The Long Way Home

The casket was closed. Naomi had not expected that. She had expected, without admitting it to herself, to see her father’s face one last time — waxy, wrong, not really him. Instead there was a lid, and a spray of carnations, and a preacher she did not know.

The preacher was young and earnest and called Martin Sinclair a man of quiet faith. Naomi doubted that. The church was full enough that she kept the doubt folded in her lap with her hands, her good coat smelling of airplane.

It was not a full church. Her father had not been a full-church man. But there were more people than the fifteen she had counted on the plane from Portland, and that irritated her in a way she declined to examine. She recognized almost none of them. That was the bargain, twenty-five years on: she left, the town kept going, and now it had gathered around a closed casket and she was a guest at her own father’s funeral.

The lid was oak veneer. She found herself noting the grain the way she noted everything, as if attention were a form of apology.

The organist played something Protestant and sturdy. The preacher read from Ecclesiastes, because of course he did, and told a story about Martin fixing the church furnace in the winter of ’87. It might even have been true. Three rows up, a man in a seed cap wept openly into his hands. Martin had taught him, probably. Thirty-eight years of sophomores, and every one of them had sat through the frog dissection.

A woman two rows up blew her nose into a tissue that had given up long ago and kept blowing anyway. When they carried the casket out, Naomi followed because that was what the body did. Gravel crunched under her shoes in the parking lot. Somebody’s toddler asked loudly when lunch was.

The preacher asked the congregation to remember Naomi in their prayers, and forty heads turned at once, and she smiled the smile she used for difficult families. She knew the words to the final hymn and did not sing.

On the church steps the town lay below in late-afternoon light, small and unbothered. Kestrel. The ninety-foot smelter stack stood against the foothills, brick gone the color of dried blood — a monument to an industry that had died before she was born. Below it: Main Street, the train yard, the river glinting between the cottonwoods. She had not lived here in twenty-five years, but she still knew how to leave.

She stood on the steps and watched people she did not know grieve a man she had not seen in two years. The arithmetic kept coming out wrong, and she kept doing it anyway. She was the only person standing alone, and she preferred it that way, which was also part of the arithmetic.

A boy in a too-big suit chased a pigeon across the lawn. An old woman in a wheelchair was being loaded into a van with the practiced choreography of people who do it daily. Naomi knew none of their names. That was the thing she kept circling: she had grown up here, and the town had continued without her, and now it was performing grief in front of a stranger who happened to share the deceased’s last name.

A woman detached herself from the knot by the door and came toward her with the purposeful walk of someone with a task. Fifty-ish. Dark hair pulled back. A navy cardigan with a pen clipped to the pocket.

“Dr. Sinclair,” she said. “Beth Kwan. I ran the clinic’s referrals for your father, last eight years.”

Naomi shook her hand. “Naomi. Thank you for coming.”

Beth studied her the way nurses study everything: all at once, no apology. “You’re staying at the house?”

“Fourteen Aspen. For now.”

“The roof is due,” Beth said, in the tone of someone reporting the weather. “Furnace is fussy. Don’t let it bully you.” She pressed a business card into Naomi’s hand. “If you need anything — linens, a wrench, somebody to eat the last casserole — call the clinic. We’re at 208 Main, the old schoolhouse, if the house eats you. Heating oil’s full — I checked last week.”

“Thank you.”

Beth rejoined the knot by the door, where comforting people was evidently also a task. Naomi put the card in her coat pocket. Practical kindness. No condolences to answer.

On the way down the steps a woman hugged her too hard and said she was Marge Prentiss, and Naomi said thank you, Marge, and felt nothing, which felt like its own small crime.

She had not been here when the arthritis took his hands. She knew the timeline of that disease the way priests know the liturgy — the months, the joints, the mornings he could not have opened the pill bottles she mailed him — and she had not come. She had diagnosed him over the phone two years ago, listening to him describe his own hands, and then she had mailed him to Bozeman, and mailed him pills, and the Sunday calls had gotten shorter on both ends. He would describe the garden. She would describe the hospital. They would run out of weather.

Her phone buzzed. Alan: Landed? Text when you can. She typed: Here. All fine. Two weeks. She put the phone away before she could add anything true.

Her patients were covered. Her practice partner and former roommate Alan had the cat. The apartment was being watched, the plants were being watered, everything was being handled. Two weeks was a number she could defend.

She walked. It was under a mile to Aspen Street, and the funeral shoes held up, and nobody offered her a ride, which she was grateful for. The street curved past the smelter stack and the houses got older and better kept as she went. Woodsmoke hung in the air — somebody burning scrap pine — and under it the smell of old timber, wet from a rain that had come and gone while she was in the church.

Main Street crossed her path and she looked down it without stopping. The Bluebird Diner’s sign, dark at this hour. Billings Hardware with its painted sign. The clinic in the old schoolhouse at the far end, its windows lit. Everything smaller than she remembered and exactly the same size.

A kid on a bicycle blew past her going the wrong way down the sidewalk, no helmet, no fear. In Portland that would have been a lecture. Here it was just Sunday. The Ortiz house had a new fence. The Billings place had the same boat in the driveway, twenty-five years older, still not in the water — a monument to intentions.

A train whistle blew from the yard, long and indifferent. She had forgotten that sound the way you forget a scar.

14 Aspen Street was a 1920 Craftsman with a south-facing porch. The rail paint was peeling in the same place it had peeled when she was seventeen. The swing hung on its chains, still. Naomi stood at the bottom of the steps and looked at it.

She did not go inside. Not yet.

The swing creaked. There was no wind she could feel. It moved anyway, a degree or two, the way old things remember.

The dog reached her first. A black Lab, heavy and gray-muzzled, tongue out, moving at the dignified pace of an animal that has decided hurry is for other dogs. Behind him came a man with a toolbox.

Naomi’s stomach did the arithmetic before her mind caught up. The shoulders. The walk. The way he stopped when he saw her standing on the walk.

Jacob Kessler. Twenty-five years older. The same.

He did not pretend not to know her. “Naomi,” he said.

“Jacob.” It came out steadier than she felt. “Is that Judge?”

The dog leaned his full weight against her leg and sighed. Jacob lifted two fingers; the dog sat. Hand signals. She remembered the Kesslers’ old dog going deaf the summer they were sixteen, and she filed this the way she filed everything: observed, noted, not asked about.

Twelve, she guessed. The gray went all the way to his eyebrows.

“You cut your hair,” Jacob said.

“You didn’t,” she said. It was true. It was still too long in the back, the way it had been at seventeen, when his mother had despaired of it.

“You still in Portland?”

“Still.”

“You eating? There’s food at the church. Enough for a battalion.”

“I’m fine.”

He nodded, accepting it the way he accepted everything — without argument, which she found more disconcerting than argument would have been.

A pause settled that was not quite comfortable and not quite the other thing. She looked at the toolbox.

“Neighborly rounds?”

“Your dad’s porch rail’s been loose since late August.” He set the toolbox on the bottom step and took the rail in one hand and shook it. It gave a quarter inch. “I was coming to fix it. Didn’t know you’d beat me here.”

Of course he had been here. Of course he knew this porch better than she did now. She had a stupid urge to ask how long, how often — and bit it off, because the answer would be a number, and the number would mean something, and she did not have room for what it meant.

“Two weeks,” she said. “The house, the estate. That’s the plan.”

He nodded like she’d told him the weather. “Your dad talked about you.”

That landed somewhere low. “Did he.”

“Said you were the smartest person he ever taught.” Jacob picked up the toolbox. “Thirty-eight years of students. That’s saying something.”

She had not known what to do with her father when he was alive. She did not know what to do with him now, arriving in sentences from other people.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” Jacob said. “He was a good man.”

“Thank you.”

Judge sat down with a grunt, all his joints at once, and leaned against Jacob’s knee. Jacob smelled faintly of sawdust and something medicinal — liniment, probably. The PT clinic. Naomi noticed his hands, and then un-noticed them, and then noticed them again — the scar across the left knuckle from the fence wire, junior year.

He looked at her then, directly, for the first time. He had lines around his eyes that had not been there. Forty-six. She had known the number without computing it.

“Welcome home, Naomi.”

She did not correct him.