Epilogue
Delilah
Four months later.
I am writing this in the back room of Halo Custom Works on a cold December evening, with a kerosene heater humming six feet away and a man I love working under a hooded lamp in the bay on the other side of the wall.
The radio is on low. He is whistling, badly and unconsciously, a tune from the Patsy Cline record he has had on a loop for three weeks.
I have a notebook on my knees and a wool blanket across my lap and a cup of tea that has gone lukewarm on the table beside me, and I am, by any honest measurement, in the most contented hour of my life.
I want to write down what happened. I want to write it down because I have started, in the last month, to forget how strange it once seemed, and I do not want to forget. I want to remember, in twenty years, that the strangest thing about my life now is how unstrange it has become.
The mural became a landmark.
That was the first thing. The town council, which had commissioned the mural with the careful enthusiasm of a council that hoped the centennial would bring in some tourists from Wheeler County, was unprepared for what actually happened.
The mural was photographed by the regional paper in mid-September and the photograph ran with a long piece by a writer I had never heard of, and the piece was picked up by a wire service, and by the first weekend of October there were cars from three states parked along Main Street on Saturday afternoons.
The historical society started selling postcards.
The diner across the street put a sign in its window — Stop in for coffee after viewing the mural — and the sign worked.
Ember Falls had not been a place anyone passed through on purpose in maybe forty years, and now, on autumn weekends, it was a place that had, of all things, a small steady flow of strangers in good coats taking photographs of a wall.
Ezra got three new commissions.
A church in Wheeler County wanted a small mural for the parish hall.
A library in the next state wanted a panel on the history of regional agriculture.
A bar in Caldwell County wanted, somewhat against my taste, a hand-painted hand-lettered sign of considerable ambition.
He took all three. Halo Custom Works expanded into a second bay in November — he leased the adjacent unit, knocked through the wall, and built a small office in the corner.
He had business cards now. He had a website, designed by Liam's wife Mara, who had taken pity on him after watching him struggle for two days with a free template.
He had, on a small wooden shelf in his office, a row of three framed photographs — one of his mother, one of the mural taken from across the street, and one of me at the piano in the parsonage, taken by my mother, on the morning after the unveiling, in the moment I had not known the camera was there.
I published my first poetry chapbook.
That was the second thing. I had been writing every day since September.
I had thirty-six poems by the middle of October, and Ezra had been reading every one, and the readings had become a small evening ritual — I would read him whatever I had finished while he cleaned his brushes at the end of the day, and he would listen, and he would say something, and the something was almost always useful.
He had a writer's ear without being a writer.
He could hear the small false beat. He could hear, as he had heard in August on the third visit, the inside of a thing.
By the end of October I had a manuscript.
By the middle of November, Mara, who knew a woman who knew a woman, had passed it to a small literary press in St. Louis.
By the first week of December, the press had taken it.
They were doing a limited run — three hundred copies — and they wanted to know if I had a cover image.
Ezra painted the cover.
I want to write about the cover, because the cover was the thing I almost did not survive.
I had told him about the offer over dinner at his apartment — we ate, most nights, either at his apartment or at my mother's table, my father at the head of the table, in the slow careful détente that had become our family's new weather — and I had told him about the cover image they wanted, and he had been quiet for the rest of the meal.
The next morning, he had not come over to the parsonage for breakfast as he had been doing on Sundays. He had not, in fact, been at the shop when I went looking for him at ten. He had not been answering his phone.
I drove home worried. He came to the parsonage at four.
He had paint on his hands. He had paint on his neck.
He had paint on the elbow of his shirt. He had been working since five a.m. in his shop on a small primed canvas — twenty inches square, the standard size the press wanted for the cover — and he came in through my mother's kitchen and he kissed her on the cheek and he said, Ruth, may I borrow your daughter, and my mother, who had warmed to him so completely in the four months of his presence in her house that I sometimes suspected her of having an alternate motive entirely, said Take her.
He took me to the shop. He had the canvas on his easel under a sheet.
He took the sheet off.
The painting was of a woman. The woman was made of words.
The words were small careful lines of cursive in different colors — cerulean, lamp black, alizarin, ochre — and the woman stood in a field of color that was not quite landscape and not quite abstract, and the words that formed her body were, when you looked closely enough, lines from the poems in the manuscript.
He had read the manuscript four times. He had picked the lines.
He had written them, in tiny meticulous calligraphy, into the shape of a woman holding her own outline up to the light.
I stood in front of the painting for a long time.
I did not say anything. I did not need to.
He stood behind me with his hands in his pockets and he waited the way he always waited, with the small infinite patience he had always given the wet edge of a paint that was not yet dry, and I looked at the painting until I could see it without crying and then I turned around and I kissed him.
The chapbook came out in early December. Three hundred copies. It sold out in two weeks.
I want to record what happened with my father. I want to record it because it is the part I had not believed would happen, and I do not want to take it for granted.
My father did not say anything about the book when the press release went out.
He did not say anything when the local paper ran a small story under the headline Pastor's Daughter Publishes Poetry Collection.
He did not say anything at dinner the night the books arrived.
I had brought one to the table — a small slim white volume with Ezra's painted cover and my name in clean serif type — and I had set it on the table, and my father had looked at it, and my father had picked it up, and my father had said, Delilah.
I had said, Yes.
He had said, May I.
I had said, Yes.
He had taken it. He had read for the rest of dinner.
He had eaten with one hand and held the book with the other, and he had read in silence for forty minutes, and my mother and I had eaten our roast beef and exchanged the small careful looks of two women who had decided to let the moment be what it was.
At the end of the meal he had closed the book.
He had not, the entire forty minutes, looked at his food.
He had said, finally, I would like to buy four more.
I had said, Why.
He had said, Your aunt. My sister. Two of the elders who I think need this.
He had said, And one for my desk.
He had bought five copies the next day at the small bookstore in Wheeler County that was carrying it. My mother told me, three days later, that she had found one on his nightstand, dog-eared at a poem called On Walking Without a Net, which was about a daughter learning to do exactly that.
He did not become a different man. I want to be clear about this.
He did not, after the publication, become a man who was easy to live with.
He was still my father. He still had the small specific severity of a man whose worldview was the only worldview he was comfortable inside.
But he had, the night he read the book at the table, opened a small door in his life, and the door, as far as I could tell, had not closed.
He and Ezra were not friends. I want to be clear about that too.
They had become, instead, two men who loved the same woman and had decided, separately, to respect each other's version of the loving.
They had not become friends. They had become something more realistic and more durable than friends.
They had become two careful men who showed up at the same dinner table every other Sunday and disagreed about baseball — they had discovered, in the third week of October, a shared and surprisingly intense disagreement about the relative merits of the bullpen — and the disagreement was conducted with the kind of vigor other men reserved for theology, and my mother and I would sit at our end of the table and eat our pie and listen, and we would smile at each other across the centerpiece, and we would know what was being built.