Tie a Yellow Ribbon
The scars of an old heartbreak resurface
The black sundress is draped across a chair, atop the black and white checkered purse with the pink poodles that somehow looks chic despite the childlike design. Tickets to a concert stick out between the zippered flaps–tickets that probably won’t get used.
Above the chair is a small gold-framed mirror. Inside it, I spy a woman with red cheeks and a red nose, oily mascara gathering at the corners of her eyes. A smattering of freckles dots the creases beneath her tired gaze.
“Where the hell did all these freckles come from?” I ask aloud. I answer my own question silently. A hazard of fragile aging skin. The same loose aging skin that made you second guess that sundress you wore today and allowed the carnage on your shoulder.
I wince as the nightgown slips over my head. Even the thin straps hurt when they touch the ragged skin across my shoulder where the seatbelt dug in upon impact. I’d been off to meet a friend when the car across the intersection ran the red light and t-boned my coupe. I was fine but in no mood to sit quietly for two hours while watching an Elvis impersonator.
I’d asked my friend if she would like to meet later in the week instead, or if she wanted to pick up both tickets. “Sure, honey,” she responded, zero hesitation in her voice. “Better late than never, right? Take it easy and don’t worry about me this weekend. I’ll come by Monday on my way out of town.”
“I’ll be here,” I answer because I’m always here. Time waits for no man, but I can’t seem to get out of my own way. I should be visiting the kids. I should be dancing at a concert. Instead, I live in my own private hell, courtesy of old age and loneliness.
I catch a glimpse of my shoulder in the mirror. The skin is painted bright blue and a lovely purple stripe has begun to melt toward my armpit. The fleshy pouch beneath my bicep swings a few moments after I stop moving. Sleeveless was a bad choice, honey.
I blot at my blood-stained skin. I probably should have seen someone, but I just wanted to go to bed and be alone with my memories. It’s just me now, and I’ve convinced myself I like it that way. That was true before the crash and will be true again tomorrow. Besides, the worst of it is just a gash across an old tattoo. The torn skin interrupts the artist’s design of a Roman numeral two and makes the attached tattered yellow ribbon appear orangey-blue. Beneath the newly rainbowed skin exists a handful of older scars, the deepest of which no one else can see.
***
“I’d never get some man’s name tattooed on me,” I toss over my shoulder. My eyes are focused on the tattoo artist in the latex gloves finishing the yellow shading on the ribbon. My design, his talent.
“Not even mine?” a deep voice asks from the corner of the shop, moving nearer. I turn my head and am rewarded with an arresting smile, dimples in his cheeks. He runs a hand through short black locks and lets his eyes rest on me. They are almost as black as his hair.
“Especially not yours.”
Deep Voice chuckles and bends down to survey the artist’s work. He stands a good two feet taller than me, even if I wasn’t sitting. His large hand settles on the opposite shoulder, the warmth of his touch unfamiliar but not unwelcome. I think, not for the first time, how easy it would be for him to flex his knuckles and ruin my posture permanently. It’s a strange thought, both exciting and terrifying.
“What’s with the yellow anyway?” His eyes shine, a hint he knows the answer but wants me to say it aloud.
“Like the song. You know,” I manage a terrible facsimile of Tony Orlando, lips twisted into a theatrical smirk, fingers snapping offkey. “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree. It’s been three long years…” I pause and shrug sheepishly. “I think it’s from the sixties.”
The tattoo artist chuckles but doesn’t join the conversation as he turns to wet a paper towel. Deep Voice cups my chin tenderly and stares at my mouth but then steps back, reaching into his pocket for the worn soft pack of Camels. The unfiltered cigarettes and creased leather smell like a memory, something my brain catalogs for the days when we are nearly dust. “You and your old lady music. Are you sure you’re really 20-something?”
I smirk and toss a lighter at him. Coincidentally, it is the one with Elvis I picked up in Memphis a few years prior on my first trip to Graceland. He grins and I can’t help but follow suit. “Alright, you got me. I’m a secret old lady agent, spying on army officers home on leave.”
A few wipes with cold green soap and the artist is done. I hand the shop owner cash before offering my hand to Deep Voice. “Let’s go smoke, Derek.”
“You got it, Lady H.” He grabs my hand and helps me to my feet. The fingers remain, winding through mine, and I don’t pull away. It’s the first time his touch has lingered.
Outside, the cold winter’s night creates an eerie fog from our exhaled breath. The lighter catches and I blow a gray plume of smoke into the blanket of darkness that has fallen over the city.
“Foggy out,” he offers before taking a long drag and blowing smoke rings above us. Show off.
“Lady H,” I muse. “How long ago did you start calling me that?”
He laughs, then coughs, struggling to clear his throat.
I don’t like the sound of his breathing.
“Gods, what was that? 1990?”
I shake my head in reply. The truth is I can’t remember when he wasn’t there, a figure in the background where we picked up and left off our friendship, sometimes years between calls. “It had to have been after the Ren Faire…was that ‘89? That’s the year I wore the emerald costume and told a tall knight with a deep voice that my name was Hannah.”
“And then you didn’t answer when that knight came back with your beer and called out your fake name.”
I grin impishly. “Can’t blame a girl for trying to keep the riff-raff away. Hey, I stayed. It was for the free beer, but still…”
Derek breathes deep, the concerning rattle in his lungs returning in a muted wheeze. He stares off into the distance beyond the urban sprawl, his eyes haunted and the laughter gone.
I want to tell him he should stop smoking. I want to make him go to the doctor. Yet, he’s not mine and I have to consider where our boundaries lie. “You gotten that cough checked out, D?” My voice is gentle, but my concern is much deeper.
“The cough is the least of it, Jane,” he replies before stubbing out the cigarette. He’s home on leave, a brief respite from the horrors of serving in a foreign country. Scars pepper the side of his neck and arm where his Jeep hit an IED. His eyes tell a much scarier story, one he won’t speak aloud — at least not to me, not yet. We both fall silent — him at the recollection, me at his abrupt mood change.
“I — ” I begin but he speaks at the same time.
“You — ”
“Sorry, I what?” I wave off my own words, more interested in where he’s gone inside his head.
“You know you’ve been a lot of things to me, Jane. Muse, therapist, pen pal.”
“Best friend?” I smile with a chuckle. “Maybe the best friend if not your best friend. Maybe just the best, I’ll accept that.” I chuckle but it feels forced.
He nods thoughtfully, ignoring my mocking tone. “The best. I wish I’d known it all those years ago, that you were the answer.”
My heart stutters and then knocks hard against my chest. The smoke in my lungs burns. “What… what was the question, D?”
Derek stomps out my cigarette beneath an army-issue boot and pauses a long moment before raising his eyes to meet mine. “To what makes me happy.”
Thunder rolls in from the west and the storm breaks suddenly, but we don’t notice. Derek moves closer and wraps me in his arms, my face pressed against his chest in a loose embrace. Like the hand-holding earlier, it is the first time. Our decades-long friendship has been riddled with bad timing when it came to romance, so I accepted years ago we were never meant to be…Until now. Something feels different and has from the moment he showed up unannounced on my doorstep asking to stay for a few days before his next deployment.
“Ever feel like we’re running out of time?” he posits, but I can’t see his eyes. I can’t read what he isn’t saying, a trick I learned years ago to unlock the mysteries that are him.
“All the time. All the…”
He cuts me off mid-sentence, bringing his lips crashing against mine. The move feels choreographed as I’ve dreamed of it a hundred times. Ours has been a moment long in the making, trapped between time and distance, always missing each other by a hair.
“Stop,” I tell him, before ignoring my own advice. I don’t want to lose a friend, especially not him. But time has never been on our side and I won’t consider it now when we stand to find our long-sought happily-ever-after.
The next morning, Derek rises early, a hazard of his life in Afghanistan. I join him on the front porch, my bare toes tucked between his legs against the chill. He hands me a mug of coffee and I sip, stealing a covert glance at him.
“I really did think about you over there, you know.” The ever-present cigarette is pinched beneath his fingers but he makes no move to light it.
I set the mug on the ground beneath us and lean back so I can read his eyes. “Sure, I thought about you right here on this swing. That’s what old friends do, right?” I was fishing. What was he thinking? Had last night meant the same to him?
“I mean I thought about all the things I stood to lose when we were holed up. You were always right there in front.”
“But, D,” I pause, knowing my words might harm, “you never really had me. I mean, I didn’t even know you felt that way, not for sure.”
“Didn’t I? Weren’t you always there when I needed you? A friend, a confidante, a cheerleader? Always, it was you, Jane. I’m just sorry I didn’t see it before.”
I look at his hand as it reaches for mine. His palm is tilted upward as a tear slips down his cheek to rest inside it. I brush it away. He is right. I never gave up on him in the silences or when he got caught up in puppy love, or later when he enlisted. “I mean, better late than never, right?” I gaze up at him, my eyes hopeful. I’ve waited for and wanted him for so long.
His dark eyes rake over my face and his mouth turns down in a sad smile. “Better late than never,” he repeats softly.
***
The next morning, I unwillingly present at the doctor’s office. He tells me the time for stitches has passed, but that I should have gone to the ER. I nod dutifully, not bothering to mention my health insurance has lapsed. Being a lonely old woman is full of annoying circumstances that don’t bear repeating. The doctor prescribes an ointment for the wound to stave off potential infection and debrides it carefully. He reminds me I’ll be sore for a few weeks due to whiplash and my age. I lament missing the concert.
“Someone cool?”
I nod and laugh. “Maybe. Elvis impersonator out of Memphis.”
The doctor smiles. “Sounds fun at least. It’s a shame about your tattoo. Did you serve?” His fingers expose a few more inches of shoulder. “Lose someone?”
He runs a gloved finger over the tattered souvenir of a different lifetime.
“No,” I answer solemnly. “I didn’t serve, but we all lost something in the war, didn’t we?”
The doctor looks up. He has a sharp gaze and a soft but sad smile. “I did a residency at the VA. Saw a lot of Gulf War Syndrome, especially in the lungs. Starts with a cough and…” he cuts himself off, his eyes misty. “Hard way to go. I guess we all lost something.”
I thank him and rush out of the office to the sanctuary of my car. A fat tear slips down between my nose and cheek, landing in my open palm. I stare at it for a moment and picture his hand wrapped around mine that last morning before he left for his final tour of duty.
“Better late than never,” he’d assured me, promising to return in a year.
I run a finger across my shoulder to find the outline of the marred tattoo. Beneath the numeral two and ribbon is a line in hard-to-read block letters that spells out, “Better late than never.” I had it added the next winter to remind me not to wait so long to appreciate the things that matter most, like love stories that end in tragedy. But it wasn’t all bad, and I try to remember that too.
As I pull out of the parking lot onto the highway, headed for home, I am reminded not to waste time. I pick up my cell phone and dial. “Hey, D. It’s Mom.” My son, a tall handsome man in his mid-thirties, has black hair and eyes almost as dark as his father’s, a father he’s never met. “I was thinking it’s time for me to move, to be closer to you and the kids.”
He pauses and I picture him, a spitting image of my late friend. “Glad you finally agreed. Better late than never, Ma.”
