Mark spent the next morning, a Friday, at home in his upstairs office, debugging a website for a store that imported wooden toys from Holland—cups and balls, floppy wooden dolls with joints made of string, little horses with manes of yarn and painted-on smiles. He didn’t care for the store, or the job. He had visited the place in September, and made a show of admiring the dolls before taking digital photos of them. The owner, an old Dutchman, had smiled to see one of them in Mark’s hands.
You have children? he’d asked. Please take. With compliments.
No—no children, Mark had stammered, too loudly. Sorry.
The man’s eyes had softened with sadness, with pity, and Mark had only communicated with him over email since.
But his work today was pleasant. Mark’s visit with Lew had reinvigorated him; he had promised himself that if he slammed through the morning’s calls, he would take the afternoon off to price rings. Lew had even offered to come along. And Allison had kissed him deeply on her way out the door—a promise, Mark was pretty sure, of lovemaking to come that night.
But at midmorning he remembered with a lurch that he owed Chloe a call. In less than two weeks it would be December 18—Brendan’s birthday. For the last few years—since they’d decided to be civil with each other, to be a part of each other’s lives—they’d had dinner together on that night. If his plans came to fruition, he might very well have to go to that dinner and tell Chloe he was engaged.
The thought dropped into a black hole in his mind. He didn’t place the call.
A plan came to him. Instead of ring shopping this afternoon, he would do what he ought to have done days ago: He’d drive the three hours to Indianapolis and surprise his father at work—Sam taught history at Butler University, but had no classes on Fridays; he’d be holed up in his office until the evening, working on his latest book, about the politics of the Colorado gold rush—to tell him about Allison.
Immediately Mark felt better. He had spilled his plans to Lewis; they were real now, and his heart sped up as he imagined telling his father, too. He’d been neglecting Sam too much, and now he could make amends. He could be the good son his father was always telling him he had.
He called Allison from the road to tell her what he was up to. “Are you okay?” she asked, after a pause.
“I’m fine,” he said brightly. “I just haven’t seen Dad enough lately. This will be a nice Christmas present for him.”
Allison and his father had met a few times; Sam, in fact, had driven to Columbus to help them move into the townhouse. She’s a peach, his father had said that night, as he and Mark stood sweaty beside the moving truck. Sam had thought awhile longer, then added, A real peach.
“Promise me you’re all right?” Allie asked.
He wished, for the thousandth time, that he wasn’t as transparent as everyone in his life found him to be. That he wasn’t the sort of man who would always have to reassure people he was fine.
“I’m just fine,” he told her. “I promise. And maybe me and Dad’ll shop for you.”
This cheered her. “Give Sam my love,” she said. “And get me something good.”
The drive from Columbus to Indianapolis followed a stretch of I-70 so straight, Mark could have safely slept behind the wheel. Cold rain and sleet pattered on the windshield. He drove past mile-wide fields, black frozen soil speckled with bent and broken cornstalks. Small towns that seemed embarrassed by their own off-ramps. A wide, straight brown river, like an interstate flowing south, its banks harboring occasional pockets of ice. An exit with a truck stop and a Stuckey’s. Mark plugged his iPod into the stereo and played loud rock and roll—Led Zeppelin—and sang along to keep himself awake.
An eternity later the Indianapolis suburbs appeared in the west like Columbus’s in reverse—the same strip malls, the same truck stop and Stuckey’s floating out of the rain. The same endless suburbs. Finally he crested a rise and saw the buildings of downtown Indianapolis, clustered and glittering.
Mark loved Columbus, his home for so long, but the sight of Indy’s skyline still warmed him. When he’d been a teenage boy—skinny, long-haired, fancying himself an artist—he used to flee the cornfields and tool around the downtown streets in his rattletrap Dodge Challenger. He’d imagined himself an adult, living in a warehouse loft, someplace with high ceilings and billowy curtains and a procession of beautiful young women in his big bed, admiring him while he painted.
He could never pass the city without remembering this. Every time he did, he felt guilty, but not because of the foolishness of the fantasy. He felt, rather, as though he’d run into an old girlfriend in line at the bank, someone he’d cruelly left, who’d cried when he’d done so. Who wasn’t ready, now—who wouldn’t ever be ready—to hear him say, I’m getting married again.
The interstate curved north, away from downtown. To the right of the highway loomed Methodist Hospital, which Mark could never see without thinking of his mother; she had been treated for lymphoma there, had succumbed in a room on one of the upper floors, when Mark was a senior in college. Mark and Sam and Chloe had all been with her. Sam had held one of her hands; Mark had held the other, his eyes closed, listening to her shallow breaths. Finally the next breath had failed to come, and the moment had stretched out longer and longer, and his father had said, Oh, no—
Mark knew, now, why he’d been hesitating to propose.
His mother had been dead more than a decade and a half, yet his father had chosen to remain single. Mark had decided upon a course of action that Samuel Fife, PhD, had never seen fit to take.
Chloe had told Mark, once upon a time, that he was just like his father. He’d protested; then, as now, comparisons to his father alarmed him. This was during the summer after his mother had died, when Mark and Chloe had lived with Sam at the farmhouse for the summer months, taking care of him. When Chloe had told him, they’d been alone in the house, curled together in the narrow guest room bed while Sam was away on errands. He’d been staring at the ceiling, Chloe’s head tucked against his chest, worrying aloud about his father’s state of mind.
I see where you get it, Chloe said suddenly.
It?
Your ability to love, she told him. The people you love, you love completely.
He hadn’t known what to say.
I’m sad for your dad, Chloe told him. But I’m glad we’re in love like he was. Is. I mean, this is pretty rare. Don’t you think?
He had thought so, had told her so then and there. At the end of the summer he vowed it, slipping a ring on Chloe’s finger in a Columbus rose garden.
But Chloe had left him. They hadn’t even made it a year beyond Brendan’s death when she’d cast him loose. We’re not the people we were, she’d told him. If we ever were.
Mark was not a husband. He was not a father. Not anymore.
He was free. The thought came sneakily, as it always did, but when it had arrived he could only clench his teeth and accept it: His wife and son had left him alone. He was a new man. His own man.
He could do whatever he wished.
Ten minutes later Mark had parked the Volvo on Butler’s campus and was inside the long, low limestone edifice of Jordan Hall, climbing wide stone steps—slightly concave, slippery with wear—to his father’s office on the third floor.
Sam Fife had worked in this building since before Mark was born. If the downtown skyline had regressed him to sixteen, the inside of Jordan took him back even further, to the age of ten. The building, he’d told his father then, smelled like thinking. It did still—a happy smell, of books and people and their heated thoughts. History, the parts of it they’d never scrub or remodel away: decades’ worth of pipes and cigarettes, once smoked openly; musky perfumes and colognes; industrial cleaners; heavy paper, glue, and leather; spilled ink; tweed in need of a wash.
From twenty feet down the hall he saw that his father’s door was open. Laughter burst out of it. Mark stood in the doorway, summoning his younger self’s doubtful courage. His father sat at ease behind his desk, fingers laced behind his head, loafered feet propped up one of his open drawers. He wore a terrible multicolored sweater, and—he did this every winter, and every winter it never failed to surprise Mark—he had grown a small white fringe of beard, at odds with his ever-balder head. His desk, as usual, was neatly organized and dusted. Shelves of books lined the walls, so densely they might have been painted on, all the way into the corners.
Another professor, Mitch Doyle—round and asthmatic, wearing a black sweatsuit and a Colts cap—sat in the stuffed chair in front of the desk, his cane across his knees. Both men smiled, at Mark’s appearance—was he a student, needing something?—and then his father dropped his feet. “Mark! Oh my goodness!”
“Hey, Pop,” Mark said—his father hated the nickname, but Mark could already see worry seeping into his face, and he wanted to calm him. “I was in the neighborhood—”
“Mitchell! It’s my boy!”
“So it is,” Mitch said, struggling to rise. “Good to see you, Mark.”
“Oh my,” his father said, and came to Mark’s side—as always, comfortingly tall.
“I’ll see you, Fife,” Mitch said, wheezing out the door. “We’ve got graduate committee on Monday, anyway.”
“If I’m interrupting,” Mark said.
“Oh no,” Mitch and his father said all at once. “Sit, sit,” his father said, and Mark settled into the vacated chair, while his father shut the door. He rolled his eyes. “Thank you,” he said. “Did I tell you Mitch is our new department head?”
He had, but Mark made a face anyway. “What’s that like?”
“A roiling, acid hell. Good Christ, the meetings take forever now.”
“You should be head,” Mark said.
His father didn’t want to be in charge of anything, but he liked to be told he ought to be. “Six more years to retirement,” he said, smiling grimly. “Mitch is a small price to pay for routine. But who cares! You’ve driven out to see me.”
“I have.”
“Something’s wrong.” Sam’s face tightened. “Has something happened with Allison?”
“No! We’re fine, Dad. I just wanted to talk some things over. Get out of my head a little.”
This was old code. Sam had been the first to use it, in the year after Mark’s mother died. Later, after Brendan, Mark adopted the phrase himself.
Sam squeezed Mark’s forearm. “Of course. Would you like to walk with me? Final papers are due—if we stay here we’ll be beset.”
His father shouldered on first his sport coat—green tweed, shot through with brown—then an overcoat. Mark followed him down the hallway. A dozen students, milling at the top of the stairs, brightened, and his father greeted them all.
They walked outside into a speckling of cold rain. His father touched Mark’s elbow, guided him down a branching sidewalk to a side street, toward a coffee shop he liked. “It is Allison. When I said her name I saw it on your face. Tell me.”
Sam was bracing himself for bad news. He had seen Mark’s mother through a year of cancer; he had answered the phone seven years ago to Mark’s choked voice telling him Brendan had died; he had seen Mark through a divorce from a woman both of them had loved. Now Sam only wanted to know that things, always and forever, would be all right.
“I’m buying a ring,” Mark said—though his throat tried to close around the words. “So yeah, I guess we’re all right.”
“You guess?” his father said. He used the Voice—the timbre, dripping with friendly sarcasm, that brought students to full attention—Mr. Shields, you’re paying attention. Please define noblesse oblige. You guess? Or you’re certain? Take your time. This is history; it’s not going anywhere. “You guess,” his father said again, laughing. “Stop.”
Sam embraced him. His father’s coat smelled like the farmhouse, like mothballs in the closet, like safety, like Sam; Mark closed his eyes, grateful, lost. “I’m so glad,” his father said. “You deserve this.”
Sam drew back, his eyes blinking rapidly behind his glasses. Deserve, Mark thought, and fended the thought away with a sudden, snappish fury. It left in its wake the bleary sadness with which Mark was too familiar. They walked along in silence, Sam’s hand on Mark’s shoulder.
The café was a small, square shop inside a bland, featureless storefront at the eastern edge of campus. Inside, though, it was close and warm; the smoky, greasy smell of roasting beans hung close to wooden rafters deeply carved with generations of initials.
As they waited in line, Sam asked, “Will you be staying tonight? I could cook—”
Mark’s plan had been to drive to Indy and back in a day, but now that he was with his father, he was tempted; he missed the farmhouse, its high ceilings and plastered walls and rooms full of books, his father’s turntable playing crackly jazz.
He had spent years, now, saddened by the thought of Sam alone there. His father wasn’t a hermit by any means—he went to dinners with colleagues; he went to concerts. But most nights he stayed at home, sitting in a deep leather recliner, grading papers or listening to his records through old headphones he’d bought in the seventies—they dwarfed his head—and drinking a single martini made with scientific precision. His nearest neighbor was half a mile down the road. Which was still dirt.
“I can’t stay,” Mark said, with genuine regret. “Allie’s going to want me home tonight.”
His father nodded, but his disappointment was evident. They each filled a mug, then took a seat by the window. “Now,” Sam said, “will you please tell me everything?”
Mark laid out his case: He and Allison had lived together for six months. She was thoughtful, calm—older, it seemed sometimes, than he was. Her divorce, he thought, gave her some common ground with him. But she was playful, too, and sharp as a tack. With her he felt something like peace.
“I love her,” Mark said. Again, louder: “I love her a lot.”
His father’s eyes flicked up to Mark’s, then back down to his drink. “What will Chloe say?” he asked.
Mark was stung, just as he’d been when Lew asked the same question.
Sam said, quickly, “I shouldn’t have—”
“No, it’s okay. I don’t know. Chloe’s got Steve now—”
“The restaurateur.” His father pursed his lips carefully around each syllable.
“Still,” Mark said.
Sam still called Chloe on her birthday and on holidays, to check in, to tell the mother of his grandson that she was still a part of his life. Mark would never have known about these calls if Chloe hadn’t mentioned them. Chloe still loved her father-in-law, too. That summer after Mark’s mother died, when they were all holed up together in the farmhouse, Chloe had taught Sam how to cook; she’d gone through Mark’s mother’s clothing for him, boxing it up for Goodwill. Sam loved to read aloud, and every night after sunset, the three of them sat on the big stone porch and drank wine and listened to his father read Great Expectations, Sam always sitting on the left side of the porch swing, as though his wife would, at any moment, emerge from the house and fill the empty space to his right.
There’d never be a good time to broach this. “Dad. Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“You never remarried.”
Sam’s brow knit; he frowned into his coffee.
His father had had dates. He’d mentioned them in passing, with an odd formality: So-and-so mentioned that to me at dinner, one night last July. He was a good-looking man, well known and well liked. Once Mark had become an adult, he’d realized his father had a dirty mind, that he was capable of the same appalling jokes with his friends that Mark traded back and forth with Lewis. He and Mark had seen each other through losses they’d each barely borne. But after all this time, Sam still never mentioned his private life to Mark, as though he worried that the tending of his emotions was business too private for his son. Mark had never found a way to tell him otherwise.
“Ever been tempted?” Mark asked.
His father looked briefly from side to side—a simple reminder of where they were, how much he could say. Figured—Mark had finally gotten the guts to ask, and he’d done so in a place where Sam had an automatic out.
But then Sam said, “Well. I’ve been meaning to tell you. I’m seeing someone. At the moment. Now.”
Mark rocked back from the table. “You are?”
“Yes. And”—his father had blushed a deep crimson—“I don’t know how to describe this. We don’t want to marry. But we’ve discussed, ourselves, what we’re doing, in those terms. We’ve spoken of… of permanence.”
“Who?”
“Helen Etley.” After a pause, he added, “Political science.”
“How long—”
“A little over a year.” His father crumpled his napkin into a ball, rolled it between his palms. “I’m a coward.”
Now Mark was peeved. “What’s so goddamned scary about—”
“Everything’s scary. Good Lord, Mark. Think about it.”
His father’s most cutting phrase. In other words: Don’t be stupid.
His father kept spilling details. Helen was twelve years younger—
“Keep your voice down!”
—and she’d been hired three years ago, from Penn State. She’d looked for a job in Indianapolis because her elderly mother, newly widowed, lived in town. Helen was smart, classy—his father used that exact word. They went to plays and jazz concerts together. She had no interest in living outside town, but they had begun to consider living together, in some fashion. Those negotiations were ongoing.
“In some fashion,” Mark said.
“Do you disapprove?”
“Dad! No, I don’t disapprove. Maybe, you know, if I had a chance to meet her, that question might actually mean something—”
“I want you to meet her.”
“I’d like to.”
His father let out a tremulous laugh. “I’m happy,” he said quietly, as though he might be arrested for it.
“Dad. It’s okay.” And it was. It absolutely was.
“Mark,” Sam said, still blushing. “You’re happy, too? Tell me you are.”
Mark swallowed a lump. “Yeah.”
“I like Allison,” his father said then, catching his eyes. “I see in her what you do.”
Relief weakened him. “Thanks, Dad.”
“Bring her out soon. Please? And—we’ll have dinner with Helen.”
Mark raised his mug; his father raised his; they clinked the rims together.
They fell silent then. Mark looked around him, at the chattering, impossibly young students. He watched a couple some tables over; they were stripping off their wet coats, smiling at each other with rapt intensity, unable to contain the joy in each other’s company. The girl—the woman—was a tall, willowy blonde, smiling wide, her glasses still dotted with rain. The boy beside her was spindly, hunched, blinking too fast, his hand never leaving his love’s elbow. As though, if he stopped touching her, she’d vanish.
Mark couldn’t watch them. He turned back to his father—but Sam was staring out the window, holding his mug halfway between the table and his lips, smiling a private smile.
Sam canceled his office hours, then drove Mark to nearby Broad Ripple, to a store that sold good antique and secondhand jewelry, owned by a friend of Helen’s. Sam stood by the door, his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, while the owner—a short, plump woman with long salt-and-pepper pigtails and a merry smile—showed Mark tray after tray of rings. His father had guided Mark well—Allie would love this place, and the woman who ran it. “Do you know the size of Allison’s finger?” she asked. Mark shook his head no. “Don’t worry,” she told him. “It can be resized. The right ring is the right ring.”
Finally he saw it: a small sapphire on a platinum band. Both colors fit Allie; her look was wintry in all the ways her heart wasn’t.
The ring was elegant, understated, not too expensive, but certainly not cheap. He handed the woman his credit card; she smiled warmly, winked, and he remembered planning his wedding with Chloe—the way everyone they’d dealt with had offered them signs and codes, as though they were joining a cult. You’ll know all our secrets soon enough.
When they were in the car, Mark forced out his last question: “Would Mom like Allie?”
His father clicked his seat belt into place, his eyebrows drawing together. “Of course she would. Allie would make your mother laugh. They’d play euchre.” Sam grasped Mark’s knee and shook it from side to side. “Mark. It’s okay. We trust you.”
We.
Mark beat Allison home by forty minutes, but well after dark. In that time he took a shower and put the ring into the pocket of his jeans. While he waited for her, he opened his phone. He’d gotten one message while showering, from a number he didn’t know.
His nerves got the better of him; his mouth was sour; he quickly ran upstairs and brushed his teeth again, then swished mouthwash between his cheeks. He patted his thigh; the ring was still there. Then, pulling aside the downstairs curtains to check the street, he dialed his voicemail.
The message began to play: He heard a woman’s voice, high-pitched, hesitant. “Um. Mr. Fife. I really need to speak with you. My name is Connie Pelham. I have—I have an issue to discuss with you. It’s very important. My number is—”
She recited it, carefully, but her voice shook, as though she was near tears. In the background Mark thought he heard the voice of a child. Then a long silence. Perhaps a deep intake of breath. “Please call,” the woman said.
To erase this message, press seven. To save it, press nine.
He pressed nine, confounded. The woman didn’t sound like she had business for him—and no one who did ever called him this late in the evening, not on a Friday. She’d sounded nervous…
He remembered again the woman who’d stared at him through the window of the coffee shop. The one who had run away from him in fear. This couldn’t be her, calling, could it? The thought was ridiculous, and yet he found himself uneasily mulling it over, all the same.
A key turned in the front-door lock, startling him. Allison stepped through the door, bundled in her coat and bearing armloads of shopping bags, shivering theatrically. She saw Mark standing at the top of the stairs, and smiled.
Mark put the phone in his pocket. His fingers touched the thin, cool surface of the ring.
And this was why he had done the right thing, why the strange woman didn’t matter, why his doubts didn’t matter: because here was Allison calling out, “You’re home!” Here was Allie, climbing the stairs, meeting him. His Allie, holding out her arms, smiling, kissing him, taking him in.