Epilogue
Zane
Five years later
The creek behind the house moves slowly tonight. Not lazy. Just steady. The way things move when they have found their rhythm and stopped fighting it.
It runs behind the back fence, half-hidden by reeds and old trees, water slipping over stones with a sound I never would have noticed when I was younger.
Back then, quiet made me twitch. Quiet meant something was coming.
A door. A fist. A voice from the hallway deciding the room needed pain in it and me choosing it as the most convenient place to put it.
Now it sits quietly beside me and no longer asks for blood anymore.
That still gets to me some nights.
Not in a bad way, but simply as something you never expected to have, sitting so ordinarily in your hands that you have to look at it twice to make sure it is real.
It still feels strange that an old man once looked at a kid digging through his skip and saw something worth keeping.
On nights when I can’t make sense of it, I sit out here, listen to the creek, and remind myself that Rainer never once needed a reason I could understand. He just decided.
I sit in the old wooden chair under the back porch, one boot braced on the step, the other planted in the dirt.
The evening air smells of cut grass, damp earth, and the faint smoke from the fire pit I forgot to clean out yesterday because my three-year-old daughter decided the entire afternoon needed to be dedicated to the serious and urgent business of finding ladybugs.
We found two.
One was dead.
She named it Kevin anyway and cried for ten solid minutes when I told her Kevin had gone to bug heaven.
Then Skylar told me I was shit at managing emotional crises and took over.
I lift my head. The sky is bruised purple above, the last thin strip of orange vanishing behind the hill. Lights glow through the kitchen window behind me. Warm and soft.
Home.
I still notice it sometimes.
The word itself. The way it sits in my mouth now, without any weight attached to it, without the old flinch that used to come with anything too good to trust.
Home.
Not a room I am borrowing.
Not a mattress I am one bad decision away from losing.
Not a space I expect to be told to leave the moment I breathe wrong, want too much, or need too loudly.
Home. Mine. Ours.
Rainer gave us this house. He also gave me the workshop. He gave me more than any man should ever give a half-feral little bastard he once found half-starved and angry enough to bite the hand offering help. And I still do not know what to do with the size of it all.
It has been two years since we buried him and I still pick up the phone some mornings to tell him something stupid.
A customer tried to argue with me last week about a noise in his engine while standing beside a car that sounded like it was filing its own death certificate.
The coffee machine in the workshop finally gave up after threatening to do so for half a decade, which Rainer would have called inevitable and I would have called personally offensive.
I wanted to tell him both things, but I couldn’t, and it still gets me every time.
I glance down at the paper in my hand. Worn soft at the folds now, the edges thin from being opened and closed more times than I can count.
I’m familiar with all the words. Every line.
Every place where his handwriting grew thinner near the end, where his hand must have shaken, but his stubborn old-bastard pride would not let him stop until it was finished.
I no longer read it every day.
At first, I did. For months after he died, I would sit out here after Skylar and Ava went to bed, beer going warm beside me, and open the letter because grief has a sick, specific sense of humor.
It takes the person and leaves the paper.
Leaves the handwriting. Leaves a voice you can almost hear if you hurt yourself hard enough to try.
I don’t do it every day anymore. Only on the nights when I miss him enough to hate the world for having the nerve to keep turning without him in it.
Tonight is one of those nights.
Maybe it was because Ava asked about him at dinner. She was sitting in her booster seat, tomato sauce on her cheek, blonde curls falling into her eyes, pointing at the photo on the wall with one small finger, wanting to know why Pop Rainer was in the picture but not at the table.
Skylar was the first to go quiet.
I did too.
Ava kept eating pasta with the kind of emotional violence only toddlers and drunk men possess, entirely unaware that she had just split my chest open with one question and half a meatball.
Skylar answered because she is better at that kind of thing than I am. She told Ava that Pop Rainer grew very old and very tired, and that his body could not hold on any longer.
Ava frowned, thinking hard, the way she does when something does not sit right with her, an expression she got directly from her mother and that already terrifies me on a daily basis.
Then she asked whether he still loved her.
Skylar looked at me.
I had to leave the table for a minute. Not far. Just to the sink. Just long enough to turn the tap on and stand there, pretending the running water had anything to do with my hands.
The truth is Rainer did love her.
Fuck, he loved that little girl in a way that made everything else in the room irrelevant whenever she was there.
Even when he was sick and his body had started betraying him in ways that made me want to put my fist through hospital walls.
I didn’t because Skylar would have killed me, and she would have been right.
He held Ava the day she was born. I helped him. That is the part that still hurts me on quiet evenings when the creek is running and the sky is going dark, and I have had enough beer to let it.
The nurses had tried to tell us he should not hold her, that he was too weak, and that perhaps he could gaze at her from the chair beside the bed.
Rainer told them he had been ignoring sensible women for seventy-eight years and saw no reason to ruin his record now.
Skylar laughed first. Then she told the nurse to leave him alone in a tone that made it clear the conversation was over. The nurse apparently agreed and left.
Rainer looked at me and said, “Your wife often threatens people.”
“She is not my wife yet,” I said.
He glanced at Skylar, then back at me with those steady eyes.
“Then fix that.”
Three weeks later, I did.
But that day, in that hospital room, Rainer was smaller than he had been six months before—the cancer having quietly taken things from him, the way it takes everything, without consultation or apology.
He smelled of peppermint, the hard little lollies he kept in his shirt pocket because the chemo had made everything else taste wrong, metallic and foreign, not like anything he recognized.
He had complained about it once, in that flat Rainer way of complaining that sounded more like a weather report than a grievance, and after that, he never mentioned it again.
Just kept the lollies in his pocket and got on with it, because that was the only way Rainer did things.
His hand shook as I placed Ava into his arms.
So did mine.
She was tiny, red-faced, and already furious at the world—a scrap of a thing with Skylar’s mouth and what I can only describe as my temper—arriving fully formed and making its feelings known to everyone in the room.
Rainer looked down at her and the whole world softened around him in a way I had never seen and will never forget.
This man had grumbled his way through every feeling he ever had. He taught me more about love through silence and work. He looked at my daughter and he cried.
One tear. That was all. It slid down a weathered cheek before Rainer looked at me.
“I am proud of you, son,” he said.
I thought it would kill me that night. Maybe some part of me did die in that hospital room, because he had always been proud of me. Even when I was nothing but bad choices, bruised knuckles, and a man trying to love Skylar without ruining her.
The letter crinkles in my hand.
I cast my gaze upon it.
Dear Zane,
If you’re reading this, then I’m gone.
I can hear you already. That jaw of yours locked tight. That look on your face that says you are about to turn grief into anger because anger feels less embarrassing.
I know you, son. Better than you think or would like. You were always easy to read. You just mistook being difficult for being mysterious.
That line made me smile the first time I read it.
It still does. Painfully.
The letter shakes a little in my hand and I fucking hate that paper can do this. Or that a man can be gone and still reach through ink to put his hand on the back of your neck. And Rainer always understood what to apply pressure to.
A few words.
A quiet truth.
One little jab, wrapped in love, because apparently even from the grave, the old bastard still had timing.
I drag in a breath that does nothing to ease the emotion of seeing this letter. His letter.
I keep reading.
There are things I should have said while I was still alive. I did not say them because I am old, stubborn, and not built for speeches. You already know that. If you wanted pretty words, you should have found a poet. You got me instead.
I want you to know why I did what I did. You asked me so many times why I took on that feral little kid I found in the trash. You always did have a talent for fighting the truth when it got too close.
You asked me why I gave every dollar I could. Why I gave you every night under my roof at the workshop. Why I kept showing up at that prison until you made yourself so ugly you pushed me away.
I knew why you turned kindness into a ledger, son. That is what people taught you. That nothing came free. They taught you that every hand reaching down had a hook in it. That love was something people used to make you owe them.
I stop there and press my thumb against the page.
The ink has blurred in one small spot.
Not from him. From me.