Epilogue
Willa
One year.
That is the strange thing about coming back from a long absence — time, which has been thick and slow for seventeen years, suddenly moves at the speed it is supposed to move.
The first month was a year. The first three months were the rest of my life.
And then somewhere in there I stopped counting, and the seasons stopped being events and started being seasons again, and now it is March and the redbuds are starting at the edges of the woods and the snow is gone from the southern slopes and I have been back in Bone Hollow for an entire year and I do not know — I do not know — where the year went.
Callum is eighteen.
He turned eighteen in November and we had a small thing for him at the clubhouse — a cake Della made, a fight Toad started for no reason that got broken up by Conrad with a single word and a look, the gift of a leather cuff that Kael had been quietly working on for six months in the back of the shop without telling me.
The cuff has Callum's name burned into the inside of it and the Sinners' patch tooled into the outside, and the leather is dyed dark to match the rest of the Sinners' kit, and my son put it on with shaking hands and did not take it off for three days.
He is running for his prospect patch now.
He is the youngest prospect the Sinners have run in twenty years.
There was some discussion about it. Conrad called a meeting.
Priest sat in the back of the meeting and did not speak until the end, and at the end he said: the boy belongs to the pack.
The pack belongs to the boy. We are not going to make him wait two years to know that.
And Conrad nodded. And Kael — who had recused himself from the vote because of the conflict of interest, my son's uncle voting on my son's patch — sat in his office with his hands flat on his desk and listened through the door for an hour until I came down the hall and put my hand on the back of his neck and said, they said yes, baby.
They said yes. And he closed his eyes for a long moment and did not say anything, and that night he came home and held my hand at the table the way he holds it now, the way he has been holding it for a year.
Callum has Ronan's grin.
He has it more now than he had it a year ago.
He has grown three inches. His shoulders have widened.
His jaw has set into the long Moran line that Kael also has, that Ronan had, and when he smiles in the kitchen, in profile, in the morning, I sometimes — for half a second — see my husband across the table and I have to look away.
It does not hurt the way it used to. It just visits.
The visit is not unwelcome. The visit is — the visit is what a son is for, I think.
The visit is the thing the son carries forward, the small visual quotation of his father in his own body, walking around in the world. I have decided to let myself love it.
He has Kael's patience.
That is the other thing. He has — over the year — acquired a patience he did not have as a child.
He sits with things now. He thinks. He turns a question over before he answers it, the way Kael does, the way Kael has done in every conversation he has had with my son for fourteen months.
Callum has watched him do it and has, slowly, started to do it himself, and the patience is — the patience is in his shoulders when he stands now, in the set of his hands at rest, in the slow steady way he goes about his shift work in the eastern clearing every morning.
He is not the boy who arrived here a year ago.
He is becoming a man, and the man he is becoming has two fathers in him — the dead one whose face he wears, the living one whose habits he has absorbed — and there is enough room in him for both.
He has my stubbornness.
That part was always there. The stubbornness has not changed.
The stubbornness is the part of me that survived seventeen years in a fishing town.
The stubbornness is the part I gave him, the part that does not let go of a thing once it has decided.
Last spring, when the prospects' instructor told him he could not pass the long-distance run with his pack on his back, he ran it three times in a week until he passed it, and the third time he came back from the run with his nose bloody and his shirt wet through and a grin I recognized from my own mirror at his age.
He calls Kael uncle now.
He calls him uncle the way you call someone uncle when you mean it.
Not the careful, testing uncle of the first time.
Not the cold uncle of the weeks after he learned.
Just — uncle. The word the way a word is supposed to be, a word that means a man who is present and is mine, and I do not have to think about it.
It is a bridge under construction. The construction is not finished.
There are still planks being laid down between the two of them, every week, in the small daily ways.
But the bridge holds. The bridge is being walked on.
Callum walks across it three times a day and so does Kael, and the structure does not creak under either of them anymore.
The boat shop opened in June.
I called it Moran's. I considered other names — neutral names, names that did not announce themselves — and I rejected all of them.
I am a Moran. My husband was a Moran. My son is a Moran.
The man at my kitchen table is a Moran. The boat shop is going to be a Moran shop and I am going to put the name on the sign and the brothers are going to bring their bikes and the local people from the holler are going to bring their trucks and tractors, and we are going to fix what is brought to us.
Last summer I hired two of the younger wolves as apprentices.
They are good with their hands. One of them — a girl named Jess, who showed up six months ago from Tennessee with nowhere to be and a wolf she did not know what to do with — has turned out to be the best mechanic I have trained in my life.
She works the bench beside me on Saturdays and she does not say much and she fixes carburetors the way a surgeon does sutures, and I have been considering whether to make her partner before she has been here a full year.
I have not told her yet. I will. In the spring, maybe.
The shop is going to grow. The shop is going to be — the shop is going to be a thing that lasts.
Kael lives with me.
That is the simple way to say it. The complicated way is — Kael has been spending nights at my cabin since the storm, and at some point the spending of nights turned into a thing without a beginning, and his clothes have been in my closet since August, and his coffee mug is on my shelf, and his glasses live on the kitchen table beside the lamp where he reads at night.
His office is still at the clubhouse. His work is still the collecting work, which never stops, which is the kind of work that does not have a season.
But his life — his life is with me. He comes home for supper every night.
He sleeps in my bed every night. He gets up before me every morning and starts the kettle, because he is a man who likes to start a kettle, and the smell of coffee in the kitchen at six in the morning is the smell of my life now and I do not — I do not take it for granted.
We go to the grave together.
We started in April. The first time we drove up the access trail in the truck and we walked the half-mile through the mud, and I had a basket of wildflowers — bare-root things I had ordered from a catalog in February, mountain laurel and trillium and bee balm — and we knelt at the grave and we planted them.
I planted. He held the basket. We did not say much.
We did not need to. When the planting was done I sat down on a flat rock and Kael sat down beside me and we looked at the stones for an hour without speaking, and at one point his hand found mine in the grass between us and we sat there and held each other's hand at my husband's grave and it was — it was right.
It was the right shape of a day. The mountain held.
The wildflowers came back this year. They are pushing up through the mossy soil now, in March, the early green tips poking out at the base of the stones.
They have rooted. They are stubborn things.
They were going to root or die and they have rooted, and they are going to keep coming back, every spring, for as long as the mountain stands.
Kael and I do not say much when we are there.
We do not have to. The work we needed to do at the grave — the long heavy talking, the apologies, the confessions, the hand-holding in the dark — we did in cabins, on porches, in his office, on the kitchen floor.
The grave does not need any more of it. The grave just needs presence.
The grave needs the small living evidence that the two people who are alive are continuing to be alive in the right shape, with the dead man tended and remembered and not forgotten and not weaponized, and we bring that evidence every month and we lay it down quietly and we go home.
Today is Sunday.
I am at the stove making breakfast. The kettle is on.
The bacon is in the cast iron. The eggs are cracked into the bowl beside the stove and the bread is in the toaster and Della has just come up the path with a jar of preserves she made last fall that she has been saving for company and has decided to bring over because Callum is here for breakfast.
Callum is at the table.