Chương 2
Ryan almost laughed.
It came out as nothing.
“You always do.”
That landed.
Derek looked at him then, and for half a second Ryan thought he might swing at him. Derek had never struck him before. They had managed thirty-two years of weddings, funerals, hospital rooms, graduations, Thanksgiving dinners, one disastrous fishing weekend, and Noah’s entire illness without becoming the kind of men who settled anything with their fists.
Derek’s hand opened and closed beside his leg.
Then Emily asked, “Did you know about the words?”
Derek looked at her.
That was worse than anything Ryan could have said.
Emily’s face was wet now, but she was not sobbing. She stood in her cream sweater with tiny red-and-green trees knitted across the chest, one beige shoe half out of its heel because she had knelt too quickly. She looked very small in Linda’s enormous living room.
Derek looked away first.
“Ask your grandmother.”
Linda flinched.
Derek grabbed his coat from the chair near the entryway.
“Derek,” Linda said.
He shoved one arm into the sleeve.
“Not tonight.”
“You don’t get to decide that,” Ryan said.
Derek turned toward him.
“You think because Noah put you on a piece of paper you get to decide everything now?”
Emily’s hand tightened.
Ryan felt it.
Whatever answer had risen in him disappeared.
He looked down at her and saw what he had nearly done: let two grown men turn her father into ammunition while she stood between them.
“Emily,” he said, “get your coat.”
Derek made a sound that might have been contempt.
Ryan did not answer.
Linda stepped forward. “Please don’t take her home like this.”
Ryan looked at her.
“How should I take her home?”
Linda had no answer.
Her navy cardigan had slipped open. She still had the red gift box tucked beneath one arm as though she had forgotten she was holding it.
Emily went to the couch and found her coat.
Grace helped her with one sleeve.
That kindness nearly broke Ryan more than the confrontation had.
People were good at the wrong times. Awkwardly. Quietly. They picked up wrapping paper while families split apart. They offered pie after funerals. They asked whether you needed a phone charger while somebody you loved was dying.
Grace bent and fixed the heel of Emily’s shoe.
“There,” she said.
Emily whispered, “Thank you.”
Derek stared at the front door.
Ryan carried the horse.
As he passed Linda, she touched his arm.
“Ryan.”
He stopped because she was Emily’s grandmother and because Noah had loved her despite everything, which was a sentence Ryan had repeated to himself often enough over the last year that it had begun to sound like a legal obligation.
Linda’s eyes went to the horse.
“I didn’t know he carved that.”
Ryan believed her.
That made it worse somehow.
He said, “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“Christmas morning?”
“Tomorrow.”
Outside, the cold hit Emily hard enough that she sucked in a breath.
Ryan opened the passenger door of his truck, then remembered the booster seat was in the back and swore under his breath.
Emily heard him.
“Dad used to say that word when the toaster got stuck.”
Ryan looked at her.
For one startling second, she smiled.
Then she didn’t.
“Yeah,” he said. “Your dad had a complicated relationship with appliances.”
“He hated our blender.”
“I know.”
“He said smoothies were soup pretending to be healthy.”
“That sounds like him.”
Ryan got her into the back seat.
He laid the rocking horse beside her, wrapped in his winter coat so the loose leg would not shift.
Emily touched the carved underside.
“Did Uncle Derek really promise?”
Ryan looked at her in the rearview mirror.
He had no idea what the correct answer was.
Adults liked to imagine children needed certainty. Usually what children needed was not to be lied to by people who were too uncomfortable to admit uncertainty.
“I think he did,” Ryan said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Did Dad ask him?”
“I think so.”
“Why didn’t Dad ask you?”
There it was.
A small question.
A devastatingly reasonable one.
Ryan started the truck.
“He asked me for other things.”
“What things?”
“To make sure you did your homework.”
Emily frowned.
“That’s not important.”
“It felt important last Tuesday.”
She almost smiled again.
Ryan pulled away from Linda’s house.
Christmas decorations blurred past the windows in clean suburban rows. Inflatable snowmen bent in the wind. Somebody three houses down had projected green moving stars across their garage. A teenager walked a golden retriever while staring at his phone.
The world, with its offensive talent for continuing, continued.
Halfway home, Emily said, “I don’t want him to fix it.”
Ryan knew she meant Derek.
“Okay.”
“I want you to.”
“I can try.”
“Dad said you’re bad at wood.”
“He was right.”
“He said you make everything square.”
Ryan glanced at the broken horse beside her.
“Square is a respectable shape.”
“He said horses aren’t square.”
“Your father was judgmental.”
Emily leaned her head against the window.
Three minutes later, she was asleep.
Ryan drove the rest of the way with one hand on the wheel and the other gripping his own knee hard enough to hurt.
He had lived with Emily for seven months.
The first week, he had bought the wrong cereal, washed one of her red socks with a load of white school shirts, forgotten that children needed permission slips signed on the back as well as the front, and discovered at 6:42 one Monday morning that “spirit day” meant she needed to dress as a favorite book character.
Noah had made parenting look irritating but survivable.
Ryan had discovered it was mostly logistics interrupted by love and fear.
He had also discovered grief behaved badly in children.
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Emily could spend twenty minutes crying because her father had died and then ask whether penguins had knees.
She could refuse to look at photographs for a week and then demand the same photograph beside her bed every night.
