Chapter 21: The Storm Season Ends
The monsoons did not so much end that year as run out of conviction. Through the last week of August they arrived late and half-hearted, a gray shrug over the mesquite, a nine-minute spatter on the new roof, and then one morning in September Evie woke to a sky scrubbed so clean it looked rinsed, and the weather radio said the pattern had broken, and that was that. The storm season was over. The desert set about its long, bright forgetting.
The rose bed refused to forget anything. The riders had rebuilt it in July out of salvaged brick and stubbornness, had reset the stones Walter had laid in 1974, had dug in compost and a drip line and the four bushes the flood had tried to take, and through the worst of August the bushes had sat there looking offended and alive. Now, with the heat finally loosening its grip, they bloomed all at once and out of season, a ridiculous, defiant show of pink and yellow in a yard that had spent two years practicing how to give up. Evie stood at the kitchen window with her coffee and looked at them the way you look at a letter you did not expect to receive.
"Showing off," she told them. "Your grandfather planted sensible bushes. I don't know where you get it."
Porch coffee resumed its old rhythm, which was Hank Breslin arriving at seven with two mugs and the Flagstaff paper folded to the crossword, and the two of them solving three clues and arguing about a fourth until the sun cleared the ridge. It was the rhythm of forty years, minus Walter, plus everything the summer had changed. Now there were interruptions, and the interruptions were the change. Marla Ortiz stopped by on her way to the courthouse with a spare slice of her sister's lemon cake. Sadie called on video from her dorm room and was held up to the roses like a visiting dignitary. Twice a week a bike would slow at the end of the lane, not stopping, just lifting two fingers off the grip in passing, and Hank would lift his mug in return with the solemnity of a man saluting a color guard.
"You're a landmark now," he said. "We should charge admission."
"You'd spend it on pie."
"I'd spend it on pie," he agreed.
The adoption ceremony, such as it was, happened on a Tuesday at mile marker 208, where the highway straightened out of the Flats and ran at the red hills. The county had a program, older than most of the riders: an organization could adopt a stretch of road, keep it clean, and get its name on a sign. The Desert Covenant chapter had adopted the whole corridor through Juniper Flats, eleven miles of it, and had paid extra โ Cole would not say how much extra โ for one additional line.
There were nine people at the unveiling, which was just Ray Delgado from the county pulling a canvas cover off a post while everybody stood in the gravel and sweated politely. The sign was green and white and ordinary, which was the correct kind of sign for the thing it said:
ADOPTED BY DESERT COVENANT RIDERS
IN MEMORY OF WALTER MARSH
Cole read it aloud because somebody should. Then nobody said anything for a moment, and the wind moved the canvas in Ray's hands, and a hawk went over, and the highway did its ordinary rushing two lanes away. Evie stepped up out of the gravel in her good shoes and put her flat palm against the metal, once, low on the post, where the paint would keep the touch of a hand longest. It was warm from the sun. She could feel the faint grit of desert dust on it already, settling in to stay.
"He'd have charged you rent for the privilege," she said. "Walter Marsh never let anybody honor him for free. He'd have had a rate sheet."
And they laughed โ Cole first, then Hank, then all of them standing in the gravel at the edge of the highway โ and it was the particular laugh that belongs to a eulogy's best line, the one that is not despite the grief but directly on top of it, the sound people make when the truest thing about the dead person has been said out loud by the person who earned the right to say it. Evie laughed too, with her hand still on the sign.
On the drive home she rode in Cole's truck with the windows down, and at the carport she got out and looked up at the other sign, the old one, Walter's own lettering restored by a rider with a sign painter's hand: MARSH โ NO MAN PAYS TO GET HOME.
"Two signs," she said. "A man could get a swelled head."
"He earned both," said Cole.
"Don't tell him," said Evie, and went in to make lunch.