Chapter 7 - Working On It
They spent less than an hour together that day. Nora laid out the rules before they left the parking lot.
No showing up unannounced. No comments about how she was raising her son. No pretending the last seventeen years hadn't happened.
Walter agreed to every word.
Right before they left, Owen asked if Walter would come to his birthday party.
Walter looked at Nora.
She hesitated. "Maybe."
Walter told me later that "maybe" got him through the whole next month.
He changed after that, in small, clumsy ways. He stopped leaving notes about our lawn mower. He fixed the chain on Cody's bike one afternoon without being asked. A baseball sailed into his yard and he walked it back to our door instead of threatening to call the HOA.
Nora came by twice over the summer. The second time, Owen and Cody ran around our backyard together for two hours. Walter stood by the fence and watched them.
One of the boys let out a shriek loud enough to hear three houses down. I looked over at Walter.
He raised both hands. "I didn't say anything."
"I know."
"I'm working on it."
"I know you are."
For Owen's eighth birthday, Nora rented a small bounce house and set it up at Cedar Hollow Park. Walter got there early with a wooden train set he'd built himself, out in the same garage that still had the barrel in it.
He spent most of the party sitting in the grass while Owen showed him how every piece of track locked into the next one.
At some point, both boys grabbed his hands and hauled him toward the bounce house. He dug his heels in for about a minute. Then he pulled off his shoes and climbed in.
Watching my permanently irritated neighbor get knocked flat on his back by two laughing eight-year-olds is not something I ever expected to see in this life.
He laughed too. Not a polite laugh. Not a careful one. He laughed until he had to sit down and catch his breath.
Seventeen years of grief didn't vanish in a park. Nora hadn't forgotten what he did, or what he didn't do. Walter didn't turn into a great father or a storybook grandfather.
But he opened one letter.
Then he made one call.
May you like
Sometimes karma isn't a punishment. Sometimes it's being forced to stand in front of the exact thing you spent half your life running from — and finding out the door never fully shut.
So here's the real question. If grief pushed someone into shutting out the people who needed them most, do we judge them by all the years they said nothing — or by the nerve it finally took to pick up the phone when love called one last time?
