Yesterday's Children

Yesterdays Children
By Curtis Ray Jones

Prologue

The road that led to Alex Reagan’s small one bedroom trailer was a narrow dirt path that snaked through a half mile of woods leading to a cornfield and an old irrigation pond. He loved it. He was only twenty-five single, lean, handsome and perfectly content to spend the rest of his life tucked away from the rest of the world.

His mother called him her little old man. She would think of her only child living alone on his dead grandfather’s tobacco farm, fold her arms and sigh. She wanted more than that for him. But, he was happy. Therefore, she tried to be happy for him.

Still she could help but feel, there was something wrong about that, that there was something wrong about him. She remembered looking down at him for the first time; his eyes all shiny and blue, so intense, so focused on something, something else, something other than her. Just like now, whenever they were together he always seemed to be looking past her, even when he was looking straight into her eyes.

Though she never admitted it, even to herself, sometimes he made her uncomfortable. She wanted to love him, but she did not know how to love a stranger, another nagging reality she would never admit, even to herself.

At five, A. M. on a cool early June morning Alex was already up. He did not own an alarm clock. He did not need one. Not once in his life did he fail to awake before sunrise. Maybe it was seeing the silvery morning mist so soft and settled over the dew soaked trees grass that caused to him awake so early. Maybe it was something else, ‘some maybe today’ promise, not yet fulfilled, that would not allow him to over sleep, he did not know. Whatever it was he did not waste anytime thinking about it. He was alive, awake and just plain happy to see another day. On the other hand, maybe was he just plain relieved? He did not think about that either.

Clad in stringy cut offs and carrying a cup of coffee he did what he did most mornings, walked out his front porch, sat down on the canvas deck chair that was always waiting for him there, sipped his coffee and watched for the deer that usually wandered out of the woods to graze in the nearby field.

It was another perfect morning sweetened by the fact that this was also the first day of a four -week vacation from Overland Trucking. He had been there since graduating high school.

He did not make a lot of money, but then he lived in second hand single wide trailer (already bought and paid for), situated on land owned by his mother, he had no wife no kids. He did not smoke drink or gamble. He did have a girl friend. However, she, being a nurse, made more money than he did. Best of all she loved him just as he was and did not care about money, as in who made the most. She did like nice things. However, she considered him the nicest thing in her life. Therefore, his life was delightfully uncomplicated. Unfortunately, for Alex, a delightfully uncomplicated life is a hollow eggshell.

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