73

SHE SHOULD have waited for him in the kitchen, but she couldn’t. The light had always been too stark in there and she’d feel exposed. But this was worse because as Bobby stood there beside her, talking low in her ear, “Let’s go sit at the table, baby. Or do you want to be alone with him?” her father came into view in the office doorway. He was looking in the direction of the table and the glass of water Bobby had put there for him, but now he turned and stared at the two of them huddled there in front of Bobby’s cluttered desk, the lamplight on behind them. He was just a thick-limbed homely man in a rumpled suit, but she felt boxed in, the air in the room thin and about to get thinner.

Bobby said: “Have a seat, Mr. Ahearn.” He meant right there at the kitchen table, she knew, but her father paused only a second then stepped into Bobby’s office and sat at the end of the couch closest to the door. His eyes went from her to the shotgun leaning against the shelves near her hip to what was on the desk behind her under the light. Noni. Her crying face and humped shoulders, that look of betrayal on her face as she rushed into her shop of old objects made by the long-dead.

“I don’t want to cause any—”

“Do you know whose guns those are?”

“No.”

“Lois’s. The woman who raised me, do you remember her? I told her you were coming and she came here to kill you.”

“Baby.”

“And your letter. Your fucking letter. What was that? Like your life was a comic book and my mother—” A hot stone in her throat, her voice squeezed off as her eyes filled and she shook her head and tried to swallow but couldn’t. Bobby’s hand was on her shoulder and she jerked away from it and stepped forward, but it was like stepping barefoot close to that cottonmouth on the bank of Bone River, and she wiped at her eyes and watched her father nod his head. He was nodding his big fucking head. He said, “I—”

“What?”

“I was a kid.”

“Yeah, well, so was I.”

“I know it.”

“You don’t know anything about me. Nothing. You didn’t even recognize me at that fucking hotel. You were staring right at me.”

In the light from the kitchen he sat there looking confused. His big hands rested on his legs like claws, and his pants had bunched up so that she could see his work boots and white socks and the pale hairless skin of his calf.

“Mr. Ahearn, what is it you came here to say?”

“Bobby—” But whatever words were coming seemed to get squeezed in her throat, for her husband’s question felt like its own betrayal. Who gives a shit what her father has to say? What about her mother, who will never speak again? Her mother, who never even made it to twenty-five? Her mother, whom she could have known and loved and been loved by all these years? Her mother, the one person she’d needed more than any other.

But Susan stood there and said nothing. Instead, she waited. She crossed her arms in the airless quiet, and she waited for what her father was going to say.