“I’m sorry,” she said simply, like a person setting down a heavy box. “Thank you. I looked down to pay the vendor and when I looked up—”
She shook her head, swallowed. “Thank you.”
“It happens,” I said. I rocked back on my good heel and let Mama June do the quiet fussing she is built for—buttoning the jacket, checking the Band-Aid, fussing the string of the kite into a safer knot. “Is that her kite?”
The mother blinked at the red triangle with its wounded seam and the tails scissoring in the wind. Her expression did something soft and painful. “Her father made it,” she said, voice caught in a place it clearly visits often.
“Before—” She stopped. There was a cliff there with no safe railing. “He worked the lines. Winter storm. He—”
She tried once more. “He loved kites.”
The girl looked up at me, the way kids do when adults’ words go gray around the edges. “It tore,” she said. “I don’t want to lose it.”
“You won’t,” I said, like a vow made its own weather.
We offered to walk them—no, not walk, ride—down the block to the little lot where her car waited. The officers nodded, satisfied with names and details, with the ease of the girl’s breath now that the plugs muted the march. The crowd melted back into parade shapes.
Phones lowered. Some people found their pockets for their shame; others didn’t bother.
At her hatchback, the mother hovered. “I was unkind to you,” she said to me without looking away from her daughter. “At the store. I taught her something I don’t want her to learn.”
“You taught her to be careful,” I said. “It’s the world that tries to teach her to be afraid of the wrong things.”
I gestured at the kite. “We can fix that. The rip. We’ve got a garage two blocks over. Take twenty minutes and a cup of coffee, and she’ll be flying it again by sunset.”
She smiled in a way that pulled a dimple out of hiding. “I don’t know if I should—”
“Mom,” the girl begged, “please.”
Sometimes the right answer is obvious. Sometimes it needs a nudge.
The Iron Shepherds’ garage is more community room than shop now.
There’s a coffee urn that has done tours of duty at more bake sales than I can remember, and a wall of photographs that could introduce you to everybody in this town you’d ever want to meet.
We fix strollers and lawn chairs and anything else that shows up with a story attached.
People bring casseroles and questions and occasionally their better selves.
Mama June spread the kite on a clean patch of workbench like a doctor asking for quiet.
She threaded a needle with a length of red dental floss—a trick she swears by because it doesn’t slip and because she likes how the word floss makes men flinch. Ty measured out a little strip of ripstop tape from the stash we keep for saddlebag mishaps.
Big Walt sat on a stool and grumbled companionably about the parade route being too long this year, which is his way of filling air so fear has less room to move around in it.
The girl watched like she was learning a magic trick. The mother watched me.
“Chaplain,” she said, trying the nickname on like a borrowed jacket. “Is that what they call you?”
“Old habits,” I said, squinting at the seam. “I still say grace, and I still listen for what people mean when their words are messy.”
“Carly,” she said, extending a hand, then pulling it back, then offering it again as if she’d had to arm-wrestle some pride to get it to behave. “I teach second grade. I should know better.”
“Knowing better gets you started,” I said. “Doing better is the ride.”
She looked at the wall of photos and found a familiar face. “My neighbor says your group did her mom’s ramp for free after surgery.”
“That ramp owes us a pie,” Big Walt said without turning. “I keep a ledger.”
Carly laughed, a small sound at first, then larger.
The girl—Mia—leaned into her mother’s side, content now that adults were making the world square again. When Mama June bit off the end of the floss and smoothed the last stitch flat, the kite looked like it had earned a scar.
Some things are prettier for what they’ve survived.
“We should fly it,” Ty said, checking the sky through the garage door. The wind had turned cooperative, the light gone to honey. “Pond’s got a good breeze at this hour.”
We rode in a small procession that would never make the news—two bikes, a hatchback, a few ordinary hopes.
On the levee path, we became a windbreak, our bodies and our machines drawing a little pocket of air where the red kite could decide what story it wanted to tell next.
“Ready?” I asked.
Mia nodded.
Courage is often a nod delivered by a small chin.
She let me show her a safer knot, the kind a lineman would approve of, the kind you tie when the world has taught you that some strings matter too much to be left to chance.
Then she ran, a red streak of jacket and laughter, and the kite rose as if it knew who had made it and why.
Carly’s hands came up to her face. She didn’t wipe the tears away. I think she wanted to know what they felt like in that particular air.
On the far bank, the parade was unwinding into dusk. The brass had softened. A bugle miles away practiced the first uncertain notes of “Taps,” and something in my chest answered.
Without thinking too hard about it, I folded a scrap of paper from my pocket—an old receipt, history written on the back of groceries—and I wrote two names on it. One was the man I had held in a desert where nothing grows. The other was a kid I’d met stateside, too young to know the shape of the choice he had made.
I set the paper boat in the shallows and let it go.
