Mason climbed into the truck after her, wondering if perhaps the universe had just shifted for him a third time, only this time, much less painfully so.
* * *
Tess knew it was on her to talk, to explain her odd line of questioning, only she couldn’t. She’d been completely waylaid. It had started with his kindness to her and to the homeless guy he’d encountered in the park.
Those were remarkable but ordinary things. Things you remembered about a stranger long after you parted ways. Things that changed the course of your day and sent you to bed mulling over a small but profound connection.
But the Tolkien quote, the one from the poem she’d carried in her backpack across Europe, the backpack she’d lost meeting him—it was too much to process. That single line of poetry meant more to her than any verse she’d heard.
Those words meant something giant to him too. They had to. Maybe she hadn’t clarified that he’d named a stray dog with wanderlust John Ronald because of the same line that had given her meaning in the darkest moments of her life.
But after the story he’d shared, she didn’t have to. She wanted to know what it meant. Wanted answers from a universe that either she didn’t know how to listen to or wasn’t in the habit of talking to her.
The final thirty minutes of Dumpster searching was quiet, wet, smelly, and unproductive. The only thing that came from it was that she’d never look at trash the same way again. Wherever her things were, they hadn’t been thrown out anywhere surrounding Citygarden.
Somehow, Tess knew after running across the remarkable-looking John Ronald that, for some reason, her stuff was gone for good. She just didn’t know how to explain that to Mason.
Finally, when Mason admitted they’d combed as much of the area as he knew, he asked if she wanted to go to the police station.
Tess thanked him but asked him to take her home instead. She gave him directions toward Nonna’s small, redbrick shotgun home on the Hill. Fifteen minutes later, when they entered the Hill’s single square-mile border and she directed him to Nonna’s, she saw the neighborhood from a stranger’s eyes.
Italian-colored flags flanked the main street entrances just as they did popular street corners within it. Tess couldn’t remember how old she was when she realized that while the fire hydrants in her neighborhood were painted red, white, and green and topped with bright-yellow caps, elsewhere in the world, they were starkly yellow.
Yards here tended to be infinitesimally small as compared to other St. Louis neighborhoods, and Tess wondered if there were more flags on street corners or more Virgin Mary concrete statues in the carefully pruned yards of the row houses they were passing. And being just a few days past Halloween, pumpkins, gourds, scarecrows, straw bales, ghosts, and skeletons still lined many of the porches of the modest frame, brick, and shotgun-style homes.
Mason drove past an old man with stooped shoulders sweeping cobwebs from the corners of his covered porch. Tess remembered trick-or-treating at his home nearly two decades ago. He and his wife had passed out cannoli instead of candy, and it had been better than her grandmother’s.
When they reached Nonna’s, Mason parked in a rare open spot alongside the sidewalk out front, and Tess was struck how his truck was nearly as long as her grandmother’s yard was wide.
He slipped the truck into Park and slowed the wipers to a rhythmic pulse. The soft rain fell around it, wrapping it in droplets like a snug blanket. She watched his gaze comb the house—the chipping paint of the double swing on the covered porch, the concrete statue of the Virgin Mary, hands spread open in welcome, nearly lost in a crowd of browning-out mums alongside the walkway. The Red Birds flag still hung on the wrought-iron garden flag post.
Looking at it now, it struck Tess for the first time how little decorating Nonna had done for Halloween this year. She wondered if Thanksgiving and Christmas would be different. Not that Tess would blame her if they weren’t. Nonna had been married to Tess’s grandfather for nearly sixty years. The thousand-square-foot house her grandparents had lived in their entire marriage wasn’t much to look at, but it was also one of Tess’s favorite places in the world.
She started to unzip the cozy Vineyard Vine hoodie he’d lent her, but he held up his hand. “Keep it. It could never look that good on me.”
Tess’s cheeks grew warm, but she didn’t argue away the offer. The hoodie was warm and cozy, and she never wanted to take it off.
She caught a glimpse of movement in the dark dining room window. Nonna was always looking out to inspect tourists who parked in front of her house on their way to one of several thriving Italian restaurants in the Hill. Would her grandmother notice she was inside the cab? Whether or not she did, Tess needed to get moving.
Only needing to go and wanting to leave weren’t the same thing.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Sorry for what? For taking up his time? Using up his gas? For not sharing what his story about John Ronald means to me? “Thanks for helping me look for my stuff.” It was easier than offering an explanation.
“You never told me what you were doing out there today. Where you were going.”
Tess considered her answer in the quiet that hung between them. The radio, tuned to a popular country station, was turned low, somehow drawing her attention to the music more than if it had been turned up. “I’m trying to start a business. I was lugging a bunch of stuff around. That’s why I needed the suitcase.”
“What sort of business?”
Even in the dark afternoon, his eyes were such a beautiful mixture of blue and green. And his hair