Joe
I’M FLOATING IN THE WORLD BETWEEN ASLEEP AND awake, where my body
lacks weight and the world is emptied of colour, in those moments before the dim light of reality gives way to the vividness of dreams. Where sound is funnelled through drowsiness, and the world on the other side of closed eyelids feels close but far away at the same time. I’m navigating my way to sleep when I hear voices, two of them, approach my door. One voice, I know, belongs to Leah. The other is achingly familiar. I shiver under three layers of blankets, but not from the cold. The door opens and Leah peeks in.
“I brought someone to see you.”
“Hello, Joe.” Cora walks in behind our daughter. Through my eyes, blurry with medication, I take her in. Her waist is still small, her legs short and solid, her smile thin. Time has given her wrinkles around her mouth and eyes, silver threads of hair have appeared where auburn used to be and, I’m ashamed to say, her nose is a little crooked.
“Cora.” Her name falls from my mouth and takes my breath. The warmth of embarrassment rushes to my shallow cheeks when I try to sit up. I’m weak and I fall back onto my pillow. Cora bends down and touches my hand. I move mine and gently set it on top of hers, taking in our skin, together. Skin that used to be taut and young and in love. Her skin is the soft that comes with aging. Not paper thin, not yet. Soft like melted ice cream. She lets our hands rest together for a moment before she slips hers out from under mine and retreats to the end of the bed.
“Good to see you,” she says as she tucks the blanket around my feet. I’m surprised to feel desire—the same desire I felt for her the day I walked into the garage and she was sitting in my chair behind the register. Desire in the dying is a cruel trick.
An uneasy quiet settles on the room. Leah sits on the other bed, her legs crossed, her back against the wall. She looks at her mother and not at me. Waiting. Cora picks at the small pills of fabric dotting my blanket.
“I never told you I’m sorry.” The words spill out despite the heaviness behind them. In my mind, I have apologized a hundred times. Lying awake at night, I tried to find the right words to make her forgive me. But there were no right words. I know that now. “And I am sorry. You never deserved anything I did to you.”
“No, I didn’t.” She sets her hands on her lap. “But that’s the past.”
“I don’t know why.” I coughed to clear the saliva caught at the back of my throat. “I’ve asked myself so many times, and I don’t have an answer.”
“Those boys you used to call friends went around telling the town that you couldn’t hold your alcohol and your Indian demons took over.” She took a deep breath. “That broke your dad’s heart. He thought the people around here had . . . changed, I guess. I told them it had nothing to do with that and everything to do with your foul temper.”
“Thank you for defending me.”
“I wasn’t defending you, Joe. I was setting the record straight. There’s no defence for what you did.”
“Well, thank you, anyway.”
Leah sat on the other bed watching her parents speak to one another for the first time.
“The thing I never understood is why you never came home. After all those years, even when Mae told you about Leah, when your dad died, you never came back.”
“I always thought Leah was better off without me.”
“I guess we’ll never know. But you should have come home,” Cora said.
“You’re not wrong, Cora.” It felt nice and familiar to say her name after all those years.
AFTER I STOLE my dad’s truck and almost ran down Archie Johnson alongside the highway, I kept going. I drove past tiny towns with names born on the other side of the ocean. Truro, Londonderry, Amherst. I passed off-ramps that led to red cliffs, which retreated from heaving tides. I drove through the green woods of New Brunswick, stopping only for gas and something to eat. The money I’d stolen and the little bit I had in my wallet
weren’t going to last, but that didn’t worry me. I had other things on my mind. I still had blood on my jeans, and each time I looked down at it, I pushed that gas pedal harder.
When I was almost to the border that New Brunswick shares with Quebec, I pulled in to a truck stop and paid twenty-five cents for a shower and an extra nickel for a towel and a tiny bar of soap. It scratched more than it cleaned and left me with little red lines etched on my skin. I tried to wash the blood out of my jeans, but it was stubborn, a permanent testament to my misdeeds. With a clean body and a spot on my jeans the colour of rust, I passed out of the Maritimes and into unfamiliar land. I went west, like people searching for something seem to do. I drove through Quebec with only two stops to gas up and an extra to take a piss alongside the road. I bypassed the cities. They might have been great places to get lost in, but I was looking for a different kind of lost. I needed to lose that part of myself that could hurt someone I claimed to love, and I needed to do that alone.
AT THE END of the bed, Cora shifts her weight and leans over my thin legs. “You could’ve come home. You could have faced the thing you did. Maybe we wouldn’t have lasted, but you could’ve been a father.”
For a moment, I feel that distant yet ugly and familiar swell of anger. For just an instant, I want to yell at her: If I’d known I was a father earlier, maybe I would have come back. But I don’t. I close my eyes and let the anger that I have no right to hold dissolve. After all, it wasn’t Cora who left, who decided that I couldn’t be a father. The only person I have a right to be angry with is myself.
“I almost did. Once. The police somewhere in Ontario found me asleep in the truck. I assumed he knew the truck was stolen and he was going to drag me out and send me home in handcuffs.” I stop, remembering how hard my heart was beating when he tapped on the window, waking me from a deep sleep. “But he was just checking to make sure I was alive. Told me to keep driving. So, I did. Dad never reported the truck as stolen, a kindness I didn’t deserve.”
“Strange to think what would have happened if your dad did report that truck as stolen, if they did send you home,” Cora says.
I look over at Leah, who just smiles quietly.
“Dad, why didn’t you come back? Even after you found out about me.”
I nearly cry with the sound of the word Dad, almost whispered, somehow sacred. Maybe only to me. Cora doesn’t seem to notice, and Leah just looks at me, waiting for an answer. The words grow thick and heavy on my tongue as I try to dissolve the lump in my throat.
“I wanted to, and I tried. But what I did to your mom and to my family . . . I wasn’t fit. And it wasn’t because I didn’t love you. The moment Mae told me about you, I loved you more than anything in this world.” I stop to take a breath. Even talking is starting to exhaust me. “But you couldn’t miss me if I screwed up again and left again. It wasn’t like Mom. She knew Ruthie. She knew Charlie. Her grief was for people she knew and loved. I couldn’t cause you grief if you didn’t know me. I’m not making any sense, am I?”
Leah shrugs and hands me my glass of water.
“So, I did the only thing I knew how: I stayed away and sent money.” “Money is not a substitute for a father or for a son.” Leah is wise, like
Mae.
“No, you’re right, and there is nothing more I can say to defend how I’ve behaved, except I’m sorry.”
BY THE TIME I got to Sault Ste. Marie, I’d had nothing to eat but Pepsi and potato chips for three days, and I needed a meal, something hot and substantial. But I was broke. I pulled into a gas station on the edge of town, hoping to find someone who might need some temporary work, enough to get me a hot shower and a meal.
The little bell rang above the door when I entered. The man leaning against the counter stood up straight and eyed me.
“You know of any work I could get around here?” I asked, standing up a little straighter, hands stuffed into my pockets.
The garage attendant took in my clothes and tired face. “Not for you.” He wrinkled his nose as he took my money.
“I’ll give you work.”
I turned to see an older man, dark-skinned like myself and a full foot taller, standing in the doorway, waiting to pay.
“You paint a house?” he said. “I can paint.”
He reached around me and paid the attendant. “Follow me.”
I followed him to the pumps and a brand new Chevy pickup truck, blue with a beaded feather hanging in the window. Dad’s old truck looked pitiful next to it. I followed close behind him, past manicured lawns and ice cream stands, until we stopped at a two-storey house with a nice lawn that sat at the end of a road. Behind the house were barren fields and high grass. I climbed out of the truck and noticed white flecks of paint littering the lawn just under the eaves. Scaffolding had been put up, but no painters were in sight.
“I hired a young guy to do the work, a local. He scraped it, took the first week’s pay, and I haven’t seen him since.”
In the garage was a well-equipped gun rack, an ATV and a deer hung up, ready to be dressed. He pointed to the paint cans on the floor. “How long you think it’ll take to paint the whole thing?”
I walked back out and around the house.
“Two coats, one side a day. Two sides are smaller than the others. It’s summer, so I can work later. Six days, maybe.”
“Great, you start tomorrow.” He put on a pair of thick leather gloves and grabbed a skinning knife. The handle was wide and the blade even wider. He turned toward the deer, its tongue protruding, its eyes opaque.
“I was kind of hoping I could start today.” If there is divine providence, it showed itself then with a growl from my stomach. His eyes narrowed before his mouth turned up at the edges.
“How about I pay you for the first day and you start tomorrow morning, sun-up.” He took off one glove, reached into his wallet and handed me fifteen dollars. I took it and headed toward my truck. I was grateful, but he didn’t need to know. I don’t like someone holding that kind of power over me.
“Sun-up,” I hollered over my shoulder.
A diner I’d passed earlier was filling up with customers for supper when I pulled in the parking lot, nearly losing a wheel to a pothole. The sign on the inside said “Seat Yourself,” with a smiley face drawn in pencil in the corner. I grabbed one of the postcards, which sat in a little metal holder, and when the waitress came to take my order, I asked for a pen. I ordered the cheeseburger with fries and a Pepsi, and then turned the postcard over to write.
“Mom and Dad, I’m so sorry.” I tried to say more, but the words faded into the grease-soaked air of the diner. I turned the card over, picture side
up, leaving my apology alone in the dark.
Food doesn’t have the same effect on me now as it did that day. Everything has a metallic taste since I started those treatments first designed to cure me, then designed to keep me around just a little bit longer. I quit them a few weeks ago. If I’d known then that the treatment would be useless, I’d have said no to the needles, the chemo, just so I could taste things like I used to. But on that day, that cheeseburger was the best thing I’d ever eaten. The grease oozed out the moment I bit in, scorched my lip and left a little red blister, but I didn’t care. My plate clean, I took my postcard and asked for directions to the post office. I mailed the postcard, the first of many I sent in place of myself. Mom reminds me still, even when I’m lying here dying, that I broke her heart, never calling, never coming home to see her.
“All my kids left me. Disappeared, died, ran away. I wonder sometimes what I did to deserve it.” She drinks a bit of whiskey now that she’s older. “No need to save the liver when everything else is on its way out,” she likes to say.
I showed up at the man’s house as the sun was creeping up over the back fields.
“Glad you came back.” He threw his cigarette on the ground, crushed it under his boot and pointed to the stack of paint cans.
It took seven and a half days to finish that house. It was hot and the bugs were nasty. At the end of the fourth day, as I was washing my head under the hose, he came out of the house with a beer in each hand and tried to give me one.
“No, thank you. Makes me angry.”
“Fair enough. More for me. But will you at least stay and have a shower? I can smell you from inside.”
I tried to say no, but he wasn’t having it. I will admit that the hot water felt good. I watched the dirt pool at my feet before it slipped down the drain. While I showered, the man took my filthy clothes off the toilet seat and put a robe in their place, then threw my clothes into the washing machine. When I hollered in protest, he ignored me, so I had no choice but to tie the robe around my waist and follow as he led me to the backyard and barbecued hamburgers. He served them with cool slices of cucumber drowning in vinegar and salt.
“You got a story?” He handed me a glass of water as I buttoned the cuff of an old shirt he said he didn’t wear anymore, over my clean T-shirt still warm from the dryer.
“Everyone has a story.”
“You seem too young to have a story of any interest.”
“I’m not.” I think he wanted more, but I wasn’t giving it. “Thank you for all this. I’ll be back in the morning.”
He paid me every second day, so I could afford a hot meal one night and chips and pop the next. I went to a different parking lot every night and rested my head against the back window of the truck, my arms crossed over my chest. It wasn’t uncomfortable, though. I was too tired by the end of each day to even consider comfort. But on the last day, when the empty paint cans were neatly stacked in the garage, and the light-blue house looked bright and new, he tried to hand me a hundred dollars, the ten-dollar bills spread out on the table like a fan.
“No, sir. You already gave me some. We agreed to fifteen a day.” “Well, you did a great job and you finished it.”
As I reached for the money, he slapped his hand down on top of the fan of cash.
“You told me that everyone has a story. I wanna know yours,” he said.
I could feel that little flame of anger burning right in the middle of my chest.
“A young man showing up this far from home.” His hand stayed where it was. Mine hovered like a child’s begging for candy. “Something is making you all dark and moody.”
“I lost my sister when I was six, I let my brother die when I was fifteen, and I left my wife bloody and bruised two weeks ago. That’s my story.”
He nodded slowly before he lifted his hand. I took the cash and refused to look him in the eye. The garage door was still open, and a case of beer sat by the stack of paint cans. I grabbed the beer, placed it on the passenger seat beside me and headed farther away from everything and everyone I’d ever known.
I PUT MY hands under me on the bed and shift my body, trying to get comfortable. “That money got me further west. When I ran out, I stopped to help a man on a farm for a few days, and that got me even further.”
“Where were you going?” Leah cocks her head to the side and rests her cheek in the palm of her hand.
“I had no idea. I just kept driving.”
ON THE PRAIRIES, it’s said that you can watch your dog run away for ten days. I believe it. That land stretched on forever, as flat and boring as a place can be. I could’ve crossed the Prairies in a day, but my God, it was hard staying awake with nothing to look at and a few beers swirling around in my belly, making my head all loose. I’d gone through the case I stole trying to get out of Ontario, and I stole some more outside of Winnipeg. A homeless woman wearing no shoes and clutching a two-dollar bill was making a stink in the beer store, and I took advantage of the situation. I tucked a bottle of whiskey—one of those big ones in plastic—under my arm and walked out while she cursed the clerk in a language I’d never heard. I bought a few bottles of pop at a convenience store next door and took turns, a little whiskey for the burn and a little sugar to cool it down.
For no reason in particular, I got off the highway in Swift Current and made my way down to the grasslands just north of the border. A dirt road cut through fields of tall grass abandoning their green in preparation for winter. The yellow stalks swayed with the wind—Mother Nature running her fingers through her hair. It seemed to me that the horizon moved farther away the closer I got. Clouds, every colour of grey, began to settle on the line between land and sky. Then they started to pile on top of one another so casually I barely noticed, until a flash of lightning erupted from a dark cloud directly in front of me. I pulled over and opened the door to breathe in some of that heavy prairie air—the air that comes before a storm, full of moisture and electricity. The land was so vast and quiet that I could imagine myself as the only person on earth.
“What the hell are you doing out here?”
I shook so hard at the sound of another voice that I thought for a moment that I’d pulled every muscle in my body.
“There’s a storm coming.”
I turned to see a woman, Indian for sure, around my age. She was wearing jeans and a bright yellow T-shirt. She was carrying long stalks of grass in her arms. I looked around for a car but there was none, just a woman in the middle of nowhere, carrying an armful of grass.
“Where’d you come from?” I said.
“My mother. Same as you.” She winked at me and leaned against the truck. “Just so you know, I can outrun you in case you think these fields would be a good place to commit a crime against me. And I hide a good, sharp knife somewhere on my body. I can reach it faster than you can get to me.”
“I have no intention of hurting anyone.” My heart had just started to slow back down when a strike of lightning burst from the clouds, followed by a peal of thunder. “What’s your name?”
She sat down on the ditch’s edge, a couple feet from me. “I don’t go giving my name out to every stranger I meet. Does it matter if you don’t know my name?”
“I guess not.”
She was strange, but there was something calming about her. We sat quietly, eyeing the clouds, waiting for the rain.
“Do you want to know my name?” I said. “Only if you want to give it to me.”
“Joe.”
“Joe.” She reached up to push some stray hair behind her ear. “So, what are you doing all the way out here in a truck that belongs on the other side of the country, Joe?” She pointed to the licence plate.
“I just needed to get away.” “So, you’re running.”
“We’re all running from something.”
“Well, well, aren’t you the Indian philosopher king.” “I don’t know what that means.”
She didn’t say a thing, just sat there and looked at me as I looked out over the grass. “You going to judge me?” I said to break the silence.
“Hell no, I have no judgments. I don’t know you, Joe. You just look like one of those Indians who goes out into the grass to find themselves.” She laughed at this. “Better than the white folks, I guess. They come out here to off themselves.”
Another bolt of lightning ripped across the sky, followed closely by a deep growl of thunder.
“I hope this rain holds until I get home. I got new shoes. Wouldn’t want to ruin them before I get to properly break them in.” She lifted up her leg to show off a new sneaker, white with black laces.
Unlike the man whose house I’d painted, she made me feel at ease sitting out here in the middle of nowhere. There was so much empty space for thoughts to escape into. I tried to rein mine in, but I opened my mouth and one just flowed out: “Do you think we’re sour? Do we Indians have something in our blood that makes us bad?”
She laughed at the same time the thunder clapped, drowning it out. It was eerie, watching her throw her head back, her silent laugh bordered by the dirt road, the grass moving faster now under the low, dark clouds.
“The only thing sour right now is your smell, and a quick shower will help with that. Where’d you get the idea we’re sour?”
“I heard it once a long time ago, and since then, everything has just kinda gone wrong.”
“Wrong how?”
“People seem to need to get away from me. And sometimes I help them along.” I held up my hand. The last of the bruising was hard to see in the faded light. The cut where my knuckles found Cora’s teeth was now a thinning white line against my brown skin.
She took my hand in hers, inspected it and then placed it back in my lap. She didn’t ask about the scars; she didn’t need to. I stayed quiet as we watched the first raindrops crater the dry earth with their heaviness.
“You know what I think, Joe?” She placed her hands at her sides, palms on the ground, ready to lift herself up. “I think that we all do bad things, but that don’t always make us bad people.” She stood above me, looking down, the dark skies above drowning out the contours of her face.
“Maybe you have bad luck, but there is nothing sour in us. We’ve been through shit, remember. Every one of us alive today comes from something bad done to the family that came before us. You being alive is a goddamn miracle, so no more talk about sour blood. Own your mistakes, make amends and move on. We owe that to those who didn’t make it.” She dusted herself off and bent to pick up the grass she’d been carrying. “You want to give me a lift?”
As we got in the truck, the skies opened. The sound of the rain on the roof and the gravel under the tires put an end to conversation as she guided me to the end of the dirt road, her long, slender finger pointing straight ahead. On the corner was a small house painted a patchwork of colours and designs. Gardens overflowing with flowers and vegetables surrounded the
house. The leaves on the fruit trees shuddered under the thrumming of the rain.
“Nice house.”
“I like things to be beautiful.” She opened the door. “You wait here, Joe.” She laid the grass on the front stoop, went into her garden and started hauling food from the land and off the trees. She came back wet with a bundle of carrots, some radishes and a few apples, and handed them to me through the window.
“Good luck, Joe. I hope you find some peace.” “I’m glad I found you. Thank you.”
“No need for thanks, just take care.”
She slapped the side of the truck and ran for the house. I watched as the water fell hard and constant, obscuring everything on the other side of the windshield. I felt a keen sadness when she disappeared into the house, shutting the white door painted with flowers tight against the storm.
When the rain started to settle into a steady rhythm, one my windshield wipers could keep up with, I found my way back to the main road. The radio was useless in a storm this loud, so I drove on with only my thoughts and the sound of the rain. I drove until the grey clouds were far behind me, a reflection in the rear-view mirror.
“SOMETHING ABOUT HER brought me comfort, the same kind of comfort I found in you.” I turn to face Cora, who looks up from the blanket and smiles. “I went back there a few times to see if she might want to see me again, but I never stopped the truck, never got out and knocked on that door. Until the last time. But that story is for another day.”
The room is quiet as Leah and Cora look down at their hands and I look up at the ceiling yellowed by decades of cigarette smoke.
“You feel things too quick and too heavy, Joe. Love, hate, guilt, anger. You need to let those things go sometimes,” Cora says, her head tilted at an angle.
“I guess it doesn’t matter anymore now.” I try to laugh at my own approaching death, but neither Cora nor Leah smiles.
THE DAY AFTER I met the woman in the field, I stopped near the Badlands and got work as a hired hand, shovelling shit, making repairs, everything
just short of being a cowboy. I stayed to myself and found a few books in the bunkhouse, Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey. I stayed on for over a year, reading and rereading those same books, my arms growing stringy with muscle, my back tightening and my skin getting weathered. I saved the money I earned and kept it safe.
When I tired of the work, I drove clear to the ocean, one so similar and yet so different from the one I knew. The mountains seemed to grow right out of the water. The waves were bigger, warmer. The kelp iridescent. The trees were always wet and smelled of life. I got a job in a lumber camp hours from the ocean and any town that dared be named. I left the truck in the company parking lot and boarded the shuttle for life in the camp, three weeks at a time. I cooked food and scrubbed toilets for good money. I slept on a narrow cot in a room with three other guys. I got used to mosquitos the size of birds, and the red welts they left on my skin. It was a dry camp and my saving grace. On my weeks off, I liked to hike into the mountains, fish by quiet streams, pick berries and sit by a fire at night. In the winter, I’d snowshoe through thick snow, sit in the sulphuric hot springs far enough away from civilization that I was often the only one there. On clear nights, I swear, I could see the whole sky. I’d lie on my back like Ruthie and I did the night before she disappeared, and watch the stars make their nightly journey. I wondered if she was out there somewhere, under that same sky. Once, I stayed in a one-room cabin for a week in the winter, and it reminded me of the times with Dad in the woods, when I’d trace the outlines of animals carved into the walls and eat Aunt Lindy’s bread with warm molasses. I sent postcards every once in a while, each time from a different location, letting Mom know I was fine. I never called and never asked about Cora. I didn’t want to know.
When you spend as much time alone as I did, you think a lot, and my thoughts tended to rest on my mother, and the weight of her grief. She got to bury Charlie, a cruel blessing but an ending. With Ruthie, there was no resolution, just a void where a child should have been. So many years were spent wondering where she was, what she looked like, if she was happy, if she was alive. Dad grieved too, we all knew, but his grief was harder to define. He kept it close. It wasn’t until a surprise call from Mae that I understood that I was a third child gone, but I was too selfish to go home, to be there for all of them. I made so many mistakes.
Despite my best efforts, they did find me. Once. A guy in the lumber camp, a quiet, skinny guy with eyes that watered continuously, came from a town near mine back home, and I’d made the mistake of befriending him. There’s something about someone knowing where you’re from, I guess. Someone who knows what you mean when you say “the Valley,” pronounces Bay of Fundy correctly and knows that Musquodoboit is a place and not just a bunch of letters thrown together haphazard-like. But he got homesick and left a couple months in. He was home only a week when the phone at the camp rang and it was for me.
“Hello?”
“Jesus Christ, it is you.” Mae was almost yelling. “Mae, I don’t want to—”
“I don’t care what you want.”
“How did you get this number?”
“Skinny fella stopped into the garage and said he worked with you. Apparently, you never told him you disappeared and wanted it to stay that way.” Mae stopped to take a breath. “Now listen to me: Mom and Dad are worried sick and have been for all these years. Eight years, Joe. Who up and leaves their family for eight years? I was right when I called you the most selfish man there ever was.”
“Mae—”
“Nope, I’m mad at you, so you don’t get to talk right now. You have responsibilities and you need to come home. Stop moping around out there in the woods and get your ass back here.”
“No.”
The line was silent.
“You got a kid, Joe. A girl. I promised Cora I wasn’t going to tell you, but something has to make you see sense.”
“You’re lying, Mae.”
I could hear my heart beating in my ears and sweat started to form on my forehead. I had a kid, a daughter?
“I’m not lying. You gotta come home, take care of your family.”
“I can’t, Mae. You know what I did to Cora. I can’t, Mae. What if I . . .” “What if you what?”
“I can’t be that man, Mae. I can’t be a father.”
“So, what do you want me to tell Cora? Mom and Dad? Leah?” “Leah?”
“That’s your girl, Joe. The one who needs a father.” “I can’t.”
“I guess I’ll tell them that you just don’t care?”
“You know that ain’t true, Mae. Don’t be that way. Tell them I’m fine.
I’ve been doing just fine.”
“Mom and Dad are getting older, Joe, and Ben works full time, and I have my own kids to think of, too.”
Mae had kids? In my mind, Mae stayed fixed like that star at the end of the pot handle of the Little Dipper. How had the world moved on like that?
“I’m sorry, Mae, but I just can’t.”
Mae took a deep breath to ready herself for another volley, and that breath was the last thing I heard before I set the receiver down and walked away from the phone. My hands were still dripping water and the pots still needed to be scrubbed.
Three days later, when the shuttle dropped us off in town for two weeks of freedom, I took almost all my money, leaving just enough to get by until my next pay, and sent it home in one of those big envelopes with a postcard that said, “For Leah, I hope this helps.” Then I threw a backpack in the truck with everything I owned and headed into the mountains.
“YOU’RE A FOOLISH man, Joe. Foolish.” Cora stands up to leave, her hand on her back to steady herself.
“I suppose I was.” I’m short of breath; the telling of the story has taken a lot out of me. And I’m so tired, but I want to sit here with Cora and Leah, to keep this moment going for as long as my body can sustain it.
“No need to suppose. You were.” She grabs her purse off the floor, walks over to Leah and places a kiss on her forehead. “I’m gonna walk back into town. I need the fresh air. It was good seeing you, Joe. I hope you find favour with the Lord. I’ll pray for it.”
“Thank you, Cora. Thank you for everything.” I nod toward our daughter, and Cora lets her hand rest on the top of my foot before leaving and shutting the door behind her.
Leah leaves to get me a glass of water and some crackers for my sick belly.
When I wake, long after the sun set but before it stains the horizon in the morning, Leah is asleep on the bed beside me, her hands curled under
her chin like a child, and I feel, just for a moment, what it would have been like to know her as a little girl.
