I get up and walk across the room to Dorothy, Connor’s oldest. She knows why. She hugs me and kisses me on the cheek and thanks me for coming. Like that was ever in question. Like that could ever in a million years have been in question.
Then I shoot Roy a signal that we’re leaving, and he meets me at the door.
“Come on,” I say. “I’ll take you home. We’ll go the long way.”
Being a hardware man means always having a good, strong flashlight in your glove compartment.
I take us out via the River Road, because that’s the shortest walk.
For what it’s worth, Roy walks fine. He still has a limp after all these years, but you’d almost have to be focusing on it to notice.
He uses a sort of prosthetic that goes inside his shoe, so he can balance well when he walks. After fifty years you can imagine he’s had a lot of practice with it. But he still takes it off as soon as he’s not in public, so I think it’s always bothered him a little. Maybe more than he lets on. Once he told me a few details about it, and it has something to do with the nerve endings at the point of that amputation. But he doesn’t like to talk about that, because it makes him feel like a complainer.
He still keeps more of his insides to himself than I might’ve hoped for, but things like that are never a zero-sum game. You get progress, you be grateful for it. In the realm of wounded humans, you’re never going to have it all.
Also, I should note that in my opinion, we’re all wounded humans. The rest is just a matter of degree.
He never married. He keeps to his own company and seems to get by okay, considering that okay is also a relative term.
He drives fine, too, though he needs an automatic transmission because he drives with his left foot. It makes him nervous to have something as vital as a brake pedal operated by a part of his shoe that doesn’t even have a foot in it. That he can’t even feel.
The only reason I drove him to the funeral is because his truck wouldn’t start.
“We’re seriously going out there in the dark?” he asks as I park on the shoulder of the road.
“Sure, why not?”
“But why are we doing this again?”
“Because you didn’t even know if it was still standing. And because it is. And because it brings back so many memories, you won’t be able to believe it. It just brings her back so crystal clear in your mind, you feel like she might be standing right behind you. Like you might turn around and slam right into her.”
He nods a couple of times. I can see it in the dash lights as I turn off the ignition.
“Okay,” he says. “I’d say I’m up for that.”
“What happened to the floor?” Roy asks me.
“Drifters,” I say. “It’s been broken into a couple of times.”
We’re sitting with our backs up against the wall where the head of Zoe’s bed used to be. Roy started a fire in the old potbellied stove with some ancient kindling that got left behind on the hearth. It’s very dry, that kindling. It’s possibly had as much as twenty-five years’ worth of drying time. It’s burning hot, but it won’t burn long, and that’s just as well. We don’t plan to sit here all night.
“What did they want to go and mess up the floor for, though?” he asks. He sounds like a kid who thinks something isn’t fair.
“I have no idea.”
He’s pulling off his right shoe, which is not a surprise. Like I said, he always does when the opportunity presents itself. His sock has been shortened, a process he performs himself with scissors, a darning egg, and yarn, so all that extra sock doesn’t bunch up and irritate him.
“Who owns this now?”
“Grandkids,” I say.
“They’re not doing anything with it, though.”
“Not at the moment, no. But I figure one of these days one of them’ll need the money they could get for the land. That’s another reason I figured we should come out here sooner rather than later.”
“Here’s a question,” Roy says. “How come so many people we know are dying?”
I laugh out loud. I can’t help it.
“What’s funny?” he asks.
“You are. It’s because we’re old, Roy.”
“Speak for yourself,” he says. “I’m not that old.”
“You’re going to turn seventy next year.”
“Oh,” he says. “Yeah. Wow. I guess that is pretty old. When did we get to be so old?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s crazy. We always used to be so young.”
For a while we talk about Mom, and I’m not sure why.
“I told you about the last time I got to see her,” he says. “The last time I got to talk to her. You never did. You kept those cards close to your vest.”
Our mom died in 1998. She was living in a nursing home by then, and her mind had mostly gone. Every now and then it would come back in a flash, and she’d know who I was. But before I could mount a response to that momentous occasion, she’d be gone again.
When the nursing home called to say a last visit had better happen soon if we wanted one, Roy and I had to go see her separately because of our work schedules.
Honestly, I wasn’t trying to play those cards close to my vest. I figured I’d told him.
“Well . . . ,” I begin. Trying to bring back details as I go. “I sat beside her bed and watched her fade in and out, and at first I didn’t say anything, because I thought she was too far gone to hear me. Then I figured at least her spirit was still there.
“So I said, ‘Hey, Mom. It’s me, Lucas. I came to say goodbye.’
“She turned her head toward me
