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The Long Saturday

Chapter 26: Home

The text I didn't check on the mountain is from Norah.

How was it?

I answer from the motel parking lot while Mom is loading the cooler back into the trunk and the sun is still low enough to make the mountains look theatrical.

Big, I type. Hard. Beautiful.

The reply comes before I have the keys out.

That sounds annoying and correct.

I smile at the phone.

Then I get in the car and point us east.

---

The drive home takes two days, which feels appropriate.

Grief should not be allowed to teleport.

We cross back through Kansas under a sky too large to be decorative. Missouri gives us rain. Illinois gives us a rest stop with terrible coffee and one surprisingly decent cinnamon roll that Mom buys on instinct and then insists I take half of because mothers maintain weird standards even in bereavement. Indiana gives us nothing at all, which is consistent with its brand.

The whole way, the backpack with the empty tin rides in the back seat.

Not entirely empty. A little still clings to the corners, a pale residue of morning and wind. Mom notices me looking at it through the mirror somewhere outside St. Louis.

"Don't wipe it out yet," she says.

"I wasn't going to."

"Good."

Then, after a few miles:

"I want some for the garden."

I keep my eyes on the road. "I know."

We don't say more because we don't need to. The sentence is not a proposal. It is a fact arriving.

At a gas station in Terre Haute, I buy us waters and call Jude from beside a rack of novelty keychains.

"You sound far away," he says.

"I am far away."

"Fair enough."

There is a pause. Cars hissing over wet pavement. The smell of fryer oil from inside.

"How was it?" he asks.

The same question. Different weight.

"Big," I say. "Hard. Beautiful."

He is quiet long enough that I know he's smiling.

"That sounds like mountains."

"Yeah."

"No rush on anything. I just wanted you to know the church is still here when you need a room full of people who sing badly."

"Comforting image."

"I aim to serve."

I lean against the brick wall of the station and watch a semi pull through the diesel lane.

"Jude?"

"Yes?"

"I think I can come by Wednesday."

Not back. Not fully. Just by.

"Then Wednesday it is," he says.

He does not make it holy. This is one of the reasons I love him.

---

Ohio does not announce itself the way Colorado does.

No ridgeline. No cinematic reveal. Just flatter light and roads I know in my hands before I consciously recognize them. The speed trap outside Mercer. The half-collapsed red barn by the county line. The church steeple visible from Route 9 if the leaves haven't come in too thick.

By the time we turn onto our street, I am more tired than grief alone should make a person.

Home looks exactly like itself.

White siding. Porch rail Dad meant to repaint the summer before he got sick and never did. Mom's daylilies leaning over the flagstone path with all the confidence of plants that know where they belong.

And yet the house has changed in the way everything has changed: by continuing.

I carry the cooler in. Mom takes the overnight bag. The kitchen smells faintly stale after being closed up for days, so I open the windows and let August in. Cicadas. Cut grass. Somebody's charcoal grill from three houses down. Ohio announcing itself by smell.

Mom stands in the doorway to the back yard for a long time.

"I missed my lavender," she says.

"Traitor."

"The mountains were wonderful. They're still not mine."

I know what she means. The mountains were what he never got. The garden is what she built.

I set the tin on the counter.

"Today?" I say.

She looks at it. Then out the window.

"Tomorrow," she says. "I want one night with him home first."

So that is what we do.

We unpack. We put the dirty motel laundry in the hamper. Mom waters the basil as if apologizing for the trip. I stand in Micah's room with the Colorado map still gone from the wall and think about how strange it is that west can now live here too — in a backpack, in a phone number from Buena Vista, in the part of my mother that saw the ridgeline and said oh like prayer.

That evening Norah calls instead of texting.

"Did Ohio survive without you?" she says.

"Barely."

"Terrible state management."

I am in the back yard, sitting on the porch steps while Mom deadheads marigolds with a concentration that would terrify lesser flowers.

"We're home," I say.

"How's your mom?"

"Already mad at the basil for needing things."

"Excellent. That's a very healthy sign."

I can hear pottery clink on her end. Studio sounds. The wheel maybe, or shelfware.

"Did it help?" she asks after a minute.

The question is too big to answer cleanly, so I don't try.

"I think it changed the size of some things."

"That's usually the best available outcome."

We stay on the phone longer than necessary, talking mostly about not the mountain: a customer who tried to return a mug because it was "too handmade," the church roof still leaking by the north classroom, a restaurant in town that now charges nineteen dollars for pasta without shame. By the time we hang up, the sky has gone from gold to blue-black and Mom has come inside.

She eyes me over the kettle.

"Norah?"

"Yeah."

"She make you laugh?"

"Sometimes."

Mom nods once.

"Good."

---

The next morning we take the tin to the garden.

Not all of it. Just what remained, and what Mom wants to keep here.

She chooses the strip by the south fence where the lavender is thickest and the roses Dad argued into existence. I kneel beside her with the trowel and loosen the dirt more for ritual than necessity. The soil is dark from last night's watering.

"Here?" I say.

"Here."

She takes the tin from me with both hands. For a second I think she's going to cry immediately, but she doesn't. She is past immediate on some subjects now. She stands in that more durable, more exhausting region of grief where tears are a tool rather than a flood.

"One place doesn't get to keep all of him," she says.

"No."

"He liked this yard." Her thumb runs once along the edge of the tin. "Even when he pretended he didn't."

I think of Micah sitting on the porch rail, stealing tomatoes before they were ripe enough, complaining about mulch prices like an eighty-year-old man, swatting at wasps with theatrical hatred. I think of him in Colorado only because now I can think of both at once without feeling like one cancels the other.

Mom tips the tin.

The ash falls into the loosened earth in a pale line and then disappears when I pull the dirt back over it.

Nothing dramatic happens. The lavender does not bow. The roses do not tremble. A bee goes on about its business.

Mom presses the soil flat with her palm.

"There," she says softly.

A different there.

I water the patch because that is what one does with new things, even when the new thing is old sorrow finding another address.

When we're done, we stand together at the fence and look at the row.

"He got his view," Mom says. "And he got his garden."

I feel something in me settle around that. Not close. Settle.

That afternoon I drive past the church without stopping, then circle back and pull into the lot anyway.

I don't go inside. Not yet. I sit there with the engine off and the windows down and look at the white clapboard and the listing steeple and the side door I used to use on Wednesdays.

Wednesday, Jude said.

I can do Wednesday.

The thought doesn't feel brave. It feels practical.

I start the car.

Go home.