Vincent let the teenager go after that, not saying why although of course he knew. Something you should read, he’d said, with an earnestness Vincent found endearing at first, Sammy with the holes in his jeans and a mouth always damp at the corners. The letters smelled like malt liquor and nag champa and had been refolded along slightly different lines. It was clear he’d taken them home and then who knows where—a party, some beer-blotted afternoon at the quarry. Just this was enough to fire him. Later, Sammy had said, letting the screen door bang.
He’d been amused. Why’s that, why should I, an uncharacteristic joviality, hands spread by his ears. The idea that there were any shoulds in the life of this boy was appealing—Sammy who just let weather happen to him, never bothering with a raincoat in the summer storms, never turning on the fan.
Because there’s somebody who’s been trying to reach you a long time. Did you know Fay Fern?
Just hearing the name in his house was an incursion, an event that made him want to check the locks, back door, side door, front.
That’ll be all I need from you this summer, he said finally, drawing what cash he had from his wallet, more than the boy was owed, fifty-seven dollars, and turning down the hall. Good luck at university.
HE PUT OFF READING THEM for forty-eight hours. He sent away the housekeeper from her usual appointment, something that baffled her from where she stood at the door. She could see stray items of clothing on the arms of chairs, she could smell the garbage he hadn’t taken out and held up the feather duster like it was a possession of his he’d lost. He shook his head again.
Fay Fern. It was possible he had never spoken her name. She had been babe, rosebud, she had been darling, she had been a smell and a time of day and something he refused to title. He told himself a well-tooled lie about that, how something real between two people needed no classification or observance, maybe suffered under it. It was a way of treating her as he did, tugging down her overalls on some gravel shoulder and pulling her onto him in the driver’s seat but not always stopping when he knew she was hungry.
Vincent scanned them in one sitting, early in the morning on the back porch, wearing the red drugstore reading glasses it had been a humiliation to buy, possibly a crisis. His eyesight had been remarkable, offering gifts in color and distance that were the envy of the other men in the program.
He spent an hour denying the possibility of it, a son, then two believing it totally, remembering something of how gentle she’d been the last time he saw her, unusually docile. She didn’t pick at one thought of his, didn’t make light of one annoyance.
By the next afternoon he had swung around again. Surely, her parents being who they were, they would have demanded some recompense. The Ferns had been famous even to him, a family whose parties you heard about once you were anybody. They had once flown two members of the San Francisco Ballet company down to perform directly on the long garden table that sat twenty, a surprise for guests after dessert. The story went that the plates had not been cleared, a small humiliation the dancers were meant to incorporate as a constraint. Claudette and James Fern would not have allowed their daughter, however far she had strayed, to raise a child alone. No.
Say they hadn’t learned, he reasoned, believing, the more he remembered her, who she insisted she was despite where she had come from, that she would never have let that information reach them. Her sister would have had the number of three different doctors. Hadn’t her first reliable punch line been the misfortune of conventional life? Once, in the aisle of a grocery store near Yosemite, an overnight trip they’d taken without a toothbrush between them, they’d been stuck on either side of a couple arguing viciously over types of bread, ignoring the bawling child in the seat of the grocery cart. She’d enacted an elaborate mime, stepping up some invisible steps and saluting the executioner, checking the imaginary noose around her neck with a vigorous thumbs-up. He had pelted her with grapes from their basket to get her to stop, had turned away to keep the family from seeing his laughter.
He decided the letters were inconsistent, sad and wild, entreating and then hateful, the handwriting gone jagged with accusations, the leaves of paper sometimes inflamed where the pen had pressed too hard.
They were not the thoughts of someone in mastery of them.
In terms of years it lined up.
A resemblance might be hard to argue with, he thought, or it could be chalked up to the reliable and boring hopes of most people. The last time he’d seen her she’d asked a strange favor, to drive her awhile to buy some dental floss. Her sister had taken the truck. There was something in her teeth she kept pushing at with her tongue. In the sand parking lot of the pharmacy she had stood with her back to him where he sat in the driver’s seat, standing in a balance while she flossed, her peachy foot flat on her thigh. When she was done she waved the strand like a little lasso in the sun and let it drop with a mannered flick of the wrist, some private joke with herself. A small moment in the scope of things, meaningless, but hadn’t she done everything that way, alone, her life an elaborate expression that admitted or needed little of the world around it? He couldn’t say what had happened to her in the years before she’d built that bomb and killed that man, except that he was sure it was what she wanted. She had not lived her life, her life had lived her.
In the highness of afternoon he began to write, just out of reach of the sprinkler he’d turned on, a legal pad on his failing gray knee, starlings and warblers calling from the trees that shadowed him. Dear Mr. Fern, he wrote, aware the boy had only ever used his first name. He started the letter but didn’t finish it, not that day or the next.