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The easiest decision—and, in some ways, the hardest—was putting the failed Kinnick family sheep ranch up for sale. Of course, the place had gone seventy-five years without hosting an actual sheep, and it felt more like a crime scene than a ranch now, but Kinnick couldn’t help but feel the loss of it in his bones. He had rebuilt himself up there, following the hardest season of his life—at least until now. There were trees he would miss like old friends, and cloudless night skies, and surreal dawn light, and the tracks of visitors in the fresh snow. His biggest regret was not sharing it sooner with his family; imagine the bends in the creek he and Asher could’ve explored, the autumn colors Leah might have named. But he got a good price for it in the end, though he surely would’ve gotten more had he not insisted on carrying the contract, so that he could stipulate that the land not be subdivided or clear-cut. He got rid of the ancient Audi, too, and bought a used Outback like Brianand Joanie’s. He found a job as a starter at a golf course along the river, telling foursomes of old, retired guys when to tee off, when to “pick up the pace,” and reminding them to not leave empty beer bottles on the tee boxes. These are also trees, he tried to tell himself on the golf course, when he felt the loss of his forest refuge. This is also water.
He had coffee a few times with Lucy, who had managed to explain to Chuck why she couldn’t be his little buddy anymore. “He’s doing great,” she said, “fully recovered, back to work at the law firm, dating some woman he met when he returned her stolen jewelry box a few years back. He says he likes her because she’s not as complicated as I am. I said, ‘Damn right she’s not!’?”
One time at coffee with Lucy, Kinnick broached the subject of the two of them “you know, um, maybe, I mean, if you wanted to, perhaps seeing each other again, you know, in a more, well, romantic way,” Lucy doing him the favor of not bursting into laughter once he’d stammered all of this out.
Instead, she seemed to really consider it for a moment, before finally saying: “Rhys, you know how, sometimes, you’ll be in the kitchen, and you’ll decide you need a glass of wine, but you can’t find the fucking corkscrew? So, you try the usual drawers. And it’s like you’re gonna die if you don’t get this fucking wine bottle open, so you just keep opening the same two kitchen drawers, moving around peelers and graters and the can opener, because that’s where youusuallykeep the fucking corkscrew, and you’re sure you put it there, even though it’s pretty fucking clear by now that the corkscrew is not in those fucking drawers, but you just keep trying them anyway?
“Well,” she said, “I think it might be time for me to try a different drawer.”
Kinnick worked at the golf course from dawn to 3 p.m. so he could pick the kids up after school. He took Asher to his monthly junior chess club tournaments at the Episcopal Church in their new neighborhood, where the former boxer Brandon had officially made Reverend. At thefirst tournament, he introduced Asher to a recent Syrian immigrant named Abdel, who was eight, and whose English wasn’t great, but who had studied the game as intently as Asher had, and who played three strong games against him, winning two and drawing the third. Kinnick worried that his grandson would be discouraged, losing to a boy younger than him, but he wasn’t at all. “Did you see that? He opened with Ruy-Lopez, but he didn’t even do it right! Plus, his people invented chess. And I almost beat him in the third game! I’m getting better!”
Unlike his sister, Asher found hedidwant to keep going to church—he suddenly had a million questions about good and evil, about what happened to your soul after you died, about whether he would see his father again someday—and so Bethany began taking him on Sundays to her mother’s old Unitarian services, which, she admitted, were a bit bland and “woo-woo,” but, at least, she told her father at dinner one night, “no one is packing heat.”
One Saturday, the whole family went to see Cortland at the nursing home, but he was so far gone, the only person he seemed to recognize was Kinnick, who he mistook for his father.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” Cortland said.
Kinnick patted the old man’s wrinkled hand. “It’s okay,” he said. “You did your best.”
The next afternoon, a breezy October Sunday, Bethany offered to take Rhys to the place where she had scattered Celia’s remains.
He quickly agreed, and they went for a walk down a paved trail into the Spokane River gorge, then turned onto a dirt path that led to a small clearing alongside the river. Bethany said that because her mother had died so early in the spring, she hadn’t realized that this little meadow and beach often became a homeless encampment during the summer. That’s why, she explained to her father, she always brought a garbage bag, and used it to pick up the empty beer cans and drug foils, macaroni boxes and candy wrappers.
On that day, there was only a little bit of garbage, which they quickly gathered up, Bethany handing Rhys the mostly empty garbage sack and saying, “Give me a minute?”
“Of course,” he said, and she wandered away from him, toward the river’s edge, where she crouched down, and seemed to talk to herself for a few minutes. Rhys felt like he should give her some privacy, so he wandered downstream fifty feet. He stood there, listening to the water babble over ancient, exposed boulders. The river was incredibly low that fall, rocks and rebar and rounded old bricks emerging in the shallows, like prehistoric bones rising from the deep. Up along the canyon walls, sunlight made clouds of late-hatching caddis flies glow like lit candles above the treetops.
What a lovely spot, Rhys thought. Celia would’ve liked it here.
After a few minutes, Bethany stepped up beside him. “I come down here and talk to her sometimes,” she said, “catch her up on what’s going on.”
“I’ll bet she appreciates that,” Kinnick said. He wanted to tell his daughter that he wouldn’t mind having his own ashes scattered here, too, one day, but it seemed somehow presumptuous of him.
“Do you want to know what I said to her today?” Bethany asked. Kinnick nodded and she reached out and took her father’s hand. “I told her not to worry. You were home now.”