Tomas drove home after midnight with his kit bag on the passenger seat and his winnings, which had never existed, replaced by the printed sheet saying the fund was full and the lamp on the river path was funded besides. Rosa's house was dark except for the kitchen window. She had waited up in defiance of her own instructions to herself and made him tea he did not want and drank, and she examined his hands the way she had examined them after fights when he was twenty-two and pretending she did not, thumb across the knuckles, professional as a mechanic. "And the other one?" she said. "Walking," Tomas said. "Talking. Signed up for beginners." "Hm," Rosa said. "Your father said men only change at walking pace." "My father sold insurance." "He sold a great deal of it," she said, "in this town, to men who thought they were in a hurry." Sofia slept down the hall in the small room with the glow stars, her homework signed, her card for him propped on Rosa's dresser to be produced at breakfast: a crayon figure, taller than the houses, holding what was either a belt or a very stern snake. Rosa had written under it in pencil, at dictation: GOOD LUCK. DO NOT GET SQUASHED. He stood in the doorway a long moment, listening to his daughter breathe, the sound his whole life had been reorganised around when he was not looking, and then he went and slept on his mother's couch with his shoes lined up under the coffee table, like a boy, like a champion, like a man whose evening had ended exactly where evenings should.
The lamps went in during the first week of December, which in Alder Falls is not a metaphor. A contractor's crew in hi-vis jackets bored the post holes along the river path and the north walk in weather that made the evening news, and the parks crew, which on Tuesdays and Thursdays included whichever of the five had drawn the shift, fetched and held and swept and learned the names of tools. Josh Parnell discovered an unsuspected talent for conduit and talked, for the first time in anyone's hearing, about the electrician's course at the county college as if it were a thing a man might apply to rather than a thing other people did. Deacon Miles planted the two memorial benches with a level and a seriousness that shamed the professional crew's first attempt, and made them redo it. Ricky Solano, who had the least to say all autumn, said at the switching-on ceremony, to Grace, within Tomas's hearing, that he had walked his little sister down the river path at six o'clock the previous evening and she had not once asked to cross the road to the lit side, and he had understood the fund then in a way the judge's paperwork had not managed. Pete Kaminski took photographs for the council report and refused, politely and repeatedly, to be in any of them, until the last night, when the lamps came on the whole length of the park at once and the small crowd of neighbours and committee members and off-duty crew applauded the electricity, and someone got him from behind, mid-applause, lit from the front by the new light, looking like a man at a fireworks show.
The switching-on was held at four thirty because in December that is dusk. Tomas stood at the back with Rosa's hand in the crook of his arm — her own household had been promised the news by telephone the moment the lamps came on, and Rosa, who had knitted hats for the occasion in a colour the manufacturer had called ocean and the family called that blue, intended to report it with an eyewitness's authority. Grace stood on the low wall with the contractor's list and counted the lamps aloud as they came on, section by section, the river path first and then the long north walk, while the small crowd turned its face to each new pool of light the way congregations turn to windows. "We can walk here now," Rosa said, as the last section lit. "We always walked here," Tomas said. "Now the town can walk here at night," she said, "which is different, which is the whole point, which you know." "I do know," he said gravely, and they watched their park turn gold, section by section, like a page being read aloud by a slow reader.