What I Came to Tell You by Tommy Hays

expected Grover to answer. More like he was asking himself the question.
    “What about you?” Grover asked. “Are you forgetting her?”
    His father wrapped his hands around his knee and leaned back. By this time of night, he always looked like he needed another shave. He had bags under his eyes and there was a softness in his face that made him look older. “If you’re asking do Ifeel better some days, I do. Other days I miss her so bad I can hardly bring myself to get out of bed in the morning.”
    Grover remembered seeing his father cry on the porch that night after he’d torn up his workshop. It was one thing to have a father who was cranky and stormed around the house, a father he could be good and mad at. It was another thing to have a father whose voice shook, who even cried. It embarrassed Grover, and he didn’t know what to say or do. His father sat on Grover’s bed for a while. Grover couldn’t remember the last time his father had sat with him.

    Grover zipped up his coat and ducked into its collar, trying to cut the wind. It was early November and the weather was freezing, the coldest morning Asheville had had so far this year. The wind burned his cheeks. Sudie, who read the weather in the paper every morning, said it would be twenty-one degrees this morning. “The wind makes it feel like below zero,” Sudie said, pulling her scarf up around her face.
    They stared with envy whenever a car passed. “Lucky dogs,” Sudie muttered as she waved to friends who waved from the toastiness of their Volvo station wagon.
    Their father had started them back walking to school. Grover, Sudie and their parents used to walk the several blocks to Isaac Claxton, and then their father would cross over into downtown and walk a few more blocks to the Wolfe house. After theaccident, their father had driven them. He hadn’t seemed to have the energy to get everyone ready, including himself, soon enough to walk. But Grover guessed the main reason their father drove was because of how their mother had died. If Sudie or Grover just walked down Edgemont, their father always looked them in the eye and said, “Watch out for cars.”
    As they passed the Bamboo Forest, Grover checked for new stakes. He did this every morning. His father had helped him pull up all the stakes, which wasn’t easy. More and more, working in the Bamboo Forest made Grover feel part of something bigger. More and more he felt like, as weird as it sounded, he was working with the place itself. The bamboo sections practically laid themselves into grids, tree branches wove themselves between the bamboo sections and leaves arranged themselves into patterns. Nature was the artist and he its assistant.
    Several blocks from school, the Roundtrees’ van passed them. The brake lights came on, and they pulled over to the curb. Clay rolled down his window. “Y’all want a ride?!”
    It was the first time Grover’d noticed the American flag decal and the
Support Our Troops
sticker on their bumper.
    “Hop in,” Leila said.
    “You have room?” their father asked, which made Grover and Sudie look at each other. Hadn’t he just finished telling them walking was good for them?
    Clay climbed out of the car and opened the sliding back door, revealing Emma Lee, who looked up from a book. Clay climbed into the very back seat and Sudie climbed in next to him. Theirfather took Clay’s seat up front next to Leila. Grover climbed in, shut the van door and slid in next to Emma Lee, who glanced up at him, then went back to reading her book.
    “Look what I made.” Clay held up a Cheerios box with rubber bands strung across an open hole in the side. “Emma Lee helped me with it last night.” He strummed it.
    “Let me try,” Sudie said.
    He held it out to her.
    Emma Lee seemed deep into her book. At first Grover and Emma Lee hadn’t talked much after that morning when she’d taken him down to the Bamboo Forest to find his father, the morning after his father had torn