“Dad did,” I said. “From a boat. With a tape recorder.”
That afternoon, I drove to Larkspur House with the court order in my pocket.
Tamsin met me at the door, grinning.
“He’s been dressed since six,” she said. “Wouldn’t let anybody touch his collar.”
My father sat in his wheelchair by the window of Room 14, his good hand resting on a duffel bag in his lap.
He looked up.
“Home?” he said.
“Home, Dad.”
Epilogue: Almost There
It took four months to pull up the gray tile.
I did it myself, one row at a time, on my knees in the front hallway. Underneath, the old pine floors were scratched and dull, but they were still there. I sanded them down and sealed them with the same amber finish Dad had used thirty years ago.
He watched from his wheelchair in the doorway the whole time, pointing with his good hand whenever I missed a spot.
“There,” he’d say. “There.”
Speech therapy came three days a week. A woman named Bridget Kowalski with a whiteboard and a patience I’d never seen in anybody. Some days Dad managed whole sentences. Some days he threw the marker across the room and cried, and Bridget waited, and then she handed it back.
“He’s stubborn,” she told me once.
“You have no idea,” I said.
Ruthie went back to the store the week after Lorraine’s arrest. She walked in, hung her purse on the same hook she’d used for twenty-six years, and sat down at her old desk like she’d never left.
By June, we’d paid back the suppliers Lorraine had stopped paying. By August, the store was in the black.
Trent was sentenced to four years on the embezzlement and two assault counts. He wrote me a letter from Ridgeline Correctional. Same facility. Same cell block, as it turned out.
I didn’t open it. I put it in a drawer.
Maybe someday.
Lorraine took a plea in September, eight years, after Nadine and the DA laid the phone records, the notary payment, and the neurologist’s testimony on the table in front of her lawyer. Her attorney had pushed for trial right up until the forensics report came back.
She never said she was sorry. Not in court. Not in her statement.
I had stopped expecting her to.
On the first Saturday in October, I drove my father out to Pruitt’s Landing.
Hank had the Second Wind cleaned up and gassed. Fresh canvas. New seat cushions. He wouldn’t take a dime for any of it.
“Your daddy paid slip fees for a year without ever setting foot on that dock,” he said. “Least I can do.”
It took Hank, Tamsin, and me together to get Dad down the ramp and into the captain’s seat. He gripped the wheel with his left hand, and his face did something I hadn’t seen since before any of this.
He smiled. Both sides tried. One side won.
We motored out to the middle of Cutter Lake and cut the engine.
The water was flat and gold. Somewhere a loon called, low and long.
I reached into my shirt pocket and took out my mother’s photo. The torn corner had been mended with clear tape. I’d had it reframed, but for today I carried it loose, the way I had that first night.
I set it on the dash in front of him.
He looked at it for a long time.
“Evie,” he said.
“She picked the name of this boat,” I said. “You told me that when I was twelve.”
He nodded slowly. Then he turned his head and found my eyes.
His mouth worked the way it always did before a hard sentence. I waited. I’d learned to wait.
“I. Said.” He took a breath. “Al-most. There.”
“You did.”
“I. Was.”
He reached over with his good hand and gripped my forearm. Weak. Shaking. Holding on with everything he had.
“I know, Dad,” I said. “You got there.”
We sat out on the lake until the sun dropped behind the pines. Neither of us said much after that. We didn’t need to.
