Epilogue
Two Years Later.
The Pinewood Hollow estate in summer.
The bronze doors of the front gallery stood open to a soft breeze coming off the water.
Imari, eleven years old, tall enough now to come up to Aurora's shoulder, no longer in braids but in two soft natural pigtails her Aunt Rory had wound that morning, sat cross-legged on a big quilted picnic blanket spread out in the shade of the live oaks, in cut-off shorts and a yellow t-shirt.
Beside her on the blanket, Atticus Iverson — a year and a half old now, fat-kneed and gray-eyed and entirely uninterested in sitting still — was pulling his own socks off and dropping them, one at a time, with enormous concentration.
Imari was holding a piece of bay-washed driftwood she had picked up on the south beach that morning. She was, very patiently, showing it to him.
“This is wood, Atticus. The bay made it smooth. See? Smooth.”
Atticus seized the driftwood in both fists, studied it for exactly one second, and tried to put it in his mouth.
“No, baby. We don't eat the wood.” She took it back, gently.
He thought about crying, then decided against it.
“When you're bigger I'll take you down to the bay and show you where it comes from.
I'm going to teach you to skip stones. Your daddy taught Aunt Rory and Aunt Rory taught me and I'm going to teach you. That's how it goes in this family.”
“Bay,” Atticus said, which was one of his words, and clapped for himself.
“That's right. Good job.”
He pushed himself upright, took three proud, lurching steps across the blanket, sat down hard on his bottom, and looked up at his sister to find out whether that had been a catastrophe.
“You're okay,” Imari said. “That was a good one. You're getting fast.”
On the long bayfront veranda above the dock, Halston sat in a wicker chair with a glass of cold beer in one hand and his bare ankle crossed over the knee of the linen pants he was wearing, the cuff rolled twice.
His circle beard had a single soft thread of silver at the chin. He was watching Imari and Atticus on the picnic blanket; happy this was now his life.
He had stepped back from Iverson Aerospace and Defense. He flew up to Houston two days a week. He was home for breakfast and dinner every other day.
He had begun, in the last year, to read fiction for the first time since he was a teenager. He had built, with his own hands, a small set of bookshelves in the new nursery on the second floor under Errol's supervision, and Errol had only had to redo three of the joints.
Rhett was on the veranda beside him now, a beer in his hand, so was Folake and the small diamond on Folake's left hand, which had been there since the previous Christmas, when Rhett had given it to her on the dock below them at sunset.
The wedding was in October.
Aurora was helping to plan it.
Folake was sitting with her bare feet up on the wicker ottoman and her diamond glinting on her hand and a glass of cold lemonade in her free hand, and she was, at that moment, lightly complaining to Rhett about his obsessive insistence that the rehearsal dinner be held at his grandmother's old bungalow in River Oaks.
“Rhett.”
“Yes, baby.”
“The house is small.”
“The house is intimate.”
“The house is small.”
“Folake. The house is where my grandmother taught me how to eat a peach. We are doing the rehearsal dinner there.”
“All right.”
“We are also doing the rehearsal dinner there because I want her to be at it, and the only way she is going to be at it is if it is held in her own living room.”
Folake softened. She set her glass down.
“All right, baby. All right.”
Halston, beside them, smiled into his beer.
Aurora came out onto the veranda from inside the house with a cold glass of water in her hand and a long pale green dress on. Her hair was out around her shoulders, the spirals catching the bay light. She had a small smear of cobalt blue ink on her finger.
She walked across the veranda, set the cold glass of water in Halston's free hand and bent down. She kissed his temple.
“Drink that. Yvette's orders.”
“Aurora.”
“Yvette's orders, baby.”
“I am drinking it.”
“Good.”
She sat down on the wicker chair beside him and set her bare feet up beside Folake's on the ottoman.
Errol came out of the second small workshop on the back of the estate fifteen minutes later, in his work pants and his white undershirt, sawdust on his forearms, a small carved wooden duck in his right hand.
The duck was for Atticus. Errol had been making Atticus a small wooden creature once a month since he had been born. Imari, on the picnic blanket, had three years of birds, and the small collection had grown into a small wooden flock she had organized along the bookshelf in her bedroom.
Errol set the duck on the side table between Halston and Aurora.
He sat down in the wicker chair opposite his son-in-law.
Ayanna, who had been in the kitchen with Yvette discussing the menu for the family dinner that night, came out onto the veranda behind him. She was in a soft pale blue blouse. Her hair was tied back in the same white printed cotton headwrap she had worn every Sunday.
She sat down on the arm of Errol's chair, handing him a cup of sweet tea. He laid his hand on her thigh without looking up. Ayanna covered his hand with hers and they watched their grandchildren play.
*****
That afternoon, after Atticus had been brought up to the house to nurse and after Imari had been allowed a small bowl of vanilla ice cream, Yvette and Ayanna had assembled, between them, a long table on the terrace for the evening meal.
Aurora slipped out of the bayfront kitchen and walked across the gallery and through the library and into the small glass-walled studio Halston had built for her on the south side of the house at the end of the previous summer.
The studio had been a gift.
It was forty feet by twenty-five, three walls of full-height glass overlooking the south yard and the live oaks, a long pale ash worktable along the inner wall, deep wooden flat-files of paper and ink Halston had a furniture maker in New Orleans build to her specifications.
On the inner wall, the watercolor of the little Black girl on the paper crane.
It had been moved from his father's library.
It hung where she could see it from her stool.
She sat down at the worktable, picked up her brush, set it back down then picked it up again.
She was painting The Wedding.
It was the third book in the small picture series she had launched the previous year with The Three Friends, a book about a little brown girl, a tall fair girl and a tall brown boy who grew up together on a bay in Texas.
The Three Friends had sold ninety-six thousand copies in its first eight weeks.
It had hit the New York Times bestseller list for picture books in its fifth week.
It had stayed on the list for nineteen consecutive weeks and it was dedicated to Maeve Larkin.
The Wedding was the second sequel. The first, The Daughter, had come out in the previous spring and had been dedicated to Imari. The Wedding was going to be dedicated to Halston.
She had not yet told him.
The studio door opened and Halston came in.
He had taken off his shirt at some point in the afternoon and put on a soft white t-shirt. His bare feet on the cool floor were quiet. He set both his hands on her shoulders and looked down at the watercolor.
“Aurora is that me?”
“It is.”
“Mm. The beard is right.”
“Thank you.”
“The eyes.”
“Thank you.”
“The chin.”
“Halston.”
“Aurora, I look very handsome in this watercolor.”
He set his palms on her shoulders and slid them, slowly, down her arms. He took her elbows and pulled her gently back against him.
He turned her around on the stool until she was sitting facing him with the brush still in her hand.
He looked at her.
“Aurora.”
“Mm.”
“Do you regret any of it.”
She tilted her head. She did not even pretend to think about the answer. She set the brush down, took his hand and pulled him down to her until his forehead was against hers.
“Halston Iverson.”
“Aurora.”
“Not the parts that brought me here. Not one.”
He kissed her.
In the background the bay shone.
The end…