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

Chapter 24

Paul came to Virginia in October and I picked him up at Norfolk International at nine at night, in the rain.

He came through the doors of the arrivals hall in a brown jacket that was twenty years too warm for the weather, carrying a suitcase with a broken wheel, and he looked older than the photograph in my address book, which is a stupid thing to think about a man I had met five times.

He hugged me longer than I expected from either of us.

Then he held me by both shoulders, which hurt, and I let him.

“You look like Andrew,” he said.

“Everyone has been saving that information up for this exact year.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m joking.”

“I know you are.” He picked up the broken suitcase and it lurched to one side. “He was the funny one. I was the one who did the paperwork.”

We drove straight to the house in Chesapeake. My mother was already there, and so was Margaret, and so was Vance, who had come down with a toolbox because the porch rail on the north side had come loose again and because, she said, she had been informed via text message that the evening was going to be long.

The four of us ate dinner at the old dining table in the house my father had wanted to give us. Four people connected to Andrew Ellery in different ways, and one person — Vance — connected to me, sitting at the end with a napkin on her lap and a screwdriver in her jacket pocket.

Margaret brought out a shoebox of photographs after the plates were cleared.

I learned things that night about my father that no letter would ever have given me.

I learned that he broke a neighbor’s window at eleven with a homemade catapult, and that his father made him stand in the yard and apologize to the man, and that he wrote his apology down first and read it off a card, because he was already the kind of child who prepared.

I learned that he hated peas with a passion that bordered on the political.

I learned that he was afraid of thunderstorms until he was fifteen, and that when he was sixteen he spent a summer working nights at a gas station just to have a reason to be awake when they came.

Every one of those details made him smaller and more specific. That is the opposite of what I had expected. I had spent twenty years with a father who was nine feet tall and made of nothing, and by the end of that evening I had a father who was five foot nine and hated peas and prepared his apologies on index cards.

I have decided that a small, specific man is worth a great deal more than a large, vague one.

Somewhere around ten, Paul and Margaret got into an argument about who had been in the car on the day the family drove to Ohio, and whether the drive had taken one day or two, and it became clear within four minutes that neither of them remembered it correctly and that both of them had been telling their version for forty years.

I let them argue.

At the door, when Paul was leaving, he stopped in the hall.

“The twenty dollars,” he said.

“What?”

“He said I’d owe him twenty dollars if you found the letter before you turned thirty. He wrote it in his own letter.”

“I know. I read that part.”

Paul reached into his wallet and took out a twenty-dollar bill, and held it out to me.

“This is stupid,” I said.

“Extremely.”

“Uncle Paul, I can’t put a twenty into a dead man’s estate.”

“Then spend it on something he’d approve of,” he said, and pushed it into my hand, and got into his rental car and drove to a hotel because the house in Chesapeake has four rooms and none of them are hotels.

I still have the twenty. It is in the envelope with the letter, which is in an archival sleeve, which is in a fireproof box, which is on the shelf in the blue room beside a small wooden airplane that has not yet been painted, because I have not decided on the color.