The Gas Station Boy I Got Fired For Came Back Six Years Later, Carrying My Missing Son's Coat and a Little Girl With His Eyes
Chapter 1: The Boy at Two A.M.
The Fuel-Rite on County Road 9 sat alone at the edge of town like the last lit window in the world. After eleven o'clock, the only things moving out there were snowplows, long-haul truckers, and the wind off the frozen bay, which came hard enough to rattle the ice machine against the wall.
I took the overnight shift eight months after Hal d!ed. People assumed I wanted the extra pay. The truth was simpler. I couldn't lie down in our bed anymore, and the house was too quiet after dark. At the Fuel-Rite there was the hum of the coolers, the hot dog roller turning, the radio murmuring country songs nobody had asked for. Noise kept the thoughts from getting too loud.
Thoughts about Wade, mostly.
My son was sixteen when he left. I came downstairs one Tuesday in March and found a sheet of notebook paper folded under the sugar bowl. Four lines in his slanted, hurried handwriting.
I'm sorry, Mom. I keep messing everything up. I'll only drag you down. Don't look for me.
Of course I looked.
I called every shelter between Harrow Bay and Port Calder. I printed flyers at the library until the librarian quietly stopped charging me. I drove the long highways on weekends with his school picture taped to my dashboard. Hal searched with me until his heart gave out in the hardware aisle of the farm store, two years after Wade left. After that, I searched alone.
By the time I started nights, there was only one picture of Wade I could stand to look at. Not the school portrait on the flyers, which had faded in a hundred shop windows. A snapshot from his fifteenth birthday: Wade sitting on the tailgate of Hal's truck, grinning around a mouthful of chocolate cake, his brand-new brown canvas work coat hanging off his shoulders. I kept it in my wallet. I touched it the way some women touch a rosary.
The boy started coming in that first December.
Two a.m., give or take. The bell over the door would jangle, and in he'd come, tall and all elbows, maybe fifteen, in a gray hoodie with the strings chewed off and sneakers soaked through. Twenty below outside, and that was all he had on. He'd go straight to the coffee station and stand there studying the creamer cups as if he were deciding between them.
He never bought anything. He never asked for anything either. He'd stand by the warm machine until the feeling came back into his fingers, then drift out before I could say a word.
The second night, I watched him in the security mirror. His lips were the color of a bru!se. His hands shook so badly he tucked them into his armpits.
The third night, I didn't wait.
I took a hot dog off the roller, put it in a bun, and ran a line of mustard down it the way Wade used to like. I poured a cup of cocoa from the machine and set both on the counter.
"These are going to waste," I said. "Roller gets cleaned at three."
He looked at the food, then at me, then at the door, like it might be a trap.
"I don't have any money."
"Didn't ask you for any."
He came to the counter slowly. He finished the hot dog in four bites, then held the cocoa in both hands and closed his eyes over the steam. For one second, with melted snow on his eyelashes and his face finally going soft, he looked so much like Wade that I had to grip the edge of the counter.
"What's your name, honey?"
"Reece."
"I'm Corinne. Most folks call me Mrs. V."
"Thanks, Mrs. V."
He said it like needing it embarrassed him.
I knew the rules. Lyle Garrity, the manager, had them laminated and taped beside the register. No loitering. No free food. Nobody behind the counter but staff. I'd followed every one of them for months.
At four-fifteen, Reece pulled up his hood and reached for the door, and I heard myself ask, "Where are you sleeping?"
He shrugged. "Around."
"Around where?"
"There's a laundromat on Pike that doesn't lock the back. Sometimes."
Sometimes. I thought of Wade sleeping sometimes, somewhere, and something in me split clean in two.
"There's a storeroom back there," I said. "It's warm. Nobody goes in it but me."
So I broke the rules.
The next night I brought the green sleeping bag Hal used for ice fishing. And I brought Wade's coat, the brown canvas one with the flannel lining, the one still hanging in his closet because I couldn't bear to give it away.
Reece held it up. The sleeves dangled past his fingertips.
"It's too big," he said.
"You'll grow into it."
He put it on, and he didn't take it off for the rest of the night.
For two winters, Reece came at midnight and left at six. He slept between cases of paper towels and jugs of blue windshield fluid, and when he couldn't sleep, he swept. He mopped up slush tracked in by truckers. He faced the candy shelves so neatly that customers remarked on it. He never took so much as a stick of gum without asking.
One night in February of that second winter, he caught me looking at the snapshot in my wallet.
"Who's that?"
So I told him. All of it. The note, the flyers, the highways. He listened without interrupting, then held out his hand.
"Can I see?"
He was studying Wade's face under the fluorescent lights when headlights swept across the front windows.
It was five-forty in the morning.
Lyle never came in before eight.
Chapter 2: Company Property
I'll never forget the sound of the door that morning. Not the friendly jangle of the bell, but the bang of the glass hitting the rubber stop as Lyle Garrity shoved it open with his shoulder.
He was a thick man in his forties with a pressed polo tucked into his jeans and a key ring the size of a fist clipped to his belt. He always smelled like spearmint gum and new car air freshener. That morning his face was blotchy red, and I understood right away that someone had told him.
"Where is he?" Lyle said.
Behind me, Reece had gone completely still. I felt it more than saw it, the way you feel a deer freeze at the edge of a road.
"Lyle, let me explain."
"Oh, you'll explain." He came around the counter without looking at me. "Earl Duffy drives the bread route. Says he's seen a kid walking out of my back door at six a.m. for two months straight."
There were three customers in the store. A trucker paying for diesel. A nurse in pink scrubs buying a breakfast sandwich. An old man scratching lottery tickets at the end of the counter. All three turned to look.
Lyle yanked open the storeroom door, saw the green sleeping bag on the floor, and turned around just as Reece tried to slip past him. He caught the boy by the back of the hood and hauled him out onto the store floor like a sack of salt.
"Lyle, stop it. He's a child!"
Reece stumbled and caught himself on the chip rack. Bags of pretzels rained down around his sneakers. He didn't say a word. He just stood there in Wade's coat, with his chin down and his face burning, while three strangers stared at him.
"You know what this is?" Lyle said, pointing at the storeroom. He wasn't talking to me. He was talking to the customers. "This is my employee running a flophouse out of company property. On my insurance. With my inventory."
"He's a boy with nowhere to sleep," I said. "It's twenty below out there."
"He's a junkie. Look at him."
"He is not a junkie."
"And the hot dogs." Lyle pulled a folded sheet from his back pocket and snapped it open. "You think I don't read the waste logs? Forty-some dogs short since Christmas. Cocoa cups. Nachos. Every single night."
My face went hot. I reached under the counter for my purse.
"Then I'll pay for every one of them. Every cup. Tell me the number."
I opened my wallet and froze for half a second, because the little plastic window where Wade's picture lived was empty. Then I remembered Reece holding it under the lights. There was no time to think about it.
Lyle laughed, a short ugly sound.
"Pay for it? That's cute. You don't get to steal from me and then make it right with a twenty."
"I never stole anything."
"You're a thief," he said, loud enough to make the nurse flinch. "You're both thieves. Leave your vest on the counter and get out before I call the police."
"Don't," Reece said.
It was the first word he'd spoken. Everybody looked at him.
"Don't fire her," he said, his voice cracking in the middle. "It was me. I asked. She didn't do anything."
"You didn't ask," I told him.
"Isn't that sweet," Lyle said. "You want to talk, kid? You can talk to a deputy about trespassing." He pulled his phone out and held it up. "Ten seconds."
I came around the counter and put both hands on Reece's arms. Under the canvas, he was shaking.
"Go," I whispered. "Go to Pike Street. I'll find you tonight."
"Mrs. V, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
"You've got nothing to be sorry for. Go."
He looked at me one more time, his eyes huge and wet, and then he was out the door and running across the lot into the gray morning, the too-long sleeves of Wade's coat flapping at his sides.
The trucker cleared his throat. The nurse looked at the floor. The old man went back to scratching his tickets.
I took off my red vest and folded it, because Hal had taught me you leave a job the way you'd want to be remembered. I set it beside the register, on top of the laminated rules.
"Six years I've worked here," I said quietly.
"And you threw it away for a stray," Lyle said. "People like you always think you're the good guy."
That night I drove to the laundromat on Pike. The back door was locked. I drove to the bus station, the library steps, and the church on Fourth that sometimes opened its basement. I went back every night for a week.
Reece was gone.
On the eighth night, I sat at my kitchen table with my wallet open in front of me, and finally let myself face what I'd been avoiding.
The little plastic window was still empty.
He'd been holding Wade's picture when Lyle's headlights hit the glass. I could see it now, the way he'd slipped it into the inside pocket of the coat to keep it safe.
The coat was gone. The boy was gone.
And with them, the last face I had of my son.
Chapter 3: Six Winters
You'd think losing a photograph wouldn't break a woman who'd already lost a son and a husband.
It nearly did.
For weeks, I'd reach for my wallet at red lights out of habit and find that empty plastic window staring back at me. I had other pictures of Wade, of course. Baby pictures. School portraits. But none of them were him at the end, grinning on the tailgate, still mine. That snapshot had been the last true thing.
I didn't blame Reece. Not once. On the nights I couldn't sleep, which was most of them, I lay awake wondering whether he was warm. Whether he'd kept the coat. Whether he'd ever looked in that pocket and thought of me.
I took a job cleaning rooms at the Northline Motor Lodge out by the interstate. Eight dollars an hour, plus whatever tips were left on the nightstands, which was usually nothing. I stripped beds and scrubbed tubs and carried a vacuum up and down concrete stairs. I told myself it was honest work, and it was. But my body was fifty-four, then fifty-six, then fifty-eight, and it started sending me bills I couldn't pay.
First my lower back. Then my knees. Then my hands, which swelled so badly some mornings that I had to run them under hot water before I could turn a doorknob. The doctor at the free clinic said arthritis and handed me a pamphlet. The pamphlet suggested rest.
I kept looking for Wade. Less often, and quieter, the way you keep a candle going with the last of the wax. Once a year, on his birthday, I called the shelters again. Once a year, they told me nothing.
Sometimes I asked about Reece too. Tall boy, I'd say. Dark hair. Probably wearing a brown canvas coat too big for him.
Nobody remembered a boy like that.
My savings went the way savings go. A transmission. A tooth. Three weeks in the hospital the second winter with pneumonia, because I'd kept cleaning rooms through the cough. When I came home, there was a stack of envelopes on the floor under the mail slot, and I knew before opening them that the little cushion Hal left me was gone.
I'd been renting the left side of a duplex on Tamarack Lane for nine years. Mr. Ostrom, my landlord, was a retired shop teacher who fixed the furnace himself and never once raised the rent. When I was short, he'd say, "Pay me when you can, Corinne," and he meant it.
Last spring, Mr. Ostrom moved to his daughter's place down south and sold the duplex.
The new owner came by on a Saturday in May to introduce himself. I opened the door in my bathrobe, and there he was on my front step, older and heavier, with the same key ring clipped to his belt and the same spearmint smell.
Lyle Garrity smiled like he'd been saving it up.
"Well. Small world, Corinne."
He'd left the Fuel-Rite two years earlier, I learned. He'd been buying up rentals all over our neighborhood, the cheap ones, the ones with older tenants who didn't know how to fight back. Gloria Benbrook, my neighbor on the right side of the duplex, called him the Landlord of Tamarack Lane, and she didn't mean it kindly.
The rent went up two hundred dollars the first month. Then late fees, added the day after the first, not the fifth like the lease said. When my bathroom faucet started leaking, he sent a text: Not an emergency. When the porch step cracked, he wrote: Watch your step.
I paid what I could. I paid more than I could. I skipped my arthritis prescription twice so the rent check wouldn't bounce.
It wasn't enough. It was never going to be enough, and I think he knew that from the start.
The notice came in October, taped to my front door with blue painter's tape. Gloria found me standing on the porch reading it with my hand over my mouth.
"Oh, honey," she said. "Oh, no."
"It's fine," I told her. "It's fine. I'll figure something out."
I didn't figure anything out. I called the county assistance line and waited on hold for two hours before the call dropped. I called a cousin in another state who didn't call back. I applied for senior housing and was told the waitlist was fourteen months long.
On Thursday night, I packed my whole life into nine cardboard boxes from the liquor store. Hal's flannel shirts. My mother's cast-iron skillet. Wade's baby blanket, folded into a square the size of a sandwich. Fifty-eight years fit into nine boxes. I kept thinking that should be harder to do.
The only thing I couldn't bring myself to take down was Hal's picture in the living room. It was the last thing on the wall.
I sat on the floor beside the boxes that night and didn't sleep.
At eight o'clock Friday morning, someone knocked on my door.
Chapter 4: Nine Boxes on the Grass
The deputy was young, maybe thirty, with a wedding ring and tired eyes. His name tag said SORENSEN. He held the court order the way you'd hold something that might bite.
"Mrs. Vasko? I'm sorry, ma'am. I have to serve this."
"I know," I said. "I'm packed."
Lyle stood behind him at the bottom of the porch steps, holding a gas station coffee cup. He'd brought two guys from a moving company to carry things out, but there wasn't much left to carry. They set my nine boxes in a row across the brown October lawn, then Hal's recliner, then the kitchen chairs, then my mother's little oak side table with one leg I'd glued back twice.
The neighbors came out. I'd known they would. Gloria stood on her half of the porch in her robe with both hands pressed to her chest. Old Mr. Paskett from across the street came down to his mailbox and didn't open it. The Delgado kids watched through their front window until their mother pulled the curtain shut.
I stood on the grass beside my boxes in my good wool coat, because I'd decided that if I was going to be put out on the street, I was going to be dressed for it.
"Ma'am, do you have somewhere to go?" Deputy Sorensen asked quietly.
"She's coming to my place," Gloria called down. "Couple nights, anyway. I've got a couch."
I nodded at her. We both knew her apartment was one bedroom and she already had her grandson sleeping on that couch.
Lyle took a long sip of his coffee and looked at the boxes.
"You know what's funny?" he said. "You were a good worker, Corinne. I mean it. Six years, never late. And you threw it all away playing mother to some kid off the street." He shook his head. "People like you always end up right here. You give away what isn't yours, and then you act surprised when there's nothing left."
Gloria made a sound like she'd been slapped. I didn't answer him. Answering would have meant my voice breaking in front of him, and I wasn't going to give him that.
"Let's go, Corinne." He checked his watch. "I've got painters coming at noon."
"Mr. Garrity," the deputy said.
"What? It's my property."
I looked past them at the living room window. Through the glass I could see the pale rectangle on the wall where every picture had hung except one.
"There's one more thing inside," I said. "My husband's photograph. Please. One minute."
Lyle sighed through his nose like I'd asked him for a kidney.
"Two minutes. Then I'm changing the locks."
I'd only made it to the bottom step when I heard an engine slow on Tamarack Lane.
A red pickup, an older crew cab with a ladder rack and snow tires already on, pulled up to the curb right behind the moving van. The engine shut off. For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the driver's door opened, and a tall young man stepped down onto the street.
He was in his early twenties, broad through the shoulders, with dark hair cut short. He wore a navy jacket with a red patch stitched on the chest. HARROW BAY FIRE DEPARTMENT, it said. STATION 4.
He didn't look at Lyle. He didn't look at the deputy. He walked straight across my dead lawn, between the boxes, and stopped in front of me.
And then I saw what he was carrying, folded over his left arm.
Brown canvas. Flannel lining. A frayed tear at the left cuff that I'd once mended with thread that didn't quite match.
"Mrs. V," he said. His voice broke the same way it had broken six years ago in the Fuel-Rite. His eyes were filling up. "I'm so sorry it took me this long."
I knew him in an instant. I'd have known him in the dark.
"Reece," I whispered.
Behind him, Lyle's coffee cup stopped halfway to his mouth.
Then the passenger door of the pickup swung open.
A little girl climbed down, careful on the high step, holding a stuffed rabbit by one ear. She was maybe five, in a pink puffy coat and rain boots with frogs on them. She came around the front of the truck and stopped at the edge of the lawn, looking up at me.
The second I saw her face, the air left my lungs.
The same pointed chin. The same cowlick fighting its way out of her ponytail.
And her eyes. Hazel, with a dark ring around the outside, and a fleck of gold in the left one.
Wade's eyes. Exactly.
My knees started to go. Reece caught my elbow before they did.
"I need to tell you something," he said softly. "But first, there's someone you need to meet."
Chapter 5: The Picture in the Pocket
The little girl walked across the grass toward me the way children do when they've been told something important is about to happen, slowly, stuffed rabbit pressed against her chest.
I lowered myself down until I was eye level with her. My knees screamed. I didn't care.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi, sweetheart."
"Are you Grandma Cory?"
I couldn't answer. I just looked at her, at that fleck of gold in her left eye, and my mouth opened and nothing came out.
"Junie," Reece said gently, "remember what we talked about? Give her a second."
"Daddy says you make the best pancakes in the whole world," Junie told me, as if that settled everything. "He says you put blueberries in the shape of a smile."
I had. Every Saturday until he was twelve, and he'd complained that he was too old for it, and I'd kept doing it anyway.
I put my hand over my mouth.
"Junie," I said. "Your name is Junie?"
"June Corinne," she said proudly. "I'm named after you. The middle part."
Behind me, someone was crying. It took me a moment to realize it was Gloria.
Reece knelt down beside us in the grass. He unfolded the coat from his arm and laid it across my lap, and with careful fingers he opened the inside pocket and drew out a small square of paper.
The snapshot. The edges had gone soft as cloth, and there was a crease across one corner, but it was all there. Wade on the tailgate, chocolate cake, that grin.
"I never took it out," Reece said, "except to show people."
I held it in both hands. Six years. I'd thought it was lost in a dumpster somewhere, or a puddle, or a fire in a vacant lot.
"Tell me," I said. "Please. Tell me everything."
So he did, kneeling on my dead lawn while Lyle Garrity stood ten feet away with his coffee going cold.
That morning, after he ran, Reece had walked four miles to the youth center downtown, the place he'd been too proud and too scared to go to before. He went because of me.
"You'd lost your job over me," he said. "I figured the least I could do was stop being somebody who needed saving."
A counselor there named Ms. Abernathy got him into a group home, then back into school. He graduated a year late. At nineteen, he got into the fire academy on his second try.
"And the whole time," he said, "I had this."
He touched the photograph in my hands.
"You told me about him that last night. I kept thinking, she gave me his coat. The least I can do is bring him back to her."
So he showed Wade's picture to everyone. Every shelter he visited on outreach calls. Every soup kitchen where his station served Thanksgiving dinner. Every recovery center the department did safety trainings for. He posted it on a network message board that counselors use across three states.
Last March, a counselor in Port Calder called him.
"She said, 'I think I know this man. He's been coming to our meetings for five years. He brings his little girl.'"
Reece drove eight hours that night.
Wade was twenty-seven now. He was a mechanic at a tire shop. He'd been clean for five years. Junie's mother had left when Junie was still a baby, and Wade had raised her alone.
"He came back here once, Mrs. V," Reece said quietly. "Three years ago. He drove to your old house. Somebody else lived there. Your phone number was disconnected. He thought you'd moved on. He thought maybe you were better off without him, like he said in that note." Reece's jaw tightened. "He's been carrying that note around in his head for eleven years."
I was crying so hard I couldn't see.
"Touching," Lyle said behind us. "Really. But this is still my property, and that's still an eviction order, and those painters—"
Reece stood up. He wasn't fifteen anymore, and he wasn't wearing a chewed-up hoodie, and he was a full head taller than Lyle Garrity.
"You'll wait," he said.
It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. Lyle closed his mouth.
Deputy Sorensen looked down at his boots, and I could have sworn he was hiding a smile.
Reece turned back to me and held out his hand to help me up.
"That's what I came to tell you," he said. "I found him. And he's been terrified for three days that you'll slam the door in his face."
"Found him," I repeated. "Where is he?"
Reece looked over his shoulder at the red pickup.
At the back passenger door of the crew cab, the one with the tinted window, I saw a shape move.
Then I heard the handle click.
Chapter 6: You'll Grow Into It
He stepped out of the truck like a man stepping off a ledge.
He was taller than Hal had been, and thinner, with the same sloped shoulders. He wore jeans and work boots and a gray thermal shirt with a grease stain on the cuff. His hair was darker than I remembered, and there were lines around his eyes that hadn't been there at sixteen.
But it was his face. Of course it was his face.
He stood beside the truck with both hands hanging at his sides, and he didn't come any closer. He was waiting. I realized he was waiting to see if I'd turn away.
"Mom," he said.
Eleven years, and that was the word that undid me.
I don't remember crossing the lawn. Gloria told me later that I nearly tripped over the box of Hal's shirts and didn't even notice. I only remember reaching him, and putting both my hands on his face the way I used to when he had a fever, feeling the scratch of stubble where there used to be a little boy's soft cheeks.
"I'm sorry," he said. He was crying like a child. "I'm so sorry. I thought I'd drag you down. I thought if I left, at least one of us would be okay."
"You stupid, stupid boy," I whispered, and pulled him down into my arms. "You were never the weight, Wade. You were never the weight. Losing you was the weight."
He held on to me with his whole body. I felt him shaking, and I held on harder.
Somewhere behind me, Junie said in a loud stage whisper, "Is Daddy in trouble?"
"No, baby," Reece told her. "Daddy's okay now."
When I finally looked up, the whole street had come out. Mr. Paskett was standing in the middle of the road without his slippers. Mrs. Delgado had her kids on the porch, all three of them crying without knowing why. Gloria was holding on to the porch rail with both hands.
And Lyle Garrity was standing alone in the middle of my nine boxes, holding a cold cup of coffee.
"Well," he said, too loudly. "That's real nice. Family reunion. But she's still evicted, so somebody better—"
"Do you know who this is?" Reece said, turning to face him. He raised his voice just enough for the street to hear. "Six years ago, this woman let me sleep on the floor of a gas station storeroom because it was twenty below and I had nowhere else to go. And this man dragged me out by my hood in front of customers, called me a junkie, called her a thief, and fired her for feeding a hungry kid hot dogs that were going in the trash anyway."
Silence spread down Tamarack Lane.
"Wait," Gloria said slowly. "That gas station story? The one about the night clerk? That was you, Lyle?"
"It was company policy," Lyle snapped.
"She offered to pay for every one," Reece said. "I was standing right there."
Mr. Paskett spat on the curb, which I'd never seen him do in nine years. Mrs. Delgado had her phone up, filming. Lyle saw it and his face went blotchy red, the same color it had been that morning at the Fuel-Rite.
"You know what?" Wade said, wiping his face with his sleeve. He looked Lyle up and down, the way Hal used to look at a bad tire. "Keep the house. She's coming home with us."
"Port Calder's a long drive," Reece said. "Good thing I've got the truck."
Deputy Sorensen tucked the court order into his jacket. "Mr. Garrity, you said your painters show up at noon? Then I'd suggest you stand clear of the lawn while these folks load up."
Reece and Wade carried my boxes to the truck one by one. Mr. Paskett carried the oak side table. The Delgado boys took the kitchen chairs. Even the two movers from Lyle's company quietly picked up Hal's recliner and lifted it into the truck bed without being asked.
Lyle watched all of it, his jaw working.
I went back into the house one last time and took Hal's picture off the wall. When I came out, I slipped Wade's snapshot into the corner of its frame.
At the bottom of the steps, Lyle tried once more.
"People like you always end up back here, Corinne."
I stopped and looked at him.
"People like me feed hungry kids, Lyle," I said. "That's all I ever stole."
Then I climbed into the back seat of the red pickup beside my granddaughter, and Junie put her small hand in mine as if she'd been doing it her whole life.
As we pulled away, I looked back once.
Lyle Garrity stood alone on the dead grass of Tamarack Lane, surrounded by paint cans, while every neighbor on the street stood on their porches and watched him.
Epilogue
It snowed early the next year, the second week of November.
I live in Port Calder now, in the little back bedroom of Wade's rented house, the one with a window that looks out on a crab apple tree. Wade made me promise not to call it a guest room. "Guests leave," he said. So I call it my room.
My hands are better. Wade found me a real doctor, and I take my medicine every morning without having to choose between it and the rent. On Saturdays I make pancakes with blueberries in the shape of a smile, and Junie tells me every single time that I'm doing it exactly right.
Reece drives up one Sunday a month. He brings bread from the bakery near his station, and he and Wade argue about football in the living room like brothers who grew up in the same house, which, in a way, they did. Every December, Station 4 in Harrow Bay runs a winter coat drive now. The sign out front was Reece's idea. It says: TAKE ONE. YOU'LL GROW INTO IT.
I heard about Lyle from Gloria, who calls every Thursday. Mrs. Delgado's video went around the neighborhood page, and then the next town's page, and then a television reporter came knocking. Tenants started comparing notes about rent hikes and broken furnaces. The city sent inspectors to every property he owned. By summer he was selling them off one at a time, at a loss. Nobody on Tamarack Lane waves at him anymore.
I don't think about him much. There isn't room.
On the morning of that first snow, Junie came running out of the hall closet dragging something brown across the floor.
Wade's old canvas coat. Reece had given it back to Wade, and Wade had hung it by the door, and none of us had touched it since.
Junie pulled it on over her pajamas. The sleeves hung a foot past her fingers. The hem dragged on the floor behind her like a wedding train.
"Grandma," she said, holding up her arms and frowning. "It's too big."
Across the kitchen, Wade went still with his coffee cup halfway to his mouth.
I knelt down in front of my granddaughter and rolled the sleeves up, one cuff at a time, until I could see her small hands.
"That's all right, sweetheart," I said. "You'll grow into it."
On the mantel behind her, a soft-edged snapshot of a grinning boy on a tailgate sat tucked into the corner of a new frame.
May you like
The new photo inside that frame shows four of us on the tailgate of a red pickup, squinting in the sun.
Nobody is missing from it.
