Prose_excerpt

Weldon is missing. Rebecca drops their three children at school and drives out to his cabinet shop, past fields of ochre corn stubs and the last scattered suburbs of Asheville. She barely notices the morning, full and bright with October chill.

“Damn,” she mutters when she sees the dark windows and bolted door of Weldon’s woodshop. The cedar-shingled building has become a mecca for tourists hunting handcrafted cabinets. The parking lot will be packed in a few hours with cars from Florida and the Midwest. She lifts the bag of breakfast food and coffee she packed, then sets it back down beside her. She wants her husband to be there, running thick, work-hardened fingers through his feathery hair and talking in the slightly distracted way he does when he’s thinking about the day ahead.

Curtis, Weldon’s right-hand man, will open the shop soon and know what happened when he hears her phone messages. She’d called five times during the night to see if Weldon wound up there, amid the neatly stacked hardwood and fragrant wood shavings that are his refuge. All five of Weldon’s employees have been through the VA hospitals. Weldon trusts them in ways that make her feel childish. They were breathing fear in Vietnam when she was only ten.

She turns on the radio, a mistake. The drone of reports from Afghanistan and Iraq are a daily background now to the gilded autumn air around them. She flicks it off.

The rumble of approaching jets had surprised her the night before, but she hadn’t felt any special alarm, even when a tremor ran through her soles at their approach.

“Do you think this is some sort of mountain training flight?” she had called into the den where Weldon was watching special Iraq coverage on TV. She could see one corner of Baghdad going up in flames.

“Asheville isn’t close enough to an air force base for this kind of racket,” she said, walking into the den, but Weldon didn’t answer. He was crouched in front of the TV, absorbing every garish word and muffled explosion. His face was blank except for a furious tick above his left eye, the most reliable indicator that his equilibrium, his daily common sense, was vacating his body. She crossed the room, took the controls from his hand and switched off the TV.

“Weldon,” she said, kneeling in front of him. “You have a sixty-thousand-dollar maple kitchen to install next week.” Sometimes if he heard the jangle of everyday currency he’d come back before his reason disappeared in the war-mangled sections of his mind. Times like this made her sure Vietnam would inhabit them forever.

She still has fifty-six minutes before work to search for Weldon. She drives to the woods that stretch below the VA complex. She and Weldon had walked there twelve years before, when he had to stay on hospital grounds during her visits. He identified trees for her on those walks, describing how each one’s wood could be used. It helped them forget the hospital looming above with its pillaged residents.

She parks and walks down to a stream by the woods. “Weldon,” she calls. Sharp-fingered oak leaves fall around her, as if her calls are cutting them loose for winter. She had been so sure that marriage and kids had cured him.