Publish :  2024

Pages :  233

Download :  105

My Heart Wants

By    Mark Heckler

Jackson Bishop of Fishing Creek, Maryland, a tiny, insular community of watermen, retired AND was divorced six years ago on the same day: his sixty-second birthday! Jackson could easily have become a very bitter man. Instead, his huge and open heart craved one final, epic adventure before he packed it in. Following the divorce that rocked his world beyond com-prehension, and being finally retired with nothing to lose, he hitched a small, vintage camping trailer to a twenty-year-old F150 and took off on an open-ended road trip that ultimately took him away from reality for thirty-eight days and covered nearly 4,000 blue-highway miles. During that incredible journey he exorcised his demons, found inner peace, met some unforgettably kind and genuine Americans and discovered that even in his sixties it was still possible to hope for love again. Six years later and smack in the middle of the third wave of a global pandemic that led to the postponement of his fiftieth high-school reunion, Jackson once again must ask himself, “Why the Hell not?” With the help of his tech-savvy son he fires off a blast-email to 130 of his fellow classmates, hoping to find just one crazy or desperate enough to join him on an even longer road trip, following what is left of Historic Route 66 from Chicago to California, then northward to Montana before finally returning to Maryland just as the new year chimes in. From an unbelievably serendipitous email response, Jackson reconnects with Doni, a female classmate whom he has not seen or heard from in thirty years, since their twentieth reunion. What Doni never knew, and what she will only find out days later when they’re on the road, is that for all that time she has been the object of Jackson’s erotic fantasies. But it gets even better! In an evening of True Confessions, Jackson admits to a massive crush on Doni since tenth grade French class! She is stunned and flattered and admits to him a similar but silent crush on him during their senior year. And soon, their tender, beguiling Third Act love story begins to take root. In a motel at the end of their road trip's first day on Historic Route 66, Jackson is struck by an epiphany: going to Montana in December is beyond stupid because he truly despises cold weather. When Jackson tells Doni their revised route will carry them south and east to Memphis, where they will stay in the historic Peabody Hotel, then to Natchez, Mississippi which she's never even heard of, to Fort Walton Beach, Florida for a final overnight and finally to the end of US Route 1 and the warmth and funkiness of Key West, she all in! But even that is not to be. In Fort Walton Beach Doni reveals her recent trepidation about some potentially serious health problems as well as the soul-crushing heartache of missing her only grandson's formative years. Hearing the sadness in her voice hurt Jackson's heart, but he knew exactly what he had to do. Key West would always be there. So, they turn their leased van north and head back to Maryland to visit first Doni's sister, then her son, daughter-in-law and grandson, before heading back to Maryland's Eastern Shore to try living in Doni's house together and plan for a three-family Thanksgiving. But much too soon after their return to the slow pace of life in a very small town, their longed-for future together becomes clouded in doubt as the results of a cognitive assessment by Doni's primary physician in February lead to the bombshell of a long-repressed traumatic brain injury discovered by a high-tech brain scan at a private clinic in Reston, Virginia just one month later. Could this fairytale of finding lasting love in their third act of life become just another version of a classic Greek tragedy? Or could it have a true Hallmark Movie ending?