sit. These are my crackers." The goldfish crackers were not in a bag. The
120
goldfish crackers were an archaeological stratum — ground into the carpet,
worked into the seat seams, crushed to an orange sediment across the whole
back bench, in layers, Sadie explained, that went back to Lubbock, and
possibly, in the deepest seam, to before the baby. "Mom says it's not worth
cleaning till we stop traveling. She says archaeologists will want it someday.
She says it's our layer."
"It's a good layer," Owen said gravely, and Sadie nodded, satisfied, and they
both looked at the orange sediment and at the car seat and at the ordinary
black car around it all, and Owen laughed — surprised by it, the laugh
arriving ahead of permission — and Sadie laughed too, gap-toothed, at her
own exhibit, and the two of them stood in the drive in the May sun laughing
like kids who had never had to watch anything, which, Owen understood
standing there, was not quite true of either of them and was exactly true of
that moment, and the moment was the one that counted. Paula and Sadie's
mother came out with plates then, and the pie was eaten standing up in an
unpacked kitchen, the way pie is eaten in houses that are becoming homes,
and on the walk back Paula said, "She seems nice," and Owen said, "Sadie
says the tree at school is climbable to the second fork," and Paula said, "The
second fork and not one inch past it," and that was the whole of it, and the
whole of it was enough.
The last Saturday of May was the kind of day the county puts on its
brochures and then apologizes for the other eleven months. Owen took his
bike out in the morning for no errand at all, which was new — for two years
every ride had had a cargo of purpose on it — and he went the long way
without deciding to, out the lane and down past the Mosses' house, where
Sadie was attempting the front-yard elm with a rope and a great deal of
commentary, and on toward County Road 12, easy in the pedals, with the
121
wind doing what it does in May and the grass gone tall and green in the
ditches and the whole of the world engaged in the ordinary business of being
a road among roads. He did not hurry. There was nowhere he was due except
supper, and supper, in Paula's house, had a flexible border on Saturdays.
He stopped at the Elbow because the Elbow was there, and because some
places you stop the way you nod to a neighbor, out of a courtesy that has
become indistinguishable from affection. The rail ran silver around the curve.
The plaque sat in its stone at the head of it, with spring grass grown up
around the base and a lizard doing push-ups on the warm rock, and Owen
stood his bike against the rail on its kickstand and read his father's name one
more time, the way you read a thing you know by heart, for the reading and
not the learning. In memory of Hollis Tate — a man who wrote things down.
"Hey, Dad," Owen said, to the stone, to the grass, in the tone of a boy
reporting in, which in his family was a form of prayer with better
record-keeping. "Ride went fine. Rail's holding. Nothing much to tell you."
A car came down the straight then, far off, in the shimmer — a sedan,
light-colored, doing the speed the road allows — and Owen watched it come
on and take the curve inside the rail at an ordinary pace and go on south,
diminishing, and he watched it go the way you watch weather, with interest
and without assignment, and his hand stayed at his side, and there was
nothing in his pocket to reach for, and nothing anywhere in him that needed
there to be. The car went. The road was empty and then, a minute later, full
of nothing but light and a hawk. He got back on the bike and rode home at
the pace the afternoon suggested, which was not fast.
At home he washed his hands at the kitchen sink and went through to his
room, because there was one thing, and it was a small thing, and it was his to
do in the order it had to be done. He took the notebook down from the shelf,
122
from between the diesel binder and the factory book, and he sat on the edge
of his bed with it in the light from the window, and he opened it to the last
page — past the entries and the logs and the pressed leaf from the chinaberry
and the ride rosters he had copied out in his careful hand — and on the last
page, in ink, plainly, he wrote the final entry. MAY — NOTHING TO
REPORT. THE ROAD IS JUST THE ROAD. He looked at it a moment, at
the hand and the saying of it, and it seemed to him complete, and completion,
he was learning, did not feel like a door slamming. It felt like a book being
put back where it belonged. He closed the notebook and put it back between
his father's manuals, spine out, in its place among the records, and went out
to where Paula was calling him to supper, and Micah's bike was audible two
streets over, coming up the street on his evening loop, early, the way he
always came now: before anything could be too late.
123