Epilogue

It was the first service after the lady passed away. The man there at the pulpit didn’t cry though, “an act of God,” Walt would say later, holding Garrett’s hand. Walt stood up there the whole time with the man who didn’t cry, and Garrett knew that was the reason.

The lawyer woman was there with someone, a man she worked with named George who was wearing too much brown for Garrett’s taste. Travis sat on his right, drawing Garrett’s favorite—birds, everywhere on the paper, wingspan wide and in flight. He usually had a hard time in service, which was often made better if Walt was sitting next to him, but on his other side was his mother who he loved very much but also rarely felt comfortable with. It was her energy, an invisible line moving through her, always electrified, agitated. He was scared to touch her.

But there now inside St. Andrew’s, he could sense something different about her. She was calm and felt more like Walt whose energy was stilled water. Walt told him they were going to see his sister after church, and he reached for memories of wiry blond hair, and small bones, and a sense of sadness that plagued Garrett almost as much as when his mother felt like a live wire. But Walt’s face was smooth and unworried, and it reminded Garrett of birds flying, real birds, not like the ones on Travis’s paper. It reminded him of how there wasn’t a Walt but then there was and how everything felt better and less strange after that. And now here was the woman whose naked feet used to scare him, and big body used to overpower him, and from where he sat taller in his older body, she looked small and loose like a balloon with no air.

And how Garrett was thankful for Walt, and change, and the flight of birds in a bare-skinned sky, and his own hand, reaching out, touching hers.