He bought the bear on a Tuesday, at the toy store in the mall out by the highway, and the transaction took forty minutes because the bear had specifications.
It had to be brown, obviously. It had to be big enough to have opinions but small enough to be carried by a five-year-old under one arm at a run. It had to have a face, he explained to the sales associate — a young man named Trevor, who rose to the occasion like a jeweler — a face with something in it. Not goofy. Not sad. "A face like it's listening," Everett said, and Trevor, to his lasting credit, did not laugh, but went into the back and came out with three candidates and lined them up on the counter like a casting call. The third bear had a slight asymmetry to the ears that Everett recognized, professionally, as character. And it had to have a bow. A purple bow. That was not negotiable, and the store did not stock bows, and so Trevor's manager — a grandmother, summoned by the specific gravity of the situation — produced ribbon from the gift-wrap counter and tied it herself, standing on the far side of the register from six feet of tattooed biker, while the whole small drama played out in the window like a scene from a better world.
"For your granddaughter?" she asked, tying.
Everett considered the word. He considered the paperwork of it, and the bear-cousin claim still under review by hospital counsel, and the calendar in his kitchen with its purple annotations, and the fact that Lily, in her covering letter to the universe, had apparently done her own paperwork on the question. "Something like that," he said. "She's the one who found me."
One month after the afternoon at Pump Seven, on a Saturday with the first edge of autumn in it, Everett Knox walked up the front yard of a small house across town, on his own two legs, with a cane he was carrying more than using and a brown bear with a purple bow under his arm. No Harley. He had been cleared for the porch, for the yard, for the distance, by Priya — who had written on the whiteboard, on his last day, DISCHARGED: BEAR TO WILD — and he had declined Del's offer of a ride with some firmness, because the walk was part of it. You do not get driven to the end of a story like this. You walk up the yard. Twelve years of exile ended at the pace of a man healing, through a neighborhood of sprinklers and Saturday lawns, with a stuffed bear's ear sticking out from under his arm and his heart going like a drum in a parade.
The walk took him past the elementary school, which was empty for the weekend, and he slowed at the fence out of a habit so old it had outlived its owner: Lily's school, though she had only attended it one year, and the cubbies would have other names now, and the teacher — the letter's custodian, Mrs. Okafor, retired to her daughter's in Ohio — had written him a card after the shooting that he had answered, actually answered, in handwriting, like a citizen. She talked about you constantly, the card had said. Mostly plans. She had an enormous number of plans for you. He had read that card at this same fence, in the spring, and been unable to proceed for ten minutes. Today he read the schoolyard — swings, a painted hopscotch, a mural of a river with every fish smiling — and proceeded at the pace of a man in a parade of one, bear and all, and arrived at Claire's street with his shirt stuck to his back and his hip complaining in the formal language of hips, and he would not have traded the walk for a parade of forty motorcycles. Some distances are the ceremony. This was one.
Claire saw him coming from the porch, where she was shelling peas into a bowl with the air of a woman who has all the time there is, and she did not wave, at first, because her hands were full and her eyes were full and it seemed important to let him have the walk — all of it, every step of the yard, unhurried and witnessed. Junie saw him at the sprinkler's range and came off the porch like a shot from a small, damp cannon, barefoot, in the unicorn shirt, which had been washed approximately nine hundred times since the plaza and still, against all textile science, glittered.
She stopped in front of him in the middle of the yard, and looked him up and down, and rendered the verdict of the entire season in the tone of a foreman signing off a job.
"You walked," she said.
"Yes, ma'am."
"No cane holding." She pointed. "You're carrying it. That's different. Priya says carrying means you're just showing it who's boss."
"Priya says a lot of things."
"She's right a lot too." Junie transferred her attention to the bear, whose head was under his arm and whose purple bow was holding up nobly under travel conditions. She went very quiet, which in her was the equivalent of a cathedral bell. "Everett," she said, with tremendous care, "who is that for?"