Breathless

come to visit?”
    She had the softest voice: “What? A ghost? No, sweetheart. This is my past and future window. When I want my past, I see your father working out there in the vegetable garden.”
    They grew tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, radishes, and more, for their own use.
    Grady sat at the table with her.
    “When I want my future,” she continued, “I see you tall and handsome and grown, with a family of your own. And I see myself with your dad again, in a new world without struggle.”
    “Don’t be sad,” Grady said.
    “Oh, honey, I’m not sad. Have I ever seemed sad to you?”
    “No. Just … here like this.”
    “When I say I see myself with your dad again, I’m not saying that I wish it. I mean I truly see it.”
    Grady peered through the window and saw only the night.
    “Believing isn’t wishing, Grady. What you know with your heart is the only thing you really ever know.”
    By then she had taken a job in the office of the lumber mill. She spent five days a week where Paul died. They needed the money.
    For a long time, Grady was concerned about her working at the mill. He thought she suffered the constant reminder of the twisted spikes and the broken saw blade.
    He came to understand, however, that she liked the job. Being at the mill, among the people who had worked with Paul, was a way of keeping the memory of her husband sharp and clear.
    One Saturday when he was fourteen, Grady came home from apart-time job to discover that Sneakers had died. His mom had dug the grave.
    She had prepared the body for burial. She wrapped the beloved dog in a bedsheet, then in the finest thing she owned, an exquisite Irish-lace tablecloth used only on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.
    Grady found her sitting on the back-porch steps, cradling the shrouded body, weeping, waiting for him. Two people were required to put Sneakers in the grave with respect and gentleness.
    As the summer sun waned, they lowered the dog to his rest. Grady wanted to shovel the earth into the grave, but his mom insisted she would do it. “He was so sweet,” she said. “He was so sweet to me.”
    Determined to be strong for him, she never allowed Grady to see her crying for his father. She couldn’t hide her tears for the dog.
    His father had given her the dog. On lonely nights, the dog had grieved with her. Now she’d lost Sneakers, but in a way, she had also lost her husband again.
    Later, Grady sat with his mom in the dark kitchen. The dog’s grave lay in a direct line with the window, at the end of the yard.
    Grady was six years older than he’d been when his dad died. His mother could talk more frankly about love and loss, about grief and faith, about the sharpness of her pain, than she had talked back in the day.
    Although she had withheld from him the depth of her anguish and her fear about their future—for a while, they had been in danger of losing the house—she never deceived him. She had always told him as much as she thought he was old enough to handle.
    The night of the day that Sneakers died, Grady realized that all ofhis mother’s sterling qualities arose from the same basic virtue. She loved Truth, and she did not lie.
    Until she drew her last breath—far too young—she never told him a falsehood. Because of her, Grady valued nothing higher than veracity.
    In this age, lies were the universal lubricant of the culture. A love of Truth and a commitment to it were seldom rewarded and were often punished.
    So you came home to the mountains, and you built tables and chairs and consoles in one Craftsman style or another. The simple materials and the clean lines of such furniture revealed where a woodworker dared to take a shortcut or to employ a substandard technique. Honest craftsmanship and a commitment to quality were evident in a finished piece, and no one could spin the truth of your work into a lie.

    As Grady sat at the table, watching the night, as Merlin sat sentry at the French door, the south end of the moonlit yard suddenly became slightly brighter than it had been. The source of the light lay out of sight.
    Grady rose, stepped around the table, and put his face to the window. He expected to see lights in the workshop, which earlier he locked tight. Instead, the glow came from the garage, to which the workshop was attached.
    Nevertheless, he knew this intruder must be the same that had toured the workshop and later had taken the baked chicken breasts.

Fourteen

U pon finding the bloody handprint on