Epilogue
Wren
Six months, and here's the inventory.
Kai is patched in and he is terrible at it.
I want to be specific, because "bad at it" undersells the achievement.
He has been given four jobs and completed two.
He argued with Roman Kade — the actual president, at the actual table, in front of everyone — about the recycling.
Not a metaphor. The recycling. He believes the foundry should be sorting glass, he is correct, and he chose to make his stand on it eleven days after being patched.
Roman looked at him for a very long time and then said, "Fine. You do it."
So my brother now runs the glass at an outlaw motorcycle club, and he's got a chart.
He's got his own door, too. Two rooms over the machine shop that Izzy walked through once and pronounced structurally offensive and then fixed anyway. He put a deadbolt on it. He shows it to people.
He calls me on Sundays. Sometimes. Twice he hasn't, and both times I sat there with my thumb over his name for about four minutes and then put the phone face down, and that's the actual work, that's the whole thing, right there, four minutes at a time.
I've stopped saying until.
We've never discussed it. I just stopped, and he noticed, and about a month in he said, "You quit saying the thing," and I said "yep," and he said "okay," and then he asked if I wanted to see the chart.
He apologized in June, in a parking lot, badly, which is the only way anyone in my family has ever done it.
I was strapping a Corolla with a folded front end and he stood there holding a coffee he'd brought me and not handing it over, which is a whole language.
"I've been trying to say a thing for four months."
"Say it while I work."
"That's — okay." He shifted. "I told you to stop coming."
"You did."
"I meant it."
"I know."
"And then you did stop," Kai said, "and it was awful. It was so much worse than I thought. I got exactly what I asked for and it was like somebody turned the heat off."
I kept my hands on the strap, because if I'd looked at him I'd have lost it.
"Yep," I said.
"So I want to take it back."
"No."
"Wren—"
"No." I set the ratchet. "You don't get to take it back, because you were right, and because I've spent four months learning how to sit in my apartment with my thumb over your name, and I'm not undoing that. Not for you and not for me."
"So what do we do?"
"We do it the boring way," I said. "You call me.
I answer. Sometimes you don't call and I let it go and it's fine, and sometimes it's not fine and I let it go anyway.
And if you're ever actually in it — not sad, not stuck, in it — then you say the word and I come, and I come exactly as fast as I ever did. "
"What's the word?"
"You know the word."
He stood there in a parking lot in June with two coffees.
"You never told me why she's called Delores," he said.
"Nope."
"I'm a patched member now."
"That's not a key that opens this."
"Wren."
I looked at my truck for a while. Brown. Thirty ton. A hundred and nine thousand miles on my watch.
"Mrs. Delores Petrosky," I said. "Bellamy Elementary. School nurse. She looked in your ear for nine seconds when you were seven and said a word I'd never heard an adult say at school, and then she made a phone call, and you had antibiotics by Tuesday."
Kai didn't say anything.
"Nine seconds," I said. "That's all it took anybody to help us, ever. Nine seconds of somebody actually looking. So when I bought a truck whose entire job is to show up and look at somebody's disaster for nine seconds and then fix it — "
"Wren."
"Don't."
"You named your truck after a school nurse."
"I named my truck after the only competent adult of my childhood," I said, "and if you make one joke I'll leave you here."
He made no joke at all. He put the coffee on the fender and hugged me in front of a wrecked Corolla and two guys from the dealership, and then he ruined it, because he's himself, by saying into my shoulder: "Does she know?"
"She's eighty-one and she gets a card every Christmas and she thinks I'm somebody else."
"You send Christmas cards to a woman who doesn't know who you are?"
"Yes."
"That's insane."
"Get off my hook," I said. "I'm working."
I run recovery contracts out of the foundry now.
Two trucks. Delores and a rollback I bought in April that has no name, because a name has to be earned. Four counties, three dealer contracts, and one arrangement with the state police that Roman found me and that I will never, ever ask about.
The club finds it hilarious that I say what I think to Roman.
"You've got a leak in the north bay."
"I know."
"You've known for a year."
"Yep."
"There's four hundred thousand dollars of building under that leak, Roman."
"You want to do it?"
"I don't want to do it, that's why I'm telling you to do it—"
And there's a whole section of the room that stops whatever it's doing and watches this the way people watch a ballgame. Cricket has started narrating. He does a voice for me. It's not a good impression and everyone loves it and I've made my peace.
Ash was right about the ceremony, by the way. It took five weeks, not one month, and it was Birdie Kade, and it was a plate.
She came across the yard at the spring thing with potato salad, handed it to me, looked at Ash forty feet away arguing with Cricket about a tire, and said:
"He reads in bed."
"He does."
"Cormac read in bed. Drove his wife to distraction for nineteen years." She patted my arm. "You'll want a lamp on your side, dear, or you'll be reading his book upside down for the rest of your life."
And that was it. That was the whole thing. I have been more thoroughly welcomed into a family in nine seconds by a seventy-one-year-old with a bowl than by every man in that building combined.
They gave me a key. I didn't ask for one. It appeared on the seat of my truck with no note, which is the single most Hollow Ash gesture I have ever received.
Ash got his patch back in July.
Ninety days at the table with no vote and no seat at the head of it, and he did it without one word of complaint, which several men told me they'd been looking forward to and were disappointed not to get.
He sat there. He read. He answered when asked.
On day ninety-one Roman pushed the patch across the table and said, "Put it on, you're depressing everybody," and that was the ceremony.
He's changed one thing, and it's not small.
There's a line item now. It's in the books, it's voted on quarterly, it has a name Cricket picked that I refuse to write down, and it pays for treatment for any man at that table who needs it.
Roman argued for it. Two men voted against. Ash made them say why out loud, and then thanked them, and then wrote down what they said — and one of those two came to him in September and asked if it applied to a cousin.
It applies to the cousin.
Forty-four men were on Marchand's list. Between the club, and Odile, and a woman in Erie whose name I got from Denny Fowler, we've placed nineteen.
Nineteen out of forty-four is not a happy ending. It's a number I look at most days.
Marchand's teaching now. Somewhere in Ann Arbor. She wrote Ash a second letter in June and he read it twice and put it in the same box.
Neither of us has said her name in a room since April.
I saw Deacon in May.
That's the one I wasn't ready for. He turned up at the foundry in a truck that was not his, having driven from Bay City, because somebody had told somebody who told him where I worked.
I came out of the north bay with a wrench in my hand and there he was, and I did the mental arithmetic on what I'd cost him in about a quarter of a second and it nearly put me on the ground.
"Ms. Adeyemi."
"Deacon."
"I'm eleven months," he said.
"...Okay."
"I finished. They let us finish. Then they closed." He had his hands in his pockets and he was rocking slightly, heel to toe. "And I got offered a placement in Weirton. Fleet shop, housing over the office. Real good money."
"Did you take it?"
"No," he said. "Because about a week before, a woman came up there and showed me the underlift on a thirty-ton and told me the new ones aren't better, and I thought — huh.
There's still people out here who know that.
There's a whole world of people out here who know that and I've been telling myself for four years there wasn't."
I stood in the gravel with a wrench.
"So I called my cousin in Alpena," Deacon said. "He's got a rollback and a bad back. I run it now. It's not much."
"It's a truck."
"It's a truck," he agreed.
I have thought about that for three months and I still can't make it into a moral. He got out because of nine seconds in a parking lot that I didn't plan and can't repeat, and forty-four men didn't get in because of eleven days of work I planned very carefully.
I don't know what to do with that. I keep it next to the nineteen.
As for me and Ash, there's nothing dramatic to report, which I understand is bad structure and I don't care.
He moved his books into the rooms over the machine shop, which took four trips and cost him a friendship with Cricket for about a day. I kept my apartment in Beaver Falls and I use it maybe twice a month, mostly to argue with the landlord.
He put a lamp on my side of the bed in about week two, unprompted, before Birdie ever said a word to me, and I have never mentioned it and I never will.
We fight about exactly one thing. He wants to know where I am.
Not in a bad way — he's never once tracked a phone or asked a question sideways — he just says, text me when you're stopped, and I forget, and then I remember at 4 a.m. in a rest area in Clarion and think about a man lying awake three counties over.
"You didn't text."
"I was working."
"I know."
"Then why do we do this."
"Because I'd like to know when you're stopped," Ash said, "and because you spent seventeen years being the person who comes, and nobody ever once asked you to check in, and I think if we do it about four hundred more times you might start to find it normal."
"That's a long-term project."
"I've got the time."
I texted him from Clarion the next week. And the week after.
It's stupid. It takes four seconds. I've cried in a truck cab over it exactly once and I'm not going to write down when.
And then, eleven days ago, the card.
It came to the foundry, addressed to Ash by name, hand-addressed, a real card from a real stationer — heavy gray stock, the kind of thing a bank sends when somebody dies.
I was there when he opened it. Six of us at the table, a Tuesday, nothing happening.
Inside, in a small even hand:
Mr. Delacroix —
I understand Lakeview has closed its doors. That's a great pity. Sylvie was one of the few people in this country doing serious work with men nobody else wanted, and I don't imagine she'll be replaced.
I'm told forty-four men were waiting. I hope they find somewhere.
With genuine regret,
Ash read it out loud in a flat voice. Roman was leaning back with a coffee.
Then Ash got to the signature and stopped.
It was a woman's name. I'd never heard it. He said it out loud with a question in it — like a man reading a foreign word off a menu — and looked up.
"Who's that?"
And Roman Kade put his coffee down.
I've been around that man six months. I've seen him get bad news, worse news, and a subpoena. I have never seen him set something down like that — carefully, with both hands, like a person who's just realized he's holding something already broken.
"Roman?" Ash said.
"Where did that come from."
"Postmark's Pittsburgh."
"Show me the hand."
Ash slid it over. Roman looked at the signature long enough that Cricket stopped chewing.
"That's not her writing," he said.
"You know her?"
"She's in Allegheny General. Third floor." Roman didn't look up. "She's been in a coma since November of 2019. She's got no family living. I pay for the room."
Nobody moved.
"Roman," Ash said. "Who is she?"
Roman folded the card in half along its spine, very neatly, and put it inside his cut.
"Get everybody. Not tonight — tomorrow, all of them. Tell Birdie to bring the 2019 file."
"What 2019 file?"
"You'll know it when you see it," said Roman. "And after that, Ash, you and I are going to have a conversation about what I've been keeping from you."
Ash didn't sleep that night. I know, because I didn't either, and at about four he said into the dark, "November of 2019."
"Yeah?"
"That's the month Cormac died."
I put my hand flat on his chest, in a room over a machine shop in a dying steel town, and did the only useful thing available to a woman who's been driving her whole life.
"Then tomorrow," I said, "we go."