Chapter 30 #2
It took me a second. Amber. The application. The acceptance letter she'd handed Jamie in the Harris Teeter parking lot with my name on a signature I hadn't written. She hadn't done it alone. Bryce had put her up to it. If I'd left Havensworth, Jamie wouldn't have stayed.
Jamie's hand found mine on her knee.
She signed the agreement. She didn't look at him when she did it. She read the pages, signed where her lawyer pointed, and slid it back.
Ten years ago I'd held her behind the library stacks while she cried about what this man had done to her. Today she'd sat across from him and asked him why. Looked him in the eye while he answered and didn't flinch.
Then she stood, and we left.
We didn't speak until we were through the lobby and out on the sidewalk.
Jamie stopped on the pavement. Turned to me.
"Thank you. For being here."
"Always."
She leaned her forehead against my chest. I put my arms around her and held her there.
Sunday afternoon.
We had the picnic blanket, the cooler with sandwiches and lemonade, Rosie's file of stories, and the small watering can Jamie kept in the trunk for the plants at the base of the stone.
Rosie knew where to put the blanket. She'd known for months.
She spread it out at the same angle every time, a few feet from the headstone, where she could see both Jack and Sarah.
Jack Donovan. Beloved husband, father, brother. World's Greatest Brother. Sarah Donovan, beside him.
Jamie crouched at the base of the stone and pulled the weeds she always pulled. A few crabgrass runners. A dandelion that had come up since last time. Her hands moved without her thinking about them. She'd done this enough that her hands remembered the shape of the stone.
Rosie unpacked her file on the blanket.
"This one is first," she said. She held up a drawing. "This is the airplane from New York. Do you see the angel wings in the clouds?"
She walked us through it. One drawing at a time.
The airplane. The taxi driver with the caterpillar mustache.
The carousel in the park. The pillow fort we'd built in the living room.
The blue couch from the Carolina Furniture Depot.
Me with the guitar, sitting on the couch, Rosie spinning with her arms out.
She saved one for last.
"This is our family."
She held it up.
Five figures. Holding hands. Sarah and Jack in the clouds, both of them with wings, both of them waving. Jamie, me, and Rosie on the ground. All five connected. Jamie was holding Rosie's hand, and Rosie was holding mine, and my stick-figure arm reached up to Jack's.
I couldn't speak for a second.
Jamie's hand slid into mine.
"It's beautiful, sweetheart," she said to Rosie. Her voice was steady. "Daddy's going to love it."
"I know." Rosie put it carefully back into the file. "He's going to love it so much."
We ate. We drank lemonade out of paper cups. Rosie found a grasshopper and spent ten minutes trying to convince it to climb onto her finger, and when it finally did she held her hand very still and watched it for a long time before she lowered it back to the grass.
Jamie leaned against my shoulder.
We stayed another hour. The heat rose. Rosie fell asleep on the blanket with her head on Jamie's thigh, Biscuit tucked against her stomach, the grasshopper long forgotten. Jamie stroked her hair. I watched the shadow of the headstone move an inch across the grass.
Jack would have loved this.
He would have sat on this blanket with us, drunk the last of the lemonade without asking.
Made a joke about how badly I played guitar and then asked me to play something anyway.
He would have watched his daughter fall asleep on his sister's lap, put his hand on my shoulder and said something that didn't need saying.
He wasn't here.
I was.
That was the shape of it. That was the thing I was going to carry for the rest of my life. The best man I'd ever known was in the ground three feet from my boot, and his family was on a blanket beside me. I was the man who got to sit with them.
Jamie lifted her head.
"We should head back."
"Yeah."
We packed up. I carried Rosie to the car. Jamie folded the blanket and carried the cooler. At the edge of the grass, Rosie stirred against my shoulder and lifted her head and waved at the sky over my back.
"Mommy and Daddy keep the sun bright for us."
"Yes, they do," Jamie said.
We got her into the car seat. Jamie's hand found mine on the console as I pulled out of the cemetery drive.
"Some of the guys are getting together tonight for Sean's birthday."
She glanced at me. "Don't stay out too late."
"Yes ma'am."
She smiled and squeezed my hand.
She didn't let go the whole drive home.
The bar was the way it always was.
Sean was in the corner booth with a beer in each hand, holding court for a group that kept growing, telling a story I'd already heard twice this week and would hear three more times before the night was over.
Tyler was at the dartboard with Elena.
He was missing the target entirely. She was leaning against the wall beside him, laughing so hard she was wiping her eyes. Every time he threw and missed, she laughed harder, and every time she laughed, he threw worse.
The room was warm with it. The noise. The bodies.
The casual knock of shoulders as men moved through the crowd.
Somebody at the pool table made a shot nobody thought they'd make, the whole table erupted.
Sean looked up from his booth long enough to shout something about beginner's luck before going back to his story.
It was imperfect.
It had always been imperfect.
The proposal was dead at the top. Graff hadn't moved. The brass was quiet, they were going to stay quiet. The system that had killed Jack was the same system these men were standing in tonight.
But these were my brothers.
This was the house Jack had walked into, the same one he had invited me to follow him into. This was the family I had found when I had no family, and these were the men who had stood around the grave when he died.
The work of breaking it open was going to be slow.
I could live with it.
Tyler caught my eye again across the room. He set his darts down on the little shelf by the board. He raised his glass toward me.
I raised mine back.
I thought about Jamie and Rosie at home. About the blue couch in the living room. About the record player in the corner. About the bedroom where Jamie was already in pajamas by now, probably reading in bed, and waiting to hear my key in the door.
I set the glass down.
It was time to go home.