39
The leaves were turning the colour of our dog.
Stan and I drove to the street where it looked like nothing bad had ever happened and I parked the old silver BMW X5 outside the house with the FOR SALE sign in the yard.
We were neither early nor late. I had timed our arrival to the minute and as I put on the handbrake the door opened in a blur of adults and small children milling in the hallway, and at the centre of them all there was the face of my daughter.
Scout was saying her goodbyes.
I eased myself from the car, the pain in my lower legs flaring, the muscles still stiff with injury from the jagged black fragments of shrapnel that would be there forever. I reached across Stan to the well of the passenger seat to take my walking stick.
When I straightened up by the side of the car, taking some of my weight on the stick, Scout was watching me, her face clouding over at the sight of her damaged old dad.
We stared at each other and in the look that passed between us there was a glimpse of the distant future, a time that we would know fifty years from today, the time when the child becomes the carer and the parent is the cared for. That time was waiting for my daughter and me around a lifetime from today, and the summers would fly by, one by one, and there was nothing that either of us could do to stop it coming.
Then the moment was gone. I took a faltering step up the garden path and paused, wincing with pain. And then it didn’t matter because I called my daughter’s name.
And Scout ran to our car, and to her dog, and to my arms.