Bonus Chapter First Christmas
Beckett
My father came to Ember Falls on the twenty-third of December.
He came by train. He came by train because his knees had stopped letting him do the four-hour drive without consequences, and because the train from Asheville to Roanoke ran twice a day in the winter and connected to a regional bus that stopped, twice a day, in our town.
He had refused, when I had offered, to let me drive down to get him.
He had said, on the phone in mid-December, Son, I am seventy-one.
I am not a piece of luggage. I'm going to make my own way.
I had not argued. I had learned, in the year of our renegotiation, when to argue with my father and when not to, and the answer was never to argue when he was protecting his dignity.
His dignity was, at seventy-one, one of his last load-bearing walls.
He texted me from the train.
He had learned to text in the spring. Alma had taught him, over the phone, with the patience of a woman who had taught accountants in her thirties how to use software. He had texted me a single sentence:
Roanoke depot. 11:42 train. I am on it.
I had texted back: Bus connects at Mill Street. 2:17.
He had texted back: Acknowledged.
That was the entire conversation.
I was at the bus stop at one fifty-five.
The bus stop in Ember Falls was a small green metal shelter outside the diner on Mill Street, with a single bench, a covered top, and a posted schedule that the bus driver mostly disregarded.
The shelter had been put up in 1987 and had not been replaced.
The paint was peeling at the corners. The bench had a small carved heart in the upper-left corner with the initials J.M.
+ R.K. and a date — 1991 — and I had been told, by Diesel, that J.M.
and R.K. had married in 1993, divorced in 2001, and J.M.
was currently the postmaster of the town.
The heart had outlasted the marriage. The bench had outlasted both of them as a couple.
The town was, as it tended to be, the longer story.
I was at the bus stop early.
I was at the bus stop early because Alma had told me to leave early.
She had said, at the kitchen table that morning, Don't make him wait.
Make him think you've been there an hour.
Whether or not you have. I had been at the stop for twenty minutes.
I had not been waiting an hour, but I would tell him I had been.
Alma was, as she generally was, correct on these matters.
The bus came in at two-fourteen.
The driver opened the doors. Three people came off. The first was a college student with a duffel bag. The second was a heavyset woman in a red coat with a tote bag full of Christmas presents. The third was my father.
He came down the steps slowly.
He had a small duffel of his own, the duffel he had carried in the Marine Corps for forty years, with his name in stenciled black across the side — HOLT, M.
R. — and which had been to more countries than I could name.
He had a wool coat over his shoulders that I recognized from my childhood, the same coat he had worn to my high-school graduation, and a wool cap pulled down over his ears.
He was using a cane I had not seen before.
I noticed it. I did not comment on it. The cane was a piece of carved hickory with a worn brass tip.
I would learn, that night, that it had belonged to my grandfather.
He had brought it from the closet of the Banner Elk house because, he told me, winter sidewalks in Virginia are not a place for false pride.
He looked up.
He saw me.
He raised one hand.
I raised one hand back. The town did not need to see us hug at the bus stop.
The town did not need to see anything. The town would be told whatever the town needed to be told by Sienna, who would, by the end of the day, have constructed a complete and mostly accurate narrative of my father's visit, which she would then deploy at the diner over the next forty-eight hours, where it would replace whatever lesser narratives the town had been operating on.
I walked over. I took his duffel.
He said, "You don't need to."
I said, "I do."
He said, "All right, son."
I had not heard him say all right, son in approximately twenty years.
The phrase had been, in my childhood, his small surrender — the thing he said when he was, against his better judgment, going to let me have a thing I wanted.
He had said it the first time I had asked to skip a Saturday morning training run because I had wanted to read in bed.
He had said it the second time I had asked to take a metalworking class in the seventh grade instead of joining JROTC.
He had said it three times in my life that I could remember, and now four.
The fourth one was for the duffel bag. The fourth one was, in some way, also for the previous three.
We walked to the truck.
The truck was parked outside the bank, two blocks down. I went slowly. He went slowly. The sidewalk had ice patches and the cane was helping but the cane was not, by itself, sufficient. I walked on his left side. I did not offer my arm. I let him have his cane. But I walked close.
In the truck, he settled.
He buckled his seat belt. He pulled his coat tighter.
He looked out the windshield at Mill Street.
He took it in. He did not say anything. My father did not say anything when he was taking in a new place — he was a man who looked first and spoke later, the same way I worked at the anvil — and Mill Street was, for him, an entirely new place, the place where his son had been living for nine years and which he had never seen.
I did not point things out.
I had decided, on the drive down, that I would not narrate Mill Street.
I would not say, That's the diner, or That's where the shop is.
He would see. He would absorb. He would, in his own time, ask.
My father was, in his architecture, a man who liked to figure things out. I was not going to take that from him.
We drove to the shop.
I had asked Alma if she wanted to be at the shop when we arrived or up at the loft. She had said the loft. She had said, I want to be at the door. I want to bring him into our home. Not into the work. She had been right about that, too.
I pulled into the lot behind the shop.
My father got out. He looked at the back of the building.
He looked at the Indian Chief he could see through the lobby window.
He looked at the Tomás Navarro Custom Cycles sign over the front of the building, the iron letters and the copper Custom I had inset for Alma.
He nodded once. The nod was a small mechanical assessment — the same nod he had given my brother's house in San Diego, the same nod he had given Gunner's apartment in Richmond, the small commanding-officer nod that meant acceptable to operational standards.
I led him up the stairs.
The stairs to the loft were on the outside of the building, off the back lot, in a small covered stairwell that Beckett had insisted on enclosing in his first year of owning the place because, he had said, outside stairs in winter are a cane-and-hip-replacement combo waiting to happen.
He had built the enclosure himself, with cedar he had milled from the back lot.
My father, going up, did not ask about the stairs.
He did not need to. The stairs were what they were.
He took them slowly, one at a time, both hands on the rail in the parts where the rail allowed it.
At the top, the door opened.
Alma was on the other side.
She had on the dark green sweater I had bought her, and her hair was down, and she had been baking — there was a small dusting of flour on her left cheek that she did not know was there and that I did not, out of mercy, mention.
She had baked because she had been nervous, and because she did not, when nervous, get drunk or smoke or eat or shout.
She baked. She had been baking since two o'clock.
The loft smelled, when my father came through the door, of cinnamon and butter and a particular spice mix she had inherited from her own grandmother and which was, in the kitchen, the smell of every Sunday afternoon of my year of marriage.
My father stepped inside.
He stopped.
He looked around the loft. He looked at the kitchen.
He looked at the small living room with the woodstove.
He looked at the bedroom door, which was closed, and the bathroom door, which was closed, and the small office area at the back where Alma kept the second laptop.
He looked at the framed Mary Oliver poem he had given me, hanging above the kitchen table.
He looked at the wooden plaque Earl had carved, hanging above the door we had just come through, in the position I had been told to hang it. THE HOLT-NAVARRO RESIDENCE. EST. 2025.
His eyes went back to the plaque.
He stood looking at it for a long moment.
Alma did not speak. She had learned, from me, that my father needed silences.
She had not, in the year of our marriage, asked me what to do in his silences.
She had simply watched me, in his presence, and adapted, and now she stood at the door with her hands clasped lightly in front of her and let him have the silence.
He said, finally, "Earl did good work."
I said, "He did."
He said, "Earl never does bad work. But this is — this is some of the best of his I've seen."
He cleared his throat. He turned to Alma. He said, "Daughter."
Alma had told me, on the drive up from the bus stop in her imagination, that she had been preparing for Forge's wife or Alma or possibly young lady if he was at the formal end of his vocabulary.
She had not, by her own report later that night, been preparing for daughter.
The word hit her at an angle she had not braced for, and her eyes went immediately wet, and she had to swallow once before she could speak. She said, "Dad."