He’s got his coffee and his paper and a view of the land that’s been in his family since his grandfather scraped together enough to buy it during the Depression.
I sit on the porch step and lean against the post.
The sun is fully up now, throwing long shadows across the yard, and from here I can see the whole spread—the barn, the pastures, the tree line along the creek.
The fence along the south section is leaning badly.
The gate on the equipment shed is hanging by one hinge.
There are a dozen things that need fixing and one dying man and one woman trying to hold it all together with calloused hands and stubbornness.
“Ran into Lee at Holcomb’s,” I say. Casual. Like it didn’t nearly take my knees out.
Earl’s quiet for a moment. The rocker creaks. “How’d he look?”
I think about it. How did he look?
Hard. Closed.
Wounded in a way that’s calcified into something permanent.
Handsome, and I hate myself for that word but it’s the honest one.
“Like a man who’s been alone too long,” I say.
Earl nods slowly. “He was a good husband to my girl. Best kind of man. The kind who answers on the first ring.” He takes a sip of coffee. “Grief makes people do strange things, Bex. Makes them disappear. Doesn’t mean they’re gone.”
“He’s been gone five and a half years, Earl.”
“So were you.”
That lands. He’s not wrong.
I left, too.
Not the same way Lee left—I didn’t stop calling, didn’t cut off contact, didn’t pretend the people who loved Rose didn’t exist.
But I put three hundred miles between myself and this town and I told myself it was for work and it wasn’t.
It was because every corner of Sharp had her fingerprints on it and I couldn’t breathe without inhaling her absence.
“I’m here now,” I say.
“You are.” Earl reaches over and puts his hand on my head, the way he’s done since I was eight years old and sitting on this same porch with skinned knees and a bad report card and nowhere else to go.
His hand is thinner now.
I can feel the bones through the skin.
But the weight of it is the same—steady, sure, the hand of a man who chose me when no one else would.
“Did you tell him?” he asks. “About me?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d he say?”
I think about the look on Lee’s face when I said the word cancer.
