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Spring arrived the way it always arrived in Virginia — first as a rumor in the soil, then as a riot of dogwood and redbud, then as the long green exhalation of May. On the anniversary of Marcus's death, Monique held a small gathering in the backyard. Family from Richmond. A few friends from the hospital. Thomas, who stood near the fence in his best plaid shirt and said little and helped Ava carry trays of food with the careful gravity of a man who understands that presence is sometimes the only useful gift.
People told Marcus stories. The snowstorm bicycle. The off-key singing. The time he fixed the Hendersons' disposal at nine at night in a dress shirt because they had company coming. Thomas listened and added, silently, the stories no one else knew: the diner in Beckley, the plastic chair, the sealed envelope, the wooden box on the closet shelf. He felt like a curator of a private museum that only three living people had tickets to.
After the guests left, after Ava had gone to bed exhausted from the performance of being brave, Monique and Thomas sat at the picnic table beneath the string lights Marcus had hung two summers earlier and never taken down.
"I keep waiting to be done grieving," Monique said. "As if there's a finish line. As if one day I'll wake up and the house will just be a house again, not a museum of every place he stood."
"There isn't a finish line," Thomas said. "There's just the next day, and the day after that. Some of them are quieter than others."
She looked at him across the table. The string lights put small gold coins of light in her eyes. "Has it gotten quieter? For you. With Andrew."
Thomas thought about the question. He thought about the letter in his sock drawer. He thought about the cemetery in Richmond and the hardware store in Gloucester and the cold water of the Chesapeake taking ashes that had already been claimed by a truck driver's promise. He thought about Ava's bare feet on his porch steps in October. He thought about the word brother and how it had meant one thing for twenty-five years and then meant something else entirely without ceasing to mean the first thing.