HOMECOMING WEATHER
Micah doesn't get up right away, and I'm grateful for that small mercy, if that's even the word I'm allowed to use anymore. He stays kneeling by the stone, chisel loose in his hand, and lets me be the one to close the distance or not close it.
I don't close it. Not yet.
"I heard this morning," I say, which isn't an answer to anything, but it's the truest thing I've got.
"Nan called me an hour before she called you.
" His voice is rougher than I remember, or maybe I've just forgotten what it sounds like when it isn't saying something that breaks me.
"Wanted the stone ready before the service.
Said Hollis would've wanted his name up before people started asking where it was. "
That's exactly the kind of thing Hollis would have wanted, and exactly the kind of detail nobody else in this town would have thought to arrange. Of course it was Nan. Of course it was Micah's hands doing it.
I look past him at the letters. H-O-L-L-I-S.
The S isn't finished. There's a rawness to the stone where the chisel hasn't gone yet, a pale unweathered gash in granite that's been going gray and green with lichen for sixty years everywhere else.
It looks like a wound. I suppose that's the point of a memorial. It's supposed to look like what it is.
"You don't have to finish it with me standing here," I say.
"I know I don't." He sets the chisel down anyway, stands, brushes granite dust off his knees in a motion so familiar it lands somewhere under my ribs.
He's wearing the cut, the Red Quarry MC leather with the skull-and-wings patch on the back, RED QUARRY arced over the top and the road captain's rocker beneath it, and it still doesn't sit on him the way it sits on the other men, doesn't look like armor so much as something he puts on the way other men put on a work shirt.
"Figured you'd want to see it before the funeral. Didn't figure you'd want to see me."
"I didn't drive eleven hours to avoid a stone, Micah."
"No." He looks at me for a long moment, and there's something in his face I don't have a name for, something between relief and grief that might just be the same thing wearing two different coats. "You look tired, Wren."
"So do you," I say, and mean it, taking in the particular hollowness under his eyes, the tightness at his jaw that wasn't there the last time I studied his face this closely. Grief and guilt wear a person down in similar ways, I think, though I don't say that part out loud.
"I buried myself in a truck for half a day. I'm allowed to look tired."
The corner of his mouth does something that isn't quite a smile. It's the ghost of one, the memory of a smile that used to live easy on his face and doesn't anymore. I used to be able to read every version of that mouth. I don't trust myself to read it now.
? ? ?
The funeral home in Blackmoor is the same one that buried my mother's mother, my father before I was old enough to remember him clearly, and half the men who ever worked a shift at Red Quarry.
I remember being here once before, at eleven, for a great-aunt I barely knew, sitting stiff and uncomfortable in a folding chair while Hollis murmured condolences to relatives I couldn't place.
I remember the specific boredom of that afternoon, the restlessness of a child too young to understand grief as anything but an inconvenient interruption to summer.
I am not that child anymore. I understand, walking through these same doors more than two decades later, exactly what this building costs the people who have to keep returning to it.
Olsen & Sons, a squat brick building three blocks off Main with a green awning that's faded to the color of pond scum, and a parking lot that fills up fast in a town this size because everybody in Blackmoor is only ever two degrees removed from everybody else's grief.
I get there an hour before the viewing starts, at Nan's insistence, because she wants to walk through the arrangements with me before the town descends.
Nan Halvorsen isn't blood, not technically — she was Hollis's business partner for twenty-six years and his best friend for longer than that, and somewhere in there she became the closest thing to a mother I've had since mine left.
She meets me in the lobby in a black dress that still smells like the lavender sachets she keeps in her closet, and she doesn't say anything performative.
She just pulls me into her, solid and certain, and lets me stand there for as long as I need to.
"You made good time," she says into my hair.
"Wanted to see him before people started arriving."
"He looks like himself." She pulls back, holds my face in both hands, thumbs brushing under my eyes like she's checking for cracks. "Peaceful. You'll be glad, I think, once you see him."
I am glad, later, standing in front of the open casket with Birdie's hand gripped tight in mine, my little sister nineteen years old and doing her best not to fall apart in a room full of people who've known her since before she could walk.
The eulogy falls to me, in the end, because there's no one else left who knew Hollis quite the way I did, and I stand at the front of the chapel with a page of notes I barely glance at, telling the room about a man who taught a nine-year-old girl to respect explosives before she ever learned to respect much of anything else, who drove eleven hours round trip more than once just to see Birdie's school play, who never once, in thirty years of running blast crews, lost a man on his own watch, not because luck favored him but because he refused to let carelessness anywhere near his crew.
I don't cry during the eulogy. I save that for afterward, in the receiving line, when an old family friend hugs me a beat too long and something in me finally cracks under the specific weight of being looked at with that much accumulated love.
Hollis does look like himself, weathered and broad through the shoulders even in death, hands folded the way they never sat still in life.
I touch his knuckles. They're cold in a way that doesn't feel like him at all, and that's the moment the morning's numbness finally breaks and I cry, quiet and unglamorous, Birdie's shoulder pressed into mine.
? ? ?
The room fills. It always does, in a town this size, for a man who ran blast crews for three decades and never once missed a Fourth of July fish fry.
I recognize half the faces and brace for the other half, the ones who know exactly what happened fourteen months ago and are too polite, or too curious, to say so to my face.
One woman I vaguely remember from church, a Mrs. Aronsen whose late husband's name sits carved a few lines above Hollis's own on the Mercy Stone, takes both my hands in hers and tells me, with the particular directness widows sometimes earn the right to, that grief gets lighter to carry but never actually gets lighter, you just get stronger arms. I think about that phrase more than once in the weeks that follow, turning it over like a stone I keep finding in my pocket.
Talia doesn't come. I notice her absence before I notice anything else, and I hate that I notice it at all.
Dutch Rourke comes, though, tall and gray-bearded and still built like a man twenty years younger, and he shakes my hand at the edge of the casket like we're closing a business deal instead of standing over my uncle's body.
There's a particular quality to Dutch's handshake I'd forgotten in fourteen months away, a grip that lingers half a second longer than comfortable, as if he's assessing your resolve through the pressure of his palm alone.
I remember disliking it even back when Micah and I were together, some instinct in me recognizing, long before I had the full context to explain it, that this was a man who measured everyone around him for weakness first and warmth second, if at all.
"Wren." He says my name the way you'd handle something you weren't sure was going to go off. "Good of you to come back."
"He was my uncle, Dutch. Where else would I be."
"Course, course." He glances past me, toward the doorway, and I follow his eyes and find Micah standing there in a black button-down that doesn't fit him the way the cut does, hands jammed in his pockets, looking like a man standing at the edge of a pit he isn't sure has a bottom.
"He's been keeping that stone up nice for your uncle.
Every name. You'll have seen that already, I'd guess. "
"I saw it."
"Good stone work runs in families," Dutch says, which is either a compliment to his son or a comment on something else entirely, and I don't have the energy tonight to figure out which.
He pats my shoulder once, awkward, and moves off toward the guest book, and I'm left standing there with my heart doing something complicated at the sight of Micah still hovering in the doorway like he isn't sure he's allowed all the way into the room.
He comes to me eventually, once the crowd thins toward the coffee and the little sandwiches Nan ordered from the diner.
He doesn't say anything about the eulogy, or the flowers, or any of the small talk grief makes people reach for.
He just stands beside me, close enough that I can feel the heat coming off him, and looks at Hollis in the casket for a long, quiet minute.
"He taught me everything I know about stone," Micah says finally. "You know that?"
"I didn't, actually."
"First summer I came around the club, before your uncle would let me anywhere near real explosives, he had me hauling scrap granite out behind the pit office.
Told me if I was going to hang around men who blew things apart for a living, I ought to learn how to put something back together first. Put a chisel in my hand before Dutch ever put a wrench in it.
" His jaw works. "I owe that man more than I ever told him. "