Epilogue #2
The first week after the funeral, I got drunk out here and read that line until the sky turned gray. Read it until the words stopped being words and became a hand around my throat.
He understood me.
Fuck, he knew me. Rainer saw every rotten thing life had carved into me—every sharp edge, every busted piece—and somehow decided I was still worth the trouble.
I drag in a breath before I force myself to keep reading.
When I found you, you were all elbows, attitude, and hunger. Too young to be that angry, too proud to admit you were scared. I knew that look because I had worn it myself.
That is something I never told you. You were not the first angry boy with nowhere to go who slept near bins and pretended he had chosen it. I was one too.
The letter shifts in my hand.
Long before the garage, before the house, before I learnt the difference between a man and a fist with boots on, there was a mechanic named Frank Mallory.
He caught me stealing parts from behind his shop when I was sixteen. I thought he would call the police, but he didn’t. He gave me a sandwich instead.
I told him to fuck off.
He gave me another one the next day. I called him worse things. He told me I had a talent for engines and the manners of a feral dog. He was right on both counts.
Frank gave me work and a place to stand. He gave me enough time to become something other than what the world expected me to be. He didn’t save me in one grand moment. That is not how saving works. He kept giving me reasons to come back until one day I realized I had stopped leaving.
When I saw you behind my workshop all those years later, I saw myself. Not the old man I had become. The boy before that.
The one who had already decided no one was coming, so he might as well become someone no one wanted to reach for. I could not walk away from that boy twice.
My throat closes.
I glance upward, but the creek blurs before me. I lower the letter and stare out at the dark water sliding over the stones.
I was unaware of any of that until this letter.
Rainer never told me why he did it. He had carried Frank inside him all those years and I never knew. He had given me a second-hand kind of mercy. Passed down because someone had once handed it to him when he was too young and angry to know what the fuck to do with it.
Fuck. I press the heel of my hand against my eye and breathe.
I lift the letter again.
You said you always wanted to pay me back for the things I gave you, but what I gave you was never a debt to me.
But I know the stubborn bastard that you are, so pay me this way.
By staying with the people you love when it gets hard, because life is never as easy as people pretend it is.
Stay when the old voice in your head tells you that leaving is kinder.
That voice is a liar. Frankly, it has always sounded like an idiot. Trust me. I know.
Skylar loves you, Zane. So let her love you, even when you think you are unlovable. A woman’s love can change a man. I am aware of that. I also know that when love is gone, it takes a piece of you with it.
But staying is harder than it sounds. You are already aware of that. Loving is one thing. Being loved is the real test for men like us.
The workshop is yours. Do not argue. I am dead and cannot be bothered to listen. You’ve earned it. Not because you worked enough hours to square the account I paid Ricky. You earned it because you stood in that place day after day and chose to build instead of break.
You made that garage breathe again when I was too tired to handle it alone.
The house is yours and Skylar’s. I understand you will think it is too much, but it’s not. I want you both to have it.
A house should belong to people who know what it means to need one. So fill it with noise. But you might want to tone down the cursing while Ava is around.
Another laugh cuts through me, louder this time, as I think of our daughter saying “shit” before she said “please.”
Skylar blamed me.
Aunty Cassie sent balloons.
I wipe away the tear rolling down my face and keep going.
Love Ava and any child who comes after her the way you were not loved at the beginning. Not perfectly. Perfect parents are a myth created by people with clean houses and bad memories.
Just love them honestly. Show up. Say sorry. Let them see that a man can be strong without being cruel.
I am proud of you, son.
Not because you never fell. You did. Not because you never made a mess. Christ, son, you were a full-time disaster for a while there.
I am proud because you got back up. More than that, you stayed up.
You learnt the hard lesson. You learnt that a man can fight his way through life and still lose everything, or he can put his hands to work and build something worth keeping.
You are not the boy I found behind the workshop. You are not an inmate number either.
You are not defined by your worst day.
You are my son in every way that has ever mattered to me.
I did not give you blood but I gave you a place to come back to. And you gave me a reason to keep the lights on.
That was enough for me; it has always been enough.
Look after the garage and the house, but mostly Skylar and Ava. Let them care for you, as well, Zane, because you can be a stubborn bastard.
I love you, son.
Rainer.
Rainer’s words sit heavy in my chest, pressing on places I thought had scarred over years ago. Turns out, grief is a sneaky bastard. It waits, then reaches up and grabs you by the throat with a dead man’s handwriting.
Behind me, the screen door creaks.
I don’t turn around. I am familiar with her steps. I have known them since we were seventeen, when she could walk across a room and make me forget the bad mood I had committed to.
Skylar crosses the boards barefoot and only then do I turn my head.
There she is.
The love of my life since we were stupid teenagers, with too much heat between us and not enough sense to know what to do with it.
Thirty-one now and she still has the kind of face that messes with my breathing.
Her hair is pulled into a messy knot atop her head and she wears one of my old shirts—its hem falling halfway down her thighs. The shirt is faded, the collar stretched, and somehow the sight of her in it still does more for me than any piece of lingerie ever has.
For the record, I have deep respect for both art forms.
One makes me want to drop to my knees in front of her and the other lacy items make me want to peel them off with my teeth.
She has a beer in each hand.
Her eyes drop to the letter in my hand, and her expression softens.
She passes me the beer.
As I take it our fingers brush for half a second. Fourteen years of that specific contact and it still does the same thing to me it has always done.
She lowers herself onto my lap, easy and familiar, as if the shape of us were decided years ago on a half-collapsed tin roof and the rest of life has just been catching up ever since.
My arm wraps around her waist.
She settles against me as she looks down at the letter.
She knows all the letters.
There are two. One for me. One for her. Rainer, being Rainer, made sure the people he loved had something to hold onto after he was gone.
Her hand covers mine and we sit like that for a while. The fireflies start doing their thing in the long grass beyond the fence.
Eventually, Skylar asks, “Are you okay?”
I peer over her shoulder at the creek, steady in the dark. “No.”
Her fingers tighten around mine as she rests her forehead against my temple.
“You read it when you miss him,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Me too.”
I turn my face a fraction. “You read yours too?”