Or running from.
We’d been married twenty-six years.
And after all that time, I knew the difference between Mark being determined and Mark being stubborn.
Ezoic
Determined is when he’s moving toward something.
Stubborn is when he’s moving away.
That night, he was both.
Here’s why we were driving to St. Louis.
Mark’s mother, Frances, is eighty-one. She lives alone in the little brick house in Kirkwood where Mark grew up. She’s lived there for fifty-four years. She raised three kids in it. She buried her husband, Joe, out of it.
Two years ago, she started forgetting things.
Little things, at first. Where she put her glasses. Whether she’d taken her pills. The name of the pastor at her church.
Then bigger things. She left the stove on. She drove to the Schnucks grocery store she’d been going to for forty years and couldn’t find her way home. A neighbor found her two hours later, parked in a church lot, crying.
