And as I looked out at the crowd, I realized I wasn’t panicking. My palms weren’t sweating. And I wasn’t worried about what I was going to say—it was simple. It was just the truth.
“I’d always loved my dad,” I said in a voice that was stronger than I’d expected it to be. “But I actually got to know him this summer. And I realized that he’d been teaching me so much, all along.” I took a big breath—not because I was nervous, but because I could feel tears building up, and I wanted to try and get through this first. “Like the importance of really bad puns.” The crowd laughed at that, and I felt myself relax a little bit. “And that you should always get ice cream when the opportunity presents itself, even if it is close to dinnertime.” I swallowed hard. “But mostly, he taught me this summer about courage. He was so brave, considering what he was facing. He didn’t run away from it. And he was brave enough to admit that he was afraid.” I wiped my hand across my face, and took another shaky breath, to try to finish.
“I’m just glad that I got the time I did with him, even—” my breath caught in my throat, and the view of the crowd got blurry. “Even if it wasn’t enough time,” I finished. “Even if it wasn’t nearly enough.”
I stumbled, half-blind with tears, down to my seat. The minister was speaking again, and now Jackson Browne was singing. And it was Warren, unexpectedly, who pulled me into a tight hug and let me cry against his shoulder.
Things wrapped up after that, with the announcement of the reception back at our house, and then the processional past the casket. I sat it out, holding Murphy on my lap, feeling like I’d already said good-bye to my father under the stars. But I noticed that as my grandfather went up, his posture so straight in his uniform, he put into the casket the figure he’d been whittling all week—a tiny carved robin, taking flight.
chapter thirty-eight
I TURNED THE CAR DOWN THE DRIVEWAY, SHUT OFF THE ENGINE, and let out a breath. I had just dropped my grandfather and his telescope off at the bus station, and it had been much harder to say good-bye than I’d been expecting. And there had been far too much of that already lately.
In the days after the funeral, we slowly fell back into the pattern of a few weeks before. But instead of playing Risk, or watching movies, we began to talk about my dad. And with every story, some of the memories of him sick faded away a little, and I started to remember him as he’d been my whole life, and not just this summer.
I was still feeling shaky, and the smallest things could cause me to burst into tears unexpectedly—like finding one of his clean handkerchiefs in the laundry and suddenly panicking about what to do with it.
But today, coming back from the bus station, I was feeling slightly closer to okay as I crossed the driveway barefoot to find my mother was sitting at the table of the screened-in porch, a manila envelope next to her.
“Hi,” I said, as I sat down and looked at the envelope next to her. “What’s that?” The sight of it somehow made me nervous. My mother turned it over and I saw that Taylor was written in my father’s handwriting. My breath caught in my throat, just seeing it, and I looked up at my mother, confused.
She slid it across the table to me. “It turns out this was your father’s mystery project. I found them upstairs in the closet. He wrote them to all of us.”
I picked up the envelope, tracing my fingers over where he’d written my name. I didn’t want to be rude to my mother, but I suddenly wanted to read my father’s last words to me in private. “Sorry,” I said, pushing back my chair a little from the table. “But…”
“Go,” my mother said gently. “And then I’ll be here if you want to talk about anything, okay?”
I nodded as I stood up. “Thanks, Mom,” I said. I gripped the envelope carefully as I left the porch. It wouldn’t have been valuable to anyone else, but at the moment, there was nothing in the world that I valued more. Before I even knew I was heading there, I found myself walking to the dock, which was deserted, the late-afternoon sunlight glinting off the water.
I kicked my flip-flops off and walked across the wooden planks barefoot, feeling them warm under my toes, all too aware that it was now mid-August and summer was starting to come to an end, that barefoot weather would be drawing to a close all too soon.
I walked to the edge of the dock and sat cross-legged, dropping my purse next to me. Then I took a deep breath and opened the envelope.