Chapter 19: Spring
The first warm morning of March smelled like pine and wet dirt, and Tommy Reyes woke before his alarm because the sun was pushing straight through the blinds. He lay there with the ring on its shoestring warm against his chest and listened to Silas clanking around the kitchen downstairs.
"Morning, Grandpa," he said, coming down in his socks.
Silas looked up from the stove. "Eggs," he said. "Don't make a face."
"I wasn't making a face."
"Your face was getting ready to make a face. I know that face. Sit."
Tommy sat and stole a piece of toast. "School's got a field trip Friday," he said. "Marine center at Tybee."
"Your mother loved Tybee," Silas said. "She collected shells in a pickle jar."
"There's a jar on her dresser. I counted them once. Sixty-four."
"Sixty-five," Silas said. "One's a button."
Tommy laughed, and it felt easy now. He used to weigh every word around this man. Now he just talked.
At school the new thing was Devon Cole, who had moved from Macon in January and sat behind Tommy in homeroom and had decided Tommy was his best friend after two shared math worksheets. Devon was loud and liked facts about sharks.
"So your grandpa's like, a billionaire?" Devon whispered at lunch.
"He was. He's retired now."
"Do you get whatever you want?"
He thought about the winters under the overpass, about dollar bills folded small in his shoe so Frank couldn't find them. "I get what I need," he said. "That's better."
Devon shoved half his sandwich toward Tommy. "You want the pickle? I hate pickles."
"I love pickles."
After school Silas picked him up in the truck, the way he did every day. In the back, packed in black plastic pots, were fourteen azalea bushes, and Silas had laid plywood across the bed so they wouldn't tip.
"Fourteen?" Tommy asked, climbing in.
"Your mother planted six azaleas in the side yard the spring before you were born. Pink ones. They're still back there, older than you." Silas started the engine. "So we plant fourteen. Pink and white. Make it official."
"Maggie's garden," Tommy said.
"Maggie's garden," Silas confirmed. "She drew one once, in a letter. The one from October."
Tommy knew that letter. His mother had sketched a little square of garden with bushes along the fence and had written, in the margin, that someday she'd have a house with dirt worth planting in.
They worked the afternoon away. Silas dug the holes and complained about it, Tommy set the root balls in and packed the soil, and Silas announced his opinion on each bush as though it had auditioned.
"Too straight," he said about one. Tommy turned it crooked on purpose. "Better," Silas said. "Now it has character."
On the porch radio, between songs, the anchor's voice went flat and said the name Tommy knew by heart. Preston Vane, former chief financial officer of Crane Atlantic Lines, had been sentenced that morning to seven years in federal prison on charges of fraud, forgery, and bribery. Tommy stopped with his hands in the dirt and looked at Silas.
Silas leaned on the digger and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. "Seven years," he said.
"Is that enough?"
"No," Silas said. "But it's something. The lawyers say most of the company's money is coming back." He was quiet a second. "Your mother asked the wrong questions about the right thief. That's what started it all. I should have asked them with her."
Tommy brushed the dirt off his hands and picked up the next bush. "You're asking now. That counts for something."
They planted in silence for a while, and the silence was fine, the kind Tommy had learned from this man, where nobody needed to fill it.
After dinner, the mail was on the hall table, and one envelope was different, plain white, with a return address stamp that said County Correctional Facility and a name in the corner in handwriting Tommy recognized. Frank Reyes.
He carried it upstairs and sat on his bed and opened it with his thumb.
Dear Tommy,
I been in here four months and I got nothing but time to think about what I did. I took from you when you were a kid with nothing. I used you like a sign on a stick. Dale would have killed me for it, and he would have been right.
I'm not asking you to forgive me. I don't got the right. I just want you to know I see it now, the whole ugly thing, and I'm sorry for all of it.
Take care of the compass. It was the one good thing your dad had, and it's the one good thing I ever handed you.
Frank
Tommy read it twice. The first time fast, his jaw tight, and the second time slow, and something in his chest moved around like furniture being rearranged. He thought about Frank giving him the compass outside the courthouse, the only honest moment the man had ever had, and how strange it was that Frank still didn't know Tommy had given it to Silas for Christmas, didn't know it sat on Silas's nightstand now, polished, opened every night.
He got a piece of notebook paper from his backpack and wrote, in his careful school handwriting, one line.
I will.
He put it in an envelope, addressed it in his best letters, and left it on the hall table for the morning mail.
Then he went down to the living room, where the dented sea chest sat under the window, holding the letters and the photograph and the birth certificate. He opened the lid, set Frank's letter inside with the rest, and closed it gently.
Outside, the new azaleas stood in their fresh soil along the fence, pink and white in the dusk. Tommy watched them from the window, and the gold ring rested warm against his chest, and the house was quiet, and it was enough.