Prologue
One, two, three deliveries of McDonald’s and Dunkin’ and Hardee’s and whatever else the app tells him to deliver and Ryan Nickerson is driving home through the morning swelter having pocketed a whole $2.25 an order for his labor. Gas is $4.30 a gallon.
He’s 37 and between jobs. Since he moved from Georgia to Florida, after it happened, work’s been hard to come by. Work’s been hard to keep, too, after it happened. Five years ago next week. He dreads the anniversary.
He turns his blue Nissan truck onto his street. The neighborhood is quiet. It’s a coastal suburb east of Orlando in the shadow of Disney. Rows of one-story houses. Hip roofs. Wide driveways for double garages.
The girls love it here.
Reese, his middle child. And Addie, his oldest, who says she wants to stay and live with him—instead of with Mom in Georgia. She loves Disney and the zoo and SeaWorld and the beach and pancakes and horror movies and Tower of Terror and those water slides that drop you, standing, down a chute after the floor gives out. Addie has no fear. She is 10.
He pulls up the drive, parks the truck. He leaves it out, uncovered, where it gleams bright blue for the whole neighborhood. The girl hit the front left bumper. And then she rolled beneath the back left tire. There’s still a scratch where she hit. He looks at it every day. For a long time he couldn’t bear to drive the thing, but what else could he do? He was behind on payments. He couldn’t afford to get rid of it. It has 150,000 miles on it now. It’s paid off. He can sell it but doesn’t want to. It’s as if she is still alive, still with him. Was she afraid? She was 10.
He goes inside. Fires up the stove, for pancakes. The summer is almost over now. The girls will be leaving soon. Next week he will fly with them back to Georgia, drop them off with their mom, and then wait for Christmas. He only gets 10 weeks each year with them. No time is ever enough time.
He makes the girls breakfast and then he goes out to the porch to sit and watch the day. The July heat depresses the neighborhood, the grass browning, the leaves drooping in the flowerbeds.
He sits here and he thinks about it. Everything that happened. He can feel it coming on, the weight of everything, because it always comes on now, always in July, always his body that feels it first.
Addie asked him about it last year.
“Daddy, why are you sad?”
He figured she was old enough to know. He told her he didn’t do it on purpose, that it was an accident. She seemed to understand.
She comes out from the kitchen now and joins him on the porch.
She has strawberry blonde hair and bright blue eyes and is wearing a white shirt with printed rows of fruit, and when Ryan looks at her, he is afraid. That she is growing older. That she will one day hate him. That he might die before she hates. And worst of all: that she might die first. That he might lose her the same way Mrs. Patterson lost her daughter, five years ago next week: suddenly, in a blink, with a bright blue Nissan truck barreling into and then over her, the driver totally unaware he had just killed a little girl.
On July 20, 2017, Ryan Nickerson was driving to work when he killed Kennadē Patterson.
She was 10 and she crossed a highway in the dark, having gone out early with her sister and brother to buy snacks. Ryan was never charged.
Every day, 20 people in America are killed by a moving vehicle—which means every day, 20 drivers could become killers, many of them accidental killers. There is no moral to these stories, and there is no moral to Ryan Nickerson’s story. One would like there to be a moral. Suffering demands a thesis. But what thesis can Ryan share? The killing was just one suffering. It was less than a minute of his life. He had suffered before. He will suffer again.
Perhaps the story of Ryan Nickerson is nothing but a litany of suffering.
Or perhaps in that litany something else happens. Something unexpected. Something that only happens when suffering happens. Perhaps it is grace.
Part I
It is early morning, July 20, 2017.
He wakes at 3:45 a.m., gets dressed and makes his lunch and coffee.
In a few hours Addie will be on her way to daycare. He passes her room as she sleeps. She is 5.
He drives. It is hot and black outside as he heads to work. The windows are up. The AC is on. The morning broadcast on News 106.7 is just starting as he climbs the hill. The hill crests and there is a dark tree line to the right. He passes it every morning. He has climbed this hill hundreds of times.
He sees something in the center lane move just over the hill, two dark silhouettes. He looks to his left.
He thinks they are deer.
He checks to make sure they are not running back toward the truck. He looks back to the right. He sees something dart from the tree line. A third silhouette. It is small and he has no time to turn. No time to brake. It is in front of him so fast.
He hits it.
The story of Job begins with a righteous man, and the man stays righteous despite all that he suffers. It is a test from God and Job passes the test because God wills everything, and so of course Job passes; he never had a choice. But the story of Ryan Nickerson begins without righteousness and proceeds without righteousness and it is not a test. Did he have a choice? Like Job, he doesn’t expect an answer. Like Job, the first thing taken is his freedom.
Ryan was 14.
His dad got through maybe a gallon of vodka one night and came home drunk and threw up and choked to death.
It was April 14, 1999. The first of several terrible dates.
Ryan wasn’t home when it happened. He wasn’t home because he was in rehab. He was in rehab because he’d been getting into cocaine. He’d been getting into cocaine because he was a kid and he was susceptible to influences and his influences told him: break things, steal things, snort things. Ryan was supposed to live with his father after rehab. Things were supposed to get better.
But a gallon of vodka and some vomit ended his father’s life and a future that would have never entailed the things Dad’s death immediately entailed: more stealing (his stepdad’s car), more discipline (boarding school) and more rebellion (punching an adult at boarding school).
If there is a moment when Ryan’s story and Job’s story enter into some union, it is here: in the night, in the fallout of his dad’s drunken death, at Ryan’s bedside in boarding school, when suddenly he was told, “Get up!” and then put on a plane to Montego Bay, Jamaica. His new home was a cove roughly two hours outside Kingston. A white plastered seaside hotel converted into a caged compound. Barbed wire. Security cameras mounted on large posts. Gates and fences everywhere.
Ryan had forcibly joined the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASP). It would be the target of future lawsuits and allegations of abuse. It would close many facilities, including Tranquility Bay, which was Ryan’s and one of the worst.
But back then, Ryan knew only that he was being punished. Unlike Job, he suspected there was a reason. Like Job, he didn’t know how bad things would get.
One day, in the courtyard, a concrete roundabout anchored by a flagpole, Ryan watched as, on a third-floor balcony, a 17-year-old girl jumped nose first down to the concrete. She landed 10 feet from Ryan. Her head exploded.
He stops in the middle of the road, but it is dark and he doesn’t want another car to come over the hill and hit him. So he eases the truck down the hill.
Whatever he hit, he hit it hard. He was going 45 mph. He felt the front bumper cave and then something roll under his tires as the suspension lifted. A baby deer, he thought. Running to its family, the other deer, in the center lane. He hopes it is a deer. But he doesn’t know, and this uncertainty terrifies him.
He continues down the hill toward a dark gas station and the sole red glow of a traffic light. He passes a church and some dark car lots. Up the road is the hospital where 35 days ago his second child was born, a girl.
He pulls into a lit parking lot just down the hill. He calls his wife. She doesn’t answer. He calls his boss.
“I hit a deer. I think. I’m not sure,” he says.
He calls 9-1-1 and then a police car drives up.
Where are you going?
Have you been drinking?
The cop asks him these questions before he asks another question.
“Can you still drive your truck?”
He says, “yeah.”
The cop asks him to drive back to where he hit what he hit.
That’s when he knows: He didn’t hit a deer. Why would they make him drive back if he hit a deer?
He doesn’t know they had already radioed it in, that this cop probably already knows, that the girl’s body was not at the top of the hill anymore but had been pushed down toward the bottom.
When he drives back to the hill the sun is coming up and the road is blocked off and there are police cars everywhere.
There is something covered at the bottom of the hill.
It is God who allows Satan to torment Job. It is God who tells Satan, go, lay your hand on everything but him. God makes the wager. Job is only the cock in the ring. When he is struck with sickness, Job asks his wife, “Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” Job understands the game. He knows there are rules.
But Ryan Nickerson can see no design. There is only round after round of torment. He has always lived between calamities, waiting for the next one. What is the purpose of this game? He wonders. Were they all tests? Tests for that ultimate terrible thing?
Ryan was 17.
He would wake in 100-degree heat and eat salt fish for breakfast with powdered milk and listen to tapes—Zig Ziglar and Deepak Chopra and Tony Robbins—and write down his thoughts and then go to school, which was just a textbook. He was told to teach himself.
When he came home, his mother and stepdad didn’t believe him.
That he was beaten, that others were reportedly raped, that a girl committed suicide by swan dive in the courtyard. They had no contact, the teenagers. They couldn’t leave the compound. Ryan found out about 9/11 two days after it happened, only because someone’s mom was said to be in the North Tower and the people in charge of the program had to tell them: She was dead.
They didn’t believe him.
How he was punished for everything. How he once talked to a girl at a bonfire one night even though they weren’t supposed to talk to the girls, and then they told him he couldn’t have any more freedoms, so he flipped out and they took him to a room without beds and pinned him on the concrete floor, one guy on his back, another guy grinding his ankles into the tile until both broke.
Ryan’s ankles still jut out 20 years later.
He is 37 now. He wants to make it past 41. He hopes to live much longer, but he wants to hit 41. It’s just a number, but it means a lot to Ryan Nickerson, because when he’s 41, Addie will be 14. When Addie is 14, Ryan has to be there. When Ryan was 14, his father stumbled home drunk and died.
Part II
He drives into a parking lot at the bottom of the hill. The police follow.
One of them comes up to him. The cop looks stern. “You hit a woman,” the cop says.
“She died.”
You hit a woman. And she died.
He feels pain and fear and nausea unlike anything he has ever felt. He is not confused. He doesn’t refuse to believe. He knows it is true. And he loses control. He begins screaming.
“NO! NO! NO!”
He throws his hands into the air and he cries and he wails. He is inconsolable.
He wants to die.
He looks around and realizes there are many people watching. There are news cameras. The police are taking pictures of his truck. When they are finished, they tell him he can go. They tell him to clean out the truck, which has Reese’s car seat in the back. He is shaking as he takes it out.
They lift the truck onto a wrecker as the sun is rising and he can see everything. He can see the front end caved in where she bounced off. He can tell where she went under. How she hit the back tire too.
Everyone is watching with that same look. That look of sadness. That look that says the worst possible thing in the world has just happened.
The police chaplain comes over. The chaplain says there was nothing Ryan could do. It was not his fault. It’s a terrible tragedy, but she died instantly. She did not suffer.
The chaplain gives him a card and says to call if he needs anything.
But what is he supposed to call about?
He knows what he has done.
When Job’s children are killed, he rises and tears his robe and shaves his head and falls to the ground—and he worships. He turns to God. Job is never in doubt.
But Ryan Nickerson has no gift of certainty. He wants to believe in God. But another part of him asks: Why would God exist and let all this happen? Let men come in the night and kidnap Ryan. Let fathers stumble home drunk to die and children run across dark roads and drivers look away for just a second.
“God puts us through trials and tribulations.”
A priest told Ryan that, after it happened.
And then the priest quoted Job, who lost everything but never gave up.
Ryan doesn’t see it.
Job doesn’t make choices. That’s the whole point: Job’s suffering is absurd because all he can do is take it.
Job didn’t deserve his suffering. That’s the whole point: Job’s suffering is absurd because it is unjust.
Maybe it’s different for himself, Ryan thinks.
Maybe he could have made choices.
Maybe he deserves it.
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He came home from Jamaica and went back to public school—as if nothing happened.
He was 18. He spent senior year high. He rented a condo and did drugs every day. Pot and cocaine and LSD and psilocybin and crystal meth and heroin, Red Rock opium, smoked out of a joint. But the meth was getting really bad. About to kill him and his best friend.
So he stopped and joined the Army.
The Army was a good thing. He wanted to make it a career, to travel the world. But instead, he only traveled to Jackson, South Carolina., and Fort Bliss, Texas, where he trained as a medic. And then he stopped. He never went overseas, never became a medic, and never made the Army a career.
He was 21. He applied for a job at Applebee’s.
He was working as the grill cook on Thursday, Nov. 4, 2005, one of those terrible dates, those tests. He was in the kitchen. He was picking up a grill grate when he heard a click. He looked behind him and a man was holding a handgun between Ryan’s eyes.
“Get on the ground,” the man said.
Well they rounded up Ryan, the fry cook, and the dishwasher. Then the two gunmen pushed the manager up against the wall and threatened to rape her. Ryan was furious. The whole thing just made him furious. He walked over to one gunman and—crack!—hit the guy with everything he had.
The other guy pistol whipped Ryan in the head until Ryan blacked out.
He woke up hogtied. He had a broken collarbone and a fractured sternum and two broken ribs and he could see the two gunmen, who had no doubt kicked the shit out of him once he blacked out, leaving the restaurant. They stole money and booze. They didn’t rape anybody.
Part III
His mom drives him home.
He hugs his wife. He goes to bed to try and sleep. Mostly, he just cries.
Addie is gone. At daycare.
His newborn, Reese, is at home. At noon, Reese is hungry. He sits on the living room carpet with her in his arms. They are watching television. He is feeding his baby from the bottle when the news comes on.
He sees his face.
He sees his truck.
And then he sees her picture.
She is wearing white. White pants and white shirt and a white hairband with a flower. She is standing with one hand on her hip and one on a tree and she is smiling. She is not a woman, like they told him.
She is 10.
She is a kid.
That’s how he finds out he killed a kid: watching the news.
His wife comes into the room and takes their baby from his arms. He is shaking violently and crying.
There are three unquestionably good moments in Ryan’s life. Three totally perfect moments of happiness and redemption: the moments each of his three children are born.
He was 24 when he met Tiffany at a job interview. She was interviewing him for a server and bartender position. She was just a year younger. They were both kids, really. They flirted. They didn’t know any better. And she stayed with him despite everything. Even after Ryan got arrested for beating an ex-girlfriend. The ex said he beat her in the emergency room, but Ryan denied it. He spent three weeks in jail. Tiff wrote him. Even after what they said he’d done. He married her a year later and not long after she was pregnant with Addie.
On April 11, 2012, Addie was born.
When she was born he thought maybe she was dying. She was all blue and at first her head was caved in like a cone because the doctors used a vacuum to get her out. And when she came out everything came out with her and he was so queasy he had to catch himself when they passed the scissors and asked if he wanted to cut the cord.
He held her.
He was the first person to hold her.
He looked at her, her bright blue eyes.
She was perfect.
He spent every day with her. Addie was 1, 2, 3, 4 and he spent every day with her. They ate waffles and pancakes and watched Bubble Guppies and Shimmer and Shine and they sang and laughed and practiced ABCs and read and took naps. These were the happiest moments of Ryan’s life.
But he and his wife weren’t happy.
He and his wife didn’t fuck anymore.
It went on for a very long time. Nearly three years.
He looked in other places. He wasn’t proud of it.
He had always lived between calamities, always waiting for the next one. But what if it was the opposite? What if he lived between happy moments? What if suffering was the norm? And happiness was only a brief and never-promised reprieve? On June 14, 2017, Reese was born. Once again he held his newborn. Once again he was happy.
Thirty-five days later, he held her as he watched the news, watching his own face appear on the television. Saw, for the first time, the little girl he killed.
After the news reports, the pictures of his face, his truck, his name, people message him. Some say terrible things. Like how he didn’t get charged for manslaughter because he was white—because Kennadē was Black. They threaten Addie. They say they know where she goes to school.
She is 5.
Others want to help. One is from Texas. He accidentally killed someone too. It was over 20 years ago. They talk for a bit online. And it does help.
But he still feels alone.
He posts online, asking for help: Who else knows this feeling?
But the comments are typical.
“You should be in jail.”
“Go kill yourself.”
His family doesn’t seem to have sympathy either.
“Why don’t you want to hold your daughter?”
He just can’t.
He can’t hold his baby.
He can’t play with his girl.
He can’t look her in the eyes.
Every time he looks at her face he starts to cry.
After his children are killed, after he is struck down with terrible sickness, Job curses the day of his birth. Let the day hope for light but have none, Job cries. Why was there ever hope? Why could he not have died at birth? Why was he not spared? He proclaims: “I have no rest, but trouble comes.”
Ryan Nickerson has no rest. His life is like a series of fever dreams, which flash in the night and cause him to wake in a sweat, one moment trailing the other, happy memories turning sad, turning red.
He was 32 and Addie was 5 and every day he woke up at noon and he drank. A 750ml bottle of Evan Williams. She didn’t come downstairs. He couldn’t stand to see her. He wanted to rip his insides out when he saw her. She reminded him of what he’d done.
Then he was gone. Gone for almost eight months. Gone up to the hills of Georgia and North Carolina and all the while drinking and drinking and drinking, and he woke up some days and thought about killing himself and he tried to kill himself, he really tried, but he didn’t, he couldn’t, he was afraid.
He wrote to Kennadē’s mother. He gave up. He tried again. He messaged her on Facebook on Oct. 25, 2017. He wrote:
Mrs. Patterson, I have debated
on writing you for quite some
time. I’m [sic] cannot ever apologize
to you enough for pain and
anguish that happened that
fateful mourning. I know healing
does come but I know it takes
time. I also know I will never
fathom or understand why our
families had to meet the way we
did on that fateful day. That
morning will be forever ingrained
in my memory. I carry a picture
of Kennedy [sic] on my phone
everyday because I want to
remember her and try to live my
life and hopefully make her
proud and my own children
proud.I was hesitant to write you
and i’ve debated on how to approach
this, however because of some
health issues. I have decided I
needed to reach out to you and
let you know that she will always
be a part of me. I don’t expect
a response nor do I want you to
feel obligated to say anything. I
just simply want you to know
that I apologize a thousand times over.
She was a very beautiful
and obviously bright soul.
Thank you. May you find
peace one day at a time
When he hit “send” he felt liberated.
He waited for a reply.
Nothing.
He went back to drinking.
She hates me, he thought.
She hates me.
Part IV
He drives the long way to work that first Monday. On the highway he drives 20 mph slower than usual. He is terrified. He is not ready.
His job is to drive trucks and make deliveries. He used to love driving. Now he hates every minute of it. They put him with a partner and all ride the guy just asks him questions. Dumb, annoying questions.
Are you doing okay?
What was it like?
(What was it like to kill someone?)
He can’t go to Walmart without seeing kids. He drives by roadside accidents and feels guilt. He feels guilt taking his daughter for ice cream and to a dance and having fun with her. She is going to grow up and have a first kiss and drive a car and graduate high school. And the girl he killed is not.
He gets the truck back a week or so later. When he gets in, he starts crying.
Weeks later, the police send him the accident report. They say what happened to the girl. It is worse than he could imagine. It wasn’t just him who hit her. After he hit her, she was hit again. The other car sped off.
His heart breaks all over again.
Was she still alive after he hit her? Could he have gone back and saved her? Did she die in agony?
It is a terrible thing to hope for, but he hopes that when he hit her, she died instantly.
He has to hope that he was the one who killed her.
Is this all Ryan Nickerson can hope for? That the suffering he has caused was only an instant suffering? He knows it is not his fault. But he was 50 percent of the equation. (Job was never 50 percent of the equation.) That’s the hard causal fact: If Ryan Nickerson was not driving, Kennadē Patterson would not be dead.
In the story of Job there is no forgiveness. There is no admission of wrong. It is God who causes Job to suffer. But God does not answer Job’s questions. God does not ask for forgiveness. This is why the story is incomplete. Why the question of suffering lingers: nothing is at fault.
But Ryan Nickerson admits wrong. He is not wholly blameless. He suffers because he causes suffering. He is, at least partially, at fault. How can a story that lacks forgiveness ever be relevant to him?
It was Oct. 28, 2017, just over two months from the accident.
Ryan was drunk when he saw the notification.
The message:
Ryan,
I’m grateful that you reached out
to me. I’d been having the same
debate on contacting you. I
found myself searching for the
words to say but they never
seemed to come.I’m unsure of why our paths
crossed. I’m unsure of why they
had to cross the way they did.
I’m unsure of so many things.
However I’m sure that “God
makes no mistakes!” I’ve never
faulted you and I pray that you
find peace in knowing that.Kennadē had a wonderful life
and I’m grateful God chose me
to be her mother. I have no
regrets. I have nothing left
unsaid. All I have to do now is
live my life in preparation of
seeing her in heaven, when it’s
my time. Hopefully we’ll see you
there too and I can introduce
you to her! (When it’s your time,
of course).One day at a time…
Ryan was drunk in his basement when he read that. How could she be okay? he thought. How could she go through this and be okay?
If she was okay, maybe he should be okay too.
If she forgave him, maybe he should too.
It was May 5, 2018.
Ryan was 33.
He met Carla online. It was less than a year from when he killed Kennadē Patterson and he had moved to South Carolina for work. He was in a photo with her cousin outside his apartment in Charlotte, which she saw on Facebook; she messaged him. He called her on the phone. They talked for months. They met on a whim in Disney World, and she picked him up at the hotel and as soon as she got out of the car she kissed him and when the trip ended they were crying.
She knew about the accident. She had been going through her own stuff. But still it surprised him. Her acceptance. How can she be okay with this? How can she know this and be okay?
They moved to Florida. They married and had a son, Ryker. Once again Ryan was standing in a hospital room holding a baby and it was the next happiest moment of his life.
Ryan worries that suffering is inherited. That the mistakes of a parent are passed to a son. That the alcoholic father who stumbles home drunk and dies and abandons his child, and the mother who sends that child to boarding school where he suffers—that these failings are genetic.
When he first held Addie he promised himself he would break the cycle.
It was September 30, 2020. Ryan had been an accidental killer for three years.
He wrote another message, a letter.
He wrote to the man who tied him up and beat him on the floor of Applebee’s. The man is serving a long prison sentence.
It’s been 15 years, Ryan remembers writing. I want you to know that I’m not mad at you. I have no idea why you did what you did. You have to face the consequences. But if it means anything to you, I just want you to know I’m not mad at you. I hope that whatever life you have left, you’ve turned around and tried to make something meaningful out of it.
The man wrote back.
The man said he was young and on drugs.
Ryan read the letter. He understood.
He forgave him.
He had been there too.
Part V
He meets Kennadē’s mother. It has been three years since the accident. Three years after he killed her daughter, he meets Tiana Paterson at the scene of the crash. They had been messaging before then, but this is the first time he sees her. They hug. A news crew is there and she holds his hand throughout the interview.
He always messages her on the anniversary. And he reads the news article from that day. But he tries not to be too much into it. Like he used to be. Because he used to be in a bottle.
On the fourth anniversary, he writes:
“Thinking about you and your family
today. Always.”
She writes back:
“Ditto! God is good!”
He tells her he got a job as a teacher.
And she writes:
“Oh my goodness! That’s
amazing Ryan!. I think that’s a
great fit for you!
Thank you for keeping Kennadē
close to your heart! It means
everything to me!”
It will never go away. For Job it goes away; Job gets everything back. What does Ryan get? He gets nightmares. He gets panic attacks that feel like heart attacks. He gets anxious in crowds and it’s all he can do each summer at Disney World to focus on Addie and her siblings—while waiting in lines, while pushing through groups of kids, while standing anywhere. He’s on 10mg of Lexapro.
Maybe life really is earmarked by suffering. Maybe we live between such states, each moment defined only in relation to the next suffering. Maybe hope is not a future that looks brighter, but simply one that can be withstood. Maybe all we bring with us are the tools to suffer better. Maybe we pass these tools on.
Ryan spends the fourth anniversary of Kennadē’s death in a school. The summer is over. He flew Addie and Reese back to Georgia weeks ago. He’s at this school interviewing for a substitute teaching job, sitting across from the principal, the assistant principal, the academic coach, and HR. Ryan has no formal education, no college degree. High school was a series of textbooks in Jamaica.
They ask him why he wants to teach, and he tells them.
He tells them about her. How he knows what it’s like. To take someone’s child. Maybe it happened for a reason. Maybe she would want him to give something back to the world. He shows them a video of the news report. Once again he watches. His name. His truck. Her smiling face.
Ryan gets the job. His classroom will be filled with over a dozen 10-year-olds.
He drives his truck to his first day at the school. The bright blue Nissan, still with a dent.
The kids bustle in. Twenty-one of them. Their uniforms—blue and black and gray, shirts and khakis and skirts—in various states of untucked and disorganized. They sit and get up and run around the classroom and braid each other’s hair. They are all her age. She would have gone back to class that fall. In a room like this with kids like this, running and braiding and laughing as a substitute tells them to settle down, pay attention, please, try and be quiet.
He is overwhelmed.
Then he sees her here.
She makes him feel okay. She makes him feel like everything is going to be okay.
Everyday he tries to forgive himself.
He fails most days.
But he thinks things are getting better.
He will think about it for the rest of his life.
But every year it gets a little bit better.
One day at a time…
Addie is 10.
The school year has started. The wait for next summer begins. Every night Ryan video calls her. He tells her he is a teacher.
She thinks it is funny and she tells him she’s never thought about having a parent in a school before.
“Let me stay with you after school,” she says. She wants to ride home with him in that blue Nissan truck after the last bus has picked up the last student.
Can Ryan finally hope? To hope is really just to endure. Faith, too, is endurance, which is the lesson of Job.
But Ryan does not have the faith in God that Job has. Which means Ryan has a choice. He can choose to endure, to break cycles, to ask something of others and himself. If grace is anything, perhaps it is the choice to endure. There is no grace in the story of Job because there is no choice; Job was already chosen. Grace, then, is only possible for the unrighteous. And it is something only the unrighteous can give to each other. Like permission. Or forgiveness.
Maybe to earn grace we must first accept grace. And to accept it, we must first feel worthy of such acceptance. This, then, is our first and most important choice: to feel worthy.
“Let me stay with you after school,” she says.
“Okay, kid,” he says, smiling.
Her blue eyes gleam back.
Joshua St. Clair
Joshua St. Clair is a writer based in New York City. He has written for Esquire, Men’s Health, and other publications. He was a finalist for the 2024 National Magazine Award in Profile Writing.
This story was made possible by the support of Sunday Long Read subscribers and publishing partner Ruth Ann Harnisch. Photos by Zack Wittman. Designed by Anagha Srikanth. Edited by Peter Bailey-Wells.
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