Chapter 10 - The Horizon Ahead
By November, the house on Maple Street had begun to feel like a home again.
Renee had moved into a two-bedroom apartment near the highway on the east side of town. The $14,000 she had siphoned had been fully recovered and locked into an irrevocable trust managed exclusively by David Vance, ensuring that every cent of Walter’s legacy would remain untouched until Elsie turned twenty-one.
Jonah spent four days a week with me and Elsie. We had set up a homework desk in the den where the two of them sat side-by-side every afternoon, working through math worksheets and spelling lists. On weekends, Arthur came down from Newton to teach Jonah how to change the oil in the lawnmower and help Elsie construct a birdhouse for the maple tree in the front yard.
I had given up my long-haul western routes.
With the help of my dispatcher, Frank, who had turned out to be far more understanding than I gave him credit for, I transitioned to a dedicated regional route. I pulled a flatbed between Wichita, Topeka, and Kansas City. Every single evening by 5:30 PM, my truck was parked at the local terminal, and my boots were on the front porch of the house on Maple Street.
On a crisp Tuesday evening, three weeks after the party, Elsie and I were sitting at the kitchen table.
The lopsided banner was long gone; the walls had been patched and painted a warm, creamy butterscotch that Natalie had always loved. In the center of the table was a glass vase filled with dried wheat and scarlet leaves that Elsie had gathered on her walk home from the bus stop.
She was working on a social studies project, carefully gluing photographs to a poster board.
“Daddy?” she asked without looking up from her glue stick.
“Yeah, baby?”
“Are we going to keep Jonah’s baseball pictures in the hallway?”
I paused, looking up from the route manifests I was reviewing. “Of course we are. Why do you ask?”
She set the glue stick down and looked at me with her large, dark eyes—eyes that looked so much like Natalie’s that sometimes it felt like looking through a window into the past.
“Because,” she said softly, “Nana used to take my pictures down when you went on the road. She put them in the drawer in the laundry room so Jonah’s trophies had more room on the shelf.”
My heart twitched with an old, familiar ache, but I kept my voice calm, warm, and steady.
I stood up, walked around the table, and pulled out the chair beside her.
“Elsie, look at me.”
She turned her face toward mine.
“Nobody is ever putting your pictures in a drawer again,” I told her, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “Not in this house. Not anywhere in this world. You and Jonah have the same amount of room on every single shelf in this family. Do you understand me?”
She looked at me for a long moment, studying my face with the quiet wisdom that children develop when they’ve seen too much sadness too soon.
Then, she reached into her pencil box and pulled out a small, flat object.
It was the silver marker from her classroom countdown chain.
She took a piece of purple construction paper from her folder, pressed the marker down firmly, and wrote three words in large, bold letters:
*WE LIVE HERE.*
She handed the paper to me.
“Can we tape this on the front door, Daddy?” she asked. “So everybody knows before they come inside?”
“Yeah, Elsie,” I said, picking up the tape from the counter, my chest swelling with a feeling that was lighter and cleaner than anything I had felt since Walter died. “We can put it right on the glass.”
May you like
We walked to the front door together. I held the corners while Elsie pressed the tape down, smoothing the edges until the purple paper sat flat against the solid oak.
Outside, the autumn wind rustled the leaves of the silver maple, but inside, the air was warm, smelling of cedar shavings, roasting chicken, and the sweet, lingering scent of strawberry sugar that refused to leave the room.
