Chapter 130 DECEMBER AGAIN

Chapter 130 DECEMBER AGAIN
December comes the way December comes and is different from last December in all the ways that a year makes things different — not dramatically, not in the way of transformation, but in the specific way of increment, of a thing having moved one year further along the road it has been on and the road being visible further back and the destination being visible further ahead. Last December we were in Edinburgh with the Christmas market smell and the castle on its rock and Load-Bearing going to Sundance and Nathan's first letter and the decision to go home in January. This December we are home. The building is on the field. Nathan is coming to dinner. The award is on the shelf in the garage office next to Margaret and the flowers from Catherine that I have replaced twice since October because some things deserve to be replaced when they run their course rather than left to prove a point about impermanence.

Nathan comes on a Saturday. Rook picks him up from the halfway house — he has been in the halfway house for eighteen months now and the transition to independent housing is scheduled for February, a studio apartment in the county that Diane helped identify and that Nathan has visited twice and described to Rook as smaller than any room he has ever lived in and exactly what he needs, which is the most self-aware thing he has said about his own requirements in Rook's memory. Rook picks him up and they drive to the field first because Nathan asked to see the building and Rook said yes without hesitation.

They are at the field for forty-five minutes. I know this because Rook texts me: at the site. He's asking questions. Good ones. I text back: tell him about the south wall. Rook texts: already did. I put the phone down and go back to book three which is at ninety-one pages and whose December chapter is the one I am inside right now, which means I am writing about the dinner that has not happened yet in the chapter about the month the dinner is happening in, which is the specific disorientation of in-process writing that I have made my peace with.

They arrive at the house at noon. Nathan is in the jacket that fits properly now — the new one, the one that is the right size for the person he is rather than the person he was before the halfway house meals did their slow work. He stands at the side entrance and does not knock — Rook has told him not to knock and he has learned the permission — and he comes into the kitchen and he looks at the room and at the table set for six and at my mother at the counter and my father in his chair by the window and Finn and Adaeze at the far end of the table already talking about something in the low comfortable register of people who are at home in a room.

He sits in the chair at the end. The same end as Christmas. The chair that has become, by repetition and consistency and the specific quiet dignity of a man taking the space he has been given and no more, Nathan's chair at this table. Not announced. Not assigned. Simply his, because he has sat in it twice now and will sit in it again and that is how chairs at tables become chairs at tables.

My mother serves. She has made food that is good and substantial and she serves Nathan the same as everyone else, which is the most significant act of the afternoon and the one I write about most in book three — not the words, which are ordinary and warm, but the serving. The plate passed across without the pause that would acknowledge the history or the complication. Just the plate. Here. Eat. You are at this table.

After lunch Nathan asks to see the book three pages. Not all of them — he would not presume. He asks to see the Nathan chapter. The one about the penmanship lesson and the third notebook and the letters being consistent. I print it and give it to him at the kitchen table while everyone else has moved to the sitting room. He reads it slowly. He is a slow reader — not from difficulty but from the habit of someone who has learned that fast reading misses things.

When he finishes he holds the pages for a moment. Then he says: you got it right. I say: I had good material. He says: that line is yours. You always use it when someone helped you. I say: it's always true when I use it. He is quiet for a moment. Then: may I keep this? I say: it will change before it's published. He says: I know. I want the draft version. The one that is still becoming what it is.

I give him the pages. He folds them carefully and puts them in his jacket pocket — the chest pocket, the inside one, the pocket that is closest to the body. He goes to join the others in the sitting room. I sit at the kitchen table for a moment with the December afternoon outside and the building on the field twenty minutes away getting its final interior touches and book three at ninety-one pages and a father-in-law with draft pages in his chest pocket because he wanted the version that is still becoming what it is.

That is December. That is the year. That is the specific quality of a life that has been built correctly for the load — not without difficulty, not without the parts that break and the parts that require rebuilding and the parts that test the joints beyond what you thought they could hold. But holding. Still holding. Every load point distributed, every joint intact, every element in its right relationship to every other element.

Rook finds me at the table ten minutes later. He sits beside me. He does not ask what I am thinking about because he already knows. He looks at the empty chair at the end of the table.

'He took the pages,' I say.

'I know,' he says. 'I saw.'

'The draft version,' I say. 'The one still becoming what it is.'

Rook looks at the chair. Then at me. 'That's what he's always wanted,' he says. 'Something that is still becoming. Something he has not missed the beginning of.' He pauses. 'He missed the beginning of everything that mattered. He doesn't want to miss the becoming of this one.'

I look at him. At the person who wrote Nathan a letter about dinner and penmanship and got a response in eight days and drove him to the field first because Nathan asked and who is now sitting at the kitchen table on a December Saturday having had a meal with his father for the second time in his adult life and who is not performing any of it — not the forgiveness, not the difficulty, not the progress. Just living it. In the room. Choosing it.

'Same time next year,' I say.

'Same time next year,' he says. 'Nathan at the end. Adaeze calling your father Dale. The terrible coffee.'

'The terrible coffee,' I confirm.

We sit at the kitchen table until the sitting room sounds remind us we have people to go back to. Then we go back. The December afternoon does what December afternoons do. The building on the field is twenty minutes away in the dark, getting its final work, almost done, almost ready.

Almost. Not yet. Still becoming.

That is exactly where it should be.