CHAPTER NINETEEN
A Gathering for Everett
Marion was the one who suggested it, standing at the makeshift kitchen counter the next morning with flour on her hands and something resolute in her eyes that told me she'd been turning the idea over most of the night before she found the courage to say it out loud.
"We ought to do some part of it for him," she said, to me and to Carla both, kneading a great mound of dough with more force than it strictly required.
"Not a proper funeral, I know we can't manage that yet, not with the roads still buried and the coroner still weeks off from being able to reach us properly.
But something. A gathering. A remembrance, while we've all still got him fresh in our hearts, instead of waiting until he feels like something that happened a long time ago to people who barely knew him. "
"I think that's exactly right," I told her, and felt a piece of it in my own chest ease at the idea, the particular relief of finally having a shape to put around grief that had been sitting shapeless and heavy in all of us for days. "He deserves that. All of us do, honestly."
Word moved through the pavilion the way word always moved through a crowded room with nowhere else to put its energy, and by early afternoon the entire place had organized itself, without anybody formally directing it, into something that looked remarkably like a proper gathering.
Denny and Gil dragged the long folding tables into a rough half circle near the larger of the two stoves.
Odette and Emmett, who had spent four days baking their way steadily through the pavilion's dwindling flour supply out of what Odette called simple nervous habit, produced an entire tray of cinnamon rolls that filled the whole building with a warmth that had nothing to do with the fire.
Carla and Reagan worked together over what remained of the venison Denny had put up that fall, and even the Pruitt children were pressed into gentle service, carrying napkins and mismatched forks from table to table with the specific grave seriousness small children brought to any task an adult had trusted them with.
"Everett would have hated a fuss," Walt said to me quietly, watching the room organize itself around us, though I noticed he was smiling despite the words, a soft, sad smile that suited the full strange, tender afternoon.
"He'd have told us to save the good venison for a night we actually needed cheering up. "
"I think tonight might be just that night, Dad," I said, and watched him consider it a moment before nodding, slow, some of the guilt he'd been carrying since that terrible night at last easing another measured notch.
We gathered fully once the light outside had gone the deep blue of early winter evening, thirty some people crowded close around the tables and the two stoves, plates balanced on knees, the whole room lit gold and flickering by lantern light since the generator was better saved, Denny had decided, for warmth than for brightness on a night like this one.
Dad stood first, hat in hand as he'd stood the day he told us all we'd be keeping Everett in the shed, and this time his voice, though still thick, carried something gentler than grief alone.
"I knew Everett Boyle four days," he said, plain.
"Four days, and I'd have called him a friend the rest of my life, given the chance.
He taught my grandson to think two moves ahead at checkers, and he taught me, without ever meaning to teach me anything at all, that grief doesn't get lighter with time so much as you get stronger for carrying it.
I think that's about the finest thing a man can leave behind him, and I mean to carry it a good long while myself. "
One by one, without much prompting, people rose to add their own small pieces of him to the growing shape of the evening.
Reagan spoke of the still, steady way he'd thanked her for trying, even at the very end, when there was nothing left to thank anybody for.
Otis, surprising me, spoke of a single conversation they'd shared about old photographs, Everett asking careful, gentle questions about his research that Otis said he'd assumed, at the time, was simple polite curiosity, and now suspected had been some part of it considerably more purposeful.
Even Deloris, standing a little apart as always, offered a short, halting sentence about how kind he'd been to her the one time she'd let herself be spoken to at all, and I watched her sit back down looking startled by her own willingness to say it.
Theo told the room, solemn and cautious, that Everett had once told him the trick to checkers was thinking past the move in front of you, and that he thought that was probably good advice for life too, which drew the kind of soft, watery laughter a room needed sometimes more than it needed anything else.
It was somewhere in the middle of that long, warm, sorrowful evening that I noticed Gil had settled himself beside Sylvie without either of them making any particular show of it, her hand resting easy against his arm, his head bent toward hers in quiet, unhurried conversation that had nothing to do with grief at all, at least not directly.
"He'd have liked you two together," I said, settling beside them with my own plate, watching the color rise faintly in Gil's weathered face. "Everett, I mean. He struck me as a man who appreciated seeing people find each other, wherever he found them finding it."
"We were just talking about him, actually," Sylvie said, unbothered, her sharp eyes warm in the lantern light.
"About how a person can know somebody four days and still feel the complete shape of a friendship missing once they're gone.
Made me think, honestly, about how little time any of us actually get, in the end, and how foolish it would be to waste whatever we've got left being careful about it. "
"Is that your way of telling me something, Sylvie Marchetti?" Gil asked, dry, though I could see plainly he already knew the answer.
"Might be," she said, and the look that passed between them, warm and a little shy and totally unhurried despite her own words, was sweet enough that I had to look away and pretend a sudden, urgent interest in my own plate.
The evening might have stayed entirely solemn, and would have been forgiven for it, except that Milo Pruitt chose that certain moment to come tearing across the room in a state of high alarm, Wyatt hot on his heels, both boys nearly colliding with the nearest folding table.
"Gerald got into the cinnamon rolls," Milo announced, breathless, to the room at large, as though this constituted a genuine emergency requiring immediate collective action. "He's got one whole roll and he won't share it and Daisy's crying because she wanted the last one."
Sure enough, Gerald the raccoon sat perched with considerable satisfaction atop a stack of folded chairs near the far wall, a cinnamon roll clutched in both small hands, completely unbothered by the ring of children now gathered beneath him in various states of outrage and delight.
"He's part of the science project," Wyatt explained gravely, to anyone who might need clarifying. "We're studying his behavior. This is important data."
"Important data," Grady Pruitt repeated, arriving with the particular weary good humor of a father who had long since stopped being surprised by anything his children declared scientifically necessary.
"Right. Well, someone go rescue Daisy a roll before this important data experiment turns into a full scale diplomatic incident. "
The laughter that moved through the room at that, real and warm and entirely unguarded, felt, for just a moment, like exactly the kind of medicine grief sometimes needed most, permission to feel something lighter without any guilt attached to feeling it, and I caught Walt laughing too, properly laughing, for the first time since the storm had taken Everett from us, and felt a piece of it in my own chest loosen at the sound of it.
Later, once the children had finally been coaxed toward sleep and the lanterns had burned low, I found myself standing near the window with Sam, looking out at the last of the snow drifting soft and slow past the glass, and thought that Marion had been precisely right, that Everett had deserved this, a room full of people who'd known him only briefly and loved him anyway, gathered together not to mourn what his death had taken from us but to truly, gratefully remember what his short time among us had given.
"He'd have liked tonight," I said, soft, leaning into Sam's shoulder. "The raccoon included, probably especially the raccoon."
"He would have," Sam agreed, and pressed a kiss to my hair, and we stood there a long while together, watching the storm eventually, truly settling itself into stillness outside, grateful, in the specific fierce way grief sometimes made a person grateful, for every last minute we'd been given with a man none of us had known nearly long enough.