What Goes Around

Chapter 20 — What Goes Around

The morning Daniel walked out, the sky over the prison was the flat pale blue of a Texas winter, and the air had the clean bite of cold. He carried a paper bag with his clothes in it — the suit, folded, which he would never wear again — and a bus ticket, and forty-three dollars. The gate clanged shut behind him with a sound he would remember for the rest of his life, and then there was just the road, and the sky, and the strange, enormous fact of having nowhere he had to be.

He went back to Elgin. Not to the house — the house was Carla’s now, settled in the divorce, and he would not have gone back even if it hadn’t been. He rented a room above a garage from an old subcontractor who asked no questions and charged him less than the room was worth, and he hired himself out as a bricklayer. Not a contractor. Not a boss. A hired hand, day rates, cash at the end of the week, his name known on the sites he worked and nowhere else.

The work was good. That was the thing nobody told you about losing everything: the work itself didn’t change. A wall was a wall. You mixed the mortar, you laid the course, you checked the level, and at the end of the day there was something standing there that hadn’t been standing in the morning. Daniel’s hands remembered. His back complained. He ate dinner standing up in the little kitchenette and slept the deep, uncomplicated sleep of a man who has spent his body honestly, and most nights he did not dream at all.

He saw Carla sometimes, in town — at the grocery store, once at a red light, her car beside his truck. They nodded. It was not warmth, exactly, but it was not war either. It was the quiet that comes after a storm has taken everything it was going to take, and you stand in the yard and look at what’s left and start, slowly, to clear the branches.

Miguel called in March.

Daniel was on a job site, laying block for a garden wall, the sun warm on the back of his neck, when his phone buzzed in his pocket. He almost didn’t answer — unknown numbers were usually solicitors. But something made him look, and the number had an Austin area code, and his hands were shaking so badly he nearly dropped his trowel.

“Dad.”

Twenty-three years old, and Daniel had not heard his son’s voice in nearly three years. He sat down on a stack of blocks, right there in the dirt, mortar on his hands and his heart hammering like it used to hammer in the bad dreams, and the foreman looked over and then looked away, the way men do.

“I’ve been thinking,” Miguel said. “About what you did. About — all of it. I’m not saying it’s okay. I don’t know if it will ever be okay.”

“I know,” Daniel said. His voice barely made it out.

“But you’re my father. And I — I don’t want to be the kind of person who can’t pick up a phone.”

They talked for eleven minutes. About nothing, mostly. The weather. Miguel’s job — he’d been promoted, he said, and Daniel closed his eyes at that, standing in the dirt with the phone pressed to his ear. The garden wall. It was the most important conversation of Daniel’s life, and it was about nothing at all.

Miguel came to visit in May. He stood in the doorway of the garage apartment, twenty-three and trying not to look nervous, holding a six-pack like a peace offering, and Daniel made coffee in a dented pot, and they sat on the two chairs Daniel owned, and slowly — the way a wall goes up, course by course, level checked and checked again — they began.

—

On the last Sunday of October, Sofia drove out to the cemetery on the east side of town. The live oaks were dropping their leaves early this year, and the air smelled like rain that hadn’t come yet. She carried a bundle of white lilies — Lucia’s favorite, though Sofia had been too young, really, to remember that with certainty; it was one of the things their mother had told her, and she had held onto it the way you hold onto anything someone gives you about a person you lost too young.

Lucia’s stone was simple. Beloved daughter and sister. The dates. Twenty years of rain had softened the edges of the letters, and Sofia traced them with her fingertip the way she had done as a child, when the stone was new and the grief was new and the world still made sense.

She knelt and laid the lilies against the stone. She brushed a leaf from the base. She sat there for a long time, listening to the wind move through the oaks, and she thought about the girl in the photograph — seventeen, laughing, forever seventeen — and about the long road she herself had walked to get here: the trap, the trial, the prison visit, the tears in the parked car. She thought about Miguel, and hoped he was happy. She thought about her mother, singing in the kitchen again — quietly, off-key, but singing. That had started last Christmas. Sofia hadn’t told anyone how much it meant.

“It’s done, hermana,” she said quietly. “It’s really done.”

She stood, and wiped her eyes, and walked back to her car under the wide Texas sky, and she did not look back — not because she was leaving Lucia behind, but because, finally, she was carrying her forward.

What goes around comes around. Daniel Reyes had lost everything — his company, his marriage, two years of his life, the easy love of his son, still being rebuilt course by course. He laid brick now for other men’s houses, and his hands were rough, and his name, in some rooms, still made people go quiet.

But at night, in a small room above a garage in Elgin, Texas, Daniel Reyes closed his eyes and slept — deeply, peacefully, without dreams — for the first time in twenty years.

And that, in the end, was the whole of it.