Epilogue #3
“Hi, Daddy,” she says, and pulls a weed from the base of his stone. “Hi, Mama.” Then, to the kids: “This is your grandpa Walt. He’d have spoiled you rotten and taught you both to cuss.”
“He threatened to feed me to the pigs,” I tell Theo, who’s busy trying to eat a clover. “Your grandpa. First real thing he ever said to me.”
“You didn’t have pigs,” Gracie says, the old joke, and her voice only catches a little.
“He said he’d buy some special.” I set Theo down in the grass and crouch beside my wife, and I look at the name cut into the stone, the man who saw straight through me from the first day and turned out to be right about all of it.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here for the end of him,” I say, quiet, to Walt Tate, who can’t answer and doesn’t need to.
“I’m here now. For all of them. I won’t miss the rest.”
Gracie’s hand finds mine in the grass. She doesn’t say anything, because she doesn’t have to.
We stay there a while, the whole loud miraculous lot of us, in the shade of the trees on the land that holds everyone she’s ever loved, until Vera decides she’s done being reverent and demands to be shown a cow.
That evening, we eat dinner on the porch while the sun sets over the farm.
Vera has spaghetti in her hair. Theo has somehow gotten sauce on the ceiling of the farmhouse, which defies physics. Waffles is making his slow circuit of the fence line, braying at nothing because he’s the most dramatic donkey in three counties and he wants everyone to know it.
“AAAWWW,” he announces.
“Same, buddy,” Gracie calls back. “Same.”
Biscuit appears at the porch railing, snuffling for apple slices. Theo immediately starts shrieking with joy, nearly upending his high chair in his attempts to reach the horse.
“Easy,” I say, catching him before he launches. “Biscuit’s not going anywhere.”
“Bih,” Theo says urgently. “Bih!”
“Yeah, that’s Biscuit. Good job.”
Vera, not to be outdone, holds up a fistful of spaghetti. “Wawa.”
“That’s right, bug. Waffles is over by the - wait, are you trying to feed him pasta? That’s for you.”
“Wawa,” Vera insists, and drops the spaghetti on the porch.
Gracie snorts. “She’s got your sense of boundaries.”
“Excuse me, I have excellent boundaries now.”
“You literally painted an eight-foot portrait of our family instead of attending that gallery opening in San Francisco.”
“That’s a priority, not a boundary issue.”
She kicks my ankle under the table, grinning.
The light catches her honey eyes, turns her black hair to silk, and for a moment I’m twenty-five again, seeing her for the first time in my parents’ orchard, pajama pants tucked into mud boots, telling me that was her horse, and I thought: oh. there you are.
“What?” she asks.
“Nothing.” I reach across the table and take her hand, the one with the ring I put there twice. “Just thinking about how lucky I am.”
“Sap.”
“Your sap.”
“Yeah.” She squeezes my fingers. “Mine.”
Waffles brays again. Theo shrieks. Vera solemnly picks up another fistful of spaghetti and deposits it on my shoe.
“Nice,” I tell her. “Really nice. Thank you for that.”
“Welcuh,” she says, which might be ‘you’re welcome’ or might be ‘welcome to parenthood, old man.’ With Vera, it’s hard to tell.
The sun slips below the horizon, painting the sky in oranges and pinks and purples. The same colors I’ve been mixing for half my life, but somehow better now, brighter and more real.
I think about the painting drying in the barn loft. About the title in the corner. About everything it took to get here, the fame and the failure and the long, slow work of becoming someone worth loving.
Gracie leans her head on my shoulder. Theo has given up on reaching Biscuit and is now attempting to climb out of his high chair using sheer force of will. Vera is methodically painting the table with marinara sauce, creating what might actually be a pretty solid abstract piece.
“Hey,” Gracie says quietly.
“Hmm?”
“I’m glad you stayed.”
I turn my head, press my lips to her hair. “There was never anywhere else I wanted to be.”
“Liar. You wanted to be in Barcelona. And Tokyo. And that island in Greece you kept talking about-”
“Okay, fine, I wanted to be in a lot of places.” I tighten my arm around her.
“But this is the only one that matters. This-” I gesture at the chaos, at the kids, at the braying donkey and the hopeful horse and the farmhouse that took us a year to renovate and still has a leak in the guest bathroom. “This is everything.”
She smiles. Leans up to kiss my jaw.
“Everything,” she agrees. “You finally got the title right.”
“You picked the title.”
“And you finally got the painting right.”
I look at my family, my loud, messy, impossible, miraculous family, and I think about that word. Everything. The weight and the truth of it.
Everything I lost and everything I found, everything I almost threw away and everything I fought to keep.
Everything. She was right. She always was.
THE END