“Oh, my, Han. It rocks. Just beautiful.”
“You like it?”
“Really.” Parker hugged the girl.
Hannah stared at the page and then asked in a soft voice, nearly a whisper, “Do you think he’ll hear it?”
Shaw asked, “ ‘He’?”
“Yeah, my dad. You know, who I wrote it for.”
Oh...
“I’m going to read it at his memorial service. You believe in that kind of stuff, Mr. Shaw?”
“What?”
“You know, that he might be there at the church? Like a ghost? I saw this show on TV, that spirits sometimes hang around after we pass. So we can say goodbye.”
He said nothing about his views on the occult, which he’d spent virtually no time considering. The subject does not appear in the survivalist canon. He told her, “Some things we just can’t know.”
Hannah took this as validation and nodded.
She stuffed the notebook back into her book bag, along with the Emerson. Her eyes went wide suddenly. She said to him, “Oh, and I have something for you!” She bounded off the swing, leaving it to rock vigorously, and pushed inside, the screen door slamming loudly behind her.
Shaw said, “She’s doing okay, it looks like.”
But Parker didn’t respond. Her eyes on him, she was offering a shallow smile. “I’m sorry.”
He lifted an eyebrow.
“You thought the poem was about you?”
He was that transparent? “We connected at the lake house.”
“A mom, a dad, they live in their children’s souls. No one else admitted to the inner sanctum. Whatever the bullshit, the anger, the words between them, they finally let us come back in, for good or bad. And Freud got one thing right: the tug’s just a bit stronger with mothers and sons, and fathers and daughters.” Parker glanced at the bag, where the notebook containing the poem rested. She smiled. “I got snubbed too, you’ll notice.”
Then Parker said, with a schoolmarm’s firm tone, “But don’t think what you’ve got with her’s superficial. It’s real and important. You affected her. What you taught her, and showed her, that’ll stick.”
Before Shaw could respond, Hannah appeared, holding a small brown paper bag in her hand.
With a grin, she handed it to him. “Here.”
He opened it. Inside was a jar of cayenne pepper.
“Until you get your gun fixed.”
He laughed. He said goodbye to both of them and started for the car.
Hannah called, “Hey, Mr. Shaw, I thought up another rule.”
He turned. “And what’s that?”
“Never lose touch.”
He gave her a nod and climbed into the rental, then pulled onto Maple View, the GPS directing him along the route that would take him eventually to the red-brick enclave of Harmon Energy Products.
Acknowledgments
Novels are not one-person endeavors. Creating them and getting them into the hands and hearts of readers is a team effort, and I am beyond lucky to have the best team in the world. My thanks to Sophie Baker, Felicity Blunt, Berit Böhm, Dominika Bojanowska, Penelope Burns, Lizz Burrell, Annie Chen, Sophie Churcher, Francesca Cinelli, Isabel Coburn, Luisa Collichio, Jane Davis, Liz Dawson, Julie Reece Deaver, Grace Dent, Danielle Dieterich, Jenna Dolan, Mira Droumeva, Jodi Fabbri, Cathy Gleason, Alice Gomer, Ivan Held, Ashley Hewlett, Aranya Jain, Sally Kim, Hamish Macaskill, Cristina Marino, Ashley McClay, Emily Mlynek, Nishtha Patel, Seba Pezzani, Rosie Pierce, Fliss Porter, Abbie Salter, Roberto Santachiara, Deborah Schneider, Sarah Shea, Mark Tavani, Lucy Upton, Madelyn Warcholik, Claire Ward, Alexis Welby, Julia Wisdom, Sue and Jackie Yang, and Kimberley Young. You’re the best!