Rain came in sideways across Route 9, needling the windshield of June Porter's truck with the fine, persistent malice of an Appalachian squall that had no intention of stopping before dark. She had left Knoxville at four that morning, the headlights cutting a pale tunnel through fog that smelled of wet asphalt and dogwood blossom, and for the first ninety miles the road had been a straight, simple promise. Then the mountains folded in, and the highway began to breathe.
The truck coughed at mile marker 167.
Not a dramatic death, nothing that would make a good story at the diner. Just a stuttering hiccup in the engine rhythm, a half-second where the accelerator forgot its purpose, then a return to ordinary motion. June noted it the way she noted everything now, with the quiet cataloguing attention of a woman who had learned, in the year since her mother's funeral, that small warnings were rarely small.
She pressed her foot to the floor. The truck surged, then settled, then coughed again at 167.3, and this time the check engine light blinked on with the resigned amber patience of something that had been waiting to speak.
"Well," June said aloud, to no one, to the cab with its torn bench seat and its rearview mirror sticky with tape. "All right then."
The shoulder was a strip of gravel and old beer cans. She pulled off, set the hazards blinking, and sat for a long moment with her hands at ten and two, listening to the engine tick itself into silence. The rain found its way through a seam above the passenger door and dripped, metronomic, onto a brochure for the Hollow Creek Farm and Flower Festival that her aunt Beatrice had mailed her three weeks ago.
The brochure said CELEBRATE YOUR ROOTS in a font that wanted to be cheerful. Beneath the words, a watercolor of a barn and a field of black-eyed Susans. June had looked at it on the kitchen counter of her apartment in Knoxville and felt something shift in her chest, a tectonic thing, slow and sour. She had folded it shut and put it in the junk drawer, then taken it out again before bed, then again put it away in the morning.
She had been doing that for ten years. Putting things away.
Now she turned the key. The engine turned over, rough and grudging, and ran. She eased back onto the road. Two miles to Hollow Creek. Two miles to the house she had not entered since she was nineteen, the house where her mother had died in the back bedroom with the window facing the ridge, the house that smelled of Lillian Porter's perfume and woodsmoke and the particular staleness of rooms that had been closed too long.
The truck made it to the bridge over Pigeon Roost Creek.
It died there, properly, with a final shudder that rocked the cab and made the box of her grandmother's china rattle in the truck bed like something trying to get out. June coasted to the shoulder, the tires hissing on wet asphalt, and the silence that followed was enormous, a hollow Appalachian silence full of katydids and the distant complaint of a crow.
She sat. She breathed. The rain came in.
The bridge was a concrete span, old enough that the railing had begun to separate from the deck, with a hand-painted sign that read HOLLOW CREEK 2 MI in faded green. Below, the creek ran brown and fast, choked with twigs and the first confetti of turning leaves. June could see, through the downpour, the smudge of town at the valley's far end, the steeple of the Baptist church, the water tower with its peeling letter H.
She turned the key. The engine answered with a single dry click, the sound of a thing that had said what it meant.
"All right," she said again, softer this time, and she reached for the rain jacket behind the seat, the heavy canvas one her mother had worn to market for fifteen years. It smelled of lavender sachets and motor oil. She pulled it on, zipped it to her throat, and stepped out into the weather.
The first breath was a slap. Cold mountain rain, tasting of iron and pine pitch, soaking through her hair in three seconds flat. She slammed the door, then opened it again to grab her mother's leather bag from the passenger footwell, the one with the broken zipper and the embroidered P on the flap. She slung it across her body, felt the weight of it settle against her hip, and went around to the back of the truck.
The tailgate stuck. She hit the latch with the heel of her hand, and it dropped with a clang that echoed back from the trees.
The box of china sat where it had been since Knoxville, lashed down with a bungee cord she had bought at a gas station in Dandridge. It was a cardboard box, double-walled, with FRAGILE written on every side in her own careful hand, and beneath the cardboard another box, and beneath that sheets of newspaper and tissue paper she had cut herself, and beneath that her grandmother's good dishes. Six place settings of bone china, white with a rim of tiny blue violets, the pattern called Bluebell and listed as discontinued since 1994. Lillian Porter had carried them from her mother-in-law's house in a laundry basket. June had wrapped each plate in newspaper and kissed the top of the stack before taping it shut.
She did not know why she had brought them. They belonged in the house. They had always belonged in the house.
She loosened the bungee and pulled the box forward until it sat at the lip of the tailgate, then stepped back and considered. Two miles. On a dry road, in sneakers, she could have walked it in thirty minutes. In the rain, in work boots with a hole in the left sole, carrying a box that weighed perhaps thirty pounds, with the box open behind her and a dead truck on a bridge that did not feel entirely safe.
She looked at the box. She looked at the road.
She picked up the box, settled it against her right hip, and began to walk.
The highway had no sidewalk. The shoulder was a foot of gravel and then the white line and then the road itself, and beyond the road the drop into the creek's small ravine. Cars passed occasionally, their headlights blooming through the rain and their tires throwing fans of water across her calves. Nobody stopped. She had not expected anybody to stop. Hollow Creek people did not stop for strangers on the side of the road, and she had not been a stranger in ten years, which was the same thing in a different tense.
She walked. The rain found its way down the back of her neck and into the waistband of her jeans. The box began to slip, and she resettled it, and it slipped again, and she resettled it, and after a quarter mile she gave up on pride and let the tailgate hang open behind her, the empty truck bed taking the rain in long gray sheets.
At half a mile, a black F-150 slowed as it passed, the driver a silhouette behind a fogged windshield, and June raised one hand without turning her head, the universal gesture of I am fine, please go on. The truck accelerated. The wake rocked her sideways, and she stepped off the shoulder into the mud and caught her balance with a sound that was half grunt and half laugh.
"Fine," she told the road. "Completely fine."
At three-quarters of a mile, the grade began to rise toward the town line, and her left ankle made its opinion known. The boot with the hole let in a thin rivulet of cold water that found the blister on her heel and turned it into a small, persistent knife. She shifted the box to her left hip. The right side of her body began to complain in a lower register, a deep muscular protest that lived in the small of her back and radiated upward.
She did not stop. Stopping was not something she knew how to do gracefully. When she had come home for her mother's funeral, she had not stopped at the church. When she had stood in the receiving line and heard the same three condolences repeated in forty different mouths, she had not stopped. When she had locked the front door of the Porter house for the last time and driven back to Knoxville in the dark, she had not stopped. Stopping meant hearing the question her mother had asked the last time they spoke, the one June had answered badly, the one that had lived in the marrow of her for ten years.
You going to come home, Junebug? Your grandmother's house needs you.
June had said she would think about it. She had thought about it every day since.
The town sign appeared through the rain at the one-mile mark, a wooden structure carved with the words WELCOME TO HOLLOW CREEK, EST. 1847, and below it a smaller board that read POP. 1,204 in letters that had been repainted last spring by someone's civic-minded daughter. June stopped beneath it. The box rested on the iron post at its base, and she took the weight off her hip and let her arms hang, the rain drumming the crown of her head.
One mile to Main. One mile to the Porter house on Larkspur Lane. One mile to a front porch swing she had not sat in since she was a girl, a kitchen that smelled of bacon grease and dishwasher soap, a hallway with a dark wainscoting that her mother had never gotten around to painting.
She looked at the box. Through a gap in the newspaper wrapping, she could see the edge of a saucer, the rim of blue violets bright against the wet cardboard. Her grandmother's hand had lifted that saucer ten thousand times. Her mother had lifted it after. June had lifted it at thirteen, when her mother had finally let her pour the tea at Sunday supper, the way you had to lift it, two fingers under, thumb on the rim, careful of the handle.
She lifted the box and kept walking.
The rain thinned at the edge of town, turning from a curtain to a gauze, and the trees along the road resolved into individual shapes. A stand of tulip poplars, their leaves broad as plates and turning yellow at the tips. A fence line strung with last year's kudzu, the vines heavy with water. A yard with a plastic deer and a hand-painted sign that read YARD OF THE MONTH, faded past recognition. Hollow Creek, dressed in its wet Sunday clothes, looking at June the way a town looks at someone who has come back from somewhere.
She passed the feed store, closed for the evening, its windows dark. She passed the Baptist church with its stained glass of the Good Shepherd, the glass webbed with a crack from the hailstorm of 2016 that nobody had gotten around to fixing. She passed the laundromat, lit up and humming, a woman she half-recognized folding sheets at a table by the window, her back turned.
Nobody waved. Nobody honked.
She was almost to the corner of Main and Larkspur when the streetlight above the post office buzzed on, early by ten minutes, its sodium glow falling across the wet pavement in a long orange wedge. In its light she saw the porch of the old Mason house, and on the porch a man in a canvas coat stepping out of a doorway with a German shepherd at his heels.
He had a beard now, and his hair was longer than she remembered, and he stood the way men stand when they have learned to take up less space in a doorway. He turned toward the sound of her boots on the asphalt, and the dog turned with him, and for a long moment neither of them moved.
Then he came down the porch steps and into the rain, and June saw his face clearly, and the box in her arms went suddenly very heavy.
He did not speak at first. He stood in the rain and let the water darken the shoulders of his canvas coat, and June watched the water gather in the creases of the fabric and run down the seams in thin threads. The German shepherd sat at his heel, ears pricked forward, watching her with the patient attention of an animal accustomed to waiting.
June's boots had stopped at the edge of the sidewalk. She did not remember choosing to stop. Her arms ached from the weight of the seed box, and her fingers had gone cold around the cardboard, and somewhere behind her the streetlight buzzed and buzzed against the wet dark like a thing trying to remember how to be a streetlight.
He took a step toward her. The porch light behind him threw his shadow long across the lawn, and the shadow walked ahead of him the way shadows do, arriving first.
"June," he said.
The name in his mouth sounded different than it had a moment ago in her own. Warmer. Smaller. As though he had been carrying it for a long time and was surprised to find it still fit the shape of his voice.
"Tobias," she said.
He stopped three feet from her. The rain had pasted his hair to his forehead, and without thinking she reached up and brushed a strand back from her temple, the way she used to when they were children and the rain came sudden and they had to run for the barn.
His hand came up too, then stopped, then lowered.
"I heard you were back," he said. "Lillian said you were back."
The name landed like a stone in still water. June felt the rings of it move outward through her chest.
"When did you see her," June said. It was not a question.
"Sunday," he said. "She asked me to come by. She had a list." A small, careful almost-smile. "She always had a list."
The dog shifted at his heel. Tobias glanced down at the animal, then back at June, and the almost-smile faded into something more guarded, more careful, the way a man looks when he is trying to decide how much truth a moment can hold.
"I should have come sooner," he said. "I should have come when she asked."
"But you didn't," June said.
"No," he said. "I didn't."
The rain fell between them. A car passed on Main, its headlights sweeping across the wet pavement and the porch of the old Mason house and the two of them standing there, and then the car was gone and the dark came back, thicker for the having been broken.
"I have the keys," June said. "I was just going to the house."
"I know," he said. "I was waiting for you."
"For me," she said. "Why?"
He did not answer right away. He looked past her, toward the street, toward the dark shape of the house at the end of the block, and his face in the streetlight was the face of a man who had been doing a thing for a long time and was tired of it in a way that had settled into his bones.
"Because Lillian asked me to," he said. "Because she said you'd need help. Because I owed her that, at least."
He paused.
"Because I owed you," he said.
The words came out rough, and he did not look at her when he said them. He looked at his hands, at the water running down his wrists and into his sleeves, and June saw that his hands were trembling, very slightly, the way a man's hands tremble when he has been holding something heavy for a long time and has only just noticed that he is allowed to put it down.
"The porch step is rotten," he said, after a moment. "Third one from the top. Don't step on it."
"Tobias," she said.
"I'll help you carry the box," he said, and he stepped forward and took it from her before she could refuse, his hands careful against hers, and the warmth of his fingers went through her cold ones like a small electric shock, like a thing remembered.
The dog fell in behind them as they crossed the street.
The house at the end of the block was dark. It had been dark for a long time, June knew. Lillian had stopped leaving the porch light on after the second winter, when the bulb had burned out and she had not had the heart to replace it, and after that the darkness had become a kind of habit, the way a house becomes accustomed to being empty and begins to wear its emptiness like a coat.
But the porch light was on tonight.
It cast a yellow wedge across the wet boards of the porch and across the third step from the top, the rotten one, and across the figure standing in the doorway, waiting.
She was small. She had always been small. She wore a blue cardigan over a white blouse, and her white hair was pinned back from her face with a tortoiseshell clip, and her hands were folded in front of her the way her hands had always been folded, the right hand over the left, the thumb of the right hand rubbing gently against the knuckle of the left.
She looked at June the way a woman looks at a thing she has been waiting a long time to see.
"Lillian," June said.
"Come in out of the rain," Lillian Porter said. "Both of you. I have coffee on."
She turned and went into the house, and the yellow light from inside fell out through the doorway and across the porch and across Tobias's face, and Tobias set the seed box down on the railing and looked at June, and June looked at him, and neither of them moved.
Then Tobias picked up the box again, and June stepped over the rotten board, and they went inside.
The house smelled of coffee and of wood polish and of the particular stillness of a house that has been closed up for a long time and is only now being opened. June stood in the front hall and let the smell move through her, and the smell moved through her the way memory moves through a body, uninvited, whole.
Lillian had set the kitchen table for three. There were three cups, three saucers, three spoons. There was a plate of gingersnaps on a blue ceramic plate that June remembered from her childhood, the plate with the chips along the rim, the plate that had been her grandmother's before it had been Lillian's.
Lillian was already pouring the coffee. She did not look up.
"Sit," she said. "You're letting the cold in."
June sat. Tobias set the seed box down by the door and came and sat across from her, and the dog, after a moment's consideration, lay down under the table at his feet with a long sigh.
Lillian brought the coffee. She set a cup in front of June and a cup in front of Tobias and then sat down herself, and the three of them sat for a moment in the yellow kitchen light with the rain coming down outside the windows and the dog breathing under the table and the gingersnaps waiting on the blue plate.
"I was sorry to hear about your mother," Lillian said to June, after a while.
The words were ordinary. The voice that spoke them was not.
"Thank you," June said.
"She was a good woman," Lillian said. "Stubborn. She got that from me."
The almost-smile was back in her voice, and June felt something loosen in her chest, something she had not known was clenched.
"She did," June said.
Lillian looked at her for a long moment over the rim of her cup.
"You have her hands," Lillian said. "I was sorry to hear you were not coming back."
"I am back," June said.
"I see that," Lillian said. She set her cup down. "Tobias has been helping me with the place. The shutters needed work. The porch step. The gutters."
"I noticed," June said.
"He's a good worker," Lillian said. "When he can be persuaded to start."
Tobias, across the table, made a small sound that might have been a laugh or might have been a protest. He did not look up from his coffee.
"I pay him," Lillian said, to June, as if Tobias had not spoken. "In coffee and gingersnaps. He says it's a fair rate."
"It's a fair rate," Tobias said.
"I have a list," Lillian said, turning back to June, and her voice changed then, took on the particular briskness of a woman who has been waiting to say a thing and has decided that the waiting is over. "I have a list of things that need to be done in the next two weeks, before I go to the home."
She said it simply. She said it the way she had said sit, the way she had said coffee, the way she had said let the cold in. As though the thing she had said were a small thing, a practical thing, a thing to be dealt with on a Tuesday evening between the gingersnaps and the rain.
June set her cup down.
"Lillian," she said.
"Don't," Lillian said. "I have made up my mind. The house is too much for me. The stairs are too much for me. I am eighty-one years old and I have fallen twice this year and I am done pretending that is not a problem."
She folded her hands again. Right over left. Thumb against knuckle.
"I want to go through your mother's things with you," she said. "Before I go. There are things in the attic I have not opened. There are things in the garden she'd I have not touched. There is a box in the back of the closet in the spare room that I have been putting off opening for fifteen years."
She looked at June.
"I want you to have them," she said. "Whatever they are. I want them out of this house before I leave it."
June's throat was tight.
"I can stay," she said. "I can stay and help. I can stay and we can take our time with it."
"You can stay," Lillian said. "But the home is not waiting forever. The waiting room at Maple Grove has a two-year list and I have been on it for six months and I will not die in this house waiting for a bed to open up."
"Lillian," Tobias said, from across the table, and his voice was careful, the voice of a man who has had this conversation before and knows where the edges are. "She just got here."
"I know when she got here," Lillian said, without looking at him. "I am not being unkind. I am being practical. There are things in this house that need to be dealt with, and I would rather deal with them with her than without her, and I would rather deal with them now than later."
She looked at June again.
"Will you help me," she said. It was not quite a question.
"Yes," June said. "Of course."
"Good," Lillian said. "We will start tomorrow. The spare room."
She picked up her coffee again. The rain came down. The dog sighed under the table.
"Tobias," Lillian said, after a moment. "There is a piece of apple pie in the icebox. You have earned it."
"Thank you, Miss Lillian," Tobias said.
"Don't thank me," Lillian said. "Eat the pie."
He got up and went to the icebox, and the dog got up and followed him, and June sat at the kitchen table with her grandmother and listened to the rain and waited for the tightness in her throat to ease.
It did not ease. It settled deeper, into the place where the things she had carried home were already beginning to make their weight felt, the weight of a house and a garden and a life and a woman who had decided, with the quiet stubbornness of eighty-one years, that she was ready to let some of it go.
The spare room was at the end of the second floor hall, past the bathroom with the claw foot tub and the linen closet that smelled of lavender sachets, past the door to what had been June's mother's room and was now, June had been told, kept closed and aired once a week. The door was closed now. June slowed as she passed it but did not stop. Lillian, walking ahead with her cane and her quiet, deliberate steps, did not comment.
The spare room door was open. June remembered it from childhood, though the memory was faint, more a feeling than an image, the way certain rooms in certain houses feel before you have any words for rooms or houses. It had been her grandfather's study, before he died. Then it had been a storage room. Then, briefly, when June was nine or ten, it had been the room where her mother had tried to set up a home office for the floral business, with a card table and a folding chair and a calculator that had not worked properly. The card table was gone now. The folding chair was gone. The broken calculator was gone. In their place was a large wooden table, scarred and dark, and a single wooden chair, and, against the far wall, a loom.
June stopped in the doorway.
Lillian did not stop. She walked to the table and set down the small basket she had been carrying, the basket that contained, June now saw, a pair of scissors and a sheaf of papers and a tin of buttons and a spool of white thread.
"I started this rug forty-three years ago," Lillian said. She did not look at June. She was looking at the loom, at the half finished weaving, at the colors that were still bright in some places and faded in others, at the places where the warp threads had been cut and retied and cut and retied again. "Your grandfather used to say it was the most expensive piece of floor in the county, because of what it cost in time and what it did to my disposition."
"Lillian," June said, and her voice was careful too, because she had learned, in the short time she had been home, that Lillian did not appreciate being managed. "You don't have to do this. I can pack it up. I can put it away. We can decide later what to do with it."
"No," Lillian said. "We cannot decide later. Later is what I have been doing for six years, and the rug is still on the loom, and the loom is still in this room, and I am still in this house, and I am tired of later."
She turned and looked at June, and her eyes were clear and very tired.
"I want to finish it," she said. "Or I want to take it off the loom. One or the other. I want it to be done. I want something in this house to be done."
June looked at the rug. She did not know how to weave. She had never woven. She had, in fact, deliberately avoided any craft that required patience, because patience, she had decided in her twenties, was a virtue she could not afford, and she had built a life and a business around the decision. Wildflowers bloomed on their own schedule. You could not rush them. But you could choose them, and arrange them, and deliver them, and be paid for the choosing, and that was enough patience for her.
"I don't know how," she said.
"I do," Lillian said. "I will teach you."
They started the next morning.
It was slower than June had expected. Lillian sat in the wooden chair, because she said her knees could not tolerate the bench at the loom, and June sat on the bench, and Lillian talked, and June listened, and June's hands learned, or tried to learn, the difference between the she'd and the beat, between the warp and the weft, between the colors that Lillian had chosen forty three years ago and the colors that Lillian wanted now.
The first colors had been bright. There was a section of deep red, the red of the zinnias that had grown along the south wall of the garden, and a section of gold, the gold of the black eyed susans that had grown in the ditch by the road, and a section of blue that Lillian said was meant to be the color of the sky on the morning that June was born. June had not known that. She had not known, until Lillian told her, that the rug had been begun in the year that June was born, and that the blue at the beginning was a memory, and that the colors after were a hope, and that the rug had been put away, and taken out, and put away, and taken out, through every year of June's childhood and every year of June's absence, and that it had never, in all that time, been finished.
"You don't have to finish it," Lillian said, on the third morning, when June's fingers were sore and her back ached and she had tangled the weft twice. "You can stop. I can find someone else."
"No," June said. "I want to finish it. Or take it off. One or the other."
Lillian looked at her for a long moment.
"You sound like me," she said.
"I learned from the best," June said, and was surprised, after she said it, that it was true.
They worked for an hour that morning, and then Lillian said she was tired, and June helped her to the bedroom, and Lillian lay down on the bed with the quilt that had been her mother's, and June pulled the curtain against the morning light, and Lillian closed her eyes, and June went downstairs and stood in the kitchen and looked at the garden through the window and tried to understand what it was she had agreed to.
The garden was wet with dew. The soil was dark. The raised beds were still empty, except for the one where the wild garlic had come up on its own, the brave, stubborn green shoots that had survived the winter without being planted or tended or asked. June looked at them for a long time. She thought about the business she had not yet figured out how to save. She thought about the lease that was due at the end of the month. She thought about the phone call she had not yet made to her business partner, the call that would require her to admit, out loud, to someone other than herself, that she did not know what she was going to do.
She thought about the rug, upstairs, half finished, half not, a record of forty three years of starting and stopping, of beginning and not quite ending, and she thought that the rug was the most honest thing in the house.
She went to the icebox. There was a bowl of applesauce that Lillian had made the day before. June ate a spoonful standing at the counter, and then another, and then she put the bowl back and went to the spare room and sat at the loom and worked the weft through the she'd, slowly, carefully, the way Lillian had shown her, and she did not stop until her hands were shaking and the light through the window had changed from morning to noon.
She heard the dog bark, downstairs, and went to see.
Wyatt Calhoun was at the door.
He was wearing a different shirt than the day before, a faded blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and his hands were dirty, and there was a smear of soil on his jaw that he had not noticed. He was holding a paper bag. The bag was from the nursery, June knew, before she looked at it, because she could smell the soil, the dark, wet, living smell of soil that has been worked and turned and brought inside to warm.
"I brought you something," he said. He held out the bag. "For the garden. If you want it."
June took the bag. Inside were six small pots, each with a seedling, each labeled in Wyatt's neat, slanted hand. Two were yarrow. Two were bee balm. Two were wild bergamot.
"Natives," Wyatt said. "They'll do well here. The soil's right. The light's right. They've been hardened off."
"Thank you," June said.
"Don't thank me," Wyatt said. "I'm trying to make amends."
The dog was sniffing his boots. Wyatt looked down at the dog, and the dog looked up at Wyatt, and there was a moment of mutual assessment that June did not interrupt.
"Come in," she said. "I'll make coffee."
"I don't want to impose," Wyatt said.
"You're not imposing," June said. "You're being neighborly."
She led him to the kitchen. She put the bag of seedlings on the counter. She filled the kettle. She measured the coffee into the percolator, the same percolator that had been on the stove since she was a child, the percolator that her mother had used, the percolator that Lillian still used, every morning, without fail. While the coffee heated, she washed her hands at the sink. The soap was the same soap. The towel was the same towel. The window above the sink looked out on the same garden.
Wyatt sat at the table. The dog lay at his feet.
"Your grandmother told me you were back," he said, after a moment. "She called me. Last week. She said you were going to need help with the garden, and she said I was the one to give it, and she did not give me the option to say no."
"That sounds like Lillian," June said.
"It does," Wyatt said. "She also said, and I quote, 'You owe this family more than soil, Wyatt Calhoun, and the time to pay is now.'"
June laughed. She had not laughed, really laughed, since she had come home. The sound surprised her. It surprised Wyatt. The dog raised its head.
"She said that?"
"She said that," Wyatt said. "And then she hung up."
The coffee perked. June poured two cups. She brought them to the table. She sat across from Wyatt. She wrapped her hands around the cup, the way she had seen Lillian do, and the warmth of the porcelain was the same warmth, and the smell of the coffee was the same smell.
"I don't know what I'm doing," she said. "With the garden. With the business. With any of it."
Wyatt nodded. He did not say she should not say that. He did not say it would be okay. He did not say he understood.
"I can tell you what the soil needs," he said. "I can tell you what the wildflowers need. I can tell you when to plant and when to cut and when to divide. I cannot tell you what the business needs. I cannot tell you what you need. But I can tell you about the soil, and I can tell you about the flowers, and I can be here, if you want me to be here, and not be here, if you don't."
June looked at him. He looked at her. The dog sighed.
"I want you to be here," June said.
Wyatt nodded. He drank his coffee.
They sat at the table for a long time, and the coffee cooled, and the dog slept, and the garden waited outside the window, and the spare room waited upstairs, and Lillian waited in her bed, and the rug waited on the loom, and none of it was finished, and all of it was beginning.