Senator Whitmore called Jackson himself that night. The conversation was short.
“I watched every second, son. I’m sorry doesn’t cover it. If you can find it in your heart to give her one more chance—”
Jackson cut him off gently. “Sir, there is no second chance when it comes to my mother.”
The divorce was final in sixty days.
Jackson sold the Chestnut Hill house, donated half the proceeds to domestic-elder-abuse charities in his mother’s name, and moved back to the little white clapboard house in Wise County, Virginia, where he grew up. The one with the tin roof and the crooked porch his daddy built before the mine took him.
He fixed the plumbing, put in a new furnace, but left the creaky floors and the chipped Formica counters exactly as they were.
Every morning he made his mama breakfast—slightly burned eggs and all—and carried it to her on the same chipped tray she’d used when he was sick as a kid.
On Sundays they sat on the porch swing and watched the mountains turn gold, then red, then bare, then gold again.
One Thanksgiving a year later, the little Baptist church in town was packed shoulder-to-shoulder for a wedding.
