Come back in February. You'll wait. I'm not going anywhere, Victoria. She held his gaze for a moment with the expression of a person who has spent 30 years not fully trusting the thing they most need to trust and who is choosing consciously carefully at some cost to trust it anyway. Okay, she said quietly.
Lucas stirred. He resettled without waking, pressed his face against Daniel's shoulder, went still again. She left at 10:45. He walked her to the door. She put on her coat, picked up the salad bag she'd forgotten in the kitchen and come back for and stood at the door with the cold coming in from outside.
Merry Christmas, Daniel. Merry Christmas, Victoria. She looked at him for one moment longer. Then she walked to the Volvo and drove away, and the tail lights disappeared at the end of the block, and he closed the door against the cold. He carried Lucas to bed heavier every month.
Now the boy was growing without permission and pulled the covers up and stood in the doorway. The way he always did. Lucas opened one eye. She's coming back, he said. In February.
Good, he closed the eye. The garage is better with three. Daniel stood in the doorway for a moment longer. Sleep, he said. Sleeping.
Lucas confirmed already most of the way there. January went the way Januaries go long and cold and quiet in the particular way of a month that exists mostly to make you earn the next one. Daniel worked his shifts. He attended his mentorship sessions. He finished the Chevelle.
He started a new project, a neighbor two streets over, had a 1969 Mustang Mach 1 that needed a full engine rebuild, which was the kind of work that required planning before touching the kind of work you could think about for weeks before you picked up the first tool. And he thought about it at night after Lucas was asleep, the way you think about something you're looking forward to. He texted Victoria twice briefly. She texted back she'd found the house in Virginia, a small white clapboard house on a county road still standing privately owned, but the owners had let her walk the property when she'd explained who she was looking for. She'd found the river.
She'd sat beside it for a long time. She didn't describe what she'd said, and he didn't ask because some things are complete in themselves and don't need to be reported. She came back the first Saturday of February. He heard the Volvo before he saw it. He was in the garage with the Mustang's hood up, and Lucas was on the milk crate with a library book, and Jimmy's folding chair was already in its spot.
Even though Jimmy wasn't in it yet, because he'd texted that he'd be over by noon. The sound of the engine on the driveway, the particular way it stopped, and then the door closing. Lucas looked up from his book. "She's back," he said. She's back, Daniel confirmed.
She came around the corner into the garage bay with the thermos under her arm and something else in her other hand. A small book hard cover worn at the corners. She looked at the Mustang first the way she always clocked whatever the current project was, then at Lucas, then at Daniel. She looked different, not dramatically, not in a way a stranger would notice, but he noticed. There was less held in her face, less of the compressed quality that had been there since October.
The sense of something being managed behind the eyes. She looked like someone who had set a thing down that she'd been carrying for too long, and her posture had changed with the absence of the weight. "You got a Mustang," she said. 1969 Mach 1 full engine rebuild. She walked over and looked into the engine bay.
Your father would have had opinions about this one too, she said. Strong ones, he said. In favor. She looked at him. And then she did something she hadn't done before.
She closed the distance and held out her hand. And when he took it, she held it for a moment. Both hands, the way you hold something after you've been away from it. Hi, she said. Hi, he said.
Lucas made no comment, which was a heroic act of restraint. She sat on her crate. She set the hardcover book on the workbench. He saw that it was a journal, not printed, handwritten, the cover worn from being carried. She put the thermos down and poured into the two mugs he'd set out.
"I wrote things," she said. "In Virginia, a lot of things. Things I needed to say, things I'd been thinking since October. Things my father would have said back if he could have." She looked at the journal.
My therapist suggested it. I wasn't sure I was the kind of person who journals. Turns out I am in the right circumstances. Did it help? Lucas asked.
Yes, she said. More than I expected. What kind of things, Lucas? Daniel started. No, it's all right.
She looked at Lucas directly. About my father? About the things I should have said and didn't? About the things I'm still learning? She paused.
About what I want my life to look like going forward. The real version, not the impressive version. Lucas nodded seriously. Did you figure it out? The real version?
She looked at the garage, at the Mustang, at the workbench with its organized tools, at the coffee maker, at the fish magnet and the crayon drawing on the refrigerator visible through the door to the kitchen. At Daniel. I think I'm in it, she said. I think that's what figuring it out looks like. Not arriving somewhere, just being in the right thing.
Lucas appeared to find this philosophically satisfying. Dad says something like that, he said. He says home isn't a place, it's a practice. Victoria looked at Daniel. He shrugged slightly.
Smart kid, she said. He has his moments, Daniel said. Lucas accepted this with the dignified composure of someone who has heard it 400 times and intends to hear it 400 more. The Saturday morning went the way Saturday mornings went work and coffee and questions and the occasional philosophical detour that only happens when a 10-year-old is in the room and nobody is trying to perform anything. Jimmy appeared at noon with a container of his wife's cornbread.
Unsolicited appearing specifically so he could hand it to Daniel and say, "This is what good cornbread tastes like. Take notes." And sat in his folding chair and asked Victoria how Virginia was. And she told him. And Jimmy listened with the full attention of a man who understands that the stories people bring back from necessary journeys are worth hearing completely.
At 2:00 in the afternoon, when Lucas had gone inside, and Jimmy had folded his chair and gone home with the self-satisfied air of someone whose afternoon has been well spent, Daniel and Victoria stood at the end of the driveway in the February cold. She had the thermos in one hand and the journal in the other. She looked at him. I've been thinking about something since Virginia. She said, "About what I want to say to you and how to say it right."