---

“Coping with change is difficult.  More so as one gets older.”  Bud’s doctor was attempting to be helpful, but had no idea how small the effect was of the reassurances he was offering.  Within the course of a week, Bud had retired from the career he’d had for decades and lost the spouse he’d had for even longer.  Even the Mercury he’d driven to the office for the appointment was different than the one he’d been used to.  The color had been selected for his wife and she never even saw it.

Normally children would step in to help a parent suddenly widowed.  That wasn’t a possibility.  Others tried to help, but nobody knew exactly what to say or how they could really be of any assistance.  Neighbors brought food.  Cards flooded in from old clients and far away relations offering ubiquitous ‘thoughts & prayers’, but those didn’t really seem to dull Bud’s pain or fill the void that he was suddenly swimming in.

The services for Joan were well attended.  Fort Stockton turns out to say goodbye to their own.  The words Pastor Peterson used were thoughtful and kind.  But to Bud it sounded like he was talking about someone else.  He halfway expected to discuss the service with Joan on his way home.  Then he remembered the service had been for Joan.

He couldn’t help but notice that Bridges Funeral Home had a fleet of Mercury Grand Marquis parked beside the mortuary, proving Joan’s theory that the last Grand Marquis he’d traded in looked like a ‘funeral car’.  He thought back to any number of things his wife had said throughout their marriage and thought about them in a brand new light.  

The loneliness was crippling at first.  He met Mason McCullough for coffee at the Grounds for Divorce a few weeks after Joan’s service.  Lucinda could see how much he’d aged just since the funeral.  In a subtle and roundabout way Bud made the suggestion that he might come back to work, maybe just part time, in order to have a purpose and somewhere to go.  As Lucinda looked on, Mason diplomatically dodged that bullet and redirected Bud’s thoughts to volunteering at the church, or the library, or Jim Bowie High, or someplace where his efforts were more needed.

“Thanks, I’ll give all those options some thought,” Bud said as he stood and headed to the front door.

“You handled that well,” Lucinda confided to him after Bud left the cafe.

“I feel bad for him.  I want to help, but there’s only so much I can do.”  Of course she understood that.

---

---

He finished cleaning out the garage that he’d started when he quit early to go get the new Grand Marquis.  The task was made easier by the fact that he didn’t have to worry about discarding anything he’d regret later if Joan went looking for it.  So impressed was he as he stood in the driveway looking at his work that Bud decided to go through the same process inside the house.  He’d been putting off dealing with all of Joan’s things, but suddenly had the courage and the motivation he’d been lacking.

It was cathartic.  

Bud cleaned out all of Joan’s clothes that had been hanging in the closet.  He was slightly amused and then irritated at the number of dresses hanging in the closet that still had the tags on them, never worn.  He tried to come to grips with how one woman could ever wear seventy-four pairs of shoes.  In the end, he determined that it couldn’t be done, but hoped dozens of women could as he loaded them into the trunk of the new Grand Marquis and headed for the Salvation Army.  ‘The women of Fort Stockton shall never be barefoot again,’ he chuckled to himself.

A similar process was engaged for the kitchen, where all the redundant items were loaded into the trunk.  He counted fourteen cookie sheets, three mixers, four rolling pins, two crockpots, and untold mixing bowls.  The entire backseat was filled with cookbooks that hadn’t been cracked open in decades.  The volunteers at the Salvation Army got used to seeing Bud pull up in the Woodrose Metallic Mercury sedan every couple of days.

The last thing the Bud needed to clean out was the dresser he and Joan had shared for forty years.  He thought that would be the easiest task of all.  And it was, until he reached the box at the back of the bottom drawer, buried under silk scarves and kid leather gloves that hadn’t seen the light of day since the sixties.  In the box was a bundle of old letters.  Bud started to just toss the bundle in the trash, completing the process.  But something told him he ought to just check and make sure there was nothing important in the stack.

---

---

Most of the letters were from Joan’s sister in Midland, or cousins she hadn’t seen in years.  There was one buried in the middle of the stack, however, that was unlike all the others.  The return address had the name Patricia Sanderson above an address in San Saba.  The postmark on the letter was OCT 1951. Patricia was a girl Bud had dated briefly in college before returning to Fort Stockton.  He hadn’t heard from her since that time.

The letter read:

Dear Bud,

I’m guessing you are surprised to hear from me.  It has been a while.  I was thinking about you tonight, as I have so many nights.  This time, I thought I would follow up those thoughts with a letter, taking a chance I suppose.

I have a little boy, Bud.  Try not to be angry or surprised when you read this.  He is a beautiful child.  He has sandy brown hair and green eyes.  He is such a blessing.  He is almost four.  And he is your son.

I am telling you in hopes that you will come see him.  Not for me, but for him.  He wakes up every morning and asks me about his father.  I no longer know what to say to him, and hope that you could let him know who you are and where he came from.  His name is James.

Hoping for the best,

Patricia

Bud folded the letter back up and slid it into the thin, brittle envelope where it had been hiding for forty years.  His heart ached as he sat on the edge of the bed.  Despite the fact that it wasn’t even noon yet, Bud made his way into the kitchen, got the bottle of bourbon out of the cabinet above the refrigerator and poured a jelly jar full.  He sat at the kitchen table and attempted to wrap his mind around all the information he’d just learned after forty years of not knowing.

The thing he’d wanted more than anything else in life was the one he’d been denied, children.  And yet, he had a child and didn’t know it.  The fact that Joan had known he’d fathered a child, a child she’d never been able to have, and kept it from him made his heart ache.  For Patrica to have reached out had to have been difficult. But as far as she knew, Bud (real name James Edwards) had chosen to ignore her and willfully ignore the son that was his.

Bud had no idea why, nor how, Joan could have denied him the chance to be a father.  Worse, she had denied a young boy the opportunity to know the man who’d fathered him.  The emotions that roiled through him were feelings he’d never had before and he didn’t know what to do with them.  But he knew something had to be done.

Of course, in 1990 the internet barely existed.  For Bud Edwards it didn’t exist at all.  He didn’t know where to begin, but knew he had to.  The thought of volunteering, or making himself available to local needs or programs disappeared.  His sole quest became to find the son he hadn’t known existed and try to explain what had happened.  He had no idea if Patricia was still alive, had ever married, was still in Texas, or if he ever even found the boy, if he’d be willing to meet.  But making every attempt to do so consumed him.

Bud asked Mason to meet him at the Grounds for Divorce; he had something to discuss that was important.  Mason feared it was going to be another request to return to work.  He wasn’t prepared for how the conversation developed.  While Bud had initially been reluctant to share the details in order to spare tarnishing Joan’s memory, he eventually opened up completely.  Lucinda heard enough to suggest that they get a hold of Perry Silverman from the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch and include him in the conversation.  “He’ll know all about accessing public records to help track the man down,” she noted.  “Might not hurt to bring Franklin Danbury into the mix.  There could be some legal issues he could help you with.”

Eventually, others around the big round table in the cafe got involved.  Sister Thelma cautioned Bud not to focus on judging Joan for her actions of four decades earlier.  “A woman who couldn’t conceive her own child might not be thinking rationally about someone who did without even wanting to.  She may have been jealous of what you were able to do without even meaning to, with another woman no less.  There are ten thousand things to keep in mind about the marriage you two had.  Don’t zero in on the one that can’t be changed or explained.”

Chad, taking a break from his Interim Manager duties, had a perspective of his own.  “I grew up never knowing my own dad.  If I had a chance to meet him now, I’d jump on it like white on rice.  All the other questions can be answered later.  Keep in mind what’s important.”

James ‘Bud’ Edwards became a man on a mission.

Though he’d never done such a thing before, he found an old Mercury travel trailer, about a 1957 model, and dragged it home and into his garage.  By day he would search records, make phone calls, write letters, and do whatever he could to track down the son he didn’t know he had.

At night, he’d go out to the garage and slowly rebuild and restore the old camper.  “I’m going to do whatever it takes to track down my boy,” he told the crew at the GFD.  “If he’s out there, I’ll find him.  And I’ll drag a refurbished Mercury trailer behind me so I can go wherever I need to for as long as it takes.”

---

---

Rusty from the hardware store would go over a night or two a week and help out with the things that required more than one pair of hands.  Sister Thelma and Lucinda reupholstered the cushions on the dinette and made new drapes for the windows.  Chad helped refinish all the cabinetry.  Bud dragged the trailer over to Frontier Ford-Mercury to have new tires put on it and the brakes reworked.  Not usually the type of service they’d perform, but Tiffany Brewster-Briscoe had gotten wind of the situation and thought it would be the perfect project for the new community outreach program she’d developed.  The guys in the back did it after hours and off the clock, and only if they wanted to.

It was while the trailer was over at Frontier Ford-Mercury that Perry and Franklin stopped by Bud’s house.  “We’ve found your boy,” Perry said.

“Patricia is still alive, and in good health.  She’s a widow now.  She lives outside Goliad.  So does James, and he has a wife and son of his own,” Franklin shared.  They handed Bud a sheet of paper with names, addresses, and telephone numbers.  Bud had to sit down at the kitchen table to take it all in.  Perry and Franklin stuck around long enough to be sure he was alright and then left him with his thoughts and to decide how to make the next move.

That night Bud made the phone call he’d waited for over a year to make.  Patricia’s voice was recognizable, even after all the time that had elapsed.  “I told James I’d sent the letter but that you never responded.  It wasn’t returned to me, so I assumed you had to have received it.”

“My wife never told me.”  Bud was choking back tears.  “I have no idea why.  It makes no sense.  She wanted children.  We both did.  We could never have any of our own.  The fact that she knew I had one and never told me I will never understand.  I’m so sorry.”

“As he got older, he’d ask me what his father looked like,” Patricia told Bud.  “I’d tell him to go look in the mirror.  He’s the spitting image of you. I hate to say it, but even his boy is. You have a handsome grandson, as well.”

A week later, the Mercury travel trailer was packed and hitched to the back of the new Mercury Grand Marquis, out front of Bud’s home.  The crew from the Grounds for Divorce was waiting out front for the send off.  Perry had a photographer there from the paper.  Lucinda had a huge Thermos of Folgers and a tin full of oatmeal raisin cookies Sister Thelma had sent along.

---

---

Tiffany Brewster-Briscoe was there with a film crew.  Her original thought was to film the send off as part of a marketing campaign Frontier Ford was kicking off.  By then, Mason McCullough had taken ownership of 18% of the dealership.  He pulled Tiffany to the side and said it was a private moment, not one to be marketed like a new F-150.  The film that was shot was presented as a gift to Bud when he got back from Goliad.

The Mercury Man.  That’s what Bud was forever known as after that.  A succession of nine Mercurys over fifty years, ten if you count the one he dragged behind him to meet his son and grandson for the very first time.

“Or maybe,” Sister Thelma said one morning not too long ago over coffee at the GFD, “the name was referring to the ‘Messenger of the Gods’.  Like God sent him the message in His own time, for His own reason, that enabled Bud to enjoy the balance of his days on earth with a family he didn’t know he had.”  Everyone thought about that and nodded.

“Or, Lucinda chimed in, “maybe it refers to quicksilver.  Hydrargyrum.  The heavy silvery-white toxic liquid metallic element used in thermometers. Because Bud’s situation took the temperature of Fort Stockton that was unique to that time.  It’s a different atmosphere now.  Everywhere else, for that matter.”

“Hard to say.”  Pastor Peterson seemed to be in a reflective mood.  “But it’s a shame the brand went out of business in 2010.  The world was a better place when they were still around.”

---