He slept that night the whole night through, and if he dreamed, he didn't remember it in the morning.
Chapter 28: The Birthday
Willa would have turned thirteen in April, and Boone did the arithmetic the way he always did it, without deciding to β on the feed-store calendar, in the truck, in the small hours. Thirteen. He tried to picture it and got a girl made of guesses: June's chin, maybe, his own height coming on, a laugh pitched somewhere between the child he knew and a stranger he would have been proud to meet. The not-knowing was the wound that freshened. He had learned to let it freshen and pass, like weather over Fairhill.
He bought yellow flowers at the grocery in town, the bright kind, the color of her coat, and he drove out to the cemetery in the morning with the windows down and the radio off. Fairhill was green and ordinary and full of other people's weather.
The drive out was its own small ceremony by now: the flowers on the passenger seat in their paper cone, the thermos, the route he'd take in his sleep. He had stopped rehearsing anything on the way. The first year he had composed speeches the whole fourteen miles and delivered none of them. This year he just drove, and let the spring come in the windows.
At the grave he stood a while before he did anything, the way you'd stand at a door. Then he set the flowers in the stone vase and cleared the winter's litter from around the base with his hands β twigs, a blown wrapper, leaves gone to paper β small housework, done carefully, because it was the only housework left that was his to do for them. A robin worked the grass two rows over, unbothered, which was how he'd have wanted the place to be. He told Willa about the plaza. He told her people knew her father's name now for a decent reason.
Sarah came with Poppy because he had asked her to, plainly, at the diner the week before β not as a duty and not as a ceremony, just: I'd like it if you were there. She stood a respectful half-step back with her hand on her daughter's shoulder. Poppy, who was seven and solemn in the way of children who understand that a place is serious without knowing why, had painted a stone at school β a round river stone with a yellow flower on it, the paint thick and careful β and she looked up at her mother for permission, and Sarah nodded, and the child laid it at the base of the headstone next to his flowers and stepped back and took her mother's hand again. It took ten seconds. It was kind and it was short, and nobody made it into anything more than it was, which was a little girl being gentle in a place where gentleness was the whole language.
"Thank you," Boone said to the child, gravely, the way you'd thank an adult, and Poppy nodded once, gravely back.
Poppy had questions in the truck on the way, asked in the blunt order children ask them, and Sarah let him answer them himself. Did Willa like yellow? "It was her favorite thing she owned," Boone said. "She'd have worn that coat to the breakfast table if her mother let her, and twice her mother did." Was she nice? "She was nine," he said. "She was nice and she was a terror and she was nine. Best kind of person there is." Poppy considered this with the seriousness it deserved and said, "I'd have shared my crayons with her," which Boone received as the highest tribute the day was likely to produce.
That night he sat at the diner's counter β not the booth, the counter, where the truckers sat β and Otis poured coffee without asking, and the talk went around the way it goes, weather and roadwork and a ballgame on the little television. And Boone, who had not said his daughter's name aloud to near-strangers in four years, said it the way a man sets down something heavy he's decided to carry in the open from now on.
"My daughter Willa liked the pancakes here," he said. "Short stack. She'd have been thirteen today."
The counter went quiet in the good way. Ray reached without a word and put a short stack on the counter between Boone and the empty stool beside him β not in front of Boone. For no one. Nobody touched it. Nobody made a show of not touching it. The coffee steamed and the game played and after a while the talk came back, gently, around the edges, the way water closes over a place where a stone went in.
He stayed until it went cold and a little past. Then he paid for his coffee, and for the pancakes, and Otis took the money without arguing, which was Otis's way of saying he understood exactly what the pancakes had been and what they had cost and what they were worth.