Page 43 of Dante

I set the shoebox on the bedspread. Set the walnut box beside it. Opened them both.

The difference in the two containers sat there between my knees. The shoebox smelled like old cardboard and the specific mustiness of a thing that had been carried through too many rooms. The walnut box smelled like fresh-cut wood and oil finish and something faintly like pine.

I picked up the birthday card first and moved it across.

I laid it on the satin lining at the bottom of the walnut box, and the yellowed card sat against the pale cream satin and looked, for the first time since I had owned it, like a thing someone was keeping on purpose rather than a thing someone had forgotten to throw out.

Dante was in the doorway of the bedroom. Leaning against the jamb, arms folded, not coming in. Watching.

I moved all my old things.

And at the bottom of the shoebox, folded once, was the card-stock tab.

It had been one of perhaps forty tabs I had made. After the federal agents came and Creed went and we packed the cabin down into crates and boxes, I had been the one to take the maps off the wall. I had peeled my tabs off the paper carefully with the edge of a thumbnail and put them in an envelope, and the envelope had gone into a drawer, and sometime in December I had taken this one out of the envelope and put it in the shoebox because I had wanted something in that box that belonged to the second half of me.

I moved it over.

I laid it on top of the photographs. Yellow against cream against the dark walnut, a small bright rectangle that had, in its small way, helped take a man out of his bed at dawn by federal agents in a state he thought he owned.

I closed the walnut box. The brass catch clicked home.

I looked up at him.

“I love it,” I said.

My voice cracked on the it. I didn’t fix it.

“I love it. It’s — “ I pressed the heel of my hand against my eye. “Now this place really feels like home.”

I heard myself say it and I heard, at the same time, the part of me that kept me honest about such things say that isn’t quite accurate, because it wasn’t. This place had felt like home before the walnut box. It had felt like home the first night I had slept eight hours without waking. It had felt like home the first time I had eaten breakfast sitting down without producing a running inventory of reasons I was allowed to. It had felt like home the first time I had said Daddy in the dark without my throat closing, and the first time I had crossed a room to get a pen without asking, and the first time the word mine had come out of mymouth about an apartment and I hadn’t braced for it to be taken back.

It had felt like home the moment I had stopped waiting for it to end.

I looked at him.

He was in the doorway. Arms folded. His cuts on the hook by the front door and his dark henley on and his hair still damp at the temples from the snow. The three cream letters I could not see from here but could feel the existence of, stitched along the bottom right of the back panel on the hook. WIZ.

My Daddy.

Home had never been the place. It had never been the apartment above the hardware store and it had never been the cabin on the mountain and it had not been any of the rooms I had slept in before those, and it was not going to be any room I slept in after, either. Home was the man in the doorway with his arms folded and his patience banked behind his eyes and his handwriting burned into a lid on my bed.

“Thank you,” I said.

He uncrossed his arms. He crossed the room. He sat down on the edge of the bed beside me and put his arm around my shoulders and drew me into his side, and I closed my eyes against his ribs and I did not cry, because I did not need to.

The walnut box sat on the bedspread between us with my name on the lid.

Home was here.

Home was him.

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