that you will someday come back to me, come back to that moment and that understanding.
Yes, I cannot breathe without you in my soul, but I also know that I cannot take your breath for you. I understand that now. You left so that you would not be smothered. You left to make the decision in your own air. I cannot deny that process to you, would not deny you now. I know I am selfish in my own needs, but you have taught me this harsh lesson in the very valley of my soul. I cannot say that I will not come to you. I cannot say that I can wait to feel you in my arms again. I cannot say this and be truthful to you.
I love you, Dustin, in this and many more lifetimes. But it has taken took me this long and this many letters to really understand what the depth of that word means, and so I beg your forgiveness for all those unanswered letters before this one; for the pain and the weeping; for the tirades and anger. For everything that was fraught with the fear that I would not see you again.
Finally, I know that when the air has settled and all the past particles of anger and shame have disappeared, we will still have that one moment. It will still bring us together.
The End
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