She had been drinking again, it wasn’t the first time David found himself ushering his sister out of the house to walk the old dirt road on the far side of the ranch."

“She doesn’t mean it Lucy, those words which she said, . . . she is just stressed, that's all."

"Sometimes I hear here talk to herself at night . . . " Lucy mumbled nervously.

"I hear it too, then come the footsteps, and creaky floor, and the hinges of the cabinet door . . ."

"Do you ever wonder why Daddy left? Do you remember him?" Desperately, Lucy raced off the questions, as if they had been simmering and were about to boil over.

"Not so much . . . other than hearing from Grandpa that he wasn't good for mom . . . I asked Grandpa once if he knew where he was. ‘Another time, perhaps when your older.’ Was what grandpa said.”

“I've been meaning to ask him again now that I just became a teenager and all.”

"Sometimes I hear his name . . . I think . . . when mommy whispers at night . . ."

"I don’t think she wants to be this way Lucy, I think she can’t help it. Grandpa has tried to get her help before."

"Do you think some flowers, out by the old hay barn would cheer her up? I could pick some and bring them back to her!"

The desperation in her eyes returned again as she looked up to David.

"I don’t think so Lucy, it may give here a tell that we know she's sad. You know how she gets, she doesn't want us to know."

"But we love her! How else we supposed to show her?"

. . .

Summer 2017:

A child and king.

The warmth of the small chapel seeped through David's blue summer shirt as he knelt in the pew. For the first time since bending down to tie his shoe, he noticed that it wasn;; just the arches of his feet that had taken the brunt of the Madrid pavement. His ankles were sore too. The night had been such a blur, stop after stop, the city lights once again filled his mind.

"Just this one stop to rest and then in under and hour I'll be back at the flat.”

"Man, I'm grateful we don’t start till 10 a.m. tomorrow, David thought as the summer’s school day schedule rushed quickly to his mind."

"Always a dreamer." His high school english teacher, Mrs. Jones, used to say about David. "One day, you'll do big things, if you can get yourself out of this town unlike the rest of us . . ." David looking around him, realized he actually did fulfill her foretold advice.

"She was a poet and a prophet," David thought. If only I had learned more in that European literature class. She lost me back then at Shakespeare."

Ever since he stepped foot in the chapel, memories of home kept rushing back to David. It seemed to be that way anytime his found himself in a church far from home. At least, that’s what happened to be the case during his first week of college the year prior.

"Nothing like your first night away from home." Grandpa used to say.

“Call me the next day if you need to, but after that you'll know what I'd tell you.”

It’d be the same thing Grandpa told him when he turned 14. Giving him the keys to run the old dodge in the field out back, David could still remember the words,

“Here's the stick, here's the clutch. One test ride with questions is what I’ll give you and then, you'll figure it out. After that, from here on out, you are on your own with this one."

"On his own." David was that first week of college, and unlike the rolled down windows on those long hot summer days in the old Dodge, his guard that first week of college was way up.

Unlike previous years, David was the only one in his graduating class of thirty to attend Oklahoma State. His roommates, one from Dallas, another from OKC, and another from a small town in Arkansas, all seemed okay, but they also were to fixed on all that “college” might offer them during the fall of 2016. Within the first week, one was already taking out multiple girls. He was the one who was undeclared in his major. Another was fixed to his desktop playing video games all week. “Enjoying the freedom away from his parents,” David assumed. The last seemed alright, he had already gotten his textbooks for class, but he also seemed a bit 'too academic for the impression David was hoping to first let off. “I’ll study hard, but I also want to make lifelong friends,” was the promise he gave to his mom.

At least his dorm, the academic one for honor’s kids that David's mom and Grandpa chose for him, was not like the others David would later learn. While his soon to be classmates were experiencing the realities of drugs, hookups, and late night fire drill drunkenness; David was caught between a suitemate playing battle royal all day, another talking about his trading cards with some other guys down the hall, and the last leaving each day to hang out with the girls in the hall across the street or at the bar, infamously labeled a “cafe,” around the corner. The quiet, studious hallways, and the disparate and eclectic group of guys in the suite left david reluctant to spend time in his dorm or room, and when he did he usually returned somber and quiet at the very end of the day.

And so David lumbered throughout that first week. The first night he laid on his lofted bed, staring up at the empty ceiling, with a paralyzing fear creeping into his mind.

"What will these four years be? What friends will I make, will OSU have a shot at winning the conference this year? Will I meet my future wife here in college? I wonder if she’s here on campus right now? What about Lucy, will she be alright without me?" Fantasies of college, worries of the past, and memories of the ranch flooded his mind.

"9 a.m. Chemistry, that is all I have to focus on. Wake up, grab some cereal, maybe a banana, bring the 5 subject notebook I got from the retail store, and bring some mechanical pencils, and the expensive calculator mom got me yesterday. Oh and the old laptop I brought from home, with it's tangled charger . . . Take a deep breath, I'll be alright.

. . .

Home . . . so elusive, and so far. Yet, why does it feel so nearby in this chapel across the ocean? So much had shifted in his first school year away from home, and here David was in a chapel far far away, but he might has well been on the old dirt road, crickets chirping in the dusk light, Grandpa calling out to him and Lucy for dinner from the porch swing.

. . .

Home . . . the host lied before his eyes, soft and white it glowed and radiated. "Before a God and child do we bend our knees." These were the words which were written in Spanish from the altar beneath.