Epilogue
Beckett
The drive to my father's house was four hours and seventeen minutes.
I had clocked it. I had clocked it three times in the years I had lived in Ember Falls and had not made the drive — once on a Christmas Eve when I had loaded the truck at six in the morning and turned around at the on-ramp and gone home; once in March of the year my mother had died, when I had driven as far as the Roanoke exit and pulled into a Sheetz and sat in the parking lot for an hour and then driven back; once on a Tuesday in July with no reason, just to see if I could, and I had not been able to.
Four hours and seventeen minutes. I had memorized the number the way you memorize a phone number you are not going to dial.
We drove it on a Thursday in November.
Alma drove the first leg, because she had asked to, and because she had said, in the kitchen the night before while I had been packing the cooler, Let me have the part where you don't know what you're walking into.
You can have the part where you do. I had not argued.
I had not argued with Alma about a logistical decision in approximately seven months, because she was, in every measurable sense, better at logistical decisions than I was, and because I had learned that letting her drive — literally and metaphorically — was almost always the right call.
She drove with both hands on the wheel and the country station low.
She wore the iron and copper ring on her left hand and the gold band beneath it.
She wore the green flannel I had bought her for her birthday and dark jeans and her hair was pulled back in a low knot at the base of her neck.
She had spent the morning making a green bean casserole from her mother's recipe, which her mother had gotten from a magazine in 1986, and the casserole was on the passenger floorboard in a covered dish wedged between her boots and the heat vent.
I had told her, when we left, that her mother's casserole was probably going to be the only thing on the table that did not come out of a Marine Corps cookbook, and she had said, Then it will earn its place.
We crossed into North Carolina at eleven-fifteen.
The Blue Ridge slid south of us. The mountains turned from the soft blue of November to the harder blue of winter approaching.
The trees had finished their color two weeks ago and were standing in the open gray that came after — the gray that I had learned, as a kid, to call waiting weather, the gray that held until the first snow.
I switched off with her at the rest stop outside Statesville.
I got behind the wheel. She slept for forty minutes with her head against the passenger window and her hand on my knee, and I drove the back roads I had not driven in nine years and found that I remembered every turn, which surprised me, and did not surprise me, because the body remembers what the mind chooses to forget.
The house was on a hill outside a town called Banner Elk.
It was a small white clapboard house with a green metal roof and a stone chimney that my father had pointed at, when he and my mother had bought the place the year I turned twelve, and had said, That chimney will outlast all of us.
The chimney was still standing. So was my father.
My mother was not. The math of the chimney was, as it turned out, the math of grief.
I turned into the gravel drive at three-forty.
My father was on the porch.
He was sitting in the same green Adirondack chair he had sat in every fall of every year I could remember, with a flannel blanket across his knees and a mug of coffee in his hands.
He stood when the truck came up the drive.
He stood the way he had always stood — straight, square-shouldered, with the small effort at the knees that I had not noticed when I was a child and that I now noticed and now did not comment on.
He was seventy-one. He had retired from the Marines at fifty-six.
The fifteen years since had taken something off him that the previous thirty had not, which is the small cruel arithmetic of the body after work.
He raised one hand.
I raised one hand back.
I parked the truck. I cut the engine. I sat in the driver's seat for a long second with my hands on the wheel and Alma quiet beside me, and she did not speak, and she did not move, and she let me have the second I needed.
I said, "Okay."
She said, "Okay."
I got out.
My father came down the porch steps. He came down them slow — slower than I remembered, but not slow, not yet — and he met me at the bottom of the steps and he put out his hand and I shook it, and then he did something I had not expected, which was that he held onto my hand for an extra beat after the shake had finished, and he looked at me, and his eyes were the same color as my mother's eyes had been, which had been a thing about his face I had never been able to look at squarely, and he said, "Beckett. "
I said, "Pop."
We had not said either of those words to each other in nine years. They came out, both of us, the way they had always come out. They came out like the words still fit.
Alma came around the front of the truck.
I had been preparing her for him for two weeks.
I had told her every story I could think of — the good stories and the hard ones, the funny ones and the ones I had not told anyone since my mother died.
I had told her that he was a man of long silences, and that the silences were not punishment but were simply the medium he worked in.
I had told her that he had loved my mother in a way that had defined him and that he had never recovered from her death and that he had also, in his own particular way, kept going, which was the only thing he knew how to do.
I had told her that I did not know how he was going to receive her.
I had told her I did not know how he was going to receive me, either.
She walked up to him.
She put out her hand. She said, "Mr. Holt. I'm Alma. I'm glad to meet you."
My father looked at her hand. He did not take it.
He looked at her face. He looked at her hand again. He looked at me. He looked back at her.
He said, "Forge's wife."
I had not heard my father say my name and not say Beckett in approximately twenty years. I felt the small thing in my chest that had been waiting nine years for some specific signal stand up and pay attention.
Alma said, "Yes, sir."
My father said, "Forge's wife doesn't shake hands. Forge's wife gets a hug, if she'll have one."
He opened his arms.
Alma walked into them. He hugged her the way he had always hugged people he meant — once, firm, with one hand at the back of the neck and one hand between the shoulder blades, and he held her for a second and a half longer than I expected and then he released her and stepped back and looked at me over her shoulder, and his eyes were full.
He said, "Get the casserole, son. Your brother's been here since noon and he's been at the pie."
We went inside.
The house smelled the way the house had always smelled in November — woodsmoke and roasting onions and the particular faint metallic note of the iron skillet my mother had used for cornbread and which my father, in the eleven years since she had died, had continued to use, because he had loved my mother and he had loved her cornbread and the skillet was, he had once told me, the one piece of her cooking that he could still get right.
Gunner was in the kitchen.
He was at the counter, carving a turkey with the small precision of a man who had taken Knife Safety at Quantico and had never quite stopped using what he had learned. He looked up when we came in. He smiled. He set down the knife. He said, "Forge."
I said, "Gun."
He came around the counter. He pulled me into a hug — short, hard, the kind of hug brothers give each other when they have not seen each other in two weeks and one of them has been carrying a small weight on the other's behalf — and he said, low, into my ear, "He's been pacing since nine."
I said, "Yeah?"
He said, "Yeah."
I said, "Thanks for being here."
He said, "Wouldn't have been anywhere else."
Craig came in from the back porch.
Craig had flown in from Camp Pendleton on a forty-eight-hour leave he had spent the better part of two months engineering.
He was in civilian clothes — jeans, a flannel, a Marine Corps cap that I knew, from the wear on the bill, was the same cap he had been wearing since 2009 — and he looked tired the way men in his line of work always looked tired, which was not in the face but in the hands.
He hugged me. He hugged Alma. He picked her up off the floor by an inch or so when he hugged her, which he did with all women he liked, and he set her down and said, "Forge picked good, Pop. "
My father, behind us, said, "Forge has always picked good. It's the other part where he and I disagreed."
It was not what I had been expecting him to say.
I turned around.
He was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room with the casserole dish in his hands. He was looking at me. He was not smiling. He was not frowning. He was doing the thing he did when he was trying, with the resources he had, to say something exact.
He said, "I owe you a conversation, son. Not now. After dinner. While the boys watch the game."
I said, "Yes, sir."
He carried the casserole into the dining room and set it on the table next to the cornbread.
The dinner was good.