"Ask me in a year," he said, and walked down the steps to Sarah's car, which was waiting at the curb with its hazards on, in the rain that had just begun.
Chapter 25: The First Ride
The doctors cleared him on a Tuesday, with conditions he negotiated down to the ones he intended to keep, and on Thursday he took the bike out of the garage for the first time since the plaza. It started on the second attempt, which he chose to read as commentary. The ride he had planned was short. It was the shortest ride there was, measured in miles, and the longest, measured any other way.
The bike had waited under its cover through all of it, and he had serviced it slowly and left-handed, checking the tire pressure twice. He had considered selling it annually and had each year found a reason coded in maintenance: the chain wanted adjusting, the season was wrong for buyers, the tires were new. The reasons had been the truth told sideways. The truth straight was that the bike was the last room of the house he and June had shared that still had her in it, and a man does not sell a room his wife is standing in. That Thursday he understood, swinging his leg over with a care the doctors would have approved, that she would have wanted it ridden rather than kept โ June had opinions about machinery the way she had opinions about everything, and idleness was not among the virtues on either list.
Fairhill Cemetery lay four miles out the valley road, past the feed store and the closed elementary school, on a rise where the county kept its dead in good order. He rode at the speed of a man relearning a language, his left side reminding him at every shift that the body keeps its own calendar. The morning was gray and undecided. He parked by the gate and walked the gravel path with his helmet under his arm, past stones he had come to know the way you know the houses on a street you no longer live on.
June and Willa lay in the newer section, under one stone with two names, where the grass had long since finished its settling. He stood a while before he spoke. Men bring flowers to such places, and he had brought them, in the first year, until the bringing had become a ritual that concealed rather than carried the news. Now he brought the news itself, the way he would have brought it to a kitchen table.
"The message came," he told them. "Four years late, but it came. The girl at the pump โ Sarah's girl, Poppy, she's seven, she wears Willa's coat. She wears it everywhere, June. It fits the way it fit." He stood with that a moment, because some sentences require a pause the way fields require a season. "Ketch is in jail. No bail. He'll be in prison a long time โ the hearing was Tuesday, and I said your names in a courtroom and they went in the record, where they'll stay. The porch is rebuilt. Dale and Tom did it; I sat in a chair like a foreman emeritus and was fed soup. Sarah bullies me through my exercises. I let her. I am โ " He tested the word before he spent it, the way his father taught him to test a board. "I am getting better, loves. In the side and elsewhere."
The rain he had watched threaten all morning arrived then, deciding, and it was just rain โ not a sign, not a rebuke, only weather doing its work on a cemetery hill. He stood in it a while anyway, because leaving felt like an interruption, and then he said the rest, which was smaller and larger than the news: that he would come Thursday again, and Thursdays after; that the coat would be by the door when he got home, which was where coats and daughters and lives were supposed to be, in use.
He rode home in the rain without pulling over. The valley road shone. Twice his side sang at a gear change and twice he thanked it, absurdly, for the information. At the house he put the bike away with the care of a man putting a tool back on its shadow-board, came in through the kitchen the way everyone came in now, and took off his wet jacket in the mudroom.
The hook by the front door held the yellow raincoat. He hung his jacket on the hook beside it โ black leather, rain-dark, dripping onto the mat โ next to a small yellow coat that smelled faintly of crayons and other people's laundry soap and safety. Two hooks. Two coats. A house, being lived in again, one ordinary day at a time. He stood dripping a moment in the doorway between the mudroom and the kitchen, listening to the rain on his new porch roof, and then he went in to make tea, because Poppy was coming Saturday to inspect the porch, and there was a great deal, all of it ordinary, to do.