Chapter 5: Six O'Clock
Joel came downstairs at ten to six.
He stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at me, then at his mother, then back at me.
He had changed out of the school hoodie.
He was holding his own phone loosely at his side.
"You stayed," he said.
"I stayed."
He pulled out a chair and sat down at the end of the table, away from both of us.
He didn't say anything else.
He just sat there, which told me everything about what kind of boy he was and what living in this house had made him.
"Joel," Diane said.
"You don't have to be here for this."
"I know," he said.
He didn't move.
At two minutes past six, we heard the car in the drive.
Diane's hands were flat on the table.
She didn't look toward the door.
I made myself breathe.
The front door opened.
Keys on the hook.
The sound of shoes coming off.
Then footsteps down the hall, and Paul Merritt — Richard Calloway — walked into his kitchen and stopped.
He was sixty-four, perhaps sixty-five.
Ordinary looking.
The kind of face you'd forget in a crowd.
He was wearing a work shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, and he was carrying a paper bag from a supermarket.
He saw me and the bag dropped slightly in his hand.
Not all the way.
Just slightly.
A small, controlled adjustment.
"Paul," Diane said.
"Sit down."
"Who is this?" His voice was steady.
I'll give him that.
"Sit down," she said again.
He sat.
He put the bag on the counter first, carefully, as if the groceries still mattered.
Then he pulled out the chair across from me and sat down and looked at me with an expression I can only describe as careful.
"I don't believe we've met," he said.
Something moved through me.
Hot and clarifying.
"My name," I said, "is the name you've been saying good morning to every day since April.
You know exactly who I am."
His jaw tightened.
Just slightly.
"I think there's been some confusion—"
"Paul." Diane's voice was quiet.
Final.
She placed the cracked phone on the table between us and slid it toward him.
"Stop."
He looked at the phone.
The careful expression cracked, just at the edges.
"Where did you get that?"
"Your car," she said.
"Two weeks ago."
"That's my private—"
"It has eleven women on it," she said.
"Eleven that I've counted.
Different names you used.
Different dead wives.
Same mug in the photograph.
Same story about the signal, the old phone, the camera." She tilted her head.
"Did you think I wouldn't notice that the mug in the photographs was the one from our hallway?"
Joel was looking at the table.
Paul's eyes moved to me.
Something shifted in them.
A recalculation.
"Whatever she's told you," he said to me, his voice dropping, becoming gentle, the voice I knew from six months of mornings, "this isn't what it looks like.
Diane and I have had problems for years.
I was lonely.
I made mistakes.
But what you and I had — that was real.
I want you to know that."
I looked at him.
"You told me your wife was de@d," I said.
He didn't answer.
"You told me her name was Catherine.
You told me she died of cancer.
You told me you still kept her cardigan on the chair by the bed because you couldn't move it yet." I watched his face.
"Was any of it true?"
Silence.
"The hydrangeas," I said.
"Were those even yours?"
He looked away.
Toward the window.
May you like
Toward somewhere that wasn't this kitchen.
That was my answer.
