Chapter 8
Ezra
The mural was finished on the first day of September.
I had felt, instead, that the wall had become a thing larger than me. The wall was a thing Delilah and I had made together. The wall was the first thing in my adult life that did not belong to me alone.
The unveiling was at two p.m.
The town came. I had not been sure they would.
The whispers I had been hearing all August had not, in the days after Vernon Crane's visit to my shop, gone away — they had only shifted, the way weather shifts, into something less openly hostile and more openly curious.
But the town came. They came with their grandparents.
They came with their children. They came with their casseroles for the reception that the historical society was hosting after, and they came with their phones and their cameras and the small careful Sunday-best of a community that had decided, even if it did not yet know how it felt about the new fact of me and Delilah, that it was going to show up for its own centennial.
Liam came.
He came on his bike. He parked it a block away, the way he had taught me to park — never blocking the route out — and he walked down Main Street in his cleanest cut, which is to say his everyday cut, because Liam did not own a non-clean version of anything.
He found me near the platform the council had set up at the base of the grain elevator.
He did not say anything for the first thirty seconds.
He stood beside me. He looked at the wall.
He said, Ezra.
I said, Yeah.
He said, This is the best thing you have ever done.
I did not look at him when he said it. I could not. I looked at the wall. I said, I know.
He said, You're not painting it alone.
I said, No.
He said, Is she here.
I said, She's coming with her mother.
He said, And her father.
I said, I don't know.
Liam nodded. He put his hand on my shoulder. He left it there for two seconds. Then he walked off into the crowd, and I watched him go, and I felt — for the first time, maybe ever — like I had given my brother something he had been waiting his whole life to be allowed to be proud of.
I had dressed for the unveiling. I want to record this because it mattered.
I had put on a clean pair of jeans and a clean blue shirt, and I had let Delilah, two nights earlier, iron the shirt — she had stood at the small ironing board in the back room of the shop where I sometimes slept, in a slip and bare feet, ironing my shirt while a thunderstorm went over Ember Falls and the lights of the shop flickered like applause, and the small domestic intimacy of it had been a thing I had not known I could survive — and I stood now at the base of my own mural in the ironed shirt, looking like a man who had accidentally dressed for church.
Delilah arrived at one-fifty.
She walked down Main Street with her mother and, behind them by three steps, her father.
He had come. He had come in his collar and his good gray jacket, and he was walking the way a man walks when he is doing a thing he has decided to do and has not yet decided how to feel about.
Ruth Crane walked beside Delilah. Ruth had her hand in the crook of her daughter's elbow, and I want to record what Ruth looked like — Ruth looked, that afternoon, like a woman who had been waiting a long time to walk down Main Street on her daughter's terms.
Delilah was wearing a dress I had never seen before.
Pale yellow. Just below the knee. Her hair was down, the way I liked it.
She had a small smudge of paint on her wrist that I knew, because we had been touching up a corner of the 1940s panel together at midnight, had come from the lamp black I had been mixing for a small shadow.
The smudge would not come off. We had tried.
She had stopped trying around one a.m. and looked at her wrist in the work-lamp light and said, I'll wear it. Let them see.
They saw.
She came to me. She came to where I was standing at the base of the platform.
She did not run. She did not hurry. She walked the way she had walked into my shop on the first Thursday of August, calmly, with the small careful composure of a woman who had decided to be brave in public, and she stopped two feet in front of me.
She said, Hi.
I said, Hi.
She took my hand.
She took it in front of the town. She took it in front of her mother and her father and Liam and the mayor and the historical society and the entire population of Ember Falls in their good clothes.
She took my hand and she stood beside me — not behind, not nearby, beside — and she held my hand the way a woman holds a hand she has decided, in advance, that she intends to keep.
The mayor gave a speech. The historical society presented a plaque.
I had been told, the day before, that I would have to say a few words, and I had been dreading it, and I stood at the small podium with my hand still warm from holding hers, and I said the few words.
I do not remember most of them. I remember saying that Ember Falls had given me my first commission when I was twenty.
I remember saying that the wall was the work of two people.
I remember saying Delilah Crane's name out loud, into the small county-fair microphone, in the open daylight, in front of her father, and I remember the small clean silence that followed it.
Vernon Crane was at the back of the crowd.
I could see him over the heads of the people in the front rows.
He had taken his hat off. He was looking at the wall.
He was not looking at me. He was reading, I knew, the line his daughter had written for the 1960s panel — The road was not built for escape.
The road was built for return — and the line was the size of his hand at that distance, and it was painted in the flowing script I had learned in art school for one semester and taught myself for the next ten years, and his daughter's name was painted in the lower right corner of the panel beside mine.
He did not move for a long time.
Then he put his hat back on. He did not smile.
But he did not, this is the part I want to record, look away.
He looked at the wall for the full length of the dedication.
He looked at the wall, and at his daughter's name, and at the line about the road, and at the small painted figures in the foreground of the 1940s panel — a man and a woman walking together, one in a uniform and one in a dress, the kind of small marriage you can imagine but never quite see — and his face did not soften but it did not harden either.
He simply received. He did the thing he had done in the study. He simply received.
The crowd dispersed for the reception. People came up to me to shake my hand.
People came up to Delilah to congratulate her on the writing.
The women's Bible study, six of them, stood in a small cluster and watched the wall for ten minutes without saying anything, and one of them — Margaret Hines, who had taught Delilah Sunday school — caught my eye across the street and gave me, of all things, a small nod.
The afternoon went on. The reception went on. Around four, Delilah found me at the edge of the crowd. She slid her hand into mine.
She said, I want to leave.
I said, Where to.
She said, I don't know. Somewhere. With you. Now.
I said, I'll get the bike.
I walked back to the shop. The shop was a five-minute walk.
I went and I rolled the Shovelhead — my own Shovelhead, the one I had built from scrap, the one that rumbled — out of the bay and onto the gravel.
I started it. The engine settled into its loping idle, the heartbeat I had been listening to alone for years, and I rode the bike up Main Street to where Delilah was standing at the corner near the grain elevator in her yellow dress with her mother on one side of her and her father on the other.
I stopped at the curb.
I held out a helmet.
I want to write about the helmet. I had bought it the week before.
I had not told Delilah. I had bought it at a shop in Wheeler County, a small leather-and-glass shop where I had been buying gear for ten years, and I had picked out a half-helmet in a deep blue color because the blue was the color of the cerulean she had gotten on her palm and on the front of my t-shirt, and the gentleman who'd sold it to me had asked who it was for, and I had said, My girl, and he had nodded, and I had paid in cash, and I had taken it home in a paper bag and kept it in the back room of the shop under a tarp because I had wanted, the first time she put it on, to put it on her myself.
I held the helmet out across the curb.
Vernon Crane looked at it. Vernon Crane looked at me. Vernon Crane looked at his daughter.
His daughter took the helmet.
She put it on. I leaned forward across the bike and I tightened the chin strap — the gentleman in Wheeler County had shown me how to fit it, and I had practiced — and she held still while I adjusted it, and the helmet was the right size, and she looked, in the helmet and the yellow dress, like a woman about to take the first ride of her life.
She climbed on behind me. I gave her the three-minute safety briefing she would later describe, accurately, as charmingly insufficient. Feet on the pegs. Lean with me, never against. Hold on.
She said, To what.
I said, To me.
She held on.
I looked back over my shoulder once before we pulled out.
Vernon Crane was standing on the curb with Ruth's hand in his.
He did not wave. He did not smile. But he nodded — the second nod that day from a man who did not give them lightly — and I returned the nod, and I let out the clutch, and we rode.
We rode out of Ember Falls on Route 9.