I should have turned left there.
“You should have turned left there, dumbass,” Sandra shrieks at me.
Sandra is my self-appointed navigator, my self-appointed personal improvement consultant, my self-appointed critic of just about everything I do.
She’s also my wife.
“Christ, this is your dinky-ass hometown we’re going to,” she grouses, “You’d think you’d at least be able to find your own hometown.”
“Cut me some slack,” I plead half-heartedly, “It’s been twenty some years since the last time I was here.”
I should be mustering a stronger defense, something sharper, something more assertive, if for no other reason than to keep Sandra at bay. But I can’t focus on Sandra because you’re here and I find you too distracting, the fact that you’re sitting beside me again as if the past twenty-five years had never happened.
“It’s been twenty-some years,” Sandra says, mocking my voice. “Well, boo-frickety-hoo.”
You knit your brow and give me a troubled look that seems to say “Maybe my being here isn’t such a good idea.”
I shrug my shoulders, not quite knowing how to respond. You must have noticed, by now, that Sandra and I don’t really mesh, that we stumble around as if we were bound together in a three-legged race. I feel the need to justify Sandra to you, to explain how I ended up with her, to tell you that Sandra was where I landed after you left me and I ran away, that Sandra happened because I was finally ready to move on and she made sense at the time.
But no explanation seems adequate.
“One thing that hasn’t changed over the twenty-five years we’ve been married,” Sandra continues hammering at me, “Is that your sense of direction still sucks.”
Sandra and I have been married for twenty-two years. She loudly proclaims to anyone who will listen that it’s been twenty-five years and that she bears each of those years like a scar etched across her soul. Be that as it may, it’s twenty-two years. Not twenty-five.
“You haven’t seen your brother in—what—decades?” Sandra is back on a rant she’s been at since we left Chicago. “You guys were never close. You hardly ever spoke. But here we are, dragging our asses back to this shit-hole town to go to his funeral.”
Any small town is a shit-hole in Sandra’s opinion. She’s a city girl, from zygote to the mass of aging cells that now comprise her slightly corpulent body. All city.
You look at me and roll your eyes. You’re from here, too, and I can tell you’re slightly offended by Sandra’s attitude. But you say nothing.
At the next crossroad, I make a U-turn and head back in the right direction. Things start to look familiar as we get closer to town. The grain elevator. The truck stop, now closed, boarded up, spray-painted with graffiti. Woodrow Wilson Elementary School.
Woodrow Wilson. I glance at you and wonder if you remember. The parking lot behind the school. 3:00 AM. Your little yellow-green car, the one that we used to joke looked like a frog, the car’s steamed-up windows wrapping us in a cocoon.
“My aunt teaches third grade here,” I whispered to you in the darkness.
“Oh my God! I hope she doesn’t catch us,” you replied.
I drive into town, past the Dairy Queen that’s still open, the courthouse, the bowling alley that’s now a Baptist church, the bowling alley we used to go to, the place where you once stopped in the doorway as we were leaving because the Bangle’s “Eternal Flame” came on the loudspeakers inside and you wanted to wait until it was over.
North street. My brother’s old house. The baptism party where we first met. That secret first kiss when we found ourselves alone in the kitchen, the kiss that was the single moment in time that my whole life pivoted on.
I turn my head for a moment and look at you, still young, still beautiful, and I realize that, after all these years, after everything I left behind, everything I ran away from, my feelings for you remain the same.
You look at me with sadness in your eyes and slowly fade back into the past.
At the funeral, people I used to know ask about you. They want to know if I ever hear from you. They want to know what became of you.
I tell them you joined an ashram in Tibet. I tell them you’re working undercover with the CIA. I tell them you’re in the witness protection program. I tell them you’re a political prisoner in Chile. I tell them you’ve been abducted by aliens.
I don’t tell them the truth—that you’re still here and that you’ll always be here.
[Photo by Jake Blucker on Unsplash]
by 
Louis Kummerer
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- Girl from Here - March 13, 2026
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