Chapter 8 #2
He went back to the fire pit. I stood there for another minute, looking at the compound — at the string lights, the kids, the families, the loose web of fifty years of choices that had brought this group of people to this evening — and I had the thought I had been chasing my entire life without knowing its name.
Belonging.
Not my father's kind. Not the kind in a uniform with a chain of command and a tradition that went back through generations.
Not even the club's kind, exactly, although that was part of it — the patch belonging, the brotherhood belonging, the I will stand with you belonging that I had received without ever asking and which had been one of the great gifts of my life.
Something else.
The belonging you forged yourself, piece by piece, from the raw material of your own choices.
A wife you had married on paper and fallen for in reality.
A trade that honored your hands instead of your father's expectations.
A community that had accepted you not because you wore the patch but because you showed up, and you built things, and you stayed.
I had stayed.
I had been staying my whole adult life, and I had not realized that staying was, in itself, a kind of allegiance — the slowest and most undramatic kind, the kind that did not announce itself and did not require ceremony, the kind that simply, year after year, kept choosing.
Alma found me a few minutes later. She had a beer for me and a glass of seltzer for herself, because she did not drink at gatherings, because Tomás had not drunk at gatherings, and because she was, in many of the small ways, becoming her uncle.
She slipped under my arm. She fit there.
She fit there the way a hand-forged piece fits the curve it was made for — by accident, by attention, by the long patient work of two people learning each other.
She said, "What were you and Gunner talking about."
I said, "My father."
She said, "Oh."
I said, "He called Gunner. He asked about me. He asked about you, by name. He asked if I was happy."
She looked up at me.
She said, "And."
I said, "I'm going to call him tomorrow."
She said, "Do you want me there."
I said, "Yes."
She said, "Okay."
That was it. The whole agreement. Three words from her. The kind of agreement you only get from a person who has stopped requiring you to explain yourself, because she has decided to take you on the size of the thing rather than the explanation of it.
We stayed at the cookout until the sun went down.
Razor's daughter Nola hugged Alma at one point — full-armed, the way Nola hugged everyone — and Alma had crouched and hugged her back with the careful seriousness she gave to children, and Nola had said, "Are you Forge's wife forever now," and Alma had said, "Yes," and Nola had said, "Good," and walked off, and that had been the entire interaction, and I had watched it from the porch, and I had thought, with the small clear quiet that comes at the end of a long day of good weather, that is what I have made.
Diesel made a toast, around eight o'clock, with the sky purple and the string lights coming on.
He raised his glass. He looked around the gathering.
He said, "I'm too old to give speeches. I'll keep it short.
Twenty years ago, half of you weren't here.
Some of you weren't born. Some of you I didn't know existed.
Look at us. Look at all of us. This is what it was for.
Not the patches. Not the runs. Not the noise.
This. Right here. Eat. Drink. Stay late. Don't fight in the parking lot."
People laughed.
He drank. Everyone drank. The cookout settled into its long evening — the kids being sent to bed inside, the older couples leaving early, the younger couples staying late, the music shifting from country to soul to something Sienna had made on a playlist that contained, somehow, both Lucinda Williams and Stevie Wonder and the Cure, all of which she insisted worked together if you understand the structure.
Alma and I sat on the porch swing.
We did not talk much. We did not need to. Her hand was on my knee. My arm was around her shoulders. The compound moved around us — figures passing the porch, the laughter, the small distant sounds of the bonfire crackling.
She said, after a while, "Beckett."
I said, "Yes."
She said, "I'm ready to go home."
I said, "Home."
She said, "Yeah. Home. The apartment."
I said, "Yeah."
I said it because she had used the word casually — home — the way you use a word that has settled into you and stopped being a decision.
She had not noticed that she'd used it. I had.
I would not, then, point it out. I would point it out later, in private, when we were lying in bed and she had her glasses off and her hair in the loose braid she made for sleeping.
For now I just absorbed the word. I let it land.
She squeezed my knee.
We said our goodbyes. Sienna cried, because Sienna cried at all departures. Diesel hugged Alma, and then me, and to me he said, low, "Tomorrow, kid. Make the call." I said, "Yes, sir." He said, "He's your dad. He's flawed. So are you. So am I. Make the call."
I made the call the next day.
It was short. My father is not a man who makes long calls.
He answered on the third ring. I said, "Dad.
It's Beckett." He said, "Beckett." Just my name.
The whole name. He had not said my name on a phone in eight years.
He said, "Gunner sent me the photograph.
Of the bike." I said, "Yes, sir." He said, "It's a fine bike.
You built every part of it yourself." I said, "Most of it.
" He said, "Tell me about the gas tank." I told him about the gas tank.
I told him about Ezra. I told him about the paint, the pinstriping, the careful slow heat of the airbrush work.
He listened. He did not interrupt. When I finished, he said, "And the woman. Alma."
I said, "Yes, sir."
He said, "Is she good to you."
I said, "She's good to me."
He said, "Are you good to her."
I said, "I try."
He said, "Trying is the part." He paused.
He said — and this is the part I will keep in a small private room of my mind for as long as I have a mind to keep it in — "Your mother would have loved her, Beckett.
Your mother would have loved her. I am sorry your mother isn't here to meet her.
I am going to be here. I would like to meet her. Whenever you can bring her."
My mother had been gone for six years. My father had not, in those six years, ever invoked her in conversation with me. He had let her become a kind of weather between us — present, never named.
I said, "Yes, sir."
He said, "Come for Thanksgiving."
I said, "We'll come."
He said, "Good."
He hung up.
I sat at the kitchen table for a long minute.
Alma was across from me. She had heard my side of the call.
She did not ask me what he had said. She just put her hand over mine on the table, and I turned my hand over, and we held hands across the table over the breakfast dishes and the small Mary Oliver paperback that had migrated to the kitchen sometime in the previous week.
I said, "We're going for Thanksgiving."
She said, "Okay."
I said, "He asked us."
She said, "I know."
I said, "He said my mother would have loved you."
She did not say anything. She just held my hand a little tighter.
That was the call.
That was the call that, ten years from now, twenty years from now, I will remember as the call my father made it possible for me to make.
Not because he had done the work; he had not.
The work had been mine. The pen put down at eighteen, the years at the forge, the slow accumulation of a life chosen rather than inherited — the work had been mine, and the wife had been the one who'd given me the room to make the call.
But he had asked. He had asked the question through Gunner, and he had asked it directly when I had answered the phone, and he had named my mother out loud, and he had invited us to his table.
That was enough.
It was, in fact, more than I had ever expected.
That night, in the apartment, Alma fell asleep on the couch again.
She had been doing it more often, the deliberate sleeping-on-the-couch of a woman who liked the couch better than the bed for naps.
I covered her with the blanket the way I had covered her the first time.
I sat down on the floor with my back against the couch.
I did not read. I did not work. I just sat there, with her hand falling over the edge of the couch and resting on my shoulder, and I let myself feel, for as long as I wanted to feel it, the thing that had been forging itself in me for almost five months.
A life.
A small, particular, hard-won life.
It was, I had finally understood, the only kind worth making.