I’m riding behind Bill along the flat road beside the New River, watching the awkwardness of his muscled legs on the bike. A two-speed rider from childhood, he’s never mastered multiple gears and prefers to stay in fifth or sixth, his legs and arms doing the work of climbing hills or picking up speed. Often, he stands, pumping his legs hard into the pedals, the way a boy of the sixties would race through neighborhoods, playing cards flap-flapping in the spokes of his wheels.

​

Beyond the second bridge on Railroad Grade Road, we pull our bikes into the grass, prop them against a tree, and climb down to the river so we can kick off our shoes and dangle our feet in the water while we munch on turkey sandwiches and apples, and share a bottle of chardonnay.

​

“I’ve got an idea,” I say. “Let’s walk that map. Let’s just do it.”

​

He knows what I mean, my father’s roadmap through France in 1944, yellow and fragile, folded to pocket size, with a distinct red ink line that zigzags from small town to small town headed east toward Belgium. I found it among his World War II army memorabilia. My father, William G. “Bill” Presnell was a first sergeant in the 30th Infantry Division, and an important part of his job was keeping records, many of which were never collected by the army after the war. His small archive includes: letters and maps; a stuffed scrapbook, its leather binding worn apart; a ledger with a roster of his company and records of those killed in action, missing in action, or suffering battle fatigue and other ailments; and an album with over three thousand photographs, some labeled, most of them not.

​

“Save these papers and the other stuff,” my father had written in a letter back home to his sister, Alma, dated early 1945, that I had found tucked in a corner of his trunk. “I’ll get them from you when I get home.” I pictured large boxes of his collection items arriving on her Laurinburg, North Carolina, doorstep, her sifting through her youngest brother’s materials.

​

The scrapbook he eventually put together chronicles his company’s journey from Glasgow, Scotland, to Magdeburg, Germany. His sources were news clippings from the hometown paper as well as Stars and Stripes, obits, postcards, and top-secret memos from headquarters. His handwritten blue ledger records daily troop movements, battles during that same period, and occasional days of rest.

​

Stark black and white photos in the album capture a story of the day-to-day life of the average infantrymen. Soldiers, including my father, drape their arms around young women or roll cigarettes beside bombed-out buildings. Bridges, orchards, sheep in fields, chow lines, individuals and groups in various configurations—the wire section, intelligence, the radio division, and the cooking crew—appear in now faded images. “Father Sullivan” shows up more than once, and an entire page is dedicated to an amusing collection of the backs of young men standing in front of latrines, peering over their shoulders into the camera. Looking at the faces in the photographs, I can imagine what my father’s life as a young soldier might have been, a complex mix of exhaustion, camaraderie, and laughter found in the most mundane moments.

​

My idea to walk the map hasn’t come out of the blue. Since bringing his “army stuff,” as we call it, home from my mother’s house to store in my attic a few years back, I’ve been thinking. The papers are fragile, the scrapbook falling apart, and I’ve pored over it like an archaeologist with her brush, reading the detail, trying to rebuild his story.

​

“Are you with me?” I ask Bill. A career journalist, he loves investigative writing, and asking questions is his strength. “I could take a semester off from teaching. I’m sure you could get some time off from work. We can travel the same roads if they’re still there. We can talk to people.”

​

His smile is all I need to know he’s on board. 

 

“What about Edwin and Ellen?” he asks.

​

“They’re not going.” I tug my shoe over my socked foot and retie the strings, careful not to lose my balance on the bank.

​

“He’s their father, too,” he says. “Whether they want them or not, the boxes belong to them as much as they belong to you, don’t they?”

​

Yes, it’s true. When I hauled the stuff home a few years back, we agreed I was storing it, not claiming it as my own. But neither has ever shown interest in them since.

​

“All right. I’ll ask them if I can use it, but that’s all. They won’t care.” The idea adds an uncomfortable wrinkle to my plan, but I know Bill’s right. I have to ask.

​

That night, home long enough to settle into the house, I sit at my computer and compose a single email to both siblings.

​

“Here’s what Bill and I want to do,” I begin. I detail our idea, perhaps too much, I realize later. I make it sound too good, too exciting, too important. I tell them of our plans to begin at Omaha Beach, to travel our father’s exact route, maybe even find some people who appear in the photographs. “There’s going to be wear and tear on the army stuff if we start digging around in it, so I need to know if it’s okay with you both if we use it.”

​

I hit send.

​

​​

​

The next morning is a school day, and I wake early, so I can hit the road to campus ahead of my first class. On the way out the door, I check my email. Two answers wait in my inbox.

​

“If you’re going, I’m going too,” writes Ellen, who lives thirty minutes from me, though we see each other only a few times a year. Edwin, from his home in Georgia, replies, “You’re not going without me.”

​

All I can think is no. No.

​

I drive to the university and teach my classes, but my mind is not on crafting a good sentence or adding detail to a paragraph. All day, I’m inventing excuses in my head. How can I tell them no, that they aren’t invited? How can I explain that I can’t share this journey with them, don’t want to, the distance between us too great? This trip is for me.

​

That night, I wait to hear the steady hum of Bill’s CPAP machine that tells me he’s fast asleep before I climb the stairs to the second floor where I keep an office. I open the attic door, drop to my knees, and drag out the storage box that holds my father’s uniform.

 

When we lived in the Ridgecrest Road house, the heavy wool jacket and pants hung in Ellen’s extra closet, ready to be lifted off the hanger and draped onto someone’s shoulders. Every summer, we’d pull it out and air it on the backyard clothesline before tucking it back into its spot in the closet, beside the artificial Christmas topiaries and the spring hats. After Ellen and I left for college, Mama bought a wardrobe storage box, folded the uniform inside, sprinkled moth balls across the chest and sleeves, and packed it away in the attic. Every year, when the moth balls would disintegrate, she’d add more. When we cleaned out her house in Asheboro after she died, we found empty seed pods left by squirrels or mice inside the box and small holes on the pocket and chest of the thin shirt, whether the result of chewing or dry rot, we weren’t sure, Along with the other artifacts, I brought the box containing the uniform to my home and stored it in my attic, adding a fresh scatter of moth balls.

​

It’s a standard issue uniform. On the top of the pile is a an olive wool jacket with nickel-sized brass buttons down the front and on the cuffs and brass US insignia buttons on the collar. On one sleeve is the First Sergeant patch with three chevrons pointed down, two pointed up, and a diamond in the middle, and on the other, the 30th Infantry Division “Old Hickory” patch—three royal blue Roman numeral Xs inside an H bordered with an O on a bright red background. Folded beneath the jacket is a khaki-colored cotton shirt, long-sleeved, its fabric so old that it is stiff beneath my touch, and so dry it crinkles when I rub it between my fingers. And beneath the shirt, olive wool pants with a button fly are folded with a crease that has fixed into a permanent line along the front legs.

​

I lift out the heavy jacket, made for cold-weather wear, then ease the fragile, almost waxy khaki shirt out of the box and unbutton the front, fearing each buttonhole will tear if I tug too hard. I slide my arms in and gently rebutton it to my neck. It’s a snug fit, but it’s a fit. 

​

Next the jacket. First one arm and then the other into the sleeves, and one by one I fasten buttons up to the V collar. Another near-perfect fit. I slip out of my jeans and step into the wool pants. Bill Presnell in 1945, according to his military records, weighed just shy of 135 pounds—my weight—and stood 5’11”, three inches taller than me—a tall, skinny, country boy. I step my right leg in and then my left and begin to pull. The waist of the pants barely reaches my hips when it stops and won’t go any higher. The cuffed ends drop down onto my feet, but I can’t squeeze the waist past my hips. I could twist and pull, but in fear of tearing them, I slide the legs down and step out.

​

In the full length mirror, I study the top half of myself. The jacket tugs neatly across my shoulders, the cuffs falling at the midpoint of my wrists. I look in my face and see in my square jaw an image of my father at war. I don’t look like a soldier; I look like the aging daughter of that young man. Still, at that moment, something besides fabric wraps around me.

​

The sleeves around my arms belonged to a healthy man, young and strong, his future in front of him, dreaming about the children he might have one day. The sleeves belonged to a time back when the world was his, and he knew it, and he was somebody, somebody important, somebody a lot of soldiers depended on.

​

I sit in the soft chair by the window, letting my arms be his arms, my chest his chest. I grow warm in his woolen jacket, even though the upstairs rooms are chilly. A full hour later I unbutton the brass fasteners down the front and tug the cuffs to slip the sleeves off my arms. Instead of returning it to the box, I glide the jacket onto wooden hangers from the upstairs closet that used to be my son’s. Shoulders take shape, wrists seem to reach out from empty cuffs.  

​

I hear a voice, as clearly as if the speaker were sitting beside me. “This is not something I meant just for you,” it says. “Take them along.”

​

Only twice in my years without him has my father made his presence known: once, to bless his grandson, his namesake, shortly after the child’s birth; later, to encourage my writing during a low period. I’m not given to hearing voices, so when one breaks in, I listen.

 

_____

 

My father didn’t have to die twice, but he did, first from a failed surgery and second from my mother’s words: “We won’t talk about him. It’ll be easier that way.”

​

No one mentioned him except a friend, new to town, who wanted details I refused to provide and, almost ten years later when I was in my early twenties, an older woman who asked how I was doing with his death.

​

“I hate him,” I told her, without hesitation. “If he’d loved me, he would have lived.”

 

She was surprised by my response, questioned it, but never asked again. Hate was the easiest way to excise him from my memory. Denial was a close second.

​

But when loss piles on to loss, as happened to me, its weight increasing like snow on a roof, eventually the rafters give way, and the house comes down.

​

My house had begun its collapse, but I didn’t know it yet, that muggy July morning in 1985, sixteen years after his death, when I drove an hour and a half from my Somerset, Kentucky, home to Lexington. I found the clinic office tucked in a shopping center less than a mile from the sprawling campus of the University of Kentucky.

​

A few months earlier, I’d left my college teaching job in North Carolina to join my husband Bill in southeastern Kentucky where he’d taken a job as a reporter for the statewide newspaper. In addition to being unemployed and in a state where I knew no one, I was four months into my third pregnancy with no child born, and I was scared to death.

​

Helen, my new therapist sat across from me in a green upholstered chair, her hands cupping the ends of its arms, her wrists heavy with bracelets. I’d sunk into the deep sofa opposite her, my legs crossed, my arms folded above the pooch of my growing belly.

​

 I liked her immediately, her smile, the way she focused in on me, as though I mattered. She didn’t take notes. Instead, she leaned in and listened, smiling, in a way that told me whatever I said would be all right. I’d spent most of my life learning how to lie. Telling the truth didn’t come naturally for me, but something about her made me feel safe enough to try honesty for a change.

​

My obstetrician had assured me all was well with the pregnancy, but I didn’t believe him. My sadness following two miscarriages within the last year was so severe that some nights my whole body ached as I lay in bed trying to sleep. I knew how to lose things, I reminded myself. Don’t get too confident, don’t hope too much. A healthy, growing fetus at four months should have been reason to feel hopeful. Any minute, I expected blood to spill again, and this latest life to end.

​

“What is wrong with you?” my husband Bill had asked over and over. “Why can’t you be happy?”

​

I didn’t know. Happy was not something I was. Every gurgle in my stomach, every heartburn in my chest or pain in my belly felt like another death was imminent. That was why I was here, I told Helen as we began.

​

She asked about my family. Brother, yes, and sister, both older. No, I don’t see them often. We’ve never been close. Mother? Still living, I told her. Educated, hard-working, a bit over-protective.

​

“Your father? Tell me about him.”

​

I hesitated, as I always did. My chest squeezed, and I looked away. “He died.” I couldn’t keep my voice from shaking. My eyes pooled with tears, and I couldn’t stop that either, though I did my best to blink them away.

​

At night, lying in bed not sleeping, I would pull the twin frame of my parents’ photos from the top of my nightstand and stare into my father’s face, remembering him, listening for his voice, and if I could only hear it, imagine what he’d say to me. I was supposed to have forgotten about him years ago; instead, I carried him around with me daily, unable to let him go.

​

She nudged forward. I’d caught her attention. “I’m very sorry. Recently?”

​

“Um, sixteen years.”

​

“Sixteen years? What happened?”

​

Behind her, books on psychology, literature, and art lined her shelves. She handed me a box of Kleenex, a dead giveaway that I wasn’t fooling her.

​

“It’s not something I talk about,” I finally said.

​

I hadn’t forgotten the smell of his soap or his big ears. I hadn’t forgotten the kitten fluff of his hair on those nights he would let me rub his head as he sat reading in the recliner. I hadn’t forgotten his voice on those afternoons when he pushed open the back door, home from the textile mill, and called out, “Law me!” to anyone near enough to hear him. Or how he’d unknot his tie and wrestle the top button of his shirt free, and soon he’d head out the back door in his Bermuda shorts and loafers, hauling dirt into Mama’s new azalea garden, dragging rocks to the back yard, his suit and tie tossed into a chair in the bedroom.

​

Helen scooted so close to the edge of her chair I thought she was going to stand.

 

“Sixteen years, and you don’t talk about it?” No one had ever spoken to me that way before, so direct and intense, and it was oddly comforting.

​

“Do you see you are living on a fault line?”

​

I was startled. His heart had always been my heart, his brown hair my brown hair, that way he stood with his hands behind his back the way I stood with my hands behind my back, but I knew better than to talk about him.

​

Her words rang through my head, crisp and lingering: You are living on a fault line.

​

I knew she was right the minute she said it. She’d found me out, uncovered my secret. My father had died. I had missed him every single day for sixteen years. I was holed up in a broken house of old grief, deep sorrow, a daughter’s inability to let go, and the walls around me were beginning to crumble.

 

_____

 

Later that night, when the house was quiet, and no one was heading up the walk with a casserole or vase of flowers, Mama lingered in the kitchen, shuffling plates of food from the counter to the refrigerator and wiping up crumbs from the counter. Ellen followed Mama’s instructions, covering open containers with lids or foil, and Edwin dropped down at the kitchen table and sat for what must have been the first time in two days. I didn’t know what to do, so I straddled the doorway to the den and began inching towards my bedroom.

​

“I need to talk with you three now that we’re alone,” Mama finally said, her voice hoarse. She eyed the limp dishrag, glanced over at Edwin, and then turned her eyes back to the countertop. Darkness poured in the kitchen window, and beyond the den, only a faint light shined from the back bedrooms.

​

Too weary for questions, we fell in line behind her to Ellen’s room where we could gather in soft light. Even Edwin, now showing fatigue, dragged, following last and not speaking. Mama sat, her back straight, on the pillow end of my sister’s twin bed, the one that had been mine until I moved into my own room four years earlier. The light from the nightstand cast a flat beam.

​

Edwin stood by the bedpost as though he needed something to steady himself until Mama said, “Sit down, Edwin,” and, sliding his hand down the post, he dropped onto the bed’s edge. Mama was still wearing her funeral dress, black and pencil thin, with delicate pearls around her neck. She looked beautiful, like Jackie Kennedy, I thought; an elegant widow. Dark moons around her eyes told a harsher story.

​

Ellen and I chose opposite beds, facing each other. I fixed my gaze on the shag carpet and the hemmed edge of the blue coverlet, looking anywhere except my mother’s dark eyes. Her long fingers traced the stitching on my sister’s blue bedspread.

​

“Things have changed for us,” she began. I caught myself looking at her before I shot my gaze back down to my brown loafers. “But we’ll be fine. We’ll go on with our lives as usual. Ellen and Barbara, you can stay home from school tomorrow, but on Tuesday, you should go back.”

​

Ellen and I traded glances. I didn’t want to go back to school, not tomorrow, not Tuesday, not ever. Ellen started to speak, but Mama cut her off.

 

“There’s nothing for you to do here. I’ll stay home this week to take care of matters, but then I’ll go back to teaching next week. Edwin, I’d like you to stay a few days, if you can, but then get back to Clemson. I don’t want you to sacrifice your grades over this.”

​

“I’ll stay as long as you want,” he said, looking down.

​

“You know what your daddy wanted, for you to do well and finish at Clemson.”

​

He nodded, scratching the knee of his pants as though a spot lingered there. I didn’t see a stain, but his fingernail moved back and forth, making a faint scritch-scritch.

​

“Edwin is now the man of the house,” she continued. “That’s what your daddy would have wanted. Ellen and Barbara, you will help me take care of things, doing what your daddy would have done to the extent you can. Life will be different, but we will be fine. We don’t need to dwell on this, we don’t need to fall apart. We are strong. We will move on.”

​

She paused. It was remarkable to me that she wasn’t crying, though her brown eyes were hazy and distant, as if she wasn’t here, sitting on the edge of the bed, as if none of this had happened, and I’d wake up tomorrow morning to Daddy’s runny scrambled eggs.

​

“I know you loved your daddy, and he loved you,” she continued. “I’m not saying it will be easy. But we won’t make it any easier by going on and on about it, especially in front of others. We’ll pull ourselves together.”

​

I didn’t know how to attend school on Tuesday and pretend nothing had happened. Everybody would stare at me, because they’d know, but they wouldn’t say anything. I didn’t know how I would get to school in the mornings without Daddy driving me on his way to work. Or how to go to sleep at night knowing he wasn’t asleep in the recliner, a book in his lap. Ellen would be fine. She’d nestle in the comfort of her friends and school. Edwin would be fine. He’d buck up, go back to South Carolina, and do what Daddy wanted.

​

“Do you understand me, children?” she asked.

​

Ellen began to sniff back tears.

​

I looked to my mother for further instructions on how to live as she expected, but her face offered none. I didn’t know what to do, but she was my mother, my only parent now, if I didn’t count Edwin, and she knew best. We wouldn’t talk about him again. We’d move on. We were strong that way. We’d show everyone how fine we would be.

​

 By Tuesday, when Ellen and I returned to school, skies had returned to blue and daytime temperatures began to climb toward the seventies, much too high for March. Pink, red, and white azaleas Daddy had planted along the front of the house and beside the driveway wall began to burst from their buds, erupting out of season. So many people had sent azalea bushes as memorial gifts that a few weeks later, Mama had a bed for them built in the front yard, a dozen azaleas, all colors, just outside her bedroom window where she could see them every morning when the sun came up, every evening as she closed her curtains. Their twenty-two year marriage had ended; their love for one another never would.