For the rest of that first morning, nobody said the truth.
They moved around it like people moving around a live wire on the kitchen floor, all of them seeing it, none of them touching it.
Margaret made tea because Margaret always made tea when life turned monstrous and uncertain. Daniel sat at the same scarred kitchen table where he had once told her, at twenty-three, that he was leaving Georgia for overseas work because he was done being poor. The house was the same house, but smaller than memory had promised. The cabinets leaned. The linoleum was cracked at the corners. The window above the sink had a line of caulk so old it looked fossilized. On the refrigerator hung spelling tests, a school lunch calendar, and a handwritten note reminding someone to feed the dog at the neighbor’s house on Thursday.
That note was signed, in Margaret’s careful script, with a single M.
Daniel could not tell whether it meant Margaret, Michael, or Michelle. He hated that he even noticed.
Margaret set his cup down.
“Drink before it gets cold.”
He looked at the cup and then at her hands.
They were rougher than he remembered. Thinner, too. The knuckles looked swollen. There was a pale burn scar near the wrist he did not remember from before. Those hands had once braided his hair for school plays when he was small, buttoned his church shirt, held his fevered forehead, waved from the front steps as he climbed into trucks and buses and finally airplanes. Now they shook very slightly when she withdrew them.
Daniel noticed everything.
That was part of the problem.
The children sat at the other end of the table, watching him with the shameless concentration only children and detectives can manage. Michael kept a notebook open in front of him and, while pretending not to stare, sketched something that looked suspiciously like Daniel’s SUV. Michelle made no effort to pretend anything.
“So,” she said. “Are you famous?”
“Michelle,” Margaret murmured.
“What? He looks like a man who has a website.”
Daniel almost smiled. Almost.
“No,” he said. “I’m not famous.”
“What are you, then?”
He leaned back. “I run a construction company.”
“In Georgia?”
continue to the next page.
Leave a Comment