Chapter 5: The Green Door
I knocked twice.
Soft, then slightly harder.
From inside came the sound of something being set down — a tool, maybe — and then footsteps, unhurried, the walk of a man who wasn't expecting anyone and wasn't worried about it.
The door opened.
He was tall.
Broader than I'd expected.
He had grey at his temples and a short beard and his hands were the hands of someone who worked with them every day, calloused and careful.
He was wearing a canvas apron with sawdust on the front.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
He had Mom's eyes.
The exact same shade of grey-green, the exact same slight downward tilt at the outer corners.
I had spent forty-three years looking at those eyes across breakfast tables and hospital beds and kitchen counters.
Seeing them in a stranger's face on a Saturday morning on a street I'd never been to before made the ground feel uncertain under my feet.
"Can I help you?" he said.
"My name is Joanna," I said.
"Frances was my mother."
Something moved across his face.
Not surprise exactly.
More like a door opening somewhere behind his eyes.
"You'd better come in," he said.
The workshop smelled of wood shavings and linseed oil.
A half-restored dresser stood in the center of the room, its drawers pulled out and lined up on a workbench.
A large tan dog lifted its head from a blanket in the corner, decided I was acceptable, and put its head back down.
"That's Biscuit," Robert said.
"Connor told me about him."
Robert turned.
"Connor's here?"
"He's in the truck.
He wanted to give us — he thought it should be just us, at first."
Robert nodded slowly.
He pulled a stool out from under the workbench and gestured to it, then leaned back against the dresser with his arms crossed.
Not defensive.
Just a man who needed something solid behind him.
"She didn't come last Saturday," he said.
"Or the one before.
I called the number she gave me and there was no answer." He looked at the floor.
"I think I already knew."
"I'm so sorry," I said.
"She passed eleven days ago.
Her heart."
He was quiet for a long moment.
Biscuit got up from the blanket, walked across the room, and leaned against Robert's leg.
Robert's hand went to the dog's head without him looking down.
"She told me she wasn't well," he said.
"Not the details.
Just that things were harder than they used to be." He paused.
"She made me promise not to fuss."
"That sounds like her."
"She talked about you every week." He looked up.
"She showed me a picture once — you were standing in front of a classroom, laughing at something off-camera.
She said you laughed like that all the time when you were small.
Like everything was the funniest thing that had ever happened."
My eyes burned.
I didn't look away.
"She left me a letter," I said.
"She explained everything.
About Thomas.
About what happened.
About you." I stopped.
"I didn't know you existed until eleven days ago.
I want you to know that.
She wasn't keeping you from me.
She was trying to protect everyone, in the only way she knew how."
"I know," he said.
"She told me that herself.
She said she'd been a coward about it and she was sorry." He shook his head.
"I didn't think she was a coward.
I thought she was someone who'd been given an impossible situation when she was too young to fight back."
"Did you ever try to find Thomas?
Your biological father?"
"He d*ed in 1987." Robert said it plainly, without grief, the way you speak about someone who was always more of an idea than a person.
"I found that out early on.
His mother is still alive.
She's ninety-three and in a care home in Vermont and I've decided she can live out her days not knowing I exist."
Something about the quiet dignity of that decision made me press my lips together hard.
"What do we do now?" I said.
Robert looked at me for a long moment.
Then he pushed off from the dresser and walked to a small table near the window where a kettle sat on a hot plate.
"I'm going to make tea," he said.
"And then I think you should tell me everything about her that I didn't get to know.
And then maybe you tell me about yourself." He glanced back.
"We've got time.
We've got a lot of time to catch up on."
Outside, I heard Connor's truck door open and close.
"Is it all right if Connor comes in?" I asked.
May you like
"He drove her here every week for a year," Robert said.
"He can have tea too."
