Seven years ago in May, on a two-story Colonial on Kipling Street over in the Westlake subdivision, a twelve-pitch roof with a widow's walk that nobody had used since the house was built, Alton's son Quincy, who was twenty-one and had been on the crew for three summers and was faster than anyone Alton had ever trained, including Ramiro, had been working the back slope without a harness. Alton had seen him. Alton had called over, Clip in, Q, and Quincy had called back, After this row, and Alton had said, All right, after this row, and gone back to what he was doing, which was arguing with the homeowner on his phone about the price of replacing rotted fascia. He had heard the sound before he understood it. It was not a loud sound. It was the sound of a bundle sliding, a scrape and then a hush, and then from below a noise that was not like anything, that he had never been able to describe to anyone, not to the doctors and not to Quincy's mother and not to the man from OSHA who had come out two weeks later with a clipboard and a polite, terrible patience.
C6, the doctors said, which Alton had not known was a thing a person could be until he was told his son was one. A burst fracture of the sixth cervical vertebra. Quincy could move his shoulders and bend his elbows. He could turn his wrists up. He could not close his hands, could not walk, could not feel anything below a line across his chest that the occupational therapist had drawn on him once with a washable marker so he could see it in the mirror. He had spent four months at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta and come home to a house on Tanyard Road that Alton had widened, doorway by doorway, with a reciprocating saw.
Seven years. In that time Quincy had finished the associate's degree he'd dropped out of at nineteen, online, with voice software and a typing stick strapped to his hand. He had gone through one period of about eight months that Alton did not like to think about, when he had stopped getting out of bed except when the aide made him, and had said things to his father, flatly, at the kitchen table, that his father had heard and kept. And he had come out the far side of that, and in June he had applied for a job as a 911 call-taker with the Henley County Emergency Communications District, and gone to the interview in his good chair with a borrowed tie that Alton had knotted for him, and passed the typing test and the listening test and the psych interview and a background check that took nine weeks, and then, on the first of September, a woman named Mrs. Pressley had called the house and said, We would like to offer you a position.
He started Monday. Night shift. Seven in the evening to seven in the morning, three nights on and four off, then four on and three off, in the dispatch center behind the county courthouse annex, which was fourteen miles from Tanyard Road by the shortest way.
The county paratransit service, which was the only way Quincy had of getting anywhere Alton could not drive him in the back of his own pickup with the chair broken down in the bed and Quincy lifted bodily into the passenger seat, ran from six in the morning to seven at night, Monday through Saturday. It did not run Sundays. It could not, the scheduler told Alton when he called, pick up at six-fifteen in the evening and guarantee arrival by six forty-five, because the window was ninety minutes either way. It did not pick up at seven in the morning at all on weekends. It did not, the scheduler said, kindly, in a voice that had said this before, really work for shift workers.
So, the van.
He had looked at them on the internet late at night for years, the way another man might look at boats. New, they ran sixty, seventy thousand dollars. Used, from the big lots up in Atlanta, forty and up, and the used ones went fast, because there were never enough of them and there were always people waiting.
And then, in February, waiting in his truck for a light on Tanyard Road at the corner of Hollis Street, he had looked to his right and seen a hand-lettered sign in the window of a small car lot he had driven past a thousand times without seeing: MOBILITY VANS — RAMPS — HAND CONTROLS — ASK. Phan Mobility & Pre-Owned. A cinder-block office painted the green of a hospital hallway, a half-acre of gravel, twenty or so cars with prices soaped on the windshields, and at the end of the row, in front of a corrugated steel service bay, two minivans with the telltale lowered floor, sitting a hand's width closer to the ground than a minivan ought to.
He had pulled in. A woman had come out of the office, small, in her fifties, in a navy cardigan with reading glasses pushed up on her head, and looked at his truck and then at him, and said, "You're not here for a Camry."
"No, ma'am."
"Who uses the chair?"