On the coldest morning of that November, I lay on my own porch steps with a broken hip and looked up into the face of the man I had asked God, every morning for a year, to keep out of my family.
It was a few minutes past seven. The frost had not burned off yet. I could see my own breath, and the sky going from gray to the pale blue we get in the Draw before the wind comes up, and I could feel the second step down, the one that had always wobbled, lying in two pieces under my back like it was ashamed of itself.
Then a shadow came over me, and it was Garrick.
He had a tape measure on his belt and sawdust on his sleeves. His truck door stood open behind him with the engine still running. He dropped to his knees on the frozen gravel and said my name the way a man lays his hand flat on a wall to see if it will hold.
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“Mrs. Wahl. Don’t move. I’ve got you.”
I thought, Lord, of everybody in this county, of every soul You could have sent. Him.
Then I thought, with a shame so hot it nearly made me forget the pain, that I had it coming.
I am going to tell you what I had been saying to God at my kitchen sink for three hundred and some mornings, and it does not reflect well on me. I am seventy years old. I taught Sunday school for thirty-four years. And for one full year I prayed against a good man because he did not look the way I had decided a good man should look.
My name is Lavada Wahl. I live in Carrollton Draw, Oregon, where the sign at the edge of town says the population is 412, which my late husband Ray always said was generous. Ray and I farmed wheat and cattle here forty-one years. When he passed, six years ago in March, I sold the ground to the neighbors and kept the white house, eleven acres, and the apple trees he planted the year our son was born.
My son Tobin is forty-four and sells insurance in Portland. My daughter Lavon is thirty-six and teaches third grade here in the Draw. She is the one who sat with me through all of Ray’s dying and did the dishes at the funeral lunch when I could not stand up. I have loved that girl harder than was good for either of us.
So when she sat down at my table on the first Sunday of November a year ago and brought Garrick with her, something in my chest went still and cold, like a pond in January.
I knew who he was. Everybody in the Draw knew who he was.
Garrick was forty-one that fall. He built cabinets and decks, and he drove a white pickup with a crack running corner to corner across the windshield and a bumper held on with wire. He had been married once, at twenty-two, for about four years. His father had left the Draw when Garrick was twelve, owing money to half the feed stores in two counties, and the boy had been known ever since as that man’s son.
And in his twenties, Garrick drank. There was a mailbox, one night, out on the Mill Road. There was a deputy and a night in the county seat and a story that grew in the telling. A small town remembers a mailbox for twenty years. I had been remembering that one for fourteen.