“Did you get to meet Molly?”
“Not this time.Maybe next visit.If Tucker decides there’ll be a next one.”
“You’d like her.She’s funny and smart and tough as nails.”
Ray nodded.A pause.Then, “How’s Cooper doing?”
Ahh.So Cooper had declined to see Ray again before he left.No surprise.Out of the three boys, Cooper had gotten the worst of it when their father left.He carried the most anger over it.
“Cooper’s going to take time,” Gray said honestly.“He’s the one who took the brunt of it when you left.And he’s the oldest.He remembers everything.”
“Yeah.”A sigh.“I know.”
Ray picked up his duffel and slung it over his shoulder.“I’m not in a hurry.I spent twenty-five years running.I plan to spend the rest of my life standing still and letting the people I hurt come to me or not at their own pace.”
He extended his hand.Gray stared at it.Memory flashed through his head of it.The big, weathered hands that he remembered in fragments.He recalled being fascinated at how his father’s hands were always tanned even if it was winter out and the Sun had mostly left until spring.He remembered feeling the rock hard calluses on his dad’s palms and wondering if he would ever get calluses like that.
Now, as he looked down, he saw a hand that had once been steady enough to keep men alive on battlefield in the desert.
An errant memory of his dad’s hands being too unsteady to hold a coffee cup at two in the morning in a house full of sleeping boys also rolled over him.He’d snuck out of bed one of the times his father had come home late to see what he did in the middle of the night when his footsteps went back and forth across the living room directly below Gray’s room for hours on end.
He shook his head once, sharply, to clear the memory.Then, in a gesture that surprised them both, he pulled Ray into a brief hug.His father embraced him back.Held him tight.It lasted only a few seconds, and they both stepped back.But it was enough.
Ray’s chin dipped once in silent gratitude.His eyes were bright.He didn’t say anything.He didn’t need to.
He walked to the green truck and tossed the duffel inside.Climbed in.The engine coughed and turned over, the same rough sound as before.He raised a hand through the open window—not a wave, just an acknowledgment—and pulled out of the Foster Ranch.
Gray watched the truck until it disappeared around the bend in the county road, trailing a thin plume of dust in the Chinook wind.A second sparrow answered the first one.The calves tired themselves out and lay down in the grass in a group for naps, all but invisible in last year’s knee-high grass.The hills were brown and dry and had a waiting quality to them.As if they were waiting for spring.For the next nourishing rain to come along and trigger the explosion of new growth that would coat them in green.
He stood on the porch for a while, the way he’d stood the first time after Ray left.But the feeling today was different.The first time he’d watched his father’s truck drive away, the empty room in his heart had been occupied for the first time by something nameless and raw.This time, the room had furniture in it.
He understood his father better now.Gray had started reading about PTSD, its symptoms, treatment, and aftermath, and he planned to continue reading about it.
Ray had done the hard work of acknowledging his problem, asking for help, and then following through with what had to be gut-wrenching therapy.Gray could respect that.And he respected how hard it must have been to come back to the mountains.Face his sons.Accept whatever accusations and judgments they threw at him.
He had to give Ray credit.He’d taken everything Cooper and Tucker could dish out square on the chin.He hadn’t ducked a single emotional punch either one had thrown at him.
He appreciated the fact that Ray was trying to build the early, fragile scaffolding of something that might, with time and honesty, become relationships with his sons.
One thing Gray knew for sure.He didn’t envy his father having to face the wife he abandoned and left in the lurch.But that was Ray’s business, not his.He did make a mental note to call his mom in a few days, if she didn’t call him, and to remind Cooper and Tucker to check in with their mom as well.
But the door was open now.A relationship with his father was possible and he judged that to be a good thing.
And for the first time in Gray’s life, a truck pulling out of a driveway and leaving didn’t feel like abandonment.It felt like a man going to do the next right thing.Ray was done abandoning his family.And now it was up to his sons and ex-wife to decide if they were going to abandon Ray or not.
As for him, he’d never been the kind to walk away from anybody.Funny, but he’d learned that from his father.Not from Ray teaching him to be present and steady and reliable for his loved ones, but from Ray showing him how much it hurt when a person you loved wasn’t any of those present or steady or reliable.
He went inside, opened his laptop, and pulled up the weather forecast.Unseasonably warm for at least another week.Wind advisory through Friday.No rain in the ten-day outlook.
He closed the laptop and looked out the window at the brown hills in worry.
Then he went to the station and checked over the fire engine.Thoroughly.With a bad feeling in his gut the whole time.
19
Gray asked the kids for help on Thursday afternoon.
He’d been thinking about it since the moment Bonnie kissed him and Ruth Sanger turned it into a town-wide news bulletin within sixty seconds.How Bonnie had stood there with defiance and saidI don’t care.How she’d kissed him again and then fled before either of them did something inadvisable in broad daylight behind Rose’s Diner.
