Summer Stories 2026: ‘Future Love (A Mostly True Story)’

You stand under the clock on the main floor of the Crescent Department Store waiting for a woman you no longer love, who is shopping for a new dress to wear to a Christmas party you do not want to attend. You check your watch and glance again at the escalator. What you see stops time. It is a girl of a woman. Blonde and slight. Dressed in sharp lines of gray. A cool, Nordic beauty, so unlike the island face that greets you in the mirror each morning. She looks at you, smiles a shy smile. You feel dizzy, you cannot breathe. Your vision dims and then lights up in neon.

& then

You see yourself as an old man, thick with age, your hair white and wild. “Strong like bull,” you say. A line remembered from a long forgotten TV show that always made your wife laugh, but this time the tears come rivering down her face. She is in a hospital room, holding your lifeless hand. Still a beauty, you think. You look at your chart. Heart attack, complications from diabetes. Age 73. Too young. Hastened, you are certain, by a lifetime of exposure to nuclear radiation. Hastened, when the company you gave your life to calls you out of retirement to fly off to Colombia, to Egypt, to fix what other men could not. Saying yes, because you had not been overlooked, forgotten. “These men are all the same,” you hear one nurse whisper to the other. “Death by food.” You hear the italics of her words – these men. “What better way to go?” you say, and laugh as the nurse tries to swat your words away.

& then

You tell your wife of another move, a new power plant. “I’m not moving again,” she says. “Enough is enough!” You travel the world for work. Alone. She stays in Phoenix to raise your children. Alone. With each new place, you worry about how you will be seen, accepted. In Atlanta, you are afraid of what your brown skin and dark wavy hair might bring your way, but those around you are kind. You make them laugh. In Portland, you do not worry. It’s a city not unlike your own. One night, while eating dinner in a downtown restaurant, the boy at the next table points in your direction and asks his father “Is that a Mexican?”

& then

You ask your wife to wake the children at 4 a.m. All of them complain, through half-closed eyes, as they pile into the van for another summer trip to visit grandma in North Idaho. The road hours are filled with cassettes played on repeat (Anne Murray, Kenny Rogers, Lou Rawls); frequent stops for burgers (usually McDonald’s, sometimes Burger King) and snacks (Planters peanuts, Paydays, beef jerky and cans of Pepsi); made-up stories (yours and theirs) about Bigfoot and Loch Ness and UFOs. You check into your motel by 3 p.m., eat dinner in the adjoining restaurant, and are back in your room by 5. “Why can’t we ever be out after dark?” your children ask. You do not tell them it is because there are places where nothing but trouble can befall a brown man, his white wife, and their children after the sun sets. Places where the equation of their love is not understood.

& then

You return home from work at exactly 4:30 each afternoon. Your children rush to the door to hug you, to fight over who will pull your work boots from your tired feet. Your wife is in the kitchen. You joke that she is never out of it. “Because I’m married to you,” she says with a laugh. You eat dinner as a family seven nights a week, even as your children grow older. Your conversation is a clatter of newspaper headlines, work rumors and school whispers, stories (both real and invented). “Not so loud,” your wife says. You are a family with passionate opinions, words that need to be heard. “It’s just us,” you say. By the way she looks at you across the table, you know you are thinking the same thought. Just us, as if outside your home, your seemingly mismatched marriage makes you mismatched company. After dinner, the night is filled with house sounds of homework and dishes being done and the drone of the evening news, until your family gathers to watch TV. The shows change over the decades (“Happy Days,” “Knot’s Landing,” “Seinfeld”), but your togetherness does not. It has always been the five of you against the world.

& then

You see the weariness in your wife’s eyes every time you tell her it’s time to pack, find a new school for your daughter (and later your son and later still your second daughter). You do not say no, when you are asked to move from power plant to power plant, for fear you will be forgotten, overlooked within the company. Because of the color of your skin, because of your last name, because of the way your features stretch across your face you have to work twice as hard and prove yourself over and over again. Almost every year, you say goodbye to your current city and hello to a new one: Alameda, Anoka, Pottstown, Kennewick, San Clemente. The cities become an incandescent blur as you speed from one to the next.

& then

You watch as the landlord’s gaze travels from you to your wife to your daughter and back to you. “We have an appointment at 9 to see the two-bedroom,” you say. “It’s not available,” he says and slams the door in your faces. On Monday, you tell your co-worker, who lives in the building, what happened. He calls the landlord and says, “He’s one of our new engineers and needs a place to live.” The landlord acquiesces, but when you go back to sign the lease and pick up the keys says, “I don’t usually rent to you people. Don’t let me down.”

& then

You marry at the courthouse in Carson City, Nevada. Your love still illegal in 17 states, but Nevada isn’t one of them. Lucky, you say to each other. You are wearing a blue sharkskin suit, she a yellow woolen dress. It’s a Friday afternoon in February, there is over a foot of snow on the ground, and the local floral shop, where you stop for a bouquet, is closed. Snow Day, the sign reads. You have no family in attendance. No friends. Just the two of you, the Justice of the Peace, and the strangers who are serving as your witnesses. After you say your vows and sign the wedding certificate, you get back in your VW bug and drive to Sacramento, where you will start your new life together.

& then

You find a crumpled letter on the floor next to her wastebasket. Her father has written to tell her she is not welcome home as long as she is dating a degenerate. His words slice. Add to the paper cuts of prejudice you’ve endured. You’ve always been proud of who you are, where you came from. A man whose parents followed the crops through the Sacramento Delta, and raised their children to choose college over stoop labor. A man who’s traveled the world in the belly of a B-52. A man who loves art and opera. Her father didn’t even give you a chance to prove yourself worthy of his daughter. He dismisses you based on his own hateful notions of what kind of heart your brown body houses.

& then

You go to the General Electric Christmas party with the woman you do not love and are shocked to see the girl of a woman from the Crescent. The two are co-workers. Your future love quits her job, starts taking classes at Eastern. Education. You quit the woman you do not love, start taking classes at Eastern. Anthropology. The two of you start to date and quickly fall in love. One night over plates of chow mein at the Washington Noodle Company, you ask her to marry you. “I have nothing to offer you, but love,” you say. She takes a sip of her tea and smiles. “What else is there?” she says.

& then

You snap back to the present, to the main floor of the Crescent. Your cheeks are wet. You don’t believe in fairy tales, but you know she is yours. You watch as she steps off the escalator, watch as her songbird blue stiletto gets stuck, watch as she steps out of it and keeps walking. You rescue her shoe from the escalator’s teeth and race toward her, toward your future. “Wait,” you say. She stops and you kneel and slip her shoe back onto her foot. Her cheeks cherry and she thanks you. “Carl,” you say. “Deanna,” she says. You start laughing. It is your beginning.