My Last Wish novel · Chapter 24 of 24

Chapter 24: Stay

On the first warm Saturday in April, Dane dug a hole in the front yard.

He dug it three feet from the porch steps, where the morning sun came in low across the grass.

"Deeper," Teddy said, from the edge, with a toy shovel.

"It's deep enough."

"Deeper, Dane."

"Fine." Dane dug another inch, to be agreeable.

His forearms were brown with dirt, and he had pushed his sleeves up past the elbow.

I watched from the porch swing with my tea, and I did not look away, because I didn't have to anymore.

The lemon tree stood waiting in its clay pot beside the hole.

It had come back in the weeks since the old house, the way things do in spring.

New leaves had crowded the branches, glossy and bright, and the one small lemon had turned from green to a deep soft yellow.

Teddy had been guarding it since breakfast.

"Is it ready?" he asked, for the ninth time.

"Not till your mother says," Dane said.

I came down the steps in my socks.

I put my hand in my cardigan pocket and found the slip I had carried for four months.

It had gone soft at the edges.

I had taken it out on a hundred mornings, and it had always been blank.

I had told myself I was saving it.

The truth was that the number one thousand had felt like an ending, and I had not been ready to write an ending.

I sat down on the edge of the porch with a pencil from Dane's shirt pocket.

He saw what I was doing.

He leaned the shovel against the step and stood still, and didn't say a thing.

I wrote in my own handwriting, slowly, with the pencil pressed hard.

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