Chapter 19: The Ride's End
The last work truck left Juniper Flats on a Tuesday, an electrician's van with a ladder rack. It backed out of Evie's yard slow, the way people leave a church, and the driver leaned on the horn once โ not goodbye, exactly, but punctuation. Then the street was just a street again, mesquite shade and dust and Hank Breslin's dog regarding the world from the middle of the road with the confidence of a small mayor. Evie stood on the porch and watched the quiet come back. It was a better quiet than the one before. She had learned, late, that quiet was not one thing. There was the quiet of nobody coming, and the quiet of everybody having just been there, and a house could tell the difference.
The supper was Friday, at the clubhouse in town, which was not a clubhouse so much as a long cinderblock room behind the feed store with a flag, a pool table, and a kitchen that produced food on the theory that gratitude should be heavy. The chapter had voted it. The chapter had also voted on a dress code, which Cole delivered to Evie's door in person, standing on the porch holding his helmet like a hat at a funeral, visibly suffering. "The vote was respectable, Mrs. Marsh. The word they used was respectable."
She wore the blue dress. It had lived in the back of her closet in a garment bag since the funeral, and before that since Claire's wedding, and before that โ she said this to Sadie, zipping her โ since a photograph on a courthouse step in 1966, where a very young Evelyn stood squinting into the sun beside a man with all his hair and most of his prospects, wearing that exact blue. The dress still fit. Sixty years of Arizona had adjusted other things, but not that, and Sadie said, "Well, now I have to cry before dinner, thank you, Grandma," and Evie said, "You'll survive it. Marsh women cry in cars, where the upholstery forgives."
Noah drove them in the rental, which still smelled of oranges. The clubhouse lot was full of motorcycles ranked like a hand of cards, and inside were three hundred riders and half of Juniper Flats besides, and somebody's granddaughter had made a banner of bedsheet and paint that said WELCOME HOME EVIE, which made her stop in the doorway and hold Noah's arm and be furious at her own eyes for a moment.
The food was brisket and beans and a tower of rolls. The mayor of Juniper Flats, who was also the feed-store owner and the umpire, said something gracious and sat down to applause he had clearly not expected to enjoy. Then Cole stood up, and the room settled the way a room settles for weather.
He did not make a speech. People would repeat this later, with some wonder, to people who had not been there. Cole Rafferty held up a glass of sweet tea in a room full of bikers and farmers and said one sentence, clearly, to the woman in the blue dress at the head table. "To Walter Marsh," he said, "who is still getting people home." And he drank, and sat down, and the room stood up around him like a field coming up after rain, and Evie Marsh put both hands over her face, and laughed and cried in the correct proportions, which in her family had always been roughly even.
Afterward the pool table got pushed and the jukebox โ there was a jukebox, rescued from the diner before the fire โ came on with something slow. Evie had not danced since the funeral. She had not danced, if she was honest, since the last anniversary party at the Legion hall the spring before Walter got sick, when he had still been able to hold a frame and make jokes about his feet being union. She was sitting with her tea sweating in her hand when Hank Breslin appeared in front of her with his hat off and his courage up, seventy-eight years old, in a shirt with a collar, terrible and wonderful.
"Walter'd haunt me if I didn't," he said. "And he'd haunt me worse if I stepped on you."
"You step on me, Breslin, and I'll do the haunting myself."
He didn't step on her. He was careful as a man carrying water, and she was careful right back, and they went once around the floor of the clubhouse, while three hundred riders applauded in waves, soft and then louder, like weather deciding, like a storm choosing, this once, to be the kind that brings the rain a whole county had been praying for. Evie put her head back at the end, laughing, eighty-one years old in a blue dress in a cinderblock room in Arizona, and thought: well, Walter. Look at your girl. Still here. Still dancing. You'd have had something to say about the company.