"It's for Mom," Lucas said. It wasn't a question. They had talked about it on the drive up.
"It's for your mom," Arthur said.
They worked side by side. Arthur loosened the root ball with his hands, feeling the fine roots through the burlap, and showed Lucas how to set the tree straight — "Stand back. Look at it from there. Is it leaning?" — and Lucas stood back and squinted and said, "A little left," with the authority of a seven-year-old, and Arthur adjusted it a little left.
They filled the hole together, tamping the soil down firm, and Arthur's knees ached, and his back ached, and he had never been happier to ache. Mrs. Doyle had packed them sandwiches. Ellis was somewhere near the house, polishing something. The estate was quiet in the way it had never been quiet when Nathan and Caroline were children and the whole place rang with them.
"Grandpa," Lucas said, patting soil around the base of the trunk, "where is she?"
Arthur's hands stilled.
"Your mother," he said carefully, "is — her body is in the ground, in Queens, where we — " He stopped. "But you mean — "
"I mean her," Lucas said. "The part that was her. Is she in heaven?"
It was the question Arthur had been dreading for a year, the one he had rehearsed answers to in the dark at 2 a.m., and now that it had come, in daylight, with dirt under his fingernails, every rehearsed answer felt like a lie.
He sat back on his heels. The boy watched him, patient as soil.
"I don't know," Arthur said.
Lucas frowned. "Grown-ups always say they know."
"Grown-ups say a lot of things when they're afraid to say they don't." Arthur wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist, leaving a smear of earth. "Here's what I believe, and it's the truth as far as I have it. Your mother was the bravest person I ever knew. Not because she wasn't afraid — she was. But she kept going anyway. She worked on her feet all day and came home and read to you and kept every — " His voice caught. He steadied it. "And I believe that something that strong doesn't just stop. I believe it's somewhere. I don't know where. But I believe love is the most real thing there is, and your mother loved you more than anyone has ever loved anyone, and that has to count for something. It has to go somewhere."
Lucas considered this. He picked up a fallen spruce needle and rolled it between his fingers.
"Do you miss her?" he asked.
The question was so simple it nearly broke him. Arthur looked at the small tree, at the turned earth, at the garden his wife had planted thirty years ago and the grandson he had not known existed a year ago, and he did something he had not done in the eleven years since the argument, nor in the year since the gala, nor, if he was honest, in the decades since Margaret died.
He wept. Not loudly. He sat in Margaret's garden with his hands in the dirt and cried, quietly, the way old men cry — as if the tears had been waiting so long they'd forgotten how to fall.
"Every day," he said. "Every single day, Lucas. I miss her every day."
Lucas put his small dirty hand on Arthur's arm. He didn't say it was okay. He didn't say anything. He just left his hand there, and they sat together in the garden, and the blue spruce stood straight and blue between them, and after a while Arthur's breathing steadied.
"Will you tell me about her?" Lucas said. "When she was little. Like me."
So Arthur told him. He told him about Caroline at seven, missing a front tooth, catching frogs in the pond at the bottom of the estate and naming them all. He told him about Caroline at ten, furious at Nathan for reading her diary, building a barricade of pillows across her bedroom door. He told him about Caroline at sixteen, after Margaret died, sitting in this very garden at midnight because she couldn't sleep, and Arthur finding her and sitting beside her until dawn without either of them saying a word.
"She was fierce," Arthur said. "Like you."
Lucas smiled — the real one, the one that changed his whole face. He leaned against Arthur's shoulder, and they sat there until the light went gold and then gray, and the spruce's shadow stretched long across the turned earth.
Before they left, Lucas pressed his palm flat against the trunk. "Grow big," he whispered to it, very seriously. "She'd like that."
Arthur put his hand over the boy's, against the rough bark.
"She would," he said. "She would like that very much."
Chapter 16: The Last Page
The letter lived in the top drawer of Arthur's desk, in the study of the Manhattan townhouse. Six pages, faded blue ink, the paper gone soft at the folds from handling. He had read five of them a dozen times each. The sixth he had never read.
He had carried it for months — to the estate, to the office, once in the breast pocket of his overcoat on the drive to Connecticut, as if proximity might do the work of courage. He had unfolded it twice, and both times stopped at the fifth page's last line — and now I have to tell you the hardest part, Dad — and folded it back up, and put it away.
Tonight there was no drink. He had poured the whiskey out in the spring, at 2 a.m., standing at the kitchen sink with Helen Park's folder open on the counter, and he had not replaced the bottle. Tonight there was only the lamp, the dark windows, the tick of the clock his father had given him, and the letter.
Lucas was asleep upstairs. Mrs. Doyle had gone to her rooms. The house was quiet in the way it had learned to be quiet over the past year — not empty, but settled, like a held breath finally released.
Arthur took the letter out. He laid the five read pages in a row on the desk, left to right, the way you lay out cards. He held the sixth between his thumb and forefinger for a long moment, feeling its weight, which was the weight of paper and nothing more, and also everything.
He unfolded it.