"That's impossible," Everett whispered.
He said it to the drawing. He said it the way a man says it to a card trick performed by God. Because he knew this bear. He had never seen this exact drawing — he was nearly certain, he would have sworn, and the uncertainty was itself a kind of vertigo — but he knew the bear, and he knew the hand, the way you know your own signature on a check you don't remember signing. The tall triangle body. The paw raised with the claws drawn as careful little triangles of their own. He had a refrigerator's worth of this bear in his memory and a cedar box of it in his closet, all of it twelve years old and none of it — none of it — on a fresh sheet of notebook paper, warm from a living child's pocket.
"Where did you get that?" Claire's voice came from very far away. She was staring at the drawing, and at his face, and doing arithmetic that refused to total.
"From the girl," Junie said, surprised at the question. "The girl by the ice machine."
"What girl?" Everett managed.
"The one with yellow hair." Junie pointed, obligingly, across the forecourt. "She was right there. She said you lost it a long time ago and I should give it back because you forgot how to growl." She considered this. "You didn't forget all the way. It was a good growl. It just needs practice."
Claire turned and looked where her daughter was pointing. Later she would describe it as the single strangest moment of a day that had several strong candidates: because she turned expecting — despite every rational account she could give herself — to see a child standing there. What she saw was the plaza in the heat: the red ice machine sweating against the wall of the store, a trash can, the glass doors sliding open and shut on nobody, the shimmer of the afternoon coming off the concrete in waves. A teenager pushed a mop bucket. A man loaded a cooler into a truck bed. There was no girl. There was no place a girl could have gone in the time it took to turn around, no door, no corner, no car door standing open.
There was nobody there.
She turned back slowly. Everett had not looked. Everett was looking at Junie the way a drowning sailor looks at a light — with everything he had left — and she watched him arrive, in his face, at the place she had arrived at standing in the heat with her heart hammering: at the short, plain list of explanations, every one of them impossible except one, and the one too impossible to say.
"Junie," Claire said carefully, "honey, when did the girl give you the picture?"
"Before," Junie said. "At the ice machine. You were locking the car. She said don't tell the grown-ups till he growls, because he has to remember by himself first." She reported this with the air of a junior employee relaying instructions from management, complete and unbothered. "She said he was the saddest bear in the whole state. She said—" she scrunched her face, retrieving the message exactly, the way she did with grocery lists, "—she said, he's been sleeping too long. It's time to get up now, Daddy Bear."
Everett's hand closed over his mouth. Twelve years of discipline — the dusting, the treaties, the refused bottles, the rides through February rain expressly calculated to freeze a feeling to death — all of it failed at once, quietly, without drama, the way a dam fails: not with an explosion, but with a sound like a sigh, and then the water.
He wept. On his knees, on the concrete of Pump Seven, holding a crayon drawing in both hands like a communion wafer, the most feared man in three counties wept in front of witnesses, and not one person at that plaza — this was the thing they would all say afterward, the truckers, the minivan mother, the old man — not one person looked away. It did not occur to anyone to look away. It occurred to several of them, later, that they had been needed there, as an audience, the way you are needed at a christening: to see it happen, so that it would count as having happened.
Junie, practical in the face of adult weather, patted his shoulder. "It's okay," she informed him. "Bears cry too. It just comes out sneaky."
And it was then — with Claire kneeling down to be nearer to both of them, with the whole improbable scene assembled — that Junie delivered the rest of her message, in the same tone she had used for the grocery list, and the afternoon changed temperature.