Chapter 24: The Apology
They put Eli down in the back room, on the cot Ruth kept for double shifts, with a diner apron folded under his head and Kevin standing guard on the windowsill. Then Hannah followed her father out onto the porch, where the anniversary was winding down into its golden hour โ bikes leaving, Sal hosing the lot, Ruth's bunting stirring in a breeze smelling of rain tomorrow.
Walt sat on the top step. After a moment, Hannah sat beside him, leaving the width of one person between them, which was, both of them understood, closer than they had been in eight years.
"I owe you some sentences," Walt said. "I've been rehearsing them a long time, and Ruth says rehearsed is fine as long as they're true, so here goes."
He did not look at her. He looked at the lot, and the words came out the way he'd planned and nothing like it.
"I'm sorry for the birthdays. All of them โ I know how many, Hannah, I counted once and I had to stop. I'm sorry for the games I never saw and the plays I walked into at the second act like that counted. I'm sorry your mother stood in all those doorways alone making excuses for me that I hadn't earned. I told myself the road was providing. The road was just the road. A man can be gone for reasons that sound fine at thirty and at fifty-eight they just sound like gone. I'm not asking you to make it smaller than it was. It was the size it was. I'm sorry."
The screen door creaked. Somewhere inside, Ruth was laughing at something, and the sound made the porch feel like the safest place in Indiana.
Hannah was quiet a while. "You know what the worst part was?" she said at last. "It wasn't the big things. It was that you were wonderful in other people's driveways. Everybody in this town has a story about Walt Briggs showing up. Fixing the furnace Christmas Eve. Driving Mrs. Kowalski to chemo. You were the most *there* man in Hartwell โ for everybody whose name wasn't mine. I used to think, what is wrong with me, that I can't get on that list?"
"Hannahโ"
"Let me finish, because I only get one of these too." Her hands were knotted together. "At Mom's funeral I said you were never really there, and I meant it to hurt, and it did, and then it just became the thing between us, and I think I kept the distance because letting go of it meant admitting part of me was just โ missing you. Underneath all the anger. Missing you was underneath the whole time, and it was easier to be mad." She laughed once, unsteadily. "Eli asked me last month why Grandpa Bike lives in a photograph. I didn't have an answer that I was proud of."
"You had reasons," Walt said.
"I had reasons *and* I had a telephone," Hannah said. "Both things are true. That's my piece of it. I'm not giving it back, Dad. I'm just saying it's mine."
They sat with that. Sal came out with two glasses of iced tea, set them down without a word, and went back in, because Sal Moretti had been feeding families for forty years and knew exactly when a porch was a church.
"We're not going to fix twenty years tonight," Hannah said.
"No," Walt said. "I don't reckon we are."
"So we do the next thing." She took her phone out โ and then put it away, and reached for the little notebook he always carried, the machinist's notebook with the oil-soft cover. "Write it in yours. Sunday calls. Six o'clock, my time's the same as yours, no excuses about the road because there is no road on Sundays. And Eli's birthdayโ" she waited while he got the pencil out, while his big fingers fumbled it โ "is June the fourteenth. He'll be six. There's a party. It's at our house in Indianapolis. You're invited, and you're expected, and if you are late I will hear about it from Kevin the dinosaur for the rest of my life."
Walt wrote it down. SUNDAY CALLS โ 6 PM. Then, underneath: ELI โ JUNE 14 โ INDIANAPOLIS. He underlined it twice, and the pencil nearly tore the page.
"June fourteenth," he said. "I'll be early."
"You've never been early to anything in your life."
"Then it'll be a first," Walt said, "and the boy can put it in his records."
Ruth turned the porch light on as the dark came down, because the step was steep and she took care of people the ways she could. Father and daughter sat a while longer in the yellow light, not fixed, not finished โ started. It was, Walt thought, looking at the two wet rings their tea glasses left on the step between them, exactly the size of a beginning. Small. Real. Load-bearing.
Chapter 25: The Wall