It was Memorial Day. After the bar shooting, but before everything went to hell. I was north of Columbus with my sister and her in laws, apparently every single one of them on down to second cousins, children included. I had gotten in early Saturday morning after a horrible close Friday night; understaffed and overworked, as usual. Didn't even intend on being here, I had requested the extended weekend off, as well as the following week as I did have some paid vacation time coming to me, but my sister suggested it a month ago and on a whim I decided to take her up on it.

"We hardly ever talk, and the last time you came down was over two years ago. People don't live forever and you know our grandmother wants to see you."

I had thought about it then, for a beat, and said, "Ok."

To be honest, I had no more of a game plan than just taking the time off and never leaving the house. I wanted to revisit the places I had been ten years previous but that was then and this was now. I was now in Columbus, or north of there, like I said before.

"I'll visit her, and call a few other people up. I'll see you in a couple weeks."

"Call first. You know this isn't easy."

And that was that. And here I am. Middle of a BBQ on Memorial Day, only the second time I've had it off in the last ten years, surrounded by the in laws of my sister, which is fine because they're all good farmers and people that accept you as is, but hard because they all have their ear on the grapevine. I came down here for a stint because even though things were good for me business-wise, personally it's all gone to hell. Even my boss from ten years ago had something to say.

"Why the h-e double toothpics can't you just settle down?" he asks over the phone, as I'm stuck in rushour traffic on the way back from seeing my father.

"Because I can't even figure myself out, let alone anyone else. She's kicked me out, and even though I have my own place again, I'm lost. And please don't feed me lines, you know me better..."

But he had already cut me off. It's funny, odd, complex how you don't talk or see or even have anything to do with certain people but somehow time never matters. We skirted around religion yet all the time talking about it, and in the end I realized that I will always be friends with certain people in my life, regardless of whether I speak to them every ten hours or ten years.

The BBQ was going though, and I was doing my best to avoid everyone. I'd spent the previous two days either sleeping or reading, and sometimes, late at night, starting the car up and driving the interstates around Columbus, exiting when I felt close by something that I remembered, and then circling endlessly around that spot. I discovered that I was lost, bewhildered, numbed, to everything. All that I had was lost, removed, bulldozed over, paved, it doesn't matter.

So again, here I was, next to the stainless grill. My brother in law offers me a dog. I say hello to my sisters' in laws, good folk, always treated me like their own, and then I just wander off to a patch of grass on the edge of the field.

"Your sister tells me you smoke."

I look up, probably for the first time today. In between chewing the dog I say "That's not uncommon knowledge." I also see that she's probably late 20's. Thin, built but not disportionatly, and long hair. I've been set up, is all I can think. "How are you stuck with these guys?" she asks, looking everywhere but near me.

"I'm her brother," I say, pointing at my sister across the minions of people in her backyard. "Who are you?"

"Same boat as you, I got married in because of my siblings and now I get dragged along just because I have no life." She paused for a minute, I finished my dog, and then we stopped looking at the soybeans still sprouting. "You wanna take a walk? There's an old schoolhouse a mile or so down the road," I threw out.

"Sure. Gotta be better than reuniting people that I've never met before."

*

Not less than halfway to the schoolhouse she asks for a smoke. The first words she's said since we left the brooha. It's then when I stop being nice. "What do you do?" is the most competent thing I can come up with, simply because stupidity seems the best tactic. It works, which is more than I can say for my Zippo because it gave out and I had to rely on the matches. "Social Work. Apparently I know how to pick the brooding tempetuous guys out in any crowd, family included."

I stop for a second. She stops too. We're at a point where the fields are separated by a grass road, and I opt for going there, the trees offering a respite from the blazing sun of nearly summer.

We walk some, stumbling through the grass clumps and rutted quasi-road that is between these fields that have been farmed for the past 200 years. I was choosing my words. "I'm the odd man out. I don't belong here, and I think that you feel the same."

Silence. I looked at her. "We don't know each other, right?"

"Right."

"So why are you here?"

"Just filling time. Why are you asking hard questions when you know they're just coming back at you."

I paused. A hummingbird, something I've never seen before, was hovering three feet in front of me. We seemed to be looking at each other, and then the bird buzzed off, literally, that's how it sounded, and I turned to her. "You want to see that schoolhouse?"

*

We walked down the road, getting there. I waved to my sisters' neighbor, a mile from where she lived, and he waved back. "I don't know who you are," I said.

"Same here. Do you want names?" I thought back to all those gatherings, things a million years from here where I never knew names but still made friends that I thought would last forever.

"You can call me Jer. After all that I've gone through the least I can do is be honest with my name." I felt remorse, pain, suffering, everything at this. All or nothing, because I have nothing left to lose.

Nothing. We walked for a bit. Trees overhead shading the road before us. Walking. She had a silver ring on her left hand, ornate but not jeweled. The cigarette was in her right hand. She tossed it aside into the still stream.

"You can't keep blaming yourself." She stopped. "All your family cares about you, but can't help you. You're the only one who can help yourself. Stop trying to make everyone else happy, you can't do it. The only person you can help is yourself, and you're not willing to do it." At this point I was beside the road, sobbing, crying out loud, and not being able to stop.

We had finally made it to the schoolhouse, me stumbling along the way, half supported on her, but we were there. It was built in 1893, a single room brick house for the farmer's kids and served in that fashion until the ungodly time of 1956, when everything finally got consolidated. Since that time it's served mainly as a place for drunks to throw their garbage bags full of Miller Lite. It is true that the living have no respect for the past, regardless of history.

We stepped through the high weeds, cornflower and Queen Anne's Lace and all those other wildflowers that people in the suburbs love. It made me think, reflect, rebuke myself, but so what. But here I am with someone who's broken it all down for me, and they still don't know the half of it.

The sun was setting. "What do you want," she said as she sat down against the west-facing wall. "How about if I just forget everything and start over."

I thought about it all again, considering my options, bent low towards her, and our lips met, but not before I asked, "Who are you?" Because I never really did get an answer.