Chapter 5 - What Eleanor Would Have Said
We stood in that driveway for a long time. Neighbors I hadn't spoken to in months came out onto their own porches to see what the commotion was. Somebody put a paper crown on my head that one of the grandkids had made, badly, out of construction paper, and I wore it the rest of the night without complaint.
Later, after the cake was gone and the kids had been put to bed in the guest rooms, Marcus and Denny sat with me on the back porch where Eleanor's garden still grew, mostly on its own momentum at this point, tomatoes coming in early the way they always seemed to.
"I keep thinking about what Mom would've said," Denny admitted, staring out at the yard. "If she'd seen us do this to you."
"She would have been furious," I said honestly. "She never had patience for foolishness, and this was foolishness. Both of yours."
Marcus winced. "That's fair."
"But she also would have understood why you thought what you thought," I added, because it was true, and because I'd had three and a half years to think it over. "You watched your mother and me scrape by your whole childhood so you could have things. It's not crazy that you assumed whatever was left over belonged to the next generation instead of to me. I understand the thinking. I just needed you to understand that thinking was wrong."
"It was," Marcus said. "It's taken me way too long to say that out loud."
We sat quiet for a while after that, the three of us, the way men in my family have always been more comfortable sitting quiet together than talking through things directly. The garden hummed with early-summer bugs. Somewhere down the street, a dog barked twice and went quiet.
"What happens now?" Denny finally asked. "Are you gonna go get a master's or something? Really give us something to worry about?"
I laughed. "No. I think I'm done proving things. I think I might just enjoy having read everything I always wanted to read, for a while."
"And us?" Marcus asked, quieter. "Are we done, too? Or is there more we need to say?"
I thought about that question for a long moment, looking out at Eleanor's tomatoes coming up red in the dark.
"We're not done," I said. "But we can start again from here, if you want to."
"I want to," Marcus said.
"Me too," said Denny.
I reached over and put my paper crown, gently, on my oldest son's head instead, and for the first time in three and a half years, all three of us laughed together in the same yard, under the same sky Eleanor used to point out constellations in, back when none of us knew yet how much we still had left to learn about each other.
I still keep my diploma framed on the wall beside our wedding photo. Some nights I look at both of them together and think that Eleanor got the last word after all, the way she generally did in our whole marriage.
Finish it. Whenever you're ready. I'll be cheering from wherever I end up.
May you like
She was. I'm sure of it now.
And so, in the end, were they.
