Part 4
Eli moved the cane.
Tom sat beside the window. Mara and Noah crowded onto the opposite bench, knees colliding beneath the table. Tom picked up one piece of the burger but did not eat.
“This doesn’t make us square,” he said.
“I know.”
“It means I want to hear about him.”
Only then did Tom take a bite. For the first few minutes, they ate without speaking.
The grilled onions were too thick. Eli could not tell whether Tom had cut them that way on purpose, and he did not ask.
After a while, Tom nodded toward the snapshot. “Did he know what I was going to be called?”
“Your mother wanted Thomas. Owen wanted Buck.”
Mara covered a laugh with her hand. Noah looked offended on his father’s behalf.
“Buck Rowan,” he said. “You could’ve had a whole different life.”
Tom wiped mustard from his thumb. “I’m beginning to see why Mom didn’t leave him in charge.”
The laugh that escaped him was brief and rough, but Eli knew the shape of it. Owen’s had begun the same way, as though humor were a piece of machinery he did not entirely trust.
Mara asked whether Owen snored. Noah wanted to know if he had been afraid. Tom stayed quiet for a while, then asked, without looking up, whether Owen had truly believed he could cook. Eli told them Owen wrote letters on any dry paper he could find and traded away his best socks for hot sauce. He admitted Owen could be vain, impatient, and generous with things he needed himself.
When Noah asked what the tattoo meant, Eli traced the blank fluke with one finger.
“There were eight of us in that picture your grandmother kept. Different jobs. Same small team. Owen said the missing piece meant we’d finish it when we all got home.”
“Did any of you?” Mara asked.
“No.”
Noah turned his cap slowly on the table. “You said you were the radioman.”
“I was.”
“I’ve been on the other end of a dead radio. What you did that night mattered.” Noah looked at the snapshot, then at Tom. “What you did afterward still hurt my grandmother.”
“I know.”
Tom picked up the snapshot.
“This stays with me,” he said.
“It’s yours.”
“It was Mom’s.”
Eli accepted the correction. The snapshot disappeared into Tom’s shirt pocket, leaving an empty spot beside the sugar jar.
At four, Tom turned the sign on the front door to CLOSED. Mara and Noah began clearing the booths while Eli tightened the door closer with a screwdriver from Tom’s junk drawer. A quarter turn was enough.
“You couldn’t leave the door alone, could you?” Tom asked.
“It was set too hard.”
“Of course it was.”
Tom nodded toward the booths. “Then make yourself useful. These have to come out before the landlord gets the keys.”
They worked past sunset. When only the window booth remained, Eli showed Noah where to lever without splitting the old wood while Tom held it steady. Before Eli left, Tom wrote an address on the back of the closing notice.
“The window booth is going here,” Tom said. “Its corner brace is split. If you come Sunday, bring tools.”
One week later, the last window booth from Rowan’s stood beneath a window along one wall of Tom’s garage. The red vinyl was cracked, and the brass edging still bore the pale rings of thousands of cups. Tom had set Ruth’s snapshot in a double-sided frame on a narrow shelf above it.
Mara arrived with a paper sack of burgers. Noah brought coffee and complained that his father had bought the weakest blend in Colorado. Eli came last, carrying his cane in one hand and a small toolbox in the other.
Tom glanced at the toolbox. “You bring clamps?”
“Two.”
Tom nodded and slid closer to the window. Noah moved the sugar jar, and Mara waited, holding four nested paper cups in one hand.
“Table for how many?” Mara asked.
“Four,” Eli said.