A Long Way Back to Troy

Chapter One

A Long Way Back to Troy
Eva Marie Everson

2018

Had it not been for my best friend begging me to attend our high school reunion, I can promise the notion would have never crossed my mind.

Allow me to clarify that—Trisha is no longer my best friend. She was my best friend, back in high school. Actually, all the way back to the days of wearing crinoline-skirted dresses, lace-trimmed white socks with black paten Mary Janes to elementary school. To those carefree days of walking from our posh houses on Bentley Road to the looming brick building with more windows that anyone could possibly count, our schoolbooks clutched to our chests, our laughter swinging limb to limb, treetop to treetop. And, from there, to the days of whispers about boys, giggling as our body's changed shape and we noticed—truly noticed—the male half of our class. For me, the attention had gone straight to Earl Corbett, the great All-American even at such a young age. For Trisha ... well, who knows who it was for Trisha back then. Her eyes roamed a lot. She'd be slap crazy about some guy. Then, just as soon as he gave her a moment's notice, she'd move on to the next one.

But she was cool and funny and I loved her ... from elementary to junior high and then to from junior high to high school where everything changed. Literally everything.

I believe it could be said and should be said that until our senior year, I'd had my whole life laid out. I knew who I was and where I was going—namely Mount Holyoke where I'd study early childhood education. After graduation, I'd marry Earl, we'd have a couple of great kids, and we'd live happily ever after in a two-story brick house with lush lawns. We'd throw great barbecues in summer and sit-down dinners when the weather turned brisk. Earl and I would go on wonderfully exciting vacations until we were too old to travel and then we'd rock ourselves on the front porch until one of us up and died and the other followed suit.

Well, if Truck Hardy hadn't come into my life, that may be exactly what would have happened. Only, he did so it didn't. He drove his souped-up Chevy with the pack of Lucky Strikes on the dashboard and an angel dangling from its rearview mirror into my life and turned it completely upside down.

"Greasers." That's what Albemarle's Ivy League—of which Trisha and Earl and I were a part—called boys like Truck Hardy, whose real name was Lamar Puckett Hardy. That's a lot for a guy like Truck; mostly I called him Bubba, the name I heard his little nephew Davy give him on the day Truck "bought" me. "Slave Day" we dubbed the auction that raised money for some cause I cannot begin to remember now. Not after all these years.

Forty-five to be exact.

Forty-five years since Truck Hardy bid fifty dollars for one day with Jeannie Travis. That's me. One day that was meant for guys making girls do stupid things like picking up trash on the football field or serving lunch to their "master" and his friends in the cafeteria.

But, of course, Truck would never stoop to anything so juvenile. Oh, no ... what Truck had me do was wash and wax his car. 

"Tortoise" he called her. 

We had to leave the school's grounds, which was not part of the ground rules. I pretended to balk at the idea. To act like I was too goody-goody to do something as scandalous as leave campus. That's when Truck threatened to "sign me over" to his friend Wally. Quite frankly, I would rather risk getting caught leaving school and being expelled for three days than to be Wally Kowalski's slave for five minutes, much the rest of that day.

Wally Kowalski ... the last I heard, you could unfurl his rap sheet and blanket a country mile with it. Not that I kept up with that kind of thing. Not anymore, at least.

So, Truck bid an enormous amount of money for 1973 and won and I ended up at the complex where he shared a cookie-cutter apartment with his mother, older sister, and Davy, washing and waxing his car and, in no short order, falling head first for a guy so far below my league that everyone—Trisha, Earl, my parents, my brother Ben—everyone stood up and took notice. And they worried. They worried a lot.

They had good reason. I'd give up Mount Holyoke—a college I'd nearly sold my soul to get in to—and the degree and teaching young children and the two-story brick house with the lawns and the parties to be Mrs. L. P. Hardy. Because no one—no one—had ever loved me like Truck. Or made me feel so perfectly in tune with myself and so outside of myself all at the same time.

Not even Jason. Who I married and gave two sons to before losing him to Tiffany, some woman half his age with mounds of blond hair, over-priced boobs, and great legs.

Well, I used to have great legs, too, Tiff ... and they are what attracted Truck Hardy to me in the first place.