Chapter 7: The House on Clement Avenue
Mr.
Hale gave me the key to the house that same afternoon.
It was a plain brass key on a simple ring — different from the safe-deposit key, smaller, worn smooth at the edges from years of use.
Thomas had lived there for a long time.
Patricia drove me over that evening.
Clement Avenue was a quiet street in an older part of town, lined with maples that had dropped most of their leaves.
The house was a narrow two-story with white trim and a front porch, the kind of house that had been well cared for without being showy about it.
I stood on the porch for a moment before unlocking the door.
"You don't have to go in tonight," Patricia said.
"I know."
I turned the key.
The house smelled like old wood and something faintly herbal — thyme, maybe, or dried lavender.
The lights worked.
Someone had been keeping it clean.
The front room had a reading chair near the window, a low bookshelf, a small side table with a lamp.
Simple furniture, nothing extravagant.
The kind of room that had been lived in quietly for many years.
Patricia stopped in the doorway.
On the bookshelf, between two plain volumes, was a framed photograph.
She crossed the room and picked it up.
It was the same photograph from the journal.
Me, at eighteen, standing outside my parents' house.
But this one was larger, properly framed, behind glass.
"He had it framed," she said.
"Yes."
She set it back carefully.
The kitchen was at the back of the house, exactly as Mr.
Hale had said.
East-facing windows above the sink.
In the morning, the light would come straight through.
I stood at the sink and looked out at the small back garden.
A wooden bench.
A bare rose bush.
A stone path that needed repointing.
"Mom." Patricia was standing in the kitchen doorway.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Go ahead."
"Are you angry with him?"
I thought about it honestly.
"I was," I said.
"When I first read the letter.
I thought — you made that decision for me.
You were twenty-two years old and you decided what I could and couldn't handle and you took fifty-five years away from both of us."
"But?"
"But I also know what I was like at eighteen.
I know what I would have done." I turned from the window.
"I would have stayed.
I would have given up everything to stay.
And he knew that too."
Patricia leaned against the doorframe.
"He wasn't wrong about me," I said.
"He was wrong to decide alone.
But he wasn't wrong about what I would have done."
"That doesn't make it right."
"No.
It doesn't."
She was quiet for a moment.
"Do you forgive him?"
I looked around the kitchen.
At the east-facing windows.
At the small wooden table with two chairs that had probably only ever needed one.
"I think," I said slowly, "that I forgave him somewhere around the third page of the journal.
I just didn't have a word for it yet."
Patricia made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost something else.
She came into the kitchen and put her arms around me from behind, the way she used to when she was small and I was standing at our own kitchen sink, and she pressed her cheek against my shoulder.
We stood there for a while without talking.
The house was very quiet around us.
"What will you do with it?" she asked finally.
May you like
"I don't know yet." I covered her hands with mine.
"But I think I'd like to see it in the morning light first."
