Page 113 of Crowned in Sin

"I miss you every day," I say. "Not the way people say that. I mean it plain. I miss the sound of your truck in the driveway and you yelling at the TV during the games. I miss you asking me if I ate. I've got somebody asking me that now too, so I guess you'd approve of that much."

I press my hand flatter against the stone like I could push the words straight through it.

"I wanted you to know all of it," I say. "Not just the wedding and the baby. All of it. The bad years too. I got through them. I'm still getting through some of it. But I'm here, and I'm happy. I wanted to tell you myself instead of just letting somebody else say it for me."

I sit with that a minute. The crow shifts on its branch. The sprinkler clicks off somewhere behind us.

Then I look up at Nico.

"Come here," I say. "Talk to him."

He doesn't move right away. I watch him decide to.

He crouches down next to me, close enough that our shoulders touch, and for a second he just looks at the stone like he's working out where to put his eyes.

"Harry," he says, and it's strange to hear him use the name plain like that, no title on it, no distance. "I'm not going to make this long."

I put my hand on his knee. He covers it with his.

"I took your life," he says. "I was eleven. I didn't have a choice in it. My father saw to that. But I've stopped letting that be the whole of the reason I say it out loud. It happened. I did it. I'm nothiding from that anymore, not from her, not from you, not from myself."

His voice doesn't shake. It's steadier than I expect, steadier than I think I could manage saying the same thing.

"I can't give you back what I took," he says. "I know that. But I can do this. I'll keep her safe for the rest of my life. I'll keep your daughter safe, and raise your granddaughter right, better than right, so there's something good standing on the ground where the worst thing I ever did happened. It's an inadequate apology, and I know it. It's what I've got instead."

He goes quiet after that. It's short, the way I asked him to keep it, and it's enough. More than enough. I feel it settle somewhere behind my ribs, a weight easing loose that's been sitting there longer than I let myself notice.

We stay crouched there a while longer, not talking, just breathing in the same slow air.

We clean the stone by hand. No rush to it. Nico wets a rag in the bucket and works the moss out of the letters of my father's name, one groove at a time, more patient than I've ever known him to be about anything. I do the base, scrubbing at the grass stains along the bottom edge until the granite comes back to a clean gray. Neither of us talks while we do it. It doesn't need talking. The work says what it means on its own.

When the stone is clean, I sit back on my heels and my mind goes somewhere it hasn't gone in a long time.

Then I reach for the bag.

I threw a pair of shoes over the power lines the day of Dad’s funeral. Thirteen years ago now. I don't even rememberdeciding to do it, just the two of us, me and the shoes, standing under those lines behind the church, and me winding up and letting them fly because I couldn't stand the thought of wearing anything that still remembered how to run when he couldn't do anything anymore.

They caught on the wire and hung there for years. I used to see them from the road sometimes. And then one day I went looking and they were gone, taken down or fallen or carried off by wind. I never found out which. And something in me had grieved that too, quietly, on top of everything else.

I take out what I brought instead.

A pair of baby shoes.

Small enough to fit in one hand. White with a little stitched flower on each one. I bought them weeks ago before we knew if we were having a boy or girl, because something in me already had a feeling.

I set them on top of the headstone, side by side, laces tucked under so the wind won't take them.

"For you, Daddy," I tell him.

Nico watches me do it and doesn't say a word. He doesn't have to.

I run my thumb once over the little stitched flower, and then I let my hand fall away.

The crow finally leaves its branch and goes somewhere else. The grass smells like rain that hasn't come yet. Nico's hand finds mine, and I let it. For the first time in longer than I can measure, the ache in my chest is grief, and something warmer besides.

It's room. Room for something else to grow in.

I stay a while longer, my hand in his, my father's name clean under the morning light, and I don't feel like I'm leaving anything behind when we finally turn to walk back down the path. I feel like I'm bringing him with me, into whatever comes next.

THE END