All Roads Lead to Roma, Texas (Finale)

Eli

Roma rose from the heat like a dream I half-remembered, a dream that had never been mine to begin with. A tale Adele had recounted one morning, mumbling like a somniloquist with eyelids as heavy as the dreams they had carried.

It shimmered along the 83—half dust, half mirage under an overcast sky—as if the town had never really been committed to a map. Just to memory. Adele’s memory. And it pulled my truck toward it without much resistance, like a siren song from Jessamine’s mythology books.

I hadn’t even registered that we had arrived until I had driven past the sign:

Roma
CITY LIMIT
POP 11561

Jessamine rubbed away the mascara smudged under her eye in the mirror of her sun visor. She carefully examined her face before bending over to retrieve her purse.

“You look beautiful, Jess. You don’t need all that.”

“I don’t want to look crazy.” She unscrewed the cap of a beige lip gloss, pursing her lips to apply it as I drove over a pothole. The sudden jolt pushed her hand down her chin. “Ugh,” she grumbled and turned to me, her face deadpan.

“Well, now you do look crazy,” I chuckled, admiring how her handiwork resembled a glittery trail of snail slime.

A grin cracked through her apprehension. “I bet you did it on purpose.”

“Not my fault the roads here are shit.”

“Maybe so,” she agreed, albeit reluctantly. “Though, I’d wager your decaying truck had something to do with this, too.”

I leaned over the wheel and caressed the dashboard. “Shh, don’t listen to her,” I whispered to my Ford. Jessamine laughed.

She hadn’t said much since we drove into Texas some 450 miles ago. She had only broken my monologue once, when I had stopped at a gas station in Victoria. After paying at the pump, I counted the loose change in my pocket.

“Be right back,” I said, closing the car door more forcefully than intended.

As I walked away, Jessamine rolled the window down and shouted, “Beef jerky, please!” before rolling it back up.

When I returned to my truck, she offered a feeble smile and let me eat most of the dried meat strips. I figured I would just let her come to me instead of forcing the words out of her, so I finally decided to stop talking. Surprisingly, it was rather comfortable.

When the Grand Roma Hotel sign came into view—curved letters unevenly painted by hand—I felt a weight settle in the pit of my stomach. I had gone through a million scenarios in my mind, but I could not figure out what I would find upon my arrival and how Adele would react. I seriously considered making a U-turn in the middle of the highway and speeding back across state lines before Jessamine’s voice pulled me back to the real world.

A world where I was parked in front of my ex-wife’s hotel with my new wife.

“I would give you a moment,” Jessamine said, “but I need to get out on your side.”

“Huh?” I looked into her eyes, dazed. “Oh, right.” I turned off the ignition and jumped out of the vehicle. Reaching for Jessamine’s hand, I helped her climb out and planted a kiss on her forehead after she had found her balance.

The hotel stood stubbornly against the heat, seemingly held together by nails and faith alone. Painted talavera tiles ringed the door, and two kids sat on the front steps sharing a mango paleta, their feet dusty, their faces unconcerned with the strangers standing before them.

Suddenly, a curious thought came to my mind. An unwelcome thought. I knew that Adele couldn’t have had children this grown in the mere two years we had spent apart. But their eyes…

I don’t know why, but I expected the hotel to be overrun with kids as I pushed open the front doors. I imagined they could be running around the lobby, with an irritated Adele in tow, telling them to play in the courtyard instead. A few of them could have been ours. Our children.

Like I said, an unwelcome thought.

Inside, the lobby pulsed with color—blankets folded in a crate, a corkboard of missing persons notices next to handwritten thank-you notes. An altar beside a vending machine. There was a smell of sweet fruits and smoky chiles. Adele’s mole manchamanteles.

Adele was hunched over the front desk, absent-mindedly fanning herself with a Vanity Fair magazine as she scribbled on a Post-It. She wore my Midland T-shirt, and the shadow of a smile threatened to expose just how much my heart swelled. She ripped the note off its stack and looked up to stick it in the corner of her desktop computer screen.

Our eyes met.

She stilled.

And for just a second, every version of us was there in the room—second grade in Marfa, that night on the lawn in front of the UT Tower, the morning after the miscarriage, the moment I dropped her off at the bus station. The silence between us wasn’t sharp anymore. Just long.

Jessamine reached out, her voice soft. “Hi. I’m Jessamine.”

Adele took her hand. “I know.” Her gaze lingered on Jessamine before abruptly dropping her hand and hiding her eyes behind a nebulous smile.

She stepped out from behind the counter and offered us water from a cooler that hummed loudly by her desk. We then followed her into the courtyard, where hammocks swung lazily and a hotel guest strummed the strings of a dissonant guitar. My hands searched for Jessamine’s, but she was too captivated by the architecture to notice.

“¡Pásala! ¡Pásala!”

“¡Ey, ey, espérate! Foul!”

“Goaaaaal!”

My head turned to the noise, where a small group of children played soccer while their parents watched.

Adele sat us down at a sun-warmed picnic table outside the dining hall, from which emerged Luke with a bowl of mandarins. “Hey,” he said, “nice to finally meet you.” He shook my hand with an easygoing smile, and I did my best to ignore his soaked shirt.

“What happened to you?” Adele asked.

“The sink needs fixin’.”

“And I reckon a reverend has just the skillset for that,” I teased, though my words came out more bitter than I was.

Luke laughed lightly. “I’ll admit that it’s a little outside my wheelhouse.” He pulled a wrench from the back pocket of his jeans. “I wonder if the car mechanic will have more luck than me.”

Before I could grab the tool, Adele placed her hand on Luke’s wrist and pushed his arm down. “I don’t ask hotel guests to fix my sinks. I’ll call Rico in the morning.”

Luke nodded once and set the wrench on the table before jogging toward the children.

“He seems kind,” Jessamine said.

“He is,” Adele replied, looking over at Luke, who had joined the soccer game. “And he’s a great source of comfort for families here.”

It appeased me to know that Adele wasn’t alone. Truly. I was happy to see she had surrounded herself with people who wouldn’t fail or abandon her. Luke wasn’t cut from the same cloth as our blanket fort. He wasn’t the kind of man to make pacts, break them, and still walk away.

He didn’t live in the gray like we did.

Thunderstorms and funerals used to pull us back to each other. Her number would light up my screen on nights when lightning threatened to rip the sky apart. And there was that one nameless letter, too. The one neither of us wanted to mention.

Every time, we told ourselves it didn’t count. That grief or loneliness or guilt had given us a pass. But if it had meant that little, why had we ever gone our separate ways at all?

Jessamine squeezed my hand from beneath the table. I could read the question in her eyes and nodded because, honestly, I was okay. Or at least, I knew I would be.

Adele turned back to us. “Walk with me?” she asked hesitantly, then cleared her throat and continued with more assurance. “I’d like to show y’all something.”

We followed her across the courtyard to a blooming garden. Every plant was carefully labeled in juvenile penmanship, and I knew Jessamine was smiling at the spelling mistakes. We made our way to the back fence, where a row of yellow flowers cascaded atop the wooden planks. A wooden plaque was nailed to the fence. Etched in Adele’s handwriting were the words “Yellow jessamine.”

Jessamine sniffled and turned away. “You okay?” Adele asked, but Jessamine was already halfway out of the garden.

Adele looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “She doesn’t like to cry in front of people,” I explained. “Hardly cries in front of me.”

“Ah,” Adele nodded. “Must be a welcome change from my hissy fits.”

“It sure is,” I said, nudging her elbow when she feigned a scowl.

Adele sat on a stone bench by the garden’s edge and motioned for me to follow suit. She angled her head to remain in the shade of a large palmetto leaf, her face flushed from the heat. Fanning herself with her hands, she thanked me for coming.

“I didn’t know if I should.”

She gave a small shrug. “I’m glad you did anyway.”

I pulled the envelope from my jacket and slid it beneath her hand. She looked at it, then back at me.

“Don’t you need this?” she asked.

“Not as much as they do,” I said, nodding toward the families in the courtyard. “Not as much as you do.”

She took it without thanks.

I wanted to ask her about Luke. I wanted to ask if she was happy. If she thought of me when the hotel creaked at night. But I didn’t.

“I should’ve...” The words sat in my mouth like a bruise.

Adele didn’t press.

“I almost turned around,” I said finally. “Back there on the highway.”

“Yeah?” She picked at a peeling flake of varnish on the bench. “Well, I almost ran back to your truck,” she admitted in a small voice. She exhaled, a slow drag of breath through her teeth. “But, I’m sorry for thinking that if I left, I’d make room for something better. For both of us.”

The sound of a child’s laughter from the courtyard interrupted us.

Adele’s eyes remained downcast, stubbornly refusing to meet mine. “You remember that first night apart? You called me.”

“Barely,” I said, though I did.

“You said something about God. That we’d messed up the plan.”

She was still looking away. “You said He’d stopped bothering with us.”

I let the wind say what I couldn’t, drifting soft and dry through the garden. That’s when it hit me: I liked this place. Not because it was peaceful, but because its noise felt honest. Grief, joy, longing. Regret. For once, I didn’t feel the need to explain myself to any of it.

There was nowhere to hide at the Grand Roma Hotel.

“Maybe I was wrong,” I finally said. “Maybe there was never a plan to begin with.” I inhaled, flooding my nose with dust and Adele’s coconut shampoo. “I think ‘meant to be’ means jack shit. I’ll regret it,” I said. “Losing you. I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.”

“Yeah?”

“Mhmm.”

“Yeah, me too,” she said, pointedly. Matter-of-factly. But there wasn’t any sadness in her voice.

The road back to Marfa didn’t exist anymore. It had sunk into the dust. Adele brushed her palm along the yellow jessamine petals and rose to her feet. The garden was hers now.

And Jessamine—

Well, Jessamine was already waiting for me.

Adele led me out of the garden. Jessamine sat cross-legged beside a girl no older than ten, carefully twisting strands of thread into a bracelet. Jessamine laughed. The same laugh that had replaced her wedding vows.

Our eyes met.

She smiled.

Adele watched me.

. . .

Jessamine curled into my side, already drifting to sleep in one of the back rooms. Through the cracked window of the room, the town hummed and stretched and sighed.

I counted to slats on the shutters, then the space between Jessamine’s breathing. I wanted to make her a promise, but I couldn’t.

And now, the only thing left to do was stay.