The Things We Couldn't Forget

Chapter 3.

Dallas Jacobs.

He was the first born son to Susan and John Jacobs.

My parents had struggled to get pregnant. They'd been married five years already and had been trying to have their first baby from the very first night of their marriage. They desperately wanted a family.

My mother, Susan, born on a reservation in Wyoming, longed to have a house full of children. Growing up on the reservation she watched all of the other families with all of their children. She had so many friends to play with during the day or while attending school. They'd ride horses, play hide and seek in the fields, gather together to listen to grandparents telling them all about their heritage and stories from a time gone by. All of the children would sit, caught on every word, smiling to each other as the stories of their ancestors took them on wild journeys.

But when it was all over, and the sun would start to dip down on the horizon, she'd go back to her tiny home where she shared a bedroom alone with her mother. She'd longed for siblings, but her father had been killed only a year after she'd been born.

Her grandparents had long since past, and she felt lonely every night she tucked into bed with her mother.

When her mother met a man named Rusty who was a tourist passing through on a tour of the Western US, they were instantly smitten. After only knowing him for one week her mother packed up their lives and moved to Alabama when my mother was only ten. She'd hoped that maybe there, she'd finally get the siblings she always wanted.

Instead, all her mother and new step father did was fight. Outside of the home, Susan found that the other kids in her new town and school, didn't want to be friends with her. They told her she was different. They would tease her, asking her where her feathered crown was. Little Indian Princess. She'd never felt more isolated from her people as when she was surrounded with other kids who didn't look like her, who didn't have stories to tell like hers.

Going home was like entering a war zone, dodging flying plates or shattered glasses while covering her ears to avoid the words like daggers being tossed between two people who were supposed to be in love.

To pass the time, she'd paint. She'd paint the places she missed. The mountains, the plains, the inky night skies decorated with shimmering diamond like stars.

She escaped into her canvases, letting everything around her slide away.

When she was seventeen years old, she met a boy. A nineteen year old John Jacobs who was in town touring Alabama University. He was their with his father, sitting at a table in the diner she waitressed at.

She would swear to you that the moment their eyes locked onto one another's, there had been an electric current. Her head felt woozy, her breath hitched. He would say he'd never seen someone with such beautiful raven hair or eyes so full of life and longing than when he'd looked into hers for the first time.

Their fingers touched as she passed him his water and they both say they knew. They knew right then and right there without a word needed, that they were going to get married.

He came back the next day, waited for her to finish her shift, then they'd spent the entire night together, walking around town in circles, talking about everything under the sun. Susan had blisters on her feet when she finally snuck back into her house that morning as the sun came up, but she didn't care. Not in the slightest. Because she knew without a doubt, she'd never be lonely again.

Months passed where they wrote each other every single day, both running to their mailboxes, hearts slamming with excitement to pull out a new letter with their names on it.