In the years before the rain, Everett Knox had been, by the testimony of everyone who knew him, the easiest man in Kentucky to make laugh. This was largely Lily's doing. She had arrived in the world with a full head of yellow hair and a temperament her grandmother described as administrative — she ran the household from a height of thirty inches, issued instructions to the dog, and regarded her enormous father as a piece of landscape she had been given personal charge of.
He was her mountain. She climbed him without asking, because mountains, in her philosophy, were for climbing. She stood on his feet to dance. She rode his shoulders through the county fair like a queen reviewing a parade of exactly one subject. She braided his beard with ribbons while he sat perfectly still on the porch steps, six feet of tattooed biker holding a plastic teacup, because the tea party had rules and the first rule was that Daddy did not move.
The bear game began the winter she was three, though neither of them could have dated it. She had crept up behind his chair — stealthy as weather — and announced herself at point-blank range:
"Mister," she said, with enormous formality, "are you a bear?"
Everett had turned slowly. He had looked her up and down the way a man inspects a challenger. And then, from somewhere deep in the cave of his chest, he had produced the growl — low, rolling, ridiculous, perfected over a hundred bedtimes — and Lily had shrieked with delight and hurled herself at him, and the question had become law in their house. Mister, are you a bear? It was how she woke him. It was how she greeted him at the door with her arms already up. It was the key that fit the lock of him, and she turned it twenty times a day.
"Her name was Lily," he would say many years later, to a stranger, on concrete, with his life running out of him — but this chapter is before that, and in this chapter he answers the question the way he always answered it.
"Depends," he'd growl, and scoop her up one-handed. "What kind of bear are you looking for?"
"A Daddy Bear!" she'd shout, as if he were being deliberately slow, and he'd roar then, a real one, and chase her around the kitchen table while Ruth laughed and threatened them both with the wooden spoon and meant none of it.
Ruth used to watch them from the doorway with her arms folded, shaking her head at the ceiling. That man is six feet tall and gets bossed around by forty pounds of yellow hair, she'd say to her sister on the phone. It's the best thing I ever saw. Don't tell him. He thinks he's fearsome.
He was not fearsome. That was the family's private joke and its private truth. The tattoos were from his wild years, which had ended the day a nurse put a yellow-haired bundle in his arms and every wild thing in him had quietly sat down. The size was genetics. The growl was theater. Underneath all of it he was a mechanic from Louisville who cried at the ends of movies and kept a wrench in his pocket at his own wedding because Ruth's father's car had been making a noise.
His daughter had one more piece of theater, reserved for storms and bad dreams and the dark in general. On those nights she would come down the hall dragging her blanket and stand in the doorway of their room, small and serious, and deliver the family's whole theology in one sentence: "Daddy, bears don't die. They just sleep till spring."
"That's right, bear," he'd say, and lift the blanket.
"Till spring," she'd agree, already half asleep against his shoulder, warm as a coal.
She drew him constantly, too — crayon portraits in which he was approximately nine feet tall and largely triangular, always with the motorcycle reduced to two circles and a line, always with herself installed in the place of honor up by his shoulder, her hair rendered as a heroic yellow scribble that frequently exceeded the page. He kept every one. He taped them to the refrigerator until the refrigerator disappeared, and then he taped them to the wall, and when Ruth finally negotiated a treaty about the kitchen, he moved the archive to the inside of the garage cabinet, where mechanics twice his size learned not to comment. That's the boss's art collection, the old hands would tell new hires. Touch it and you're fired. He'll cry first, then you're fired.
He thought about her hair most. Grief is specific that way; it does not take the whole picture, it takes details and polishes them. The yellow of it in kitchen light. The way it stuck up in the mornings like she'd been arguing with the pillow. Twelve years later he could still see it exactly, and the exactness was the wound, and he would not have traded the wound for anything on earth.