Lucas’s expression passed through hope to disappointment, hardened for a moment, then collapsed into resignation.
Hank reckoned dying alone was a bitter price to pay for not keeping up good relations with one’s children.Thing was, most people figured that out too late, when there wasn’t enough time left to repair broken relationships.He’d seen it before, and it saddened him every time.When folks approached death, they tended to have only one regret: the things they hadn’t said to the people they loved.
He was glad Lucas was writing those letters.It might be the man’s only chance to say all the things he regretted not saying sooner.
Hank sat with Lucas a little longer, then packed up and drove back to town with the windows open and the splinter Lucas’s words had planted still working at him.
There was a lesson sitting in that house, laid out plain as an x-ray, about a man who’d mistaken providing for loving and was going to die alone between the two.
Hank, in the grip of a diagnosis he’d carried for ten years, did with it what he always did with new evidence against an old certainty.He decided Lucas had it backward.
The old man thought providing for his family had failed to earn his kid’s love because providing wasn’t love.But Hank had learned that healing people, holding them together and holding them up was the love.Splint it, brace it, carry it, pay for it, sit with it.It was who he was and what he did.
But, when there was nothing left for him to heal or support, the people he loved realized they didn’t need him any longer.He was just somebody standing in front of them with his arms out.In the way.
Sunny didn’t need anything from him anymore, which meant he was about to be the obstacle standing between her and what she wanted.It was time for him to get over what he wanted and step aside.
He didn’t pull back all at once because there were children involved and they wouldn’t understand the way an adult would that it was for their own good.He did it the way frost comes, slowly and quietly, with nothing left to point to in the morning except that the garden had gone black at the edges overnight.
Tuesday, he had charts to finish when tea hour came around, which was even true, and excused himself to go work.Wednesday, he drove Madison to Tessa’s for a 4-H club meeting and stayed to help clean up afterward.Thursday he went to sit with Lucas and was there late.The kettle sat cold on the stove three nights running.The house noticed.He told the house to mind its own business.
Thursday night, Reno’s truck was sitting in front of the house when he came home from the Shoemacher place, and Reno himself was sitting on the porch steps with two root beers from Rose’s, holding one out like bait.
“Madi let me in, fed me, and went back upstairs to her book,” Reno said.“Your daughter’s better company than you are, these days.Sit.”
Hank sat because his brother was the only Steele fully as stubborn as he was.They drank root beer in the dark and the crickets and frogs filled the night with sound.
Reno, who could break down the hardest witness under cross-examination, sat there without saying a word, letting silence do the work for him.Hank knew and was annoyed by what his brother was doing, but that didn’t make it any less effective.
“So,” Reno said at last.“Sunny’s money came through.”
“Good.Lord knows, she deserves every penny of it after what he put her through.”
“Uh-huh.”Reno turned the bottle slowly in his hands.“I talked to her on the phone today.She sounded like a woman who’d won a lottery at a funeral.”
Hank’s gut twisted.It was for the best.He was doing right by Sunny.She would see that soon enough.
Reno continued, “And now I’m sitting on this porch with you, and the kitchen’s dark at nine o’clock.The stove’s cold, and you’re as grim and doleful as she is.”He tipped his head back against the post.“I got a conviction once on less circumstantial evidence than this.”
“Long day, Reno.”
“They’re all long days.You’ve had long days since you were nine.”Reno looked over at him and the courtroom came into his voice gentle as it ever got.“Whatever you’re doing, big brother, and I can see the shape of it because I’ve watched you do it my whole life, I want you to think hard about one thing.There’s a difference between opening a door for a woman and standing behind it so she can’t see you anymore.”
Hank looked at the lake for a while.“Bedtime for me.Goodnight, Reno.”
“Yeah.”Reno stood, set his empty bottle on the rail, and went down the steps.
At the bottom he stopped, the way lawyers stop, with the one question they actually came to ask.“Did she find you worth keeping and you got scared and bolted?Or did you not stick around long enough to let her make that decision for herself?”
He was gone before Hank had to not answer.
Friday he wrote the final check.
The restoration account had one invoice still outstanding.She’d submitted it to him two weeks ago, typed and itemized down to the last hinge.He’d let it sit on his desk, untouched, because paying it made the contract between them finished.And that wasn’t a word he’d wanted to let into the house.
He paid it in full Friday morning, first thing, before the part of him that wanted her to have a reason to stay could lodge an objection.He put the check in an envelope and wrote her name on the front of it.Odd, but writing her name took longer than writing the check had.
She came by that evening.He heard her car, her light, quick footsteps on the porch, and the squeak of the front door opening for a woman who’d stopped knocking weeks ago.He was in the office, standing, with the envelope in his hand, and the kitchen was dark.He watched her clock the unlit room from the hallway the way another woman might clock a door slammed in her face.
