1968. The tag said DOBBS, CURTIS L., and my brother and I stared at each other like two children caught in a lie. “That is the first husband of Mama,” Dwayne whispered. “He has been gone fifty years, Rhonda.” I lifted the binoculars again and found the little white house. On the porch swing sat a very old man in a wool cap, thin as a fence rail. He raised one hand and waved at the mill, slowly, like a man waving at someone he has known all his life. Then he lowered it, and my knees went soft. I did not know whether to laugh or cry, so I did both.
We did not wait for the sun to move. We drove down off that hill and over the river bridge at Linder Shoals, and neither of us said a word. The red door was open before we parked. The old man stood in it with both hands on his cane, and he looked at Dwayne, and he looked at me, and he said, “You have your mother eyes, girl.” His voice was gravel and kindness. “I figured Harlan would not be coming Saturday. Come in. The coffee is on. It has been on for thirty years.” Rain had started to fall on the river, and the bridge shone like a ribbon.
His kitchen was spotless. There was a calendar on the wall with every first Saturday circled, and a flag folded in a frame. Curtis Lee Dobbs told us the whole thing without once raising his voice. He came home from Vietnam in 1970, after a long time in a hospital overseas, and by then Mama had been told he was lost and had married my father. “I stood across the street from your church that Sunday,” he said, “and I watched her laugh. And I turned around. A man should not take a laugh from a woman.”
The man across the river was the lost first husband of Mama, and our father had quietly kept watch over him for thirty three years.
“Your father found me anyway,” Curtis said. “Harlan and I were boys together on this river. He saw me at the bus station in Atlanta and he sat down beside me and cried like a baby. He promised me he would never tell her unless I asked. And I never asked.” Curtis smiled at the window. “He helped me buy this little house in 1991, the same year he closed the mill. Then he put his flashlight and his coffee up on that top floor, where he could see my porch light. Every first Saturday he checked that it was on.”
Dwayne sat down hard in a kitchen chair. “The boards,” he said. “He fixed every step on that stairway.” Curtis laughed, a dry happy sound. “So I would not worry about him climbing, he told me. He said he wanted the best seat on the river. And he would not sell that mill for any brewery, son. He said a man cannot sell the only place his friend can see him from.” Dwayne put both hands over his face. I thought of a church on Easter Sunday and a word my brother had been called, and I wanted to take it back.
“What about the Fourth of July?” I asked. “Mama said to leave him be.” Curtis nodded. “Fireworks still take me back to a bad place, honey. So on the Fourth your daddy would bring a radio and a thermos and sit in my kitchen with all the windows shut, and we would listen to ballgames until it was quiet. Your mother knew. Once, in 1988, she left a pecan pie on my porch. No note. Just the pie. I have never tasted a better one, before or since.” He chuckled at the memory, and the old cane tapped the floor in time.
We stayed until the stars came out over the water, and Curtis showed us what Daddy had left in the kitchen drawer: forty years of grocery receipts, each one paid by my father, and each one marked with a tiny drawing of a rooster. “He said you laugh at roosters,” Curtis told me. I did laugh. I laughed so hard I had to hold the counter. Dwayne wiped his eyes and said that Daddy never once told a joke at the dinner table in his life, and here was the proof that he had been saving them all for a friend.
I asked him why he never knocked on our door, just once. He looked at his hands for a while. “Because Charlotte had you two, and a good man, and a quiet life. I only wanted to be sure she was all right. Your daddy told me every month. Her garden, her biscuits, your wedding, Dwayne. I knew your children before they could walk.” He reached into his shirt pocket and drew out a photograph, soft as cloth. It was Daddy and a young soldier, arms around each other, squinting into the sun. It was the only gift the old soldier kept on his refrigerator door.
On the back, in my daddy handwriting, it said: Curtis, you gave me a brother. I will give you a porch light. Dwayne laughed and cried at the same time, which is a sound I had not heard from him since we were small. We stayed until the light left the river. When we finally stood to go, Curtis pressed the dog tag into my palm and closed my fingers over it. “That belongs on the desk,” he said. “Harlan wanted somebody up there to keep looking.” In the evening we walked across the bridge again with a casserole from my kitchen.
Dwayne tore up the paperwork from the brewery that very night. We did not sell the mill, and we never will. Now the first Saturday of every month, I climb four flights of good solid steps with a thermos of coffee, and Dwayne climbs behind me. We sit in my daddy chair and take turns at the binoculars. Across the river a porch light is on, and a hand lifts from the swing. And every single time, we lift ours right back. It is the best view in all of Georgia, and we will not trade it.
