"The loan was going to take my house when Lucia walked away from the project. Ben bought her out. He's been finishing the house so we can sell it and pay off the debt before the bank forecloses."
Ruth stared at me. "He put up his own money?"
"Yeah." I paused. It was more than just putting up his own money. Ben had risked everything he'd spent fifteen years building, for a mess that wasn't his.
She looked toward the entrance, toward the driveway where Ben's truck was parked. Then back at me.
She didn't say anything for a long time.
She just sat there on the window ledge, her hands still in her lap, looking out through the glass at the darkening tree line. Her face had gone somewhere private. Somewhere I couldn't follow.
Then Ruth started talking.
"He was nine, maybe ten," she said. "We didn't have much back then. His father was between jobs." She smoothed the frayed cuff of the hoodie over her hand. "I had a little dish on the kitchen counter. Just somewhere I'd drop loose change at the end of the day. Ryan knew about it."
She paused.
"One week I noticed the change was disappearing. Little by little. Quarters mostly."
"He'd taken it?"
"He had." Something moved across her face. "I asked him and he just... crumbled. You know how kids do. Before they've even opened their mouth, their whole body gives it up." She looked down at her hands. "He'd seen a ceramic bluebird in a shop window on Main Street. I'd mentioned once—years before, I don't even remember saying it—that bluebirds were my favorite. But Ryan remembered." She shook her head. "He wanted to buy it for my birthday. Didn't have enough money. So he borrowed from the dish."
"Planning to put it back."
"Before I noticed." She glanced at me. "I always noticed."
She was quiet for a moment.
"I sat him down. Told him you can't take what isn't yours, even if you mean well. Even if you're going to give it back." Sheexhaled. "He cried. Lord, he cried. Kept saying, 'But I was going to fix it, Mom. I was going to fix it.'"
She stopped there.
Outside, the light had gone flat and gray, the last of the evening bleeding out of the sky.
"We went to the shop together the next day," she said finally. "I made him put every coin back in the dish first. Then we went and bought the bluebird. Properly." A long pause. "It's been on my windowsill ever since. Thirty years."
She turned to look at me, her tired eyes finding mine.
"Every morning I look at it and I still can't decide if I'm proud of him or furious."
She reached over and covered my hand with hers.
"I expect I never will."
I turned my hand over and held hers.
My eyes moved around the house. The fireplace, the windows, the ceiling Ryan had drawn in the margins of notebooks before he even knew what he wanted to build. He'd always meant to fix it. That was the thing about Ryan—he could break something and convince himself the breaking didn't count yet, that it would all come right in the end, once he had something good enough to show for it.
Sometimes it worked.
Sometimes you ended up with a bluebird on your windowsill.
Chapter 28
Ben
Isanded a section of trim that didn't need sanding.
