Carol retired that year, after thirty years in education, and she moved back, not to Maple Hollow, but to a town twenty minutes away, close enough for Sunday dinners, far enough for independence. Harold pretended to be casual about it. He was not casual about it. He was overjoyed. Carol came for dinner every Sunday, and they would sit on the porch afterward, and she would tell him about her garden, her book club, her volunteer work at the literacy center, and he would tell her about the car club, the diner, the latest neighborhood drama, which Mrs. Abernathy had relayed with full editorial commentary. One Sunday, Carol brought a box, and inside were Eleanor's teaching materials, the lesson plans, the finger-painting guides, the guinea pig care instructions, saved all these years. I thought the school might want them, Carol said. For the archive. Harold held the lesson plans, in Eleanor's handwriting, the loops and slants he knew better than his own. She'd like that, he said. Being archived. She always said she wanted to be remembered as a teacher first. She will be, Carol said. She is.
The literacy center where Carol volunteered asked Harold to come read to the children, and Harold, who had never read aloud to anyone but Eleanor, found himself, at eighty-four, sitting in a tiny chair in a bright room, reading Where the Wild Things Are to a circle of six-year-olds. He was terrible at the voices. The children didn't care. They climbed into his lap. They asked about the firefighter in the book, and Harold told them he used to be a firefighter, and their eyes went wide, and one little girl said, Did you save people? And Harold said, Sometimes. And she said, That's good. Sometimes is good. Harold thought about that for days. Sometimes is good. It became, in his mind, the most profound theological statement he had ever heard. He told Eleanor about it that night, sitting in her chair, and he laughed, and he cried, a little, and it was all right, all of it, the laughing and the crying, the sometimes and the good.
The neighborhood continued its slow, ordinary miracle of change. The Patels' children grew. The boy, now ten, could name every part of the Mustang's engine. The girl, eight, had decided she would drive it one day, and Harold had promised she would, when she was old enough, and her parents had looked nervous, and Harold had winked at the girl, and she had winked back. Rosa, the compliance officer, retired, and her replacement was a young man named Kevin who had been trained by Rosa personally, in the art of knocking on doors and talking to people like neighbors. Violations stayed low. The quarterly enforcement logs were published, as required, and they were boring, which was exactly the point. Diane Kessler's garden won another prize. Robert took up golf again. Tyler, the former compliance officer, now managed two hardware stores, and he hired Jesse's younger brother for a summer job, and the circle turned, the way circles do.
Harold's health, inevitably, became a topic. His knees were bone-on-bone. His hands ached in the mornings. His doctor, a kind woman named Dr. Patel, no relation to the neighbors, though Harold liked to pretend, told him he needed to slow down, and Harold told her he would slow down when the Mustang did. She laughed, and adjusted his medications, and told Carol, privately, that her father was remarkably healthy for his age, stubbornness being, in her professional opinion, a protective factor. Carol relayed this to Harold, who said, See? The doctor says I'm healthy. Carol said, The doctor said you're stubborn. Harold said, Same thing. And they both laughed, because Eleanor would have laughed, because it was the kind of joke Eleanor would have made.
He thought about Eleanor constantly, but differently now. In the early years, the thinking had been a wound, probed daily. Now it was a companion, a warmth. He talked to her in the car, on the porch, at the overlook. He asked her advice, and he heard her answers, in her voice, with her laugh. When the car club debated paint codes, he heard her say, Hal, it's a car, not a religion. When he worried about Carol, he heard her say, She's stronger than both of us, stop fussing. When he stood at the water's edge with the compass, he heard her say, I'm right here, you old fool. I'm right here. And he believed it, not as theology, but as fact, as real as the V8's rumble, as real as the lily of the valley in the upholstery. Love, he had learned, was not diminished by death. It was concentrated by it, like a sauce reduced, stronger, richer, essential.