Epilogue
Rhett
One year later.
I am on the roof of the clubhouse before dawn.
I have a coffee in one hand and a wool blanket around my shoulders against the small cool of the early June air, and the eastern sky over the ridge is the color it gets before the sun — that pale washed slow lifting blue that is not yet morning and is not anymore night — and the wisteria over the library garden two blocks down on Main is already in full bloom because I can see the soft purple haze of it from up here even in the half-dark, and the air smells of peony and creek and the faint warm yeast of the bakery starting its ovens, and I am thirty years old.
I am thirty years old and I am getting married today.
I sit on the same milk crate I have sat on since I was twenty-one years old, the milk crate Knox left up here for me the week I patched in, and I drink my coffee slow, and I watch the slow lifting of the light along the ridge, and I think — the way I have thought once a year on this roof for ten years now — about who I was, and who I am, and the slow careful distance between them.
The first morning I sat on this roof I was a hammer.
The morning I met her, fourteen months ago, I was a hammer in a library doorway holding a paper bag of bolts that fit a shelf I was about to anchor for a woman in a green cardigan whose voice had a small careful stutter and whose hands had ink on the thumb.
This morning I am a man on a roof with a coffee waiting for the woman in my bed downstairs to wake up so I can take her hand and walk her down to the library garden where the wisteria is blooming and where Hawk has built a small cedar arch at the end of the path between the roses and where the whole town of Clover Ridge is going to gather at six o'clock this evening to watch me promise to spend the rest of my life inside the slow careful gravity of her.
That is the distance.
That is the answer to the question I asked on this roof every morning for ten years.
Will I ever be more than a weapon.
I know the answer now.
I have known the answer for one year exactly.
The conservatorship petition died in a Richmond courtroom on the fourth of October, after a forty-minute hearing in which Mira Quintrell of Asheville stood up in a cream linen suit and said, very politely, that her client was a Master of Library Science with four years of unbroken employment, two retirement accounts, perfect credit, no medical history of any cognitive disorder, three character witnesses from the town in which she had built her life, and frankly a clearer head than half the bar association in this room, and that the petition before the court was not a conservatorship action but a family quarrel, and that the court's time and the family's money would both be better spent elsewhere.
The judge agreed in seventeen minutes. Pauline did not look at Nora when she left the courtroom.
Graham Forsythe was not present. He had been advised against it by counsel.
I drove Nora home that night.
She slept the whole four hours in the truck with her head on my shoulder and her library cardigan pulled up over her like a small green blanket and the sound of the road going long underneath us, and I drove with one hand on the wheel and one hand on her knee and the radio low, and I did not, for one single mile of those four hours, want to be anywhere else.
That was the night I knew I was going to ask her.
I waited five months.
I waited because I wanted her to have a winter of her own first. A winter where nothing was being taken from her and nothing was being asked of her, only a winter of her own house and her own library and her own small careful slow life and me coming through the back door at six every evening with my boots off on the mat and my hands washed at her kitchen sink.
I gave her the winter. I asked her on the first warm day of March, on the cedar bench in the library garden, under the wisteria that was not yet in bloom, with one knee on the brick and her hand in both of mine and the small braided silver ring my grandmother left me — the one I have carried in my wallet for nine years without knowing why — held out between us in the long thin late winter light.
She said yes before I finished the sentence.
She did not stutter.
She has not stuttered, that I have heard, in eight months.
I drink the last of my coffee.
The light on the ridge is coming up faster now.
The pale lifting blue has gone gold at the bottom edge.
The thrush on the ridge does its three notes.
A delivery truck rolls somewhere down on Linden.
The wisteria over the library garden is starting to take on its real color in the early light, that deep slow lavender that has been hers from the first morning she walked up the gravel drive in her green cardigan and her sandals and asked me to come fix a shelf.
The door behind me on the roof opens.
It opens slow and it opens careful — the way she opens every door — and I do not turn around because I know who it is, and I do not need to look to know what she is wearing, which is my flannel shirt and her own pajama bottoms and her bare feet on the cold roof tiles, and she walks across the roof to where I am sitting on the milk crate, and she stops beside me, and she puts her hand on the top of my head the way she did that night on the floor of her kitchen, and she does not say anything for a long minute.
Then she sits down next to me on the second milk crate Knox left up here last summer.
She says, "Good morning."
I say, "Good morning."
She leans her shoulder against my shoulder.
She says, into the slow lifting light on the ridge, "You are not supposed to see me today."
I say, "We are not married yet. The rule starts at six."
She says, "That is not how the rule works."
I say, "It is how it works on this roof."
She laughs.
She laughs the small soft tired laugh she did under the wisteria that first night a year ago, the laugh that goes down into me and lights up the dark in my ribs in the soft warm way, and she puts her head on my shoulder, and the eastern light comes up gold over the ridge, and the wisteria down on Main goes purple in earnest, and I put my arm around her shoulders under the wool blanket, and we sit there together on the roof of the clubhouse on the morning of our wedding and watch the sun come up.
I say, after a long while, "I used to ask a question up here."
She says, "I know you did."
She knows because I told her. I told her one night in October, after the courtroom, after the long drive home, on the couch in her kitchen with her under the quilt and the rain coming down on the metal roof of her little house.
I told her about the question. Will I ever be more than a weapon.
I told her I had been asking it every morning on the roof for ten years and that I had stopped asking it the morning she walked up the gravel drive in the green cardigan and asked me to come fix her shelf, and that I had not asked it once since.
She did not say anything that night.
She just took my hand under the quilt and put it on her chest where her heart was, and she let me feel it beat, and she said, that is your answer.
I have not asked the question on this roof since.
I sit with her this morning in the gold lifting light and I do not ask it.
I do not need to.
She says, "What are you thinking."
I say, "I am thinking I am going to marry you in eleven hours."
She says, "Eleven and a half."
I say, "Eleven and a half."
She says, "Are you nervous."
I say, "No."
She says, "Neither am I."
We sit on the roof until the sun is fully up over the ridge and the gold has gone clear and yellow and the wisteria down on Main is in its full deep purple and the bakery downstairs has begun to send up the warm yeast smell through the floorboards, and then she stands, and she takes my hand, and she walks me back down off the roof, and we go down to the kitchen where Hawk has already started the coffee and where Knox is already at the long table with the morning paper and where the day of our wedding begins the way every day begins, with bacon and the radio and the long table and my brothers and her hand still in mine under the wood.
—
Nora
I get to the library garden at four in the afternoon.
The wisteria is at the peak of its bloom for the second June since I have been the woman who tends it.
The trellis Hawk built me is heavy with it, soft slow drifts of lavender petals already falling onto the brick path the way they did a year ago, and the climbing roses Briar planted along the east wall last fall are out in full white-and-pink against the dark green leaves, and the peonies are the size of soup bowls, and the cosmos are budding along the back border, and the air smells of all of it together — wisteria and rose and peony and the warm wet stone of the path and the green of the river two blocks down — and I stand at the gate for a long second and I let myself look.
I let myself look at the garden I have spent two years building.
I let myself look at the cedar bench where, a year ago, I let a man I had decided to trust put his careful hands on me for the first time in my life, under the same wisteria that is blooming now, on the same cedar bench he built me with his own hands.
I let myself look at the cedar arch Hawk has built at the end of the path between the roses, which is where, in two hours, I am going to stand in front of two hundred and four people from the town of Clover Ridge and tell that same man that I have decided to keep him.
I am going to do it without a stutter.
I have rehearsed.
I have rehearsed in front of the mirror in the small back office of the library every afternoon for two weeks, by myself, with the door closed, with Briar's careful list of breathing exercises taped to the side of the mirror, and I have rehearsed in front of Briar twice and in front of Wren once and in front of my mother once on a video call from Richmond.
My mother.
That is the new thing.