Epilogue - Elias
The percussion gun woke me. It sounded like an outboard motor, exactly as Nolan had described it when he explained why he never used it before dawn.
For three and a half years he'd worked his hip in silence so that nobody below him, beside him, or down the hall from him would learn what it cost him to walk.
Now it was ten past seven on an August morning, and the thing was rattling away in the living room, loud enough for the floor below.
I got up, taking my time. Nolan was on the mat by the recliner with his knee pulled to his chest. He didn't stop when I appeared. He briefly waved a good morning and kept breathing into the joint.
His hip hadn't changed. The retirement announcement in July hadn't fixed it. What had changed was that he didn't hide the damage. He worked on the hip in the middle of his living room with the blinds up, grunting when it hurt.
I made coffee. We'd agreed that it was my job. He'd conceded the machine after I pulled a better shot than his five days in a row.
My shirts hung in his closet without an inch of air between them and his suits. There was a mat on my side of the bed and boxes from Minneapolis stacked in the guest room.
In Seattle three weeks earlier, Eamon had sat across a table from me for two hours with my file open between us.
He didn't raise his voice. Near the end, he closed the folder and said the part he made me fly out to hear in person: The attachment was never the failure, Elias.
The failure was you carried it alone for three weeks.
It was permanently in my record, but I was still The Guardians' point man for the athlete portfolio.
Now, I was working out of a condo in the Central West End.
Nolan finished the floor work and climbed up off the mat. "Park," he said and was already reaching for his sneakers.
"Is that my briefing?"
"You're not on the clock." He smiled. "You're coming anyway."
We entered the park at Lindell and walked west. Nolan set the pace, which had gotten faster since June.
August meant a nearly empty park by late morning. The joggers finished by eight. The golf course shimmered with heat rising off the grass.
Nolan avoided the bright sun. He went down behind Art Hill into the trees, and I went with him.
The grass had grown back where the tires had run across it in pursuit of Nolan. There was nothing to see. He walked the length of the path without slowing, talking about whether Jamie's new contract would ruin him.
"Kate sent a picture," I said when we returned to the SUV. I'd flown to Raleigh after Seattle and sat in her kitchen with her father's boxes for an afternoon. She kept one thing out on the table for me.
"It's a team photo, Nolan. Ray put a small dot over one face in the back row, nineteen-year-old Ty Hawkins." Nolan stood in the front row. "I'm having it framed," she said.
"Good."
Nolan's bloodwork from a cohort study had gone in six weeks ago; imaging, too.
The answer hadn't come back, and the researchers had told him he might never have a clear answer.
He'd told me on the drive home from the draw that he'd decided it didn't change what the hip needed either way. He did the mat work.
As we drove back, Nolan said, "Hannah's bringing Paul at six. Brick's bringing the whole family."
Eileen Danaher arrived first, at a quarter to six. She considered on-time a form of lateness. She handed me a tin of cookies at the door and looked past me down the hall.
"So this is the place," she said, and proceeded to take a look around.
The Brickners arrived like a summer storm. Brick carried a cooler he wouldn't explain, Jen carried a salad, and Maddie carried a bakery box level in both hands, announcing to the room that nobody was to touch it, look at it, or breathe near it.
Hannah and Paul arrived last. Hannah had two bottles of wine: red and white.
She took one look at the kitchen and began taking it over. She enlisted Nolan as her sous chef. He'd been reluctant the first time, but now he knew his way around his professional-grade range.
A small carved bear sat on the windowsill above the sink. It had come in the mail two weeks ago in a box with customs stamps and no note. Nolan set it facing the living room, and we agreed that no note was Misha's note.
Eight of us sat down at Nolan's table designed for eight. It was beginning to feel normal.
Brick's cooler included sardines, mustard, and a loaf of rye—"Cup championship food," he insisted, assembling a sandwich over Jen's objection and Maddie's gagging noises.
The table got loud. Paul told us that he had seen Vern Danaher play when he was nine.
"What was he like?" Maddie asked. She'd stopped eating.
"He was a good man," Eileen said. "He loved hockey, but he said playing the game was making a living on thin ice. It wasn't a complaint. He'd have done it all over again. He just never let anybody tell him the ice was thicker than it was."
"Anyway," Brick said, "this food is amazing. Hannah, love the spareribs, but sardines—" Everyone laughed so hard he didn't finish the sentence.
Eileen turned toward me over coffee. "Vern would have liked you," she said. "To be honest, he didn't like many people."
Then Maddie stood, lifted the bakery box with both hands, and revealed her cake. It had the Wheel piped across the top in blue. There were no candles this time.
"You forgot the candles," Brick said.
"I didn't forget anything." She set the cake in the middle of the table. "You already won."
Our guests left in stages, Eileen first, walked to her car by Nolan while the rest of us pretended not to watch through the windows. The Brickners were last. Maddie swayed in the doorway with an empty box. "You ate the whole thing."
When it was down to only Nolan and me, my phone buzzed.
Mac: New principal. Olympic alpine skier. She asked for you by name. Can you travel this fall?
I read the message to Nolan. He put his arms around me and pulled me close. "You should take it," he said. "I'll come for the mountain part. Suddenly, I've got some time on my hands."
***