Chapter 65
He ran on the morning of his fortieth birthday alone, as he ran most mornings, through the familiar paths of Hope Gardens in the early gold light.
He was forty years old and he had been running seriously for twenty-two years and his body was different from what it had been at eighteen, obviously, and from what it had been at thirty. Things took longer to repair. The mornings required more warming up. He was not slower he had never been about speed but the running had a different quality now: less about pace, more about the particular form of presence it created.
He thought, running, about what forty meant. He thought about what he knew that he had not known at thirty. About the things he would tell his thirty-year-old self if he could.
He would say: the work is the right work. You found it early and you've done it consistently and that is its own form of luck and its own form of discipline. You've built things that matter. You've built a marriage that is a genuine equal partnership. You've built children who know who they are.
He would say: the distance wasn't defeat. Every mile of it made you who you are. Wolverhampton and Birmingham and the cold bus stops and the long-distance phone calls and the shoebox of letters all of it was the education. All of it was necessary.
He would say: your mother knew. She always knew. She built the foundation and trusted you to build on it. That is the most complete gift one person can give another.
He ran to the far corner of the gardens and turned for home.
The city was waking up around him. The light was doing what it did in Kingston mornings, that particular warm gold that he had never stopped being grateful for. He was home. He had been home for nineteen years. He ran home every morning.
He turned the last corner and the apartment was ahead, lights on in the kitchen, and he could see through the window Nia at the counter making coffee, Elise already at the table with a book, Joseph not yet visible but audible his voice carrying from somewhere in the apartment, describing something with great urgency.
His whole life was in that window.
He ran toward it.