Part 9 — Year Zero: Before the Light
Rosa Whitaker arrived with the kind of morning that makes coffee smell like an idea. She wore a denim jacket and carried a metal lunch tin with a dent shaped exactly like use. The nurse let her in with a nod that said kindness doesn’t need visiting hours.
“You’re June,” she said, and I was already in her arms—Bo’s laugh in the way she hugged, Bo’s steadiness in how she set me back on my feet. She touched my mother’s hand. “Evelyn.” She touched Tom’s shoulder. “Tom.” She shook Ray’s hand like she recognized the kind of man who keeps his word.
The tin clicked open. Inside: a small cloth-wrapped bundle, a folded card, and a cassette in a paper sleeve labeled in Bo’s blunt, humble print: Year 0 — Before the Light.
“He made me swear,” Rosa said, half-grin, half-grief. “No mail, no shortcuts, hand-to-hand only. He said some days need a witness.”
We set the helmet—matte black with the red smile—on the windowsill where the first light could find it. Tom placed the red candle in a glass holder shaped like a porch and lit it. The flame made a soft promise. The red fern band caught the lamp and became a ribbon for the room.
Ray checked the player, swapped a battery because he knows how time cheats, and slid the tape in. My mother’s eyes were clear, her hand warm around mine.
The machine clicked. Hiss. Birds I couldn’t see found their way into the speaker: that thin pre-dawn chorus that sounds like hope clearing its throat. Then Bo.
“If this plays when the day is still deciding,” he said, voice low, unshowy, “we did it right.”
He let the birds sing a few beats.
“I’m recording this in a truck cab that smells like coffee and rain,” he said. “Streetlight in the windshield. My hands are too big for this little machine and my heart is too big for my ribs. Evelyn’s inside, sleeping. Tom is home, good and scared with the kind of love that makes you clean the kitchen twice. June, you’re not here yet. I’m talking to the air where your name will be.”
He laughed under his breath, embarrassed at his own sincerity. “I don’t have a map for this. I have a socket set and a handful of vows. So here they are, before the light, when promises are sharp enough to cut through foolishness.”
Paper rustled; I pictured him reading off a parts receipt because he hated waste.
“I vow to love you even if love is from the edge,” he said. “I vow to keep the hinge oiled on the door I don’t walk through. I vow to fix what I can around the people who chose steadiness, and to never make my ache their weather.”
He exhaled. The cab ticked as it cooled.
“I’ll send you the sound of every birthday,” he said, “because days can be a ladder you climb even if you never see the roof. I’ll save a key that isn’t a key. I’ll find you a red door when you’re grown and make sure it opens. I’ll pick a sister who knows how to wait with a tin.”
Rosa’s laugh was a small, bright bruise. She put a hand over her mouth and nodded into it.
“And one more thing,” Bo said. “If you ever find yourself in a room almost dark, where someone you love is making the jump we all make, press record. Let them leave something. A laugh, a prayer, a grocery list, the sound of a window. We don’t get to keep people. We get to keep what they say when love is honest.”
He let the birds have the last word. Click.
We sat in the soft aftermath. The candle made a steady low sound, a whisper that said yes. My mother closed her eyes and opened them again like a blessing.
“Joy,” she whispered—echoing herself, echoing him. “He remembered to pack joy.”
Rosa unfolded the card Bo had tucked in the tin. “He added this later,” she said. “Said it was for the person in charge of mornings.”
In Bo’s square letters: If the tape called zero plays, give June the little recorder. Tell her to collect first words, last words, and the ones in between. Call it whatever she wants. If she hates naming things, call it The Morning Box. Put a simple sign on the red door: We record love. Don’t overthink it.
I looked at Ray. He didn’t say Birthday Tapes, but his eyes did. Tom’s hands tightened as if they’d found work they knew. Millie wasn’t there, but I could see her flipping a sign to Open and making room on the counter between the pothos and the cash jar.
“Would you like to leave something?” I asked my mother. My voice didn’t wobble. It RSVP’d to the day.
She smiled like a secret that wanted to be kind and not clever. “Yes,” she said. “I would.”
Ray set the microrecorder on the pillow. Mom didn’t sit up; she didn’t need height for what she had to say. She looked at the helmet in the window, at the candle flame, at the red-banded fern. She began.
“June,” she said, and my name in her mouth was every year layered into a single syllable. “I’m sorry for the quiet I mistook for peace. I’m grateful for the steadiness I called love and that was love. I want you to run the fund if it makes you stand up straighter. I want you to plant tomatoes if they make you kinder. I want you to forgive me, not because I deserve it, but because you deserve being free.”
She paused, took a small breath that felt like a full one.
“And Bo,” she said, turning her head slightly, like you do when you talk to a photo on a nightstand, “I loved you. I will love you from whatever porch they give me next. Thank you for keeping the hinges honest. Thank you for singing off-key on purpose. Tell the fence I’m on my way.”
She smiled at Tom. “And you,” she said. “Thank you for making a house that didn’t leak on our heads. Thank you for pancakes with initials. Thank you for painting the door the red I like.”
Tom nodded, because what else do you do when the person you’ve shared a life with hands you the inventory of what you did right.
Ray clicked stop. He checked the tiny tape, popped it, labeled it with a piece of the red tape from the fern stem like a flag on a hill you’ll want to find again. Rosa put the microrecorder back in the tin beside Year 0 with a care that looked like prayer.
Outside the window, morning tipped from thinking about it to doing it. The blind edges turned into piano keys again; this time the room knew the song.
The nurse stepped in, checked screens that had the humility to be merely useful. “You’re all doing beautifully,” she said, which is a sentence I’d like stitched on a quilt somewhere.
We sat with my mother through the long, good minutes where being present is the only job. Tom read a psalm, stopping to breathe where the old words still fit. Rosa told a short story about Bo teaching their cousin to change a tire in church clothes. Ray stood and sat and stood again the way men do when they are too full and don’t want to spill.
“Helmet,” my mother murmured, and I lifted it from the sill. She set her palm on the crown like a blessing. “Keep whoever rides with you safe,” she said. “Tell the wind I said be gentle.”
She looked at me and then through me and then at me again. “Play zero one more time,” she said. “I want to hear the birds.”
We did. The room welcomed the sound the way rooms want to be useful.
When the tape clicked to silence, she squeezed my fingers and let go of the squeezing and kept the holding. Her breathing had the soft cadence of someone listening to a story they’ve heard before and like better every time.
“I feel tidy,” she said again, smiling. “Take care of the red.”
“We will,” I said.
The next breaths were small and honest and then there weren’t any. Not a drama, not a startling. A porch light going out because morning had fully arrived.
We didn’t look at the clock. We looked at her. We let the quiet name itself. The nurse was there when she should be and not a second before. There are rooms in America where people know how to help you leave with your dignity intact. This was one.
Rosa kissed my hair and said, “He wanted the dawn for her.” Tom pressed his forehead to the back of my mother’s hand like a man who knows gratitude better than grammar. Ray turned the candle just enough so the glass wouldn’t be too warm under the shade.
We sat until sitting felt like a way to love her. Then we did the small clean things grief asks: called who needed calling; gathered what needed gathering; left the fern in the cup and the helmet on the sill for one more hour like symbols that hadn’t finished their shift.
Rosa reopened the tin and slid a smaller envelope across the tray. “He asked me to give you this after,” she said. “Said it’s not a tape. Said it’s a list.”
Bo’s print again, on a page torn from the little notebook I knew from the toolbox: People to Keep. Names. A line about each:
Millie — knows when to water and when to repot.
Ray — answers on second ring.
Mrs. L. — dryer belt, grandson needs after-school job.
Band van — alternator, still owes us a song.
Maple High — ask the shop teacher who needs a first wrench.
It went on. Not long. Enough.
“We’ll need help,” I said, hearing Part Ten before I had a title for it.
“You have it,” Rosa said. She looked at the helmet, at the candle, at the fern. “He left you a whole country made of small roads.”
The sun fully found the window. Outside, a motorcycle went past on Maple Avenue, unshowy, a low hum like a throat clearing before a promise.
Tom took my hand. “When you’re ready,” he said, “we can go to the red door. The bench will want to hear.”
Ray lifted the microrecorder, then the cassette boxes, then the tin, with the same gentleness in three sizes. Rosa tucked Year 0 against her heart for one more second and then let it join its brothers.
I blew out the candle. Smoke curled and became a ribbon. The porch light went dark because the day had us now.
At the door, my phone buzzed. A text from Millie: Front room is full. Kids, a shop teacher, a woman with a dryer belt in a bag. Nobody knows why they came at dawn. Bring a sign. Bring the recorder.
I held up the screen. Ray smiled. Tom nodded. Rosa looked at my mother and then at me.
“Go start the morning,” she said.
We stepped into the hallway, carrying a helmet and a tin and a list. The red on the fern band caught a final stripe of lamp light behind us and then we were in the day, heading toward a door that knew our names.
Part 10 — We Record Love
Dawn had already chosen our block by the time we reached the red door. The sidewalk looked like a small town decided to be brave together: teenagers in hoodies, a shop teacher with chalk on his sleeve, a woman clutching a dryer belt in a grocery bag, a pair of band kids holding dented cases, two nurses on their way off night shift, a grandfather in suspenders with a Polaroid camera that still worked if you asked it nicely.
Millie waved us in and handed me a grease pencil. “Make it big,” she said, sliding a scrap of foam board onto the counter between the pothos and the cash jar.
I wrote in block letters the way Bo would have wanted: WE RECORD LOVE. Under it, smaller: Mornings, No Charge — First words, last words, and the ones in between.
Ray set the microrecorder on the bench and checked levels like he was tuning a gentle engine. Rosa put the lunch tin beside it, lid open, Year 0 on top like a compass you keep handy even if you know the road. Tom set the porch-shaped candle on the windowsill and lit it. The flame made a steady, useful glow.
“Do we need a ribbon?” Millie asked nobody and everybody. “Feels like we need a ribbon.”
“We’ve got red,” I said, and wrapped a length of electrical tape around the sign’s edge. The color answered like a friend who shows up before you finish asking.
People didn’t ask permission. They knew what to do.
Mrs. L—dryer-belt woman from Bo’s ledger—stepped to the bench first. She wasn’t grand about it. She held the recorder like a phone. “Ethan,” she said, voice shaking and then settling, “you start after school at the plant shop if you want it. Your granddad would be proud of your hands.” Click. She looked up, blinked twice, and put the recorder back down with an apology that didn’t need saying.
The band kids stood near the door, whispering in a way every old hallway still remembers. The shop teacher—the kind with a quiet that earns you—nudged a kid with oil under his nails forward. “First wrench?” he asked me.
I slid open the red toolbox from Maple’s unit and pulled out a nut driver roll and a pressure gauge, placed them in the kid’s hands like a future you can measure. “From June’s Toolbox,” I said, and he nodded like he had just been given a password.
“More like a door,” he said, and his smile found the red.
A nurse in scrubs took a turn with the recorder. “Mom,” she said, “your tomato starts are taller than you think. Keep them under the window in the afternoons.” A man left a story for a niece about a library card. A girl barely older than the tools recorded the sound of her laugh because she wanted to remember loving something before she knew what it cost.
The band van pulled to the curb—old, faithful, paint flaking in the places that admit they’ve been useful. The driver leaned in the door. “Somebody said we owe a song,” he said, grinning at the audacity of a ledger that counts music.
“You do,” I said, and he nodded like he’d been waiting to hear it.
They set up right there, brass and a snare, two clarinets that had survived a thousand freezing football games. They played the hymn the town uses when it wants to say thank you without arguing over syllables. Cars slowed. A baby in a stroller clapped at the wrong times and was exactly right.
Rosa stood near the window, smiling at a memory I suspected had a porch. Ray moved through the room the way he always did—big enough to block the sun, careful enough to be a skylight. Tom stood with his hand on the candle like he was keeping the light steady with sheer politeness.
When the last note hung and chose where to land, I climbed onto the little stool with the dent and faced the room that had made itself.
“Bo left us a list,” I said, holding it up. “People to keep. Not because we own them—because we owe each other small mercies.” I pointed to the toolbox, the sign, the bench. “This is what we’re going to do with what he left: mornings for messages; small grants for first jobs; a habit of oiling hinges.”
The shop teacher raised a hand like his class had trained him. “How do kids apply?”
“Ask Millie,” I said, and she bowed like a houseplant receiving rain. “Or Ray. Or me. Or Tom. No essays. No hoops. Tell us what you want to learn and who’ll teach you. We’ll buy the first wrench, the first boots, the first month of bus fare.”
A murmur—approval disguised as logistics. The grandfather with the Polaroid lifted the camera and asked permission with his eyebrows. I nodded. The photo slid out and dreamed itself into color on the counter while we ignored it on purpose, the way you do when you trust a thing to arrive.
I took a breath; the room took it too. “There’s one more part,” I said. “It’s called The Morning Box.” I tapped the tin. “If you have someone who can’t be here to say a thing love needs, we’ll help you record it and keep it safe until the day is right. No charge. No judgment. Just… tape.”
No one clapped. They didn’t need to. It wasn’t a performance; it was a list of chores we were agreeing to enjoy.
Tom stepped forward then, eyes on me, then on the room because some apologies are better when a few people overhear them. He set the old pawn ticket on the counter and the cassette player beside it.
“I kept something that wasn’t mine,” he said. “I told myself it was kindness. Maybe it was fear. I’m giving it back, and I’m asking the town to help me be braver with whatever years I’ve got.” He swallowed. “If any of you ever need me to carry a box or move chairs or sit on the end of a row and save the easy seat for a person who has trouble, I know how.”
A whole block’s worth of shoulders dropped a fraction, like a picture finally straightened on a wall.
Rosa lifted the Year 0 tape. “He wanted the birds,” she said, “for the days when our rooms forget the words.” She pressed play just long enough for that thin chorus to thread the shop like string through a quilt. It didn’t drown the traffic. It didn’t need to.
I bent behind the bench with Ray and loosened the little strip of wood he’d found the day before. Inside the cedar box rested the last of what we hadn’t opened: a folded sheet titled Rules We Can Break in Bo’s print. I read them aloud:
1. Start with the simplest thing first—unless someone needs a hug before the wrench.
2. If the door sticks, check the hinge; if the heart sticks, check the story.
3. If a kid shows up twice, give them a key.
4. If you can’t fix it, make it kinder while it’s broken.
5. If you don’t know what to do, do the small clean thing in front of you.
We taped the list to the pegboard with red and let it be our policy manual.
By midmorning the plant shop had run out of change and didn’t care. The sign in the window made strangers stop and put their palms to the glass like they were reading braille. The bench developed a line, the good kind. The band van took one more lap around the block and honked like a promise.
In the lull that wasn’t a lull, I stepped outside with Ray and looked at the door that had been painted for my mother’s exact red. The bell stuck and rang and stuck again. The street smelled like coffee from a diner that means it.
“First ride after lunch?” Ray asked, too casual to be anything but careful. “There’s a county line with your name on it.”
I thought of Evelyn’s palm on the helmet and Bo’s habit of singing off-key on purpose. I thought of wind and maps and hinges that learned to behave because someone bothered to listen.
“Yeah,” I said. “First ride after lunch.”
“Simple first,” he said.
“Then two steps left if that doesn’t work,” I answered, and he smiled like a person who recognizes their own sentence in another mouth.
Back inside, the grandfather shook the Polaroid. The shot bloomed into a picture of the room we were making: the red door open, people bent over the bench like a prayer that’s learned to stand, Millie mid-laugh, Tom holding the candle higher than he needed to, Rosa catching Year 0 with her fingertips like a bird you don’t scare.
I wrote a date on the white strip: Today.
We pinned it to the pegboard with the same care we’d give a child’s spelling test or a mechanic’s first paid invoice.
Around noon, we closed for an hour and carried the sign and the recorder back to the hospice. We set the candle where the lamp could remember it. We left the red tape fern in the water cup on the tray because some symbols have earned their keep. We said our goodbyes with gratitude instead of instructions. The nurse nodded. The room did its job: held what had happened without trying to make anything else.
On the way out, I put my palm on the lintel the way my mother used to do with our own front door, a private blessing for whoever came next.
By sunset we were back at Whitman and Fifth. The last customers of the day recorded a birthday joke and a baby’s squeal. A teenager in a thrifted jacket wrote her name on a clipboard under Intern and didn’t cross it out. The shop teacher drew a simple schematic for a person who’d never seen inside a carburetor and handed them a pencil as if to say, Make mistakes here; it’s allowed.
We hung one more sign, small enough to make you step close:
JUNE’S TOOLBOX — Starter grants for first jobs
Ask. We’ll figure it out together.
At closing, we sat on the floor with paper cups of diner coffee and let the room become quiet in the honest way. Millie watered the fern. Tom blew out the candle and smiled at the smoke as it wrote its cursive in the air. Rosa tucked the tin into a drawer with a label none of us changed: THINGS THAT MATTER.
Ray gave me my helmet. I traced the red smile and fastened the strap under my chin the way you do a thought you want to keep. We rolled out while the streetlights practiced being stars.
At the county line, he killed the engine and we listened to a kind of silence that still had a heartbeat. The air smelled like cut grass and summer deciding to let go.
“Say it,” Ray said, because he already knew I had words that needed air.
I thought of my mother’s letter and Bo’s vows and Tom’s apology and a town that had learned to turn kindness into a fence and then into a gate.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” I said, and the wind caught the sentence and carried it like a thing worth keeping. “We’ll measure our lives in little mercies that don’t photograph well. We’ll fix what we can and make kinder what we can’t. We’ll start simple. We’ll go two steps left. We’ll leave a light on. And every morning we’ll record love until the tape runs out and then we’ll get another tape.”
Ray nodded, helmet tucked against his hip like a punctuation mark that knows its place.
On the way back, the road held us up like it had noticed we finally trusted it. We passed the diner and the mill and the church whose bell rings even when nobody asks. We pulled up at the red door. The bell stuck and chimed and stuck again.
I locked the toolbox. I turned the sign to Open Tomorrow.
Under the bench, the cedar smelled like a promise already kept.
I looked at the door and thought of Evelyn in a room that knew the song, of Bo at a fence, of Tom painting a color first and finding the courage later, of Rosa riding a bus with a tin full of mornings, of Millie watering patience, of Ray answering on the second ring.
I didn’t need a map.
I had a town.
And a door that opened both ways.
Thank you so much for reading this story!
I’d really love to hear your comments and thoughts about this story — your feedback is truly valuable and helps us a lot.
Please leave a comment and share this Facebook post to support the author. Every reaction and review makes a big difference!
This story is a work of fiction created for entertainment and inspirational purposes. While it may draw on real-world themes, all characters, names, and events are imagined. Any resemblance to actual people or situations is purely coincidenta
