He put his face back in his hands.
“And she was here,” he said. “The whole time. She was right here. Every Saturday. Eating out of the garden I wanted to tear out.”
It was quiet for a long time.
The fog was starting to lift. You could see the sun now, a pale white circle behind the gray.
Then my father walked over and sat down on the gravel next to Brent. He did it slowly. It took him a long time. His knees cracked so loud I heard it from the porch.
He sat there next to Brent for a while without saying anything.
“In nineteen eighty-two,” my father said, “the paper mill laid off two hundred men. I was one of them.”
Brent lifted his head.
“I had a wife and a five-year-old daughter.” Dad nodded toward me on the porch. “That one, there. Kristin. And a mortgage. And no job. And no prospects, because every other mill in the valley was laying off too.” He looked out at the garden. “We had a garden then. A little one. Maybe a quarter of what it is now. Marta grew it. My wife. She grew it because she liked flowers, mostly. Some tomatoes. A few beans.”
