I didn't always believe it. There were years when I didn't believe much of anything. She looked at Boon, but he was right. Boon said nothing. There was nothing useful to add to that.
On the first Thursday of December, Coach Foster read the squad list in the Mil Haven High Gymnasium at 4:15 in the afternoon. Ren's name was on it. The Black girl who had entered the school as an outsider had earned a place on the squad on the strength of her work. She didn't jump, didn't make a sound. She stood straight and said, "Thank you, Coach Foster. " That was the entirety of her response. Foster looked at her the way a person looked at someone they'd been watching for months and had already arrived at a conclusion about.
"You earned it," Foster said. "That's the whole of it. " Ren called Boon from the hallway outside the gym. Her voice was completely level. The voice she used when she was containing something larger than she'd calculated how to express. "I made the squad," she said.
"I know. " Boon said he'd known for 3 weeks. He'd been watching Foster watch Ren and had understood what he was seeing. "I just wanted to tell you," Ren said. "I'm glad you did," Boon said. She hung up.
He sat in the garage a few minutes after the radio off. The evening coming down over Larkin Street early now the way December evenings came down fast in Tennessee. He thought about the morning they'd pulled into Mil Haven. The thin line of light on the hills. Ren asleep against the window with her arm around her backpack.
The sign on the highway with the population count and the founding date. All that accumulated history before they arrived. All that weight of a place that had been here long before either of them. He thought about what she'd said at the kitchen table in the first week. Testing the words the way you tested ice.
This place I think it could be the one she'd known before he did. She'd known the way she knew most things. Not from certainty, but from paying close attention and being willing to trust what she observed. He drove out to Route 9 on his way home. He'd been here once before early in November, not knowing exactly why he'd come.
He knew better now. The cemetery was quiet in the December cold. The cedar tree Ruth had mentioned was easy to find, still green in the way she'd said Walt had appreciated philosophically. The stone beneath it was simple. Walter James Callahan, 957, 2015.
The dates on either side of a dash that contained everything. Boon stood there in the cold without a speech prepared. He wasn't that kind of man. And everything he'd come to understand about Walt suggested. Walt wasn't that kind of man either.