MAY
Constance peels her upper body from mine, examines my face, perhaps expecting her ex-husband’s nose and mouth hidden in my feminine features. Instead, she sees . . . What? A counterfeit version of herself? Tears gather in the corners of her eyes. She has every right to hate me.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she says, embracing me again. “I knew someone would come. I didn’t know it would be like this or so soon. Don’t leave afterward.” Constance moves on to pray for the kneeling man to my right.
“What did she say?” Gladys asks when I return to our seats.
“That we should stick around.”
Gladys’s forehead crinkles. “You were up there a long time.”
I could live up there.
The service ends on a song and though we are greeted by the people around us, the church soon empties. Constance and another man scurry around blowing out candles, shutting down the sound system, repositioning mics for next week. Constance yells to the back of the sanctuary, “Hey, Jake, lock up for me? I’d like to take this crew to lunch.”
A question for Jake. A question for us.
Jake raises a set of keys into the air and jingles his yes. I give Constance a weak “Sure.” The others follow my lead. This is why we came. After we exchange names, Constance walks us to the Burger King on the corner. She tells the cashier the food’s on her. When none of us order what we would if we were paying for our own meals, she says, “Supersize everything.”
Over Whoppers and fries, I tell my story. The castle. Aulus’s disappearance. Dad’s arrest. Everything between. I withhold minimal details. Like: Don’t come back until you believe me. There’s no skirting around the FBI’s belief that Dad is the Gemini Thief or his laissez-faire attitude, so I lay it all out on the table with the ketchup and grease.
When I finish, Constance says, “You’ve all been through quite a trauma.” She lifts her purse from the floor and rifles the contents. “My sister—she was at service this morning—brought this.” The newspaper falls open. The Lexington Herald-Leader headline: “Suspect Arrested in Gemini Thief Case.” Dad’s named in the caption.
“So that’s why you said you knew.”
“I expected the police or the FBI. Not Don’s daughter. I didn’t even know he had a daughter.”
Tank and Nick lock their arms around my chair. I say, “I didn’t know he had a first wife.” My throat constricts as I ask what I came to ask. “Do you know anything . . . anything that might help make sense of this?”
Constance places her elbows on the table and steeples her hands. “I haven’t seen your dad in two decades.”
Three times I start to phrase a question but am a stuttering mess before Gladys steps in. “Can you tell us why you guys didn’t work out?”
Constance folds the corner of her Whopper wrapper and shifts the newspaper into her purse. “He left on a Tuesday.” She says on a Tuesday as if no time has elapsed between the memory and today. “When you’re eighteen, love is starlight in your pocket. For some people starlight’s a gift, and for others it’s a fire that needs putting out.” Constance watches a toddler in an adjacent booth make gooey eyes at Nick. She smiles at the flirting child and her voice—flat and factual—doesn’t match the expression. “I’m sure there are two sides to every marriage, every divorce, but Don was never happy once the rings were on.”
I don’t know Constance, not really, but she’s handling this painful situation with far more grace than Dad deserves. Nick must agree. He reaches across the table, palm up, and Constance takes his extended hand with grateful, teary eyes. “Thank you. What a silly thing that this still makes me weepy.”
Nick keeps her hand and takes advantage of the moment. “This is awkward, but would you trust me, us, enough to share something personal? I’d like to know if Don was ever violent or if he ever did anything that made you afraid or nervous?” Nick pauses, but not long enough to let her speak. “You understand why we’re asking?” There’s a glance at me. “Thea lives with him and . . .”
“I was never afraid.” A but lingers in the air. I have no sooner thought this than Constance says, “His ability to disengage was alarming. There were always two Dons.”
“Two Dons?” I ask.
She retracts her hand from Nick’s with a pat, wads the wrapper with half her burger inside, and pushes the greasy lump to the edge of her tray. “Oh yes,” she says. “The Don who loved me dearly and the Don who left me washing his clothes in the coin laundry while he filed for divorce without a word of warning.” She’s back in that laundromat, jabbing quarters through slots and slinging wet boxers from washer to dryer.
I’ve torn a scab by visiting.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and I tell her she doesn’t owe me an apology. “But, Thea, our divorce doesn’t make him what the FBI or media suggest he is. I’ll tell you what I’ll tell them too. There was nothing, and I mean nothing, in your father’s character that suggested he had the capacity to murder or injure a six-year-old boy. We even volunteered together at a daycare, and he was always great with kids. I mean, you must know that, right?”
Dad’s fine and all, but I wouldn’t say great. More evidence she knew a different Don than I do.
Constance says, “A man can be capable of the lies and deception you’ve described—the castle, the money, Aulus’s help—and be incapable of murder. I’m not sure what you want to hear, but if he says he didn’t do this, I’d believe him.”
Tank exhales, says, “That’s generous of you under the circumstances.”
“Well, he’d have had to change everything about himself, and I don’t see that in the cards.”
This would be more reassuring if she’d seen Dad once in the last twenty years.
“Can you make any sense of the castle?” I ask.
Her eyes drift in the direction of her Dollar General church building. “Don was always compulsive about something. Once it was God, then it was me, then it was not me. I guess now it’s a castle.”
“Crazy compulsive?” Nick asks.
Tank’s shaking his head and starts to protest the question when Constance cuts him off. “Depends on your definition of crazy. Is crazy inherently bad? Does life require a little crazy?” She pauses. “I mean, what do you call a man who hikes Everest? Insane or daring?”
We give honest nods, but what do we know? I came here for a straight answer: Do you think my dad is a murderer? She doesn’t. Even though I like her very much, I don’t want a lecture on the nuances of crazy.
Constance reads my body language perfectly. “I won’t go on and on,” she says. “But if you asked everyone I left behind to follow my dream . . . they might call me crazy. You meet Noah after the flood, you think, That brave, faith-filled, visionary man. You meet him before and you’re like, What a nut job. Perspective and timing matter. Sometimes you have to accept that you might not be able to see the truth from here.”
“I’m scared of the truth,” I say.
Constance doesn’t have sleek answers for my frustration. “You have more what-ifs than you deserve. No one can tell you what to do or believe, least of all me.” She collects our trays, stacks them, and organizes the trash. I can almost see her thinking that she needs to right something for us, and this is all she has.
After she returns from the garbage bin, she says, “I have a box of photos from those days. Not much of an offering, but they’re yours if you want.”