My mother put the pot roast on the table. Hannah helped with the sides. I sat at the end of the table, across from my dad and next to Hannah, and my mother served me first without asking, because I had come in with a sad face and she was going to take care of me the only way she knew how—put food in front of me and be nearby while I ate it.
None of them asked about Cara, and I was grateful. I felt themnotasking, felt their worry around the edges of the conversation, and I was grateful for that too.
About halfway through the meal, my dad set his fork down and looked at me across the table—the direct, considered look hehad developed in his sober years, the one that still caught me off guard sometimes because it was so different from the man I had grown up with.
“You staying?”
My mother looked up from her plate. Hannah went very still beside me.
“Staying where?” I said, though I knew what he meant.
“Here. In the Falls. In the Hollow. Wherever you’ve landed. You staying, or are you going somewhere else?”
I had been expecting Hannah to pull me aside after lunch. I had not been expecting my father to put his fork down in the middle of the pot roast and ask me directly. I had not been ready for it, so I answered without the version I had been rehearsing.
“I’m staying.”
My mother let out a slow breath.
“I’m taking a job with Emmett. At his firm. His office is here in town, and I’d be his partner.”
Hannah set her fork down. She did it carefully, deliberately, and she looked at her plate for a moment before she looked at me. “Emmett?”
“Yes.”
“Emmett Harrington. Emmett, who used to eat cereal at this table before he could reach the counter without a stool. Who cried at our dog’s funeral and then denied it.”
“That’s the one.”
“Who now has a firm?” She said it in a tone I could not entirely read—something that was not quite surprise and not quite something else entirely, and she looked at her plate again briefly in a way she probably thought was neutral. “I didn’t know that was something he’d done with himself. Uh, I mean, I don’t really see him around town.”
“He’s been building up to it for a few years. He’s done well.”
Something moved across her face that she pulled back before it finished arriving. She picked up her fork again. “Good for him,” she said, in a voice that was working very hard to be even.
I did not say anything. I filed it away.
My mother was smiling the way she smiled when things she had hoped for quietly came true. She had known Emmett since he was small enough to sit at this table on a booster seat, and she had fed him here for years after that whenever he found his way back.
“When does it start?” my dad said.
“Soon.”
He nodded, and looked at me across the table with that open, careful attention. “That’s good work, Jasper. Work that’s going to use what you know. Work that keeps you here with your family.” He paused. “You keeping the cabin?”
“Yes.”
“Good cabin. You bought well.” He picked up his fork, and that was the whole conversation—the conversation I had been putting off for weeks, months even, and my father had walked straight to the center of it in about forty-five seconds and then gone back to his food, and somehow that was exactly right.
My mother reached across the corner of the table and covered my hand with hers. She did not say anything. She squeezed once and let go.
Hannah had not said anything more, but I could feel her waiting for later. The porch was where this conversation was going to happen, and she was simply biding her time until she could get me there. I let her wait. I needed a few more minutes of the pot roast and my mother’s kitchen before I was ready to say out loud what I had done.
After we’d finished lunch, my dad cleared the table and put the leftovers away, then went back to the recliner. My mother started on the dishes and waved Hannah off when she tried tohelp, as she always did, which meant she knew we were going to talk it out on the porch, just like we had done our whole lives.
Hannah got her jacket from the hook by the door. I followed her out.
The porch faced west, and the afternoon light was coming in low and pale through the trees, the kind of November light that made everything look like it was already becoming a memory. Hannah sat on the top step and pulled her jacket around her and looked out at the yard, and I sat beside her and we were quiet for a moment just like we had been quiet on this porch a hundred times before—after bad things and good things and things that were both at once, after deployments and homecomings and the years in between when I had not come home enough and she had not said so but I had known.
