35. Brakkus
Brakkus
Five Months Later.
The hills out past the windows were flat and colorless, cedar and dead grass under a low gray sky. The glass was beaded over so the whole valley looked like something seen through a windshield. Inside, my living room smelled like woodsmoke and frosting.
I held a banner that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY OTTO in green letters over the fireplace. Hannah stood back by the couch with her head tipped.
“Little higher on the left,” she said.
I moved it. She came forward with one hand at the small of her back, the way she’d started standing in the last few weeks and looked up at it.
“Perfect.”
The Christmas tree stood in the corner throwing red and gold light out across the limestone, half its bottom branches stripped bare where Otto had gotten to them.
Lola came through the entry from the kitchen. “Maria and I will have everything ready at four,” she said.
“Sounds good. Thank you, Lola,” I said.
She stopped and looked at the balloons on the floor, then at Otto.
She then put her hand on my arm for a second as she passed.
I fed another split log into the fireplace and pushed it down into the coals with the poker.
On the rug, Trey was on his back with his knees up and my son holding his hands and standing on his shins.
“Up,” Otto said.
“You’re already up there.”
“Up, Tay.”
Trey pushed his legs up, and Otto went straight into the air over him with his mouth wide open in laughter. Hannah came past me with a bowl of chips in one hand and stopped to watch them. I put my hand on her back.
Six months ago, my son wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t speak, and wouldn’t look at anyone. Today there were a hundred and fifty balloons on my floor, my kitchen smelled like Lola had been cooking all day, and my son was shrieking at my cousin.
The doorbell rang. “I’ve got it,” Hannah said, and squeezed my arm on her way past.
She came back through the foyer with her sister.
Megan had her pink hair up in a scarf. She had an enormous rectangle wrapped in brown paper under one arm. A smaller box was balanced on top of it. She was holding the whole arrangement with her chin.
“Somebody take this before I drop it.”
I got there first and took the larger item off her hands. I leaned it against the wall beside the present table. Megan set the small box down and took off her jacket.
“Megan. Good to see you. How’s the new job?”
“I love it.” She said it like she was still surprised by it. “I really do. They’ve got me hanging the spring show in February. Me, deciding what goes where.” She pushed the scarf back off her forehead. “Thank you again. For putting my name in.”
“I didn’t do anything. When the woman from Cortada Contemporary came to do the lobby installation at the Brute Squad building, I got to talking to her and she told me she needed somebody.” I shrugged. “You seemed like a good fit.”
“Best thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said.
“I’m not exaggerating. I’m moving back to South Congress in March, close enough to walk to the gallery.
” She was already looking past me at the room, the tree, the balloons all over the floor.
Then she saw Otto and the rest of it stopped mattering. “There he is.”
He came off the rug at a run. She got down and caught him and made a sound like he’d knocked the wind out of her, which he mostly had.
The bell went again ten minutes later. Denis and Kyle came in together off the front steps, both of them wet across the shoulders. Kyle stamped his boots on the mat like there was snow on them.
“It’s really coming down out there,” Denis said, handing Hannah his gift. “Good day to be inside.”
He went straight to the fireplace and stood in front of it with his hands out to the flame, rubbing them together. Kyle had a wrapped package under his arm that was shaped exactly like a toolbox.
“How’s the program?” I asked him.
“Good. Real good, actually.” He pushed his hair back. “I finished the fall block with a ninety-one. Ninety-one, in a class where half the guys washed out by October.”
“That’s serious.”
“I’ve got the EPA 608 exam in February and then I’m certified. There’s an outfit off Braker that does commercial refrigeration, and they’ve already said they’ll take me on placement.” He said it fast, like he’d been waiting for somebody to ask. “It’s real money. Benefits and everything.”
He glanced over at his sister, who was on the floor with Megan, Otto, and Trey. “She fronted the deposit back in the summer, when I was—” He stopped. “I’m going to pay her back for everything she’s done.”
“Just keep up the good work,” I said. “That’s the best way to pay her back.”
Kyle nodded and put his hands in his pockets. Over at the hearth, Denis had turned around and was now warming his back.
“I’ve been going down to the community center,” he told me. “I’m taking woodshop classes.”
“Do you enjoy it?”
“I do. I made a bird feeder,” he said. “Liked it so much, I made three more. Then the fella asked if I wanted to help him teach the beginners, so now I’m there Saturdays too.” He rubbed his hands together in front of the fire. “There’s about nine of us. We get coffee after.”
“That’s good, Denis.”
“It gets me out of the house.” He shrugged.
Megan dropped onto the couch across from the fire, and her father came away from the hearth and sat down beside her.
“I showed a friend at the gallery the picture I took at your wedding.”
“Which one?”
“The one down the hill with the lights on in the trees.” She had her hands out like she was framing it. “It looks like a painting.”
The rental people had set the chairs out on the back lawn that morning, five rows on either side of an aisle, and strung lights through the live oaks. By seven the sun had come off the hill and everything past the pool had gone gold. It had been a beautiful evening.
“Every time I look at that photo, it makes me think of the food,” Megan said.
“The peaches,” Denis said in agreement.
“The grilled peaches with the cream. Mmm.”
“That was the caterer’s idea.” Hannah had her feet tucked up under her on the other couch.
“Your wedding was the prettiest event I’ve ever been to.” Megan looked over at her sister. “And that dress. You came down that aisle looking so gorgeous. You were absolutely beaming. I knew that my sister had found her happily ever after that night.”
The wedding had been a magical event. Hesta came up from Breakstone in her turquoise and sat in the front row.
Lola sat in the second in a blue dress with Otto on her lap.
Denis walked Hannah down the aisle and put her hand in mine, and he held onto both of ours a second longer than he needed to before he let go and sat down.
“Your vows were almost as beautiful as Hannah’s dress,” Megan said.
I’d written them at four in the morning three days before the wedding, at the desk in my study, and thrown away every version that sounded like a speech. What survived was more poetic than anything I had ever said in public. Nobody seemed prepared for that. Least of all me.
I told her I wanted every version of her the years would give me. The woman standing beneath the live oaks on our wedding day. The mother carrying our children through the kitchen. The old woman who would someday sit beside me while our grandchildren tore through the house.
I wanted her laughter in every room I lived in and her hand in mine through every changing year. Then I promised that on the last day of my life, I would still be reaching for her.
Otto came off the rug with a fistful of ribbon and made straight for the couch.
“Hatta.” He got both hands on Hannah’s knee. “Hatta. Up.”
She got him under the arms and hauled him into her lap, and he turned himself around and settled back against her with the ribbon in both fists. She put her chin down on the top of his head.
The doorbell rang, and I got up to answer it. I pulled the door open on Theron and Orsala Vossic standing under the overhang with the rain coming off the edge behind them.
Theron had four boxes stacked up under his chin and two bags hanging off his arm. Orsala had a flat parcel in gold paper nearly as tall as she was, and her coat was dark across the shoulders where she’d come up the walk. They’d come in orc form. One of the few times I’d seen them that way.
“We may have gone slightly overboard,” Theron said.
“Slightly,” Orsala said.
“Come on in.” I got the top two boxes off Theron’s stack before he lost them. “Gift table’s in the living room, past the tree.”
They’d flown down three weeks after the wedding and asked to speak to me in the study.
Orsala did the talking. She got four sentences in before she couldn’t do it anymore, and Theron finished.
What they said was that they had been wrong, and that they were sorry for dragging us all through it.
All they wanted was to be allowed back into Otto’s life.
I sat there behind that desk knowing I could make them beg forever if I wanted to. But Nadia loved them. She’d have wanted her son to know the people who made her. So, I let them back into Otto’s life.
Otto had been sitting in Hannah’s lap. Then he twisted around, got himself down off her knees, and crossed the rug.
He went straight to Orsala with both arms up.
She crouched, gathered him in her arms, and stood with my son on her hip.
Otto grabbed the pearls at her throat, and she let him have them.
At four, Lola came out and said dinner was ready, and the whole room got up at once. Lola’s assistant cook Maria got her coat on and Lola walked her to the door.
The kitchen windows were foggy with steam. Outside, the rain was still coming down on the patio and the pool, and inside it smelled like cumin and browned meat and hot corn masa.