MY STEPFATHER BROKE DOWN MY DOOR AT 2 A.M. — UNTIL ONE TAP UNDER MY KITCHEN TABLE TURNED HIS RAGE INTO TERROR

Chapter 15

The route took us out along a four-lane that thinned into two, past strip malls and a car wash and a long field behind a chain-link fence, and then turned southeast onto a road that ran between subdivisions that had been farmland when the map in my lap was printed.

At a stoplight, my mother spoke for the first time.

“I looked for this street once.”

“When?”

“The year after the funeral. I had a name from an old address book of his and about four hundred dollars and a lot of pride.” She watched the light. “I got as far as the city limit and turned around.”

“Why?”

“Because I had a nine-year-old in the back seat.”

I looked at her. She did not look back, which I had come to recognize as the way she said things that cost her something.

The light changed.

The street I had circled on my father’s map turned out to be a real street, and not a long one. Two blocks. Old maples arched over it from both sides, their branches meeting in the middle with about four feet of sky between them, so that the streetlight under each tree lit a small room of green leaves and the rest of the road lay in shadow. The houses were modest and mostly the same age — 1950s ranches and one-and-a-half-stories, some with brick, some with white siding, all of them set back on lawns that nobody had tried to make impressive.

Number four-eleven stood on the left, third house from the corner.

I knew it before I could read the number, and the reason I knew it was the hydrangeas: a long bed of them along the walk, blue, heavy with blooms, some of the heads bending almost to the ground under their own weight so that they brushed the concrete.

My mother parked at the curb and killed the lights.

Neither of us moved.

“This place feels familiar,” she said.

“You’ve never been here.”

“No.”

She looked at the porch — a narrow one, with two steps and a rail and a chair with a cushion that had faded from whatever color it had been.

“But he described it to me,” she said. “Twice. In the first year we were married. Once when he was half asleep.”

The front door opened, and a rectangle of yellow light fell across the hydrangeas.

Margaret Marsh came out onto the porch.

I want to record, as accurately as I can, what I saw. She was in her sixties, with short silver hair cut the way a practical woman cuts it, in jeans and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled, and a pair of reading glasses pushed up into her hair. She was not tall. She had my father’s hands, which I recognized from four feet away and from twenty years back, because the last time I had seen those hands they were holding a knife against a block of pine.

And her face, in the porch light, was my father’s face assembled by somebody who had used slightly different proportions.

I got out of the car.

My shoulder had been aching steadily since Chesapeake, and the sling made every movement a business, and I stood on the curb and looked up the walk at a woman staring down at me with one hand on the doorframe.

“Oh, Andrew,” she said.

Her voice caught on it. I could hear that from the curb.

I have no idea what my face did.

Margaret immediately shook her head, hard, twice, the way you shake off water.

“I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair of me.”

“No, it’s—”

“It wasn’t fair.” She came down the steps. “I just—” and then she stopped about three feet away from me and looked at me properly, at my whole face, and said the thing that ended me.

“You have his face when you’re trying not to cry.”

I laughed instead, and the laugh came out wrong, and my eyes did what they had been threatening to do for three days, and I stood in a stranger’s front yard in Chesapeake, Virginia, at eight in the evening and cried in front of two women who had both spent twenty years of their lives being careful about this exact moment.

My mother came around the car and did not touch me. She stopped beside me and stood there. That was the right thing. I do not know how she knew it was the right thing, but it was.

Margaret looked past me at her.

“Hello, Diane.”

My mother — whose name was Diane now, whose name had been a subject of two decades of arguments and one piece of legal paper, whose whole first life belonged to a woman I had known only as my mother — said:

“Margaret.”

Twenty years lived inside those two names.

Margaret stepped back and held the door.

“Come in.”