It Happened on Maple Street

Tim.

Ann got a kick out of my newly painful state. In a compassionate kind of way.

“Don’t look now, but your Tim is behind us,” she continued as we walked toward the door of the building.

I didn’t look. But I could feel him there.

My Tim.

Two

THERE WAS A TRADITION at Wright State University. A fall party on campus—a welcome to students. October Daze. It was held outside in the field next to the Rathskeller—a pizza-and-beer place on campus. There were booths with food and club paraphernalia. Live bands and lots of beer.

It was exactly the kind of gathering I avoided. I’d made it all the way through high school without attending a single party. Not one. I didn’t drink outside of my home, where my dad would occasionally share a sip of his very smooth and expensive scotch whiskey with me because I was the only one in the family besides him who liked it, or my mom would allow me a taste or two from her glass of wine.

“Come on, Tara,” Ann said the first Friday afternoon in October— the day after our first geology lab. I was huddled in my raincoat, the bottoms of my jeans dragging on the wet ground, and telling her I wanted to go home. The drizzling had stopped for the moment, but I had a romance novel burning a hole in my purse. I’d had a hard day at school, gotten a paper back in my writing class that the teacher hadn’t absolutely loved, and I just wanted to crawl into a story and stay there.

“We have to go,” Ann was saying. She was trying to talk me into going to October Daze. Because she wanted to go. She wanted to meet up with some guys she knew. “What if he’s there?” she continued haranguing me about Great-Hair Guy. “You don’t want him to find some other girl without you even having a chance, do you?”

Of course I didn’t. “I don’t even like beer.”

“Have you ever had it?”

“Well . . . no, but I know I don’t like it.” I liked smooth, expensive scotch. My dad did not drink beer. And I was his drinking buddy. Me with my sip or two on the occasions when he actually had a drink.

“It doesn’t matter if you like it or not,” Ann laughed and hooked her arm in mine, dragging me down the hill away from my little blue Manta and the school books that she’d ordered we leave there. “You just drink it,” she explained.

I let her pull me along. And I laughed, too. I didn’t know why. I just did.

I was changing. Life was changing. Anything could happen.

The day was cool, overcast, and misting rain. A typical early October day in Ohio. He was barely eighteen and a bit overwhelmed, but no one was going to know that. He’d made it out of high school. Out of the small town where he’d grown up—even if only during the day. He’d made it to college and to a college party. He was going to enjoy himself.

Even so, the smell of wet grass on the cool air took him back to earlier days of football and playing in the mud. Back to a time when getting dirty was funny—the dirtier the funnier.

When had he left those days behind? When had being respectable become important?

And earning a degree even more important?

He made his way to the twenty-five-cent beer wagons and placed his order. His first college beer, and it was out of a plastic cup.

Silently toasting the college life, he drank. Stroh’s had never tasted so good. Looking out over the hundreds of students huddled together, listening to the hippie-looking guys up on stage, he chuckled to himself. He was a long way from his home on Maple Street. His brothers would be proud.

Two of the band members were hopping around, one on electric guitar, the other dragging a mic stand with him. The third guy was beating on drums as though he could somehow change the world with those sticks.

And all the while, the college students laughed and drank their beer as fast as they could pour it down. It was so different from the small town he’d grown up in.

A different universe.

In Eaton, he knew everyone. Or at least knew someone who knew everyone. Here he didn’t know a single person. He was out of place.

But he was staying.

The youngest of five boys—three of whom were at least a full generation older than he, two old enough to be his parent—he’d learned early that he had to tackle life and wrestle from it what he wanted.

His mother, widowed when he was only five, had sacrificed much to get him there. He wasn’t going to forget that.

He was going to succeed. Graduate. Make something of his life. He wasn’t going to spend his entire life as he’d spent much of his youth, eating well enough at the beginning of the month and being grateful for the beans that were on the table by month’s end.