“What chicken?”
“When she was nine. Came home from school crying because they’d hatched chicks in class and the teacher was going to give them to a farmer. Rose was convinced the farmer was going to eat them. So she snuck back into the school at night—climbed through a window, nine years old, in her nightgown—and stole all six chicks. Put them in a cardboard box and walked two miles home in the dark.”
“She never told me that.”
“She wouldn’t. She was embarrassed about it by the time she was old enough to tell it. But I found her in the barn at two in the morning with six chicks in a box and tears on her face, and I thought—” He stops. Looks at his coffee. “I thought, this kid. This kid is going to save the whole world, one chicken at a time.”
I can see it.
Blonde hair wild, nightgown dusty, crouched in the hay with a box of chirping chicks and the absolute moral certainty of a child who hasn’t learned yet that you can’t save everything.
That was Rose. That was always Rose.
The woman who saw something hurting and moved toward it without hesitation, without calculation, without any thought for herself.
She would have saved me, too, if she’d lived.
Would have sat me down and taken my face in her hands and said,“Lee Simms, you stop this right now. You are not allowed to disappear. I forbid it.”
And I would have listened, because I always listened to her, because her voice was the only one that could reach the parts of me I’d nailed shut.
But she didn’t live. And I disappeared anyway.
“She was so proud of you,” Earl says. “Road Captain. She used to brag about it to the other teachers. ‘My husband plansevery ride for the whole club. He knows every road in the county.’ Like you were a general or something.” He laughs. Small, dry, but real. “She didn’t understand half of what the club did. Didn’t care. She just knew you were important to them and they were important to you, and that was enough.”
My throat tightens.
The coffee in my hand is cold.
I drink it anyway because I need something to do with my mouth that isn’t letting the sound out that’s building in my chest.
“She kept a picture of you in her classroom,” Earl continues. “On her desk. One of you on the bike. The kids used to ask if her husband was a cowboy and she’d say, ‘Something like that.’”
I close my eyes, press the heel of my hand against the socket.
The ring presses into the thin skin there and I let it, let the small pain anchor me to something that isn’t the avalanche of missing her that’s threatening to bury me right here on this porch.
“You don’t have to tell me these things,” I say. Rough. Barely a voice.
“Yeah, I do.” Earl’s looking at me with something fierce in his expression—not anger, not pity. Intention. “Because somebody has to remind you that she existed outside the way she died. You’ve been carrying that night around like it’s all there was. Like the last four minutes erased the whole life that came before. She wasn’t just a woman who died in a car accident, Lee. She was a woman who stole chickens and bragged about her husband and made tamales from her grandmother’s recipe and laughed at your bad jokes because she thought they were the real test of love.”
He knows about the joke thing.
She told her father about the joke thing.
I didn’t know that.
All these pieces of Rose—scattered across the people who loved her, held in the hands of a father who will carry them until his hands give out.
“She was so much more than the worst thing that happened to her,” Earl says. “And so are you.”
I can’t respond.
Anything I say right now will come with the thing underneath it—the ugly, primal sound of a man who’s been holding his grief at arm’s length for years and just felt it close the distance.
I nod. That’s all I can manage.
A nod, the hand over my eyes, and the ring catching the afternoon light is all I can manage while Rose’s father gives me back the pieces of her I’d been too broken to carry.
