A Love that Went Missing

Sitting at an old wood picnic table writing at dusk under an oak tree at the Holiday Motel in Creston, Iowa, I hear cicadas buzzing, a dog barking, an occasional morning dove coo — a sound that reminds me of an owl’s hoot, the way they talk to each other at night in the dark, seeing and speaking to what we cannot see. The air is cool, there’s a slight breeze. Moisture hovers everywhere, pressing against my skin. It’s the kind of town I could have an affair in. The only thing to do on a Saturday night is to get in your body, go outside, and feel things.

I’m on a roadtrip with my father. It’s 2013. We’re traveling from Wyoming to his hometown of Burlington, Iowa on the banks of the Mississippi River. It is the first time I’ll see where he comes from, the house he grew up in, the streets he played on, the downtown mortuary that was once the family business. On the first day of the drive he says, more times than I can count, “That’s the way it ought to be,” when we talk about government, the problem of politicians, how he thinks there should be term limits, how he believes in “something spiritual” but that it all comes from the inside. Religions and Christianity in particular have, in his words, “ruined so many things.”

“Jesus was probably married to Mary Magdalene,” he says before asking, “What do you think of racial memory?” as if I believe in it because “it is the white man…