Epilogue
Jade
Eleven months later.
The lake at the end of October is the color of pewter, and the back lawn is full of pumpkins.
We are hosting Linden Lake's harvest festival this year. Mrs. Higgins asked me in August if the Sterlings would be willing to put up a few booths along the driveway. Graham said yes before I could answer, which tells me everything about who he's become.
The pumpkins line the path from the front gate to the back lawn.
Children run between them with painted faces.
The diner is selling cider. The librarian is running a booth of secondhand books, all proceeds going to the school.
The diner owner has set up a folding table by the cider stand and is selling deep-fried pickles to a line of children who have been told, repeatedly, that this is not a dinner.
Iris is somewhere in the chaos, organizing a parade of stuffed owls. Last count: seven.
At the far end of the dock, a duck with a crooked feather sits on the cleat with the look of a property owner who did not authorize any of this. Greg is doing fine.
I am sitting in a chair on the back porch with the baby on my chest.
Lila is four months old today. She has Graham's eyes and my mouth and a temperament the pediatrician has, generously, called alert.
She arrived in late June, in our bedroom, on a warm afternoon with the lake sitting flat and silver outside the window.
Iris was in the room. My mother was second to hold her.
Graham's hands were shaking so badly he couldn't tie the cotton sling.
Pierce, who had driven up uninvited and unannounced, stood in the doorway and pretended he wasn't watching.
Lila is asleep against my collarbone in the sling now. The only configuration in which she will tolerate being asleep during the day.
She makes a face in her sleep. The small scowl Graham makes when Pierce calls during dinner. I watch it move across her face and disappear. Four months in and she has already inherited the expression he wears when he is being inconvenienced by the world.
A child laughs somewhere by the pumpkins. The sound travels clean across the lawn. Lila does not stir.
"Mama-Jade!" Iris shouts from the lawn. "Daddy says the cider is too hot. He says I have to wait. Can you tell him I'm seven and seven is old enough for warm cider?"
"He is correct, sweetheart. The cider is too hot. You have to wait."
"But I'm seven."
"You are extremely seven."
She sighs the kind of sigh only a child of seven can produce and stomps off to find my mother, who will let her have the cider when no one is looking. Maria's commitment to my parenting boundaries lasts exactly as long as it takes Iris to look at her with her father's eyes.
Graham crosses the lawn toward me, ducking under the string lights I made him put up at five this morning.
He's in jeans and a flannel shirt I bought him a year ago that he has, against all of his instincts, started wearing voluntarily.
His hair is grey at the temples now, more so than last October.
He looks like a man who has been allowed to stop bracing.
He sits down on the step next to my chair and rests one hand on Lila's small back through the sling.
"How is she."
"Asleep. Finally."
"How are you."
"Tired. Happy. Both."
"Want anything?"
"Maybe more tea."
He doesn't move. He sits there with his hand on the baby and his shoulder against my knee, watching the festival roll across our lawn.
"Pierce called."
"On a Saturday. He must really love us."
"The Ainsworth merger closed in February the way it was supposed to.
Six thousand jobs. The board sent a fruit basket.
The Whitlock civil matter settled last month.
Christopher's sentencing is on the record.
" He pauses. "Tiffany got the magazine job.
She sent a note. She said to tell you thank you. "
"For what."
"For believing her, I think. And Pierce said Martha's Gazette series ran through the fall. He said the town's version of us is the only version left."
The last sentence settles into the afternoon air and stays there.
He sets the phone face-down on the porch railing and doesn't pick it up again.
I tilt my head against his temple. We sit there for a minute in the late autumn sun while our younger daughter sleeps and our older daughter narrates an owl pageant somewhere on the lawn.
"Graham."
"Mm."
"Thank you."
"For what."
"For saying yes to the festival. For the flannel. For the pancakes last Saturday when I couldn't get out of bed before nine. For being the kind of man who answers when Iris calls from down the hall at three in the morning without being asked."
He doesn't answer right away. His hand presses gently against Lila's back.
"Thank you for staying. That's all. Just that."
I reach over and find his free hand and lace my fingers through his, the emerald ring catching what's left of the afternoon light.
Lila stirs against my collarbone. A small sound, not a cry, the murmur of a baby who is checking that the world is still there. I put my hand over her back, over Graham's hand, and she settles.
My mother appears in the back doorway with a plate of something that smells like cinnamon.
She has color in her face she didn't have a year ago, and she moves through the doorway without touching the frame.
The doctor's last report used the word remarkable.
She let me read it once and then put it away.
That is the most she will say about it, which is enough.
She has made four flans this week. I have not commented on this. I understand that the flans are a language.
"The Mayor is here. He wants to thank you for the festival."
The Mayor is behind her, and Martha from the Gazette is behind the Mayor with her notebook and the patient expression of a woman who has been waiting twenty minutes for a quote.
"I'll be there in five minutes."
"Five." The way she says everything, like a fact that has already occurred.
She goes back inside. Through the window I can see her moving toward the front room. I can see the exact moment she decides that thanking me can wait and talking to these people herself is a better use of everyone's time. The Mayor's wife leans in within thirty seconds.
Iris appears at the bottom of the porch steps with a cup of cider. The cider is warm.
I look at her. She looks at me.
"Grandma said it cooled down."
"Did she."
"She said seven is old enough for cool cider."
"Hm."
Iris takes a sip with the serenity of a child who has won and knows it.
Graham makes a sound against my temple that is not quite a laugh and not quite a sigh. The sound of a man who has accepted that he is outnumbered by Alvarez women and has decided, somewhere in the last eleven months, that this is the best possible outcome.
Iris climbs the porch steps with something held behind her back and the focused conspiratorial expression of a child who has accomplished a mission.
"Mama-Jade."
"Yeah, sweetheart."
"I have a new one for her."
She brings her hands around. A small stuffed duck, yellow, with a black bead for an eye and a bow tied around its neck, crookedly, with a length of festival ribbon that Iris has clearly added herself.
"I won it at the ring toss. The man said it was the last duck. I told him my sister needed a duck because Justice and Judge are mine and the new baby gets a different bird, and I said it had to be a duck because of Greg. He said okay."
"That is a very thorough sales pitch, Iris."
"I had to explain about Greg."
"You did."
She sits down on the porch boards next to my chair, legs straight out, hands open in her lap, the way my mother has taught her to wait. She does not ask.
Graham slides over to make room. I unbuckle the sling with one hand and lift Lila out, keeping my palm flat under her head, and lower her into Iris's lap. Iris does not move. Her small arms come up around the baby in exactly the configuration we have practiced. Her face is very serious.
She leans down close, the way she leans close to Judge when she has something important to tell him.
"Hi. I'm Iris. I'm still your big sister. This is a duck. His name is Wednesday because that's the day I won him. He's going to live in your crib with you. There is a real duck named Greg out on the dock. He is working on his attitude. You can meet him when you are bigger."
Lila does not wake up. She makes a small sleeping sound against Iris's collarbone, the same sound she makes against mine.
Iris looks at me. Her face is doing the thing where she is trying not to smile too big.
"She heard me."
"She heard you."
She sits there with the baby for one minute. Two. Graham's hand finds my knee on the chair and rests there. None of us speaks.
Then Iris carefully, carefully slides back out from under Lila. I lift the baby back into the sling. Iris sets Wednesday the duck on the porch railing next to Graham's phone, like an offering.
She stands up. She brushes off her dress. She looks at me.
"We match."
She trots back down the steps before I can answer.
The festival runs until nine. The town stays late.
Iris falls asleep on the porch steps sometime around nine, her face still painted, at least three stuffed owls piled in her lap and Wednesday the duck tucked under her chin. Graham carries her in without waking her.
I follow with Lila. My mother turns off the porch lights and locks the front door, and for a moment I stand in the hallway of the finished house and listen to all of it settling around me.
Graham's footsteps on the stairs. The creak of Iris's door.
The silence of a house where everyone I love is accounted for.
I set my hand against the wall of the hallway, the smooth new plaster where the hole used to be. I press my palm flat against it.
The wall holds.
I am home.
I am home, and I plan to stay.
The End.