by Richard Moriarty
Leaving Home
It’s early August in eastern Kansas, bright and quiet on the morning Charlie leaves home. Told no one he’s heading for college. Right now, his father is mowing the rough around the seventh green at the town’s public golf course where he works maintenance. In twenty minutes, Charlie’s father will hear the 7:06 train pull into the Front Street station and won’t know his son is leaving on it.
On foot Charlie passes the brick ranch homes, the gas station, the football stadium, a bar called The Office, which his high school friends have already started sneaking into––he knows most of them will spend the next couple years doing the same. He cuts through an alley onto Main Street, moving a bit quicker now. He’d left the house still unburdened by the late summer heat and the guilt of leaving his father behind, but the weight of his duffel bag has already multiplied. He’s coming up on the old shoe store two blocks from the station. Now an auto parts shop, it was the town’s only shoe store when his grandfather opened it in the fifties; Charlie’s father still clings to this fact as his main source of pride in the town. And in their family. Because of this, Charlie can’t ever walk down Main without acknowledging the old storefront in some way. “Someday you’ll own something of your own, buddy, you’ll carve your own niche.” His father’s voice follows him as he makes his way to the station, even as he cuts through another alley to avoid the old store.
The hum of the approaching train starts as a whisper but gets louder every few seconds, eventually drowning out the sound of his footsteps, and some but not all of his thoughts. He speeds up again. If there’s going to be a moment when he decides to turn around, to write his deposit at the university in Missouri off as a sunk cost, sign up at the community college the next town over, keep his job at the sporting goods store, stay at home with his father, well, the moment for making that decision is here, and it arrives just as he’s about to pass the golf course where his father works.
There’s no route to the station that avoids the golf course entirely. The course is right next to the depot and the ramp to I-70. It’s the first thing you see when you pull into town and the last thing you see when you leave. Charlie could forget this whole plan; he could just stop by the course, see his dad, bother him for a bit. And he wants to, but it hurts him to even think about his father at the course, still working there in his fifties. Charlie knows his friends make fun of his dad behind his back for working full-time at the same job some of them work in the summers for beer money. Charlie is convinced if he doesn’t leave for college now, he never will. Year after year, living in the same house, working the same job, burning away weekends at The Office. Thinking about what his life could become made his lungs tighten. He slows down and catches his breath for a few seconds before making the last charge past the golf course’s maintenance garage, where the risk of being seen by his father would reach its peak. But as he sprints past, the clubhouse looks empty. All the workers are busy out on the course. He peers out into the expanse of the course and sees several workers in the distance, only discernible from that far away by their work shirts. Navy blue dots with arms and legs, churning slowly through the patchy rough and sunburned fairways.
He’s the only one boarding the train at the station, and on the car he finds only a few passengers, all of them asleep. He glances out the window for one more look out across the golf course. Is that his father pushing a mower near the ninth hole? Charlie sits down at the back of the car and sinks low into his seat. All he can think of or feel is the pure and prickly guilt for leaving his father alone in this town they both grew up in. There’s an urge inside of him––something almost as powerful and perhaps as intricate as the firing gears of the train’s engine––propelling him forward against the knowledge that he’ll never walk the streets of this town in the same way his father and his friends always will. The train lurches forward and quickly picks up speed, its whistle and whine filling his entire body, even the parts of him that ache to be sent hurtling back home.
Author Richard Moriarty lives in Durham, North Carolina. He teaches writing and literature at Alamance Community College. His stories have appeared in Watershed Review, Stymie Magazine, and The Twin Bill.
Artist Cyrus Carlson is an abstract painter from the Midwest. His small (typically 4”x6”) paintings capture moments of attention in a distracted world.
Gulf Stream Magazine 