Epilogue #2
Ezra came to Sunday dinner in a clean shirt.
He said grace, when asked, without irony — he had been raised, as it turned out, by a mother who took him to church until he was twelve, and the words came back to him with surprising ease — and he ate seconds of everything my mother made, which was the form of affection that mattered most to her.
He argued about pitchers. He listened to my father's sermons on the Sundays we attended the church, which was once a month, by mutual unspoken agreement, and he stayed for coffee hour, and the women's Bible study, four of them, had begun to ask him politely about his work.
Liam watched the whole thing with the kind of quiet satisfaction that older brothers wear when they have been right about something for a long time and have decided to be gracious about it.
At a club gathering in November — Ezra brought me along, the first time, in a cautious negotiation that turned out to be much less of a negotiation than he had expected — Liam had taken Ezra aside near the bonfire and said, in the careful flat voice he used for important sentences, You found something I thought you'd spend your life running from.
Ezra had said, I didn't find it.
He had said, She stood in my shop and made me want to stop running.
Liam had nodded. He had looked at me across the bonfire.
I had been talking with Mara about the chapbook and the cover, and Mara had been telling me, with a wry smile, that her husband had said the painting was the best thing his brother had ever done.
Liam had caught my eye across the fire. He had raised a beer in a small private salute.
I had raised my cider. We had not needed to say anything else.
Tonight, in the back room of the shop, with the kerosene heater humming and the December wind making the steel roof tick, I have a new poem.
I want to write about the poem because the poem, like most poems that matter, came up on me without warning.
I had been sitting on the cot writing a different poem — something about my mother, who has, in the last month, started a tentative correspondence with a sister of hers in Iowa she has not spoken to in fifteen years — and the poem about my mother was not going where I wanted it to go, and I had set the notebook down and looked at the candle on the table and thought, with a small soft surprise, about Ezra.
I thought about him painting in the bay.
I thought about the four months. I thought about the cerulean palm.
I thought about the rain Friday and the cot the first time and the candle that had been the lighthouse of my life ever since.
I thought about a man who paints fire and a woman who writes about it, and how between them they could warm any room.
I picked up the notebook. I wrote the poem in nineteen minutes. I have never written a poem that fast.
When I was done, I stood up. I wrapped the wool blanket around my shoulders. I walked into the bay.
Ezra was working on the underside of a tank for the bar sign — the project had grown, since I had last seen it, into a small piece of furniture, with brackets and steel reinforcements and his name in elaborate script across the front — and he had his back to me, and I stood in the doorway and watched him work for half a minute before he turned.
He smiled when he saw me. He set the brush down. He came to me. He put his hands on my hips.
He said, Cold?
I said, I have a poem.
He said, Read it to me.
I read it. I read it standing in the bay with the blanket on my shoulders and the steel roof ticking and the kerosene heater making its small warm sound.
I read it slowly. I had not edited it. I had only written it nineteen minutes earlier, and I read it the way it had come, with whatever stumbles the first draft had in it.
He listened with his whole face. He listened the way he had listened on the third Tuesday of August, in the gold rectangle of work-lamp light, when he had told me I was writing the inside of things.
When I was done, he was very quiet.
He said, Read it again.
I read it again.
He said, That's the one.
I said, The one what.
He said, That's the one you publish next.
I said, How do you know.
He said, Because it made me want to put down my brush.
He said, And nothing makes me want to put down my brush.
I smiled. I felt my mouth do the small involuntary thing it does when he says a sentence I will think about for a long time, and I felt the smile spread, and I looked down at the notebook in my hand, and I felt the small new permission of a poem that had landed.
I sat down on an overturned crate — my old crate, which had become a piece of seating in the bay now that the bay had been expanded — and I wrote the title at the top of the page.
I wrote Saint's Sin.
He laughed.
I laughed.
He said, That's a terrible title.
I said, It's a perfect title.
He said, Yeah, it is.
He went back to the bar sign. I sat on the crate with the blanket on my shoulders and watched him paint, and the shop was warm and the heater hummed and the radio played Patsy Cline, and the high windows showed a sliver of the December sky going slowly violet, and I thought about the woman I had been on the doorstep at eleven-eighteen on a Tuesday night in early August, the woman who had reached for a journal she did not yet know would change her life.
She would not recognize me. That is what I want to record.
The woman in the white nightgown on the doorstep would not recognize the woman in the wool blanket in the bay.
The woman in the second pew with her hands folded would not recognize the woman with the published chapbook on her father's nightstand.
The woman who had not, in twenty-five years, raised her voice in her father's kitchen would not recognize the woman who had said, in his study, I'm inviting you to visit. But I'm not asking permission.
But the woman in the bay tonight recognizes her.
I want to say that too. I recognize the woman on the doorstep, and I recognize the woman in the second pew, and I am grateful to both of them, because they kept the small private journal in the bench of an upright piano, and they wrote in it on Wednesdays in the empty sanctuary while the light came through the stained glass and lit their hand the color of bruise and apricot, and they did not, despite everything that had been asked of them, give up the writing.
I am them. They are me. We are all of us, finally, the same woman.
The candle on the table burns down. The shop is warm.
Ezra is humming. The night is cold and clear and the wind has stopped, and somewhere out on the gravel road a single car goes by, and the headlights cross the front of the bay and move on, and the shop holds us the way it has held us for four months now — with paint and steel and the warm certain knowledge that the best things in life are the ones you were told you could not have.
I close the notebook.
I stand up. I walk across the bay to him. I put my arms around his waist from behind. He does not stop painting. He leans back into me, just a fraction, the small unconscious gravity of a man who has stopped running.
I press my cheek against the back of his shoulder.
The shop is warm. The night is long. The poem is written. The future, for the first time in twenty-five years, is mine.