She drove out to Route 9 at nine in the morning with one of the chairs in the back seat. The Yoders had let her borrow theirs.
Walt Brenner was in his barn workshop, sanding something. The old radio was playing. Biscuit was asleep under the workbench. The whole place smelled like cedar and coffee and sawdust.
Ruth Ann set the little rocking chair down on the workbench, upside down, so the bottom of the seat was facing him.
Walt looked at it. He didn't stop sanding. But his hands slowed down.
"Morning, Ruth Ann," he said.
"Morning, Walt."
They had known each other forty years. Neither of them said anything for a while.
"How'd you figure it out?" Walt asked finally.
"I measured three hundred and twelve chairs," Ruth Ann said. "And then I remembered the picture by the door."
Walt put down the sandpaper. He picked up the little chair and turned it right side up and set it on the floor. He gave it a gentle push with one finger. It rocked back and forth, smooth and quiet.
"Bobby wanted six kids," he said. "He used to say it on the bus. Six kids and a farm and a wife who could cook better than his mother, which wasn't hard. Eddie said he'd settle for two, as long as one of them played football for the Panthers."
He watched the chair rock.
"They didn't get any."
Ruth Ann didn't say anything. A good teacher learns to wait.
"I came home in 1970," Walt said. "I didn't talk to anybody. I didn't know how. I worked. I built things. Ten years like that." He rubbed his thumb along the top rail of the chair. "Then one night in '81, I heard Lloyd and his wife had a baby. Their first. Bobby would've been that baby's uncle."
"So you made a chair."
"So I made a chair. I didn't know what else to do. I put their initials on the bottom so they'd be part of it. I left it on the porch at two in the morning and drove home and sat in the truck and cried for an hour."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Then somebody else had a baby. And then somebody else." He shrugged. "And I figured, every kid in this town is a kid Bobby and Eddie would've known. Would've coached. Would've yelled at from the bleachers. So."
He didn't finish. He didn't need to.
"Three hundred and twelve," Ruth Ann said softly.
"Three hundred and fourteen," Walt said. "You missed two. They moved to Kentucky."
Ruth Ann drove home and sat at her dining room table with her eleven notebooks and the last chapter of her book.
She had the best story she'd ever found. The kind of story that gets a book noticed. Maybe even gets it into a newspaper in Columbus.
She wrote it all down that night. Every word Walt said. It took her until two in the morning.
Then she read it back once.
And then she tore the pages out of the notebook, folded them in half, and put them in the drawer with the good silverware.
The last chapter of *Pine Hollow: A Town Remembered* was only one page long when the book came out in the spring. It said that for forty-five years, someone in Pine Hollow had made a little rocking chair for every baby born in town. It said that nobody knew who. It said that some mysteries are better left alone.
It was the only time in her life Ruth Ann Mercer ever wrote something she knew wasn't the whole truth.
She never regretted it.
On Christmas Eve, Lloyd Hersh's great-granddaughter was born at the hospital in Marietta. Seven pounds, two ounces. They named her Roberta, after a great-great-uncle she'd never meet.
Two days later, Walt drove to Lloyd's house in the middle of the afternoon. In daylight. He knocked on the door.
Lloyd opened it, leaning on his cane. He looked at Walt. Then at the little cherry rocking chair Walt was carrying under one arm.
Lloyd's face changed.
"You," he said. "All this time. It was you."
Walt nodded.
He set the chair down on the porch and turned it upside down. Then he took out his pocketknife and held it out to Lloyd, handle first.
"The bottom's not finished yet," Walt said. "Thought maybe you'd like to do this one."
Lloyd Hersh, seventy-nine years old, lowered himself down onto the porch step. His hands shook. It took him a long time.
But he carved them himself. Small. Careful. In the corner where the seat met the back leg.
*B.H.*
*E.S.*
