He reached for her free hand and squeezed it.
It was, Izzy could not deny, a strange life. There was nothing normal about her circumstances, how young and stupid she had once been and how much she still felt connected to the teenage version of herself, completely lost and with no possible chance of happiness. It wasn’t fate that she felt in this moment, no sense that any of this had been ordained. She felt the chaos of the world, how easily she could have ruined her life and the life of her son, and how some miracle had changed it. She thought of that day when Dr. Grind had come to visit her at the barbecue joint, and how she had signed her life over to him, had decided that she would not settle for anything other than a happy life. She was, which she rarely admitted because of her own discomfort with emotion, so fucking strong. She had made this happen through sheer force of will, and she would never, ever, let it go.
The three of them, together, listened to the quiet of the room, the warm air circulating through the house, everything silent and still. When they returned to the world, this moment past, and it would happen soon enough, the three of them would stand up, hand in hand, and walk into the courtyard to greet the new day and whatever mysteries that it held.
epilogue
the infinite family project (year ten)
Izzy and Mr. Tannehill stood side by side and pulled the meat from a pig, their motions so in tune, even after those years apart, that their hands never crossed each other up. By the time they were finished, they had a tray filled with steaming pork. Though Mr. Tannehill had slowed down some and Izzy had taken over a good portion of the work with the pigs, he was still strong enough to lift a whole hog on his own and he still inherently knew the exact time to cook a pig, the perfect rub, a wealth of knowledge about barbecue that, to Izzy, was unequaled. He carried the barbecue out of the kitchen and to the porch of the restaurant that he and Izzy co-owned in Nashville, Swine Before Pearls. They had also branched out to ribs and brisket, though Mr. Tannehill had worried over the shift, and their restaurant, since it had opened two years ago, encountered lines running out of the building, people waiting for more than an hour for Swine to open, the barbecue running out before the lunch shift had even ended, customers turned away only to show up earlier the next day.
They had recently won a James Beard award in American Classics, which had only served to increase the lines that waited for their barbecue and Izzy’s strange twists on classic southern sides. Izzy and Mr. Tannehill had been featured on several TV shows, standing with looks of complete befuddlement beside famous chefs-turned-hosts. Today, however, a Sunday, they were officially closed; even so, the first Sunday of every month was the Infinite Family Reunion, and Izzy was excited to find that seventeen of the twenty-nine members of the family had gathered at the restaurant for lunch.
The walls of the restaurant were covered with small wooden letters, a holdover from Izzy’s work in college. To unwind, her hands jittery from hours working in the kitchen, after Cap went to bed, she would spend an hour in the garage, her bare feet covered in sawdust, using a band saw, bringing yet another story into the world, making it tangible, a ghost in reverse. With each letter, sanding it carefully, she could feel the tiny threads that connected her to all aspects of her life. She would touch the smoothness of the wood, and feel her life stretch out to Hal, the emphatic way he asserted that art was necessary, and she could feel it stretch to her mother, long dead and yet always within fingertip reach, watching her daughter with great approval as she created something strange and beautiful, and she could feel it return to the complex, to each and every member of the family who had spent time with the band saw to help Izzy.
She had chosen Jane Eyre, a book that she had come to love, her connection to Jane, her weird acrobatics that turned Preston into Mr. Rochester. It was a never-ending project; Izzy admitted that she might never complete it, but the letters had spilled out of the garage, into their house, and it had been Cap who finally suggested that she hang the letters on the walls of the restaurant. She had agreed, though she placed the letters in random order, each week bringing in a new batch to cover the bare parts of the walls, answering questions about the letters with a shrug, as if she was crafting a hidden code that only she would know the answer to.