Chapter 9: Saturday
He was taller than I expected.
I don't know why I had expected anything.
I had one photograph of him at seven years old.
But when the car pulled up in front of the house and he got out — tall, dark-haired going gray at the temples, wearing a dark coat — my first thought was simply: *taller.*
My second thought was that he walked like Thomas.
The same slight forward lean, the same deliberate pace.
Carol was beside me at the window.
"Go," she said.
"Don't make him stand on the step."
I opened the door before he could knock.
We looked at each other.
He was fifty-four years old and he had my mouth and Thomas's eyes and a face I had never seen before and somehow already knew.
"Eleanor," he said.
"Robert." My voice held.
Barely.
"Come in.
Please, come in."
He stepped inside.
He looked around the hallway — the photographs on the wall, the coat hooks, the worn runner on the floor — the way people look at things when they are trying to understand a place quickly.
Carol appeared from the kitchen.
"I'm Carol," she said.
"I made too much food.
It's a nervous habit."
Robert looked at her for a moment.
Then he smiled — my smile, on his face — and said, "I stress-clean.
My wife says our house has never been tidier than this week."
Carol laughed.
Actually laughed.
We sat at the kitchen table, the three of us, and we ate Carol's too-much food, and Robert told us about Portland and his wife, whose name was Diane, and Maya and June, and the cross-country team he coached, and the way June had cried when he told her, and the way Maya had immediately started asking logistical questions about flights and time zones.
"She's practical," he said.
"She gets it from Diane."
"How does Diane feel about all of this?" Carol asked.
"She's the one who told me to keep looking, every time I thought about stopping." He wrapped both hands around his coffee cup.
"She said, 'You'll regret it if you don't.' She was right."
I looked at him across the table.
"I want to answer your questions," I said.
"Whatever you have."
He nodded.
He had been working up to something.
I could see it.
"My childhood was good," he said.
"I want you to know that first.
My parents — my adoptive parents — were good people.
I wasn't unhappy."
"I'm glad."
"But I always felt like there was a shape missing.
Like a piece of a puzzle that should have been there." He looked at his cup.
"I want to know about you.
Not just what happened in 1969.
I want to know who you are.
What you care about.
What your life has been."
So I told him.
I told him about growing up, and meeting Thomas, and the letter that ended it.
I told him about the years after, and the man I had married, and the life we had built, and losing him.
I told him about Carol and David and Sarah.
I told him about the garden and the roses and the cross-country team I had run on in high school, which made him go very still.
"You ran cross-country," he said.
"Four years."
He looked at Carol.
"She ran cross-country," he said, as if confirming it to himself.
"She did," Carol said.
He shook his head slowly.
Not in disbelief.
In something quieter.
"I coach it because I ran it," he said.
"I ran it because I was good at it.
I was good at it because—" He stopped.
"Because it was in you," I said.
He nodded.
We sat with that for a moment.
Then his phone buzzed on the table.
He glanced at it and his expression changed.
"Unknown number," he said.
"Don't answer it," Carol and I said at the same time.
He looked up.
"Richard Holt?" he said.
"Probably."
He declined the call and set the phone face-down.
"You told me everything on the phone," he said.
"About the will, the clause, what he was planning to do."
"Yes."
"So he's too late."
"Yes."
Robert nodded.
He picked up his coffee.
"Then let him call," he said.
That afternoon, the three of us walked in the garden.
Robert stopped at the roses.
"They come back every year," I told him.
"I planted them after my husband died.
I wasn't sure they'd survive the first winter."
He looked at them for a long moment.
"Things do," he said.
"Sometimes."
May you like
It was a quiet thing to say.
It landed exactly right.
