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

Chapter 16

The inside of the house was the strange part.

I had braced myself for an abandoned place. I had built a picture in my head on the drive over of a shut-up house with sheets on the furniture and a smell of mice, the way houses go when nobody moves in them for twenty years.

What I walked into was a home.

The front room had a sofa with a knitted blanket folded over one arm. A bookshelf with real books in it, some of them looking read. A dining table set with two candles, though there was nothing on it. The kitchen, which I could see through a doorway, had a coffee pot on the counter and a bowl of fruit and a dish towel hanging on the oven door in a way that meant somebody had last used the oven to dry the towel.

It smelled like lemon polish and old wood and, under that, faintly and impossibly, cedar.

Nobody had lived here in a long time. The house had been cared for as carefully as if somebody had.

“You live here,” I said.

“No,” Margaret said.

“Then who does?”

“Nobody.”

“Then why does it look like this?”

She was turning on a lamp near the sofa, and she did not look up.

“I come every Thursday. Occasionally Sunday, if the flowers need it.”

“For nineteen years?”

“Almost. There was a year and a half in the middle when I couldn’t make myself do it.”

I stood in the middle of a living room that had been kept in the condition of a life for two decades by a woman who did not live in it, and I asked the question that I already knew the answer to.

“Why?”

Margaret put the lamp down and looked at me, and she had my father’s eyes doing something my father’s eyes had probably done, and she said:

“Because I was waiting for the owners to show up.”

I did not have anything to say to that.

She had made tea. Of course she had made tea — there were three cups already on the table when we came in, which meant she had been expecting us before I called, or had been expecting us for some length of time I did not have a unit for.

We sat at the dining table. I had Dad’s map in my jacket pocket and the letter for Margaret in a folder in my lap and the whole archive box still back at Vance’s, and none of it came out for the first ten minutes.

She asked my mother two questions. She asked how she had been, which is a question that means nothing, and she asked whether the house in Ohio had ever gotten the new roof, which is a question that apparently meant a great deal, because my mother answered it with her eyes on the table and then coughed and straightened up.

Above the table, on the wall, hung a framed photograph.

My father, maybe seventeen, in an ugly short-sleeve shirt, holding a spinning rod. Beside him a girl of about nineteen with the same jaw, holding her own rod and squinting into the sun. Between them, on the ground, a stringer of fish and a tackle box.

The photograph had been taken in bright, hard, terrible sunlight, the kind that makes everyone in the picture look uncomfortable and happy at the same time.

“You were close,” I said.

“We were.”

“What happened?”

Margaret poured the tea. She poured all three cups, whether or not anybody wanted any.

“Our father happened,” she said. “Nothing dramatic. He was a man who believed there was exactly one correct way to live a life, and he had an unfortunate habit of confusing disagreement with disloyalty.”

I looked up at her.

“Because that’s exactly what my childhood was like.”

“I assumed it would be.”

“Why?”

“Because Andrew spent his whole life being the person who tried to hold our family together.” She set the pot down. “And people who do that in one house usually end up doing it in the next.”

I thought about my father in a hardware store parking lot. I thought about a man humming while he repaired things. I thought about how much of my childhood had consisted of me learning to read a room so that I could manage the mood in it, which I had always assumed was something I had taught myself.

“Did Andrew ever come back here?” I asked.

“He came twice.” Margaret sat down. “The year before he died, he came down for a week and stayed in this house by himself. It was the last time I saw him.”

“Why? Why did he come down?”

She looked at the map on the table between us.

“He said he had three errands,” she said. “Norfolk, Chesapeake, and the beach. And that they were all the same errand.”