Epilogue
Junie
Two years.
I'm the clinic's nurse practitioner now, permanent, with my name on a door and a parking space that nobody respects.
Okafor got his retirement in March and threw a party for himself at Margo's, and he cried a little, and everybody said kind things, and then he showed up the following Tuesday at seven-fifteen in the morning because, and I quote, "there is nothing to do in this town and my wife has taken up watercolor. "
He works three days a week. He is paid for none of them. We have stopped arguing about it.
Theo is a footnote in another state. I know exactly one thing about where he landed and I know it because Ramona knows it, and I have made a rule with myself that I get to think about him for no more than four minutes a year, on his birthday, out of spite.
Tank walks with a limp he'll have for the rest of his life.
I want to be precise about this, because it's the whole thing. The limp did not go away. I never told him it would. Some of that hardware is permanent and some of that gait is permanent and there are cold mornings when getting out of a chair costs him something I can see from across a room.
What changed is that he stopped reading it as a verdict.
That's it. That's the entire recovery. He limps out to a bike, and he limps into church meetings and sits fourth on the left, and he limped down the aisle of a converted Pentecostal church yesterday afternoon in front of about ninety people and did not think about it once, and I know he didn't, because he was looking at me the whole way.
They got married at the clubhouse, which used to be a church, which everybody agreed was extremely convenient.
"It's still consecrated," Otto insisted.
"It is absolutely not."
"They didn't deconsecrate it, though. Did they. Did anybody do a form?" Otto looked around the room with genuine concern. "Judge. Judge. Was there a form?"
"There's a form for everything, Otto," said Judge, with his hat on.
Rev did the ceremony. He was eleven months into a divinity program at twenty-eight and Nevada is fairly relaxed about the rest of it, and he asked me four separate times over three weeks whether I was sure I wanted him, and each time I said yes and each time he nodded like a man receiving a delivery he hadn't ordered.
He was good. He was very short and very good. Delaney cried into a napkin and Warrant slept through the entire thing under the third table with all three legs out sideways.
Connie stood up with Tank. She did not make a speech; she just stood there beside her brother with her hand around his elbow — not holding him up, just holding on — and I watched her not-say about nine things in a row and I loved her enormously.
Margo did the food. Delaney did the cake, three tiers, and the top one was lemon because I asked, and she got the marble slab in the feed store window so cold that morning that Birdie said the whole bakery smelled like a walk-in.
And Otto ran the sound system.
I want it recorded that this was not my decision. This was a decision arrived at by committee, in a bar, at eleven at night, and it was defended on the grounds that Otto had "done a wedding before," which turned out to mean he had attended one.
Here is what happened.
Otto built a playlist. Otto was extremely proud of the playlist. Otto had also, at some point in the preceding week, used the same phone to record a nine-minute voice memo to himself about a transmission he was rebuilding for Dutch, and Otto does not understand how his phone organizes anything.
So we come down the aisle. Ninety people. The transom throwing red and gold all the way down the middle of the floor. Tank standing up there in a jacket Connie made him buy, looking at me like a man who has been handed something he still, two years on, cannot get an invoice for.
And out of four hundred dollars of rented speakers, at volume, comes Otto's voice saying:
"Okay so the issue with the input shaft is that Dutch said it was a five-speed—"
Ninety people. Dead silence.
"—and it is NOT a five-speed, Otto, remember that, it is not, he's lying, he's been lying since March—"
Ramona put her forehead on the table.
Otto dove at the soundboard with both hands and hit, as far as anybody can establish, every control on it simultaneously, and the voice memo went briefly to double speed, and then stopped, and then a mariachi version of the wedding march came on at a volume that moved air.
And Tank laughed.
Not a chuckle. Not the thing he does through his nose.
He put his hand over his eyes and he laughed until he had to sit down on the step in a jacket his sister picked out, in front of ninety people, in a church with no cross on it, and Judge said "Oh, thank God" out loud, and Connie started crying, and Ramona later told me she hadn't heard that sound out of Beckett Rhodes in three years and had privately assumed it was gone with the leg.
I walked the rest of the way down the aisle to a man sitting on a step wiping his eyes, and I said, "Are you going to be able to do this?"
"No," he said. "Give me a minute."
"Take two."
He took two. Then he stood up — off the step, no hand — and we got married in about four minutes, and Rev said the shortest closing line I've ever heard at a wedding, and I've been to eleven.
"That's it," he said. "That's all of it. Go on."
The call came in during the reception.
Judge took it standing by the boot sign with a finger in his good ear, shouting the way he does, and I watched his face go through three things and land somewhere I didn't like.
He hung up. He stood there a second. Then he came back in and put his hand on Tank's shoulder and said something short, and Tank set his glass down.
"Halvard Nystr?m died," Judge said, when I asked. "Thursday. Heart."
"I don't know that name."
"No, you wouldn't. He was out of the chapter down in Pahrump, thirty years back." He turned his glass on the table. "Best friend Dietrich Voss ever had in this world."
Dietrich Voss — "Cannon" — was at the far end of the bar, alone, with his back to all ninety of us, and had been for about four minutes.
"There's a daughter," Judge said. "Twenty-six. No mother in it, no other people that anybody knows of." He put his hat back on, which meant it was settled before he said it. "She's coming here."
"Here?"
"Somebody's got to be, Junie." He tipped his chin toward the end of the bar. "And he's the one who promised."
My contract folder is still in the glovebox of the green Tacoma.
I've never taken it out. It's got a coffee ring on it and it's gone soft at the corner, and it says twelve weeks, and it has a renewal line at the bottom that I never signed, and every so often I open the glovebox for the registration and there it is.
Twelve weeks, unrenewed.
Forty years overdrawn, and counting.