Vernon lowered himself down beside me, slowly, carefully, and after a long moment, he reached out and took my hand.
It was the first time my father had held my hand since I was six years old.
His hands were a carpenter’s hands, rough and strong, exactly as I had forgotten they were.
“I’m here now, Hannah,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere. The getting-lost is over. I know exactly where home is.”
PART 5 — FINAL
We set down the resentment that afternoon, in that backyard, and we started, carefully, to build something in its place.
It was not instant. Twenty years do not dissolve in a single conversation.
There were hard days, days his memory still slipped, days I grieved all over again for the childhood the scaffold had stolen from both of us.
But my father was here. Well, and clear, and mine. And we had time now, the one thing my mother had run out of.
