50. Jamie
JAMIE
Pinewood Ridge does not need much of a reason to throw a party, and midsummer is reason enough, so the town shut the square down the same way it had the autumn I first stood in it, with the same bunting and the same wobbling folding tables and a banner that an unkind wind had already begun editing into something obscene.
I had been a different man the last time I poured cider at this festival.
I had been a careful man, a closed door of a man, standing shoulder to shoulder with a woman I had already decided I was not allowed to want, telling myself the warmth I felt at her side was nothing I would ever be reckless enough to keep.
The square looked very nearly the same. I was the thing that had changed.
Marge had appointed herself the festival, the way she appoints herself everything, and she tracked me down within a minute of my arrival to inform me that the cider booth was mine again, on the grounds that I had done it before and that complaining was futile.
“You poured a mean cider that year,” she said, “for a man who looked like he was attending his own funeral.” I said I had felt precisely like it.
“I know,” she said, with the brief, ferocious tenderness she permits herself perhaps twice a year.
“Look at you now.” Then she patted my cheek hard enough to sting and went off to terrorize the pie judges, and I stood there in the noise and the gold light feeling, of all the ridiculous things, seen.
The day unspooled the way the good ones do, which is to say without anybody’s permission and slightly out of control.
Hank Dooley entered Lyndon in a rooster pageant that existed, as far as I could ever determine, only in Hank’s own mind.
Asher and Bandit defended their old title in the Ugliest Mutt contest, and Bandit, gray around the muzzle now and entirely without shame, took the ribbon a second time to a roar of civic approval, while Asher explained her triumph to anyone who would hold still long enough to receive it.
And right on schedule, at about two in the afternoon, the Pruitt boy’s llama got loose, because some traditions are sacred, and the same sheriff who had lost a footrace to it years before set off after it with the grim resignation of a man who knows exactly how the next twenty minutes are going to go.
I laughed. I want to be clear about that, because there had been a festival, years earlier, where my own laughter had felt like a thing I was stealing.
This time it did not feel stolen. This time it was simply mine.
It was all of them, really, the whole cast of the years that had remade me, scattered across that square in the gold of the afternoon.
Tom Garrety, who had sat with me through the worst of it and talked about diesel so that I would not have to talk about myself, manning the grill and blaming the smoke for his eyes.
Della, who runs my clinic the way a tugboat runs a harbor, judging the baking with the incorruptible severity of a woman who cannot be bought, though several entrants tried.
Birdie, knitting in the shade, a small ferocious person who had once cornered me to announce, apropos of nothing, that grief shared is grief halved, and who had been so plainly right that I avoided her for a month afterward.
I had come into this valley four years ago certain that the kindest thing I could do for any of them was keep my distance, spare them the contagion of me.
They had declined the offer. They had simply, stubbornly, mulishly refused to let me be alone in it, and it had hauled me back from a long way down, and not one of them would ever take a scrap of credit for it.
I had told Zoe I would ask her in a hundred ordinary places until she lost count of them, and I had kept my word, over dishwater and at stoplights and once, memorably, with a thermometer in a heifer.
So she was not braced for the one place that was not ordinary in the slightest. Asher was in on it, which is the entire reason it worked, because a seven-year-old cannot keep a secret but he can absolutely keep a ring box, and at the appointed moment, when the band fell quiet between songs and Marge had, not by any accident, herded half the town toward the bandstand, my boy marched up to his mother in front of the whole of Pinewood Ridge and held it out to her in both hands, the way he carries the things that matter most. “Dad has a question,” he announced, at a volume that reached the next county.
“And I already said yes for my part.” The square went quiet.
Zoe turned and found me, and her eyes had already gone bright, and her hands had come up over her mouth the way they do.
I did not make a speech. I had spent a whole lifetime hiding behind speeches.
I just got down low, where my son was already standing, the two of us together at her feet, and I asked her the only question I had left. “Will you keep us?”
She did not make me wait for it. “Yes,” she said, and then louder, because the back of the crowd was already demanding a ruling, “yes, obviously, you ridiculous man. Get up off the ground.” And Pinewood Ridge, which had watched me turn up four years before a stranger and a ghost, which had fed me and meddled with me and refused, with enormous stubbornness, to let me vanish, lost its collective mind.
Hank put two fingers in his mouth and produced a whistle that startled livestock three counties over.
Marge wept and insisted she had something in her eye.
Asher, his duty discharged, lost all further interest in the proceedings and went to check on the llama situation.
I stood up with my arms around the woman who had just said yes, in the middle of the town that had saved my life without my ever once asking it to, and she pressed her forehead to mine in all that noise.
“A hundred ordinary places,” she said, “and then the one that wasn’t.
I was starting to think you’d never run out of barns.
” I told her I had been saving the good one. I told her I had been saving all of it.
Later, when the festival had worn itself down to the last few stubborn holdouts and the spilled cider and a llama restored at last to its rightful and unrepentant owner, the three of us drove out to the lake.
I used to believe I would never again be able to stand at the edge of any water without hearing it ask me the old question.
For five years a lake had been the worst word in my private language, a place I drove the long way around, a current that pulled at me even on dry land.
And then a different lake had very nearly taken a different boy, and I had gone into it after him and come back out with him in my arms, and somewhere in the going in and the coming back the water had quit being my enemy and gone back to being only water.
We had started coming out here on the long evenings, on purpose, because a thing you are afraid of grows teeth in the dark and loses them in the daylight, and because Caleb had loved the water more than almost anything in the world, and to keep my living family away from it forever would only have handed the worst day one more victory.
Asher knew about the lake. We had told him the truth of it, the size of it adjusted to fit a seven-year-old, because we had decided early that there would be no locked doors in this family, no rooms a child was not permitted into.
He took it the way he takes everything, sideways and without flinching.
“Was this where the before-brother went in the water?” he had asked, the first time we came out, and I had told him no, that that was a different lake, a long way from here, but that yes, it was a lake a great deal like this one.
He had nodded, and thought about it, and then asked whether Caleb had been any good at skipping rocks.
I told him I would bet the before-brother had been absolutely terrible at it, the same as Asher, and Asher had found this enormously comforting, a brother who was also bad at the thing, and gone back to flinging stones at the water with a lighter heart.
That was the whole of it, in the end: not forgetting him, only making room.
So we came, on that midsummer evening with the festival still ringing in our ears.
Asher hunted the shallows for the flattest stones he could find and narrated each doomed throw like a sportscaster.
Zoe waded in to her knees and shrieked about the cold and dared me to follow her, sunburned clean across the nose from a day she had flatly refused to wear a hat for.
And I stood on the shore in the long gold light with my son’s drawing in my wallet and my son’s brother in the same wallet, the two of them sharing the space at last, and my whole impossible life spread out in the shallows in front of me, and I was not afraid.
The lake was just a lake. The grief was just grief, a thing I will carry for the rest of my days, set down gently now where I can pick it up when I need to instead of being crushed flat beneath it.
The past was not a current anymore. It was only the ground I was standing on, solid under my boots, holding me up.
Zoe came and stood beside me after a while, her shoulder fitted against my arm, water still dripping from the rolled hems of her jeans.
“You all right?” she asked, the way she asks it now, which is not the frightened way, only the way you check on a person you fully intend to keep checking on for the rest of your life.
I told her that I was. And for once it was not the old reflexive lie, the one I had handed out for years like bad candy to hold everyone at arm’s length.
It was the plain truth. I was all right.
I was, if anything, a great deal better than all right, standing at the very edge of the worst thing that ever happened to me with every last one of the best things throwing rocks at it.
She leaned her weight into me, and the two of us watched our boy lose a long and badly one-sided argument with the laws of physics, and neither of us moved to hurry a single part of it along, because we had, at the very last, all the time in the world.
Some of us are sure we do not get second chances.
We spend years making certain of it, building the case against ourselves brick by patient brick, mistaking our guilt for justice and our leaving for love.
I had been the surest man alive. And I got mine anyway: a sunburned woman with cold water to her knees, a fearless boy with a pocket full of bad throwing rocks, an ugly dog snoring in the truck, and a whole stubborn town that simply would not let me drown.
I do not know what I ever did to deserve it.
I have stopped asking, because Ruth is right that some questions are only one more way of refusing the answer.
The answer is that it is mine. They are mine. And I am never, ever letting go.
THE END