Epilogue Julian
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The party is on the back porch. It is the first warm Saturday in March. The sky is the high clean blue it goes when there is no dust in the air, and the snow has gone from the ridge.
Matthew is ten today.
He is at the foot of the porch steps with my brother Eli on one side of him and my mother on the other.
He is opening a present from my father that is a remote-controlled drone and Matthew is grinning from ear to ear.
My father, who has driven six hours to see this look, is matching his grin.
“Eli,” I say. “Help him with the batteries.”
“On it.”
Eli takes the box. He sits on the step. He gets the batteries out of the small bag at the bottom and starts loading them into the controller, talking to Matthew the whole time, and Matthew is listening with the absolute concentration he gives to the things he is genuinely interested in, which now includes my brother.
It has been like this for a year.
Eli came up at Christmas, then again in February. He is here this weekend, and he is coming up again in April for what he is calling a long visit, which I think means he has finally decided to take the sabbatical he has been threatening to take from his job for two years.
He is good with Matthew. He is good with Caleb, who is now eighteen and who has a girl from Eastfield who came to dinner last Tuesday. She makes Caleb tongue-tied in a way that is hilarious to watch.
He is best with Maggie, who at fourteen months is at the stage where she has decided uncles are a separate species from parents and that this species is for being carried about and shown things.
She is on Caleb’s hip now.
Maggie is pointing at Biscuit and saying, “Dog. Dog. Dog.” Her hair has come in dark and long enough to curl at the ends.
I stand at the porch rail with a beer in my hand and I watch my family.
My mother is at the table.
She has Maggie’s lunch plate in front of her and she is cutting strawberries into the small thin slices Maggie will accept.
She wears the cardigan Donna sent her at Christmas.
My mother phoned her afterwards and that led to a conversation I was not in the room for.
It has resulted in Donna and my mother phoning each other every Sunday.
I had not seen that coming.
Wyatt is at the grill turning over sausages.
He is in the dark green flannel I bought him in November and a pair of jeans that have at last started to fit him properly again, which they did not for the first six months after Maggie was born.
Wyatt feels me looking at him. He looks up. He does the small thing his mouth does, which is the corner of it lifting half an inch, and he goes back to the sausages.
My phone, on the rail beside my beer, lights up.
I pick it up. It is an email. I am working again.
It took a year. The accreditation review found in my favor in September. The firm dropped the data policy claim in November on the advice of their counsel. The settlement of the firm’s claim was a single page. I signed it and that was the end of that piece of my old life.
The court found against Linden in January. The pumps are off.
They have been off since the injunction in December of last year. The water table started recovering inside the first quarter, as I had told Wyatt it would, and the south well came back live in late January.
I just stand and watch my family. I had no idea it would turn out like this. If you had told me two years ago that I would live on a ranch of all places, I would have told you that you were mad.
Instead, now I can’t imagine living anywhere else.
I stand there watching until Donna comes out of the kitchen with the cake.
The cake is enormous. It is a chocolate one, with white icing, and on top of it is a tractor that Donna has piped on by hand. The cake has ten candles on it. The candles are not yet lit.
“Boys,” she says, in the voice she uses to gather a yard. “Cake. Now.”
Matthew comes at a sprint.
Caleb follows at his usual pace. Eli brings Maggie. My mother stands. My father whistles to the dog and the dog comes.
Wyatt takes the sausages off the grill and puts them on the platter on the table, and he comes over and stands next to me at the rail, and we go down the porch steps together.
Donna lights the candles and we all sing.
Matthew puts both hands on the table and blows the candles out in one breath. The smoke curls up into the warm March air.
Donna cuts slices and hands him the first one, which he takes on a paper plate. He goes to the porch step and sits down and starts eating it with his fingers.
I stand up.
Wyatt is beside me. He has not said anything. He puts his hand into mine and he leaves it there.
We sit at the table with our family. The cake is good. The strawberries are good. The dog goes to sleep under the table with her head on Matthew’s shoes.
Eli has put Maggie down and she is walking with a wobbly kind of pride. She goes around the table and she stops at my chair, and she puts both hands on my knee.
“Up.”
“Yes, my love.”
I lift her into my lap. She settles in against my chest, and Wyatt, beside me, watches her settle with the soft expression he gets when he watches her do almost anything. He puts his hand on her back, and she makes a small content noise.
The sun has come around the side of the porch and is on the table now. It is on her hair and on Wyatt’s.
It is a March Saturday. We have come through the winter. The well is full. The pumps are off. The roof does not leak. The boys are growing. My daughter is on my lap and the man I love is on my left, holding my hand.
“Julian.”
“Mm.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too, Wyatt.”
The dog snores, once. The wind moves through the cottonwood at the corner of the yard. Maggie, on my chest, turns her face into my shirt and breathes me in the way Wyatt did, years ago now, in a kitchen on the first day of his heat, and falls asleep.
We stay like that.
The afternoon goes on around us.
The End