He could have burst at the sight her unlatching the corners of the suitcase: that was the most trust he had given anyone, the most he ever could give to anyone.
She didn’t know him, not like he wished she did. She had assumed all along that she had fallen in love with whole man, a man that felt every piece of his body beat in unison with the ticking of his heart. A man that knew where he came from, and knew why he left.
She unlatched the final pieces of the satchel; his eyes burrowed into his brow, his finger tips gripped at her thigh as she sat there, carelessly un-filing the items in the case. One by one, she emptied its contents, spilling tin-type photos from the 1920’s all over the dashboard.
Grasping at a tiny glass bottle of Aqua Velva from inside the case, she sat it down on the floor of the car, her fingers glistened with the scent of him even closer than he had been.
The case was full of mementos, photos, items of his past - mostly belongings his aunt had shuffled away before she died. Photos of his family tracing back decades, a pocket knife that belonged to his grandfather, an old iron horse shoe that dated back on his family’s farm to the late 1800’s.
Then there it was, at the very bottom of the suitcase, a manuscript --
It was the book his father had been writing for 35 years prior to his spontaneous demise. The book was a memoir of a simple man, (or so he had been told by his aunt, the only other family member to know of the book). His father had briefly mentioned, when he was a boy, that some of the passages in the book would help him to understand more of who he was.
But when his father passed, the manuscript was gone. Assumed thrown away, never to be found. The boy would go along the majority of his life, never knowing of his mother, his father, or any other depth-ful traces of who his family really was. Leaving him to wonder why he had been abandoned with nothing but a rusty car, and a house liquored with yellow wallpaper, and his aunt to look after him.
The front page of the manuscript was titled:
The Love of the Last Tycoon
By,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
credits
from Three,
released July 23, 2012
Andrew Cote - piano
Cindal Lee Heart - text
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