They come for grief. They park. They walk to the porch. They stand in the yard with their helmets in their hands and they wait.
Phantom climbs the steps, looks at Earl, looks at me and puts his hand on my shoulder—the same grip from the chapel,firm and brief and weighted with everything a man like Phantom can’t say out loud.
Then he steps back and gives us space.
Shadow stands at the bottom of the steps.
His eyes are red. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t have to.
I nod. He nods back.
The language of brothers who have been through enough together that words are redundant.
Someone calls the funeral home.
The machinery of death begins its slow, necessary turning—phone calls, paperwork, the logistics of ending a life that took eighty-one years to build.
The brothers handle it. That’s what they do. They handle the things that need handling so the people who are hurting can just hurt.
The yard has cleared.
The brothers have gone—quietly, one by one, the way they came.
The funeral home has been and gone.
Earl’s chair is empty.
The coffee cup is in the kitchen.
The porch light is on because neither of us could bring ourselves to sit in the dark.
Bex finds the whiskey.
Top shelf of the kitchen cabinet. Maker’s Mark—Earl’s bottle, the one he kept for evenings when the work was done and the land was quiet and a man had earned the right to sit on his porch and pour two fingers of something warm.
It’s three-quarters full.
The label is worn from handling.
She pours two glasses.
Neat, then reaches into the freezer for ice.
Drops two cubes in each.
The way Earl drank it.
Always on the rocks. Always two cubes.
“Anything else is a cocktail,” he used to say. “And I’m not a cocktail man.”
We take the glasses to the porch, sit in our chairs—mine on the right, hers on the left, Earl’s empty between us.
The evening is cool. The sky going wide and orange and infinite, the horizon line stretching so far in every direction that the world feels both impossibly large and small enough to hold in your hands.
The bay is at the fence.
Standing quiet. Head up, ears forward, watching the porch the way he’s watched it every evening since Earl started sitting here again. A rescued thing guarding the place it was given.
