First they went under the bridge, and his hand on the curve of the archway. They drank coffee in the coolness of morning. Achilles was standing above them.
“Hey, Clay,” said Michael, quietly. “It’s still not finished, is it?”
The boy by the stone said, “No.”
He could tell by the way he’d answered, that when it happened he’d leave us for good—and not because he wanted to, but he had to, and that was all.
* * *
—
Next was something long coming, since Penelope, the porch and the stories:
You should ask your father to draw one day.
They were small by the bridge, in the riverbed.
“Come on,” said Michael, “here.”
He took him out back to the shed, and Clay saw now why he’d stopped him—when he’d gone for the torturous shovel that day, when he’d driven him out to Featherton—for there, on a homemade easel, and leaning slightly away, was a sketch of a boy in a kitchen, who was holding toward us something.
The palm was open but curling.
If you looked hard you could tell what it was:
The shards of a broken peg.
It was in this kitchen I’m sitting in.
Just one of our in-the-beginnings.
* * *
—
“You know,” said Clay, “she told me to. She told me to ask you to show me.” He swallowed; he thought, and rehearsed:
It’s good, Dad, it’s really good.
But Michael had beaten him to it.
“I know,” he said, “I should have painted her.”
He hadn’t, but now he had him.
He would draw the boy.
He would paint the boy.
He would do it through all the years.
But before that beginning was this:
In the last weeks, for the most part, it was barely her shell that stayed with us. The rest of her, out of our reach. It was suffering, the nurse and her visiting; we caught ourselves reading her thoughts. Or were they thoughts long written in us:
How the hell does she still have a pulse?
There was a time when death had loitered here, or swung from up on the po