Chapter 21: The Reply
Walt got his mail the way he got most things: late, and without ceremony. The box at the end of his drive had a door that hung crooked, and he emptied it when he remembered. The letter sat there two days before he found it, under a seed catalog.
He knew the handwriting before he turned the envelope over. Hannah had learned cursive in third grade and never unlearned it; every letter leaned forward, in a hurry to be somewhere else. He held the envelope a long time before he opened it, because opening it meant the answer was whatever it was; not opening it meant it could still be anything.
In the end he took it to the Blue Plate, where he did his thinking these days, and where Ruth would give him coffee and not ask questions while he read.
"Mail came," he said.
"So I see," Ruth said, and poured.
He opened it at the counter with his thumbnail, careful as a man defusing something. The letter was one page, front and back, and it was not easy β Hannah had never learned to make things easy.
*Dad,* it began, and the word did something to his chest that he had to breathe through.
*I read your letter a dozen times. I read it at the kitchen table after Eli went to bed, and in the car outside his school, and once standing in a grocery store parking lot like a crazy person, because my hands kept finding it in my purse.*
*I'm not writing to tell you everything is fine. It isn't fine, and I won't pretend for either of us. You missed a lot. I carried that a long time, and some days I carry it still.*
*But I've been thinking about what you wrote β about the little girl and the bicycle, and how you fixed what was in front of you because it was in front of you. I think you're telling me something you don't know how to say any other way. So I'm going to try to hear it the way you meant it.*
*The diner is having its anniversary this month. Eli and I will come to Hartwell. We'll stay at the motel on Route 8 and come to the celebration, and we can start there. But I'm tired of the distance too, Dad. I've been tired of it longer than I've been angry, and I only just figured that out.*
*Eli knows your picture. He calls you Grandpa Bike. I didn't teach him that. He invented it.*
*β Hannah*
*P.S. He'll want to see the motorcycle. I told him I'd ask.*
Walt read it three times. The third time, Megan came by with the coffee pot and he put one big hand flat over the page, just holding it down, the way you'd hold down a map in a wind.
"Good news or bad news?" Megan asked.
"Yes," Walt said.
He folded the letter along its original creases and put it in his breast pocket, and then he stood up so fast the stool spun, and he walked out into the lot and sat on his bike with the engine off and his helmet in his hands and looked at the highway.
Ruth watched through the window and did not go out. She had known Ellen, and Walt before Ellen, and she knew the difference between a man who needed company and a man who needed a minute, so she let him have the whole minute.
When he came back in, his eyes were red and his voice was ordinary, which for Walt was a kind of shouting.
"Ruth," he said. "What's the biggest pie you know how to make?"
"Why?"
"Boy named Eli is coming end of the month. Five years old. He's gonna want to see the motorcycle, and I figure a man meets his grandson the first time, there ought to be pie after."
Ruth set down the pot. "Walt Briggs," she said. "We can do pie."
That night he wrote back. It took him four drafts, because every version said too much or tried to be clever, and clever was a road he was done traveling. The final one fit on a card.
*Hannah β Thank you for the letter. I read yours a dozen times too, so we're even. Come hungry. The bike will be clean. Love, Dad.*
He mailed it in the morning before he could revise it into something worse. Then he went home and washed the motorcycle like angels were going to inspect it, and when he was done he stood looking at it, gleaming and enormous, and thought about a boy in Indianapolis who called him Grandpa Bike and had never once seen the thing.
"End of the month," he told the bike. "We got time to practice being impressive."
The bike, being a bike, said nothing. But Walt polished the chrome one more time anyway, just in case.