The Sound of the Screen Door

I still hear the screen door slamming.

It’s been twenty years, but it still echoes through my memory like a heartbeat. The rusty springs stretching, a sharp thwack, the whisper of it settling back into place. Joe never closed it gently. He didn’t believe in gentle exits.

Summers back then felt like beginnings; that summer especially. I was twenty-two, working behind the bar off Main. I saved my tips in a chipped mason jar with a picture of a Greyhound bus taped to the outside. I hoped to leave come fall. Nobody believed me.

Joe did.

He walked in one evening, bringing with him the smell of river water and cigarette smoke. He had a smirk tucked into the corner of his mouth and sand on his boots. He said little at first. Just sat there. He ordered a rye and soda, and studied the jukebox like it held all the world’s secrets.

He was easily older than me by a few years; old enough to have been somewhere and come back looking a little frayed around the edges.

After three nights of watching him stir around the ice in his glass with one long, calloused finger, I asked, “You passing through or planning on laying down roots?”

He looked up and smiled real slow, like the Cheshire Cat. “Guess I’m letting the town decide.”

That was Joe.

He stayed nowhere long, but he was never in a rush to leave either. It was like he was always listening for something in the wind, some sign that it was time to move on. Maybe in the wind through the pines. Maybe in the whistle of the 5:15 train from Albany.

We spent most evenings that summer at the edge of Onion Creek. We dangled our feet in the water and tried to guess what the fireflies blinked in lazy Morse code around us. He told me many stories about cities he’d wandered through, people he’d met, songs he’d written and then forgotten. He had a small notebook he carried with him. He spent half the time scribbling in it without looking, but the words flowed through him rather than from him.

“You gonna write about me?” I asked once.

“Already have.”

I never saw the page.

What I remember most of all wasn’t anything big. It wasn’t the kiss by the water tower or the way he always drummed his fingers on the steering wheel of his truck, like a song played on repeat in his mind. It was how he looked at people directly yet compassionately, as if he knew the stories they had told no one yet.

That August, the town put on its annual Harvest Jubilee. Joe got talked into playing a few songs on the makeshift stage behind the post office. I watched him from my place in the back. At that moment, watching him play, I thought he’d stay. Maybe we’ll both stay.

But you don’t pin down a man like Joe.

Come Monday morning, he was gone.

He left behind a half-full cup of coffee, his guitar pick under my pillow, and the sound of the screen door slamming shut.

No note.

Not even a goodbye.

I stayed—of course. Now it seemed I always had a reason to. Mama’s health, the economy, the weather, the way the town looked when the maples turned; I had a new excuse every fall. The mason jar disappeared, forgotten behind the stacks of tins, and the bus station closed the following year.

Life stretched on.

After a few years, I married someone safe. She and I built a house with clean lines and quiet halls. We had a daughter who danced like the wind and wrote poems on the covers of her notebooks. I never told them about Joe.

Not directly, anyway.

And when our girl plays her guitar on the porch, I feel the notes echoing through the chambers of my heart. Once, she sang a melody I’d never heard, and it tugged at something behind my memories like an old screen door in the wind.

I don’t believe in ghosts — not the sheet-draped Charlie Brown kinds — but I do believe there are hauntings of the heart. They slip in during songs on grocery store speakers, in the smell of river mud after summer rain, in the way the sky goes a soft orange just before dusk over Onion Creek.

Sometimes, when I’m alone, I pull out the napkin I kept under the cash register the day he left. The ink of a half lyric had faded, but you can still read it:

“If you remember me, let it be in song.”

Maybe he thought that was enough.

Maybe he was right.