Cathy and Mike

"The sand couldn’t have blown over it since this morning. The day is clear and there is no wind. Where is it?"

After driving this way for a while, he again turned his car around, pulling onto the pavement and cutting across to the other side. He never looked to see if there were cars coming. Who ever drove this road in the heat of the day? Mike turned up his radio, the Eagles blaring out, helping him force his mind off the bright desert heat.

He stopped again along the side of the highway. Across from him, going off to the North, was a newly paved road. The road which led to Cathy!

He was so intent at finding his missing road, he did neither see or hear the large truck coming swiftly toward him, as he turned to drive across the highway in a U-turn, and onto the road he was looking for.

The old trucker was shocked to see the little yellow Mustang suddenly pull in front of him. He never had time to break before he smashed into the driver’s side of it, carrying it a long distance down the highway before he could bring his rig to a stop.

The old man got out and hobbled around to the wrecked car, cursing and crying. He could see there was only a young kid behind the wheel of the demolished car, and he was plainly dead. Stumbling back into his cab, crying, he got on the radio and called the highway patrol.

It was later that evening, a highway patrol officer pulled into the driveway at Mike’s home. His mother greeted him, standing silently in the doorway as she heard the news about her son. The officer was perplexed at her lack of reaction. He had done this unpleasant duty before, but he never saw someone act like this. The woman had no expression at all, nor would she say much of anything to him.

After trying unsuccessfully to see if she had a neighbor or a relative who could come spend time with her, he reluctantly left her alone, as she requested.

She simply went back to her chair, and brought the old photo album up to her lap once more. There were pictures of Mike as a toddler, and a few of his high school pictures, but she didn’t look at these.

She simply held an old Kodak print, now faded with age, of a young man she once loved. He never came back to her after her brief and sweet encounter with him. She had looked for him in the places where he said he had lived, but she never found him. She carried his child, however, and named the little boy who was born, after his father. She even took the young man’s last name as her own.

She shed silent tears over that photograph. Tears of joy and grief. Pure hearts know such things. She finally understood why her young man never came back. She knew he had really tried to find her. She knew now that he really had loved her. That knowledge made her heart glad. She had not been mistaken about him, she knew that at last. Pure hearts never are mistaken.

She also understood now why it was he never found that old highway again. Knowing why he never returned to her, broke her pure heart all over again.

Clutching the picture, she looked out the window, into the darkness. Through her tears, Catherine at last cried out into the empty desert night, "Mike! I lost you again, my young man!"