Epilogue 2 Summer Rain #2
He kisses the top of my head. Stands up. Walks across the store to where Mama is showing Lucia how to pose for a selfie with her great-aunt Patricia, who's already been adopted into the family without anyone clearing it with her.
***
The family dinner is at our apartment.
I don't cook. Colt and I don't pretend to.
We have ordered from the Italian place on Halsted that's been our standing Sunday order since we moved in.
Three pans of lasagna. Two big tubs of salad.
A loaf of garlic bread the size of a small ottoman.
Tiramisu in a tinfoil container the size of a lasagna.
Everyone is here.
The lasagna gets passed. Wine gets poured. Sam pours for the table. Daddy makes a toast with the fewest words and the most meaning.
"To Summer. Who came home."
Glasses click.
We eat. We talk. Jake tells a story about a fisherman in McClellanville who tried to swap him a redfish for the carry-on Tupperware of pecan pie at the Charleston airport.
Autumn tells Patricia about her own promotion at her firm.
Patricia approves of Autumn, which is to say she's decided Autumn is acceptable and will continue to be observed.
Lucia, mid-meal, leans toward Colt across the table and says, very seriously, Uncle Cowboy, your shirt has sauce on it, and Colt looks down and indeed his shirt has sauce on it, and the whole table laughs at the precise volume a three-year-old likes, and Lucia, satisfied with her observation, returns to her garlic bread.
I lean back in my chair. Colt is next to me. He has his hand on the back of my neck. He's been doing that since dinner started. The light pressure. The reminder.
"Roof," he says, into my ear, soft.
"After everyone's gone," I say.
He winks. "I'll smuggle up the good bottle."
We have cake. I cut it. I serve it. People eat it. We clear plates together. Mama tries to take over the kitchen and Colt blocks her at the sink. Mama swats him with a dish towel and goes back to the table.
The evening goes soft. Lucia gives out first. Mama carries her to our bed and lays her on her stomach, arms flung out, leaves the door cracked.
Dom and Daddy stay at the kitchen table, still talking.
Mama ends up on the couch with Patricia.
Autumn and Sam are on the loveseat. Jake falls asleep in the chair by the fireplace before the rest of us are ready to admit the night is ending.
Family. The kind that doesn't match anyone's idea of family and has decided to be one anyway.
We let them stay until midnight. Mama and Daddy take Lucia to their Airbnb, with Marisol, Dom, and a small parade behind them. Patricia, Autumn, and Sam leave a little after. Jake wakes up long enough to walk himself to the guest room and is asleep again before he's on the bed.
The last door closes. The apartment is ours.
I grab a cardigan. The night's warm, the soft mid-June warm Chicago gets before real summer, and the puffer's in the closet, sleeping for the season. Colt has the throw blanket off the couch, the bottle of wine, and two glasses.
***
The roof hasn't changed. The folding chairs are still up there, though they've been there since January and look worse for it. The view east is the lake, dark, with downtown gold to the right. The summer sky is the color of plum.
He sets the wine on the parapet. Pours.
I take a glass. He clinks his against mine.
"To you."
"To us."
"To us."
We drink. The wine is good. The summer air on the roof is warm. The city hums below us. Somewhere west a siren winds up and fades. Somewhere south a baseball stadium is letting out. The cumulative noise of three million people doing their lives is the soundtrack I've learned to love.
He sits in one of the folding chairs. Pulls me into his lap. I'm taller than him from up here and I love that. He puts his hands at my waist.
"That book."
"Yeah."
"That book was the bravest thing I've ever read. And I haven't even read the next one yet."
"You've read six chapters."
"Six chapters and I already know what it costs you to write it. All of it, Summer. The one that launched tonight and the one you're not done being scared of. Every word of it."
"You said you weren't going to use that word."
"I've decided it's the right word again. Vivienne ruined it. We're reclaiming it."
"From your mother."
"From my mother. From Cheyenne. From every person who tried to use it against you. Brave is yours, Summer. I'm putting it back where it belongs."
Sonny pled in the spring. The sentence came down last month, and there's a number with the word years after it.
Cheyenne pled too on both charges. I cup his face.
He has the small lines now at the corners of his eyes that he didn't have at twenty-three.
The lines that come from grinning at a three-year-old who calls you Uncle Cowboy.
The lines that come from crying he doesn't see coming and laughing without restraint.
He's more beautiful than the boy who walked into King's Diner at sixteen and grinned at me with grass-stained knees.
I didn't think that was possible. I've been wrong about a lot of things.
"Tell me again," I say.
"What."
"What you said about happiness. The earned kind."
"You wrote it down already."
"Tell me again."
"I'm happy in the specific small daily way. I'm happy that I'm the man sitting on this roof with you on the night your book launched. I'm happy that I'm that man at all. I'm happy that you let me become him."
"Yeah."
"You?"
"The same."
"Tell me yours."
"I'm happy in the way my mother described.
The lost child comes home. And home was never Charleston, or even Chicago.
It's booth four, the one I carry around with me.
It's wherever the people I love are sitting.
Tonight that was the rooms below us, full of all of them.
Now they've gone home and you're right here.
Home is in the room. It's been in the room the whole time. "
He kisses my hair.
We stay like that a long time, me in his lap, the wine glasses going empty on the parapet. The city doesn't stop. The night doesn't stop. We aren't in a hurry.
Eventually I stand. He stands. He shakes out the throw blanket. We carry the glasses down.
The apartment is quiet now, the lamps low, the lasagna pans soaking in the sink, Jake's snoring faint through the guest room door.
"Bed."
"In a minute."
"Why."
"I want to write something first."
I go to the writing desk in the corner of the living room. Open the laptop. Open the document. The new book, which Patricia doesn't know about yet, which has six chapters drafted, which has the working title I've been holding onto.
I don't write a chapter tonight. I haven't written one at night in months. The chapters come at six in the morning, before the day starts, and tonight isn't that time.
I write the dedication.