The Eight Hours
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE EIGHT HOURS
Lex
Eight hours.
I have, in my head, the schedule of the eight hours arranged the way I arrange anything I am going to lose. I have eaten a meal with the woman in my kitchen. I have laughed at my daughter. I have washed dishes at a sink with my woman at my side. I have eight hours left in this house and then I have to put both of them back into the world.
I am going to make the eight hours count.
? ? ?
I take Nora down to the dock at 11:14 AM.
Maeve walks behind us with a coffee. The path from the cabin to the dock is forty yards. Nora walks the forty yards holding my hand. Her hand is small. Three of her fingers wrap around my index. She’s never held my hand before, except yesterday on the porch when I taught her the breathing thing, and the breathing thing was operational. This is not operational. This is a child holding her father's hand on a Saturday morning at a lake she’s not yet learned to be impressed by.
"What are we doing?" she says.
"We are going to throw rocks in the water."
She stops walking.
She considers this. The consideration is the consideration of an almost-three-year-old being given a piece of news that is genuinely surprising to her, meaning she gives it the gravity of a Supreme Court justice receiving briefs.
"Why?" she says.
"Because it is a thing people do at a lake."
"Why?"
"I do not know."
She accepts this. She continues walking. She takes the answer the way she’s taken every answer I have given her in the last two weeks, which is at face value with the small extending grace of a child who has decided, somewhere along the way, that the man holding her hand is not lying to her.
Maeve, behind us, makes a small sound that is not quite a laugh.
I do not turn around. If I turn around I will lose composure in a way I am not prepared to lose composure. I keep walking.
On the dock I show Nora how to hold a rock.
"Like this," I say. "Flat side down. Pinch the edge."
She pinches the edge of a rock the size of a quarter. Her tongue comes out the side of her mouth. The tongue is, apparently, the architecture of full concentration in a person under three. She pinches. Her grip is wrong. I do not correct it. I have decided, in this particular case, to teach her badly so that she gets to figure out the right way later, which is, I am realizing, the way my own father taught me to do certain things.
"Now you throw it."
She throws it.
The rock leaves her hand at a forty-five-degree upward angle, executes a small, graceful arc, and lands six inches from her foot in the dirt of the dock.
She looks at the rock.
She looks at me.
"That," she pronounces, "is not a lake."
