Sitting upstairs in the closet, where she’d hidden, the mother heard a knocking through the floor—sound that seemed at first to come from on the wood there in the closet, just behind her head. She could not move. She was so thick. The mother, sitting wobbling, felt the knocking shift along the inseam of the house, all down around its back and belly to the downstairs, to the front door. There the knocking became pounding, became shouting, became bells—a chime the house had held inside it, somehow, since it had been built, a human sound. The low tone of the doorbell made the mother’s body moisten, the stink of grass around her head—the knocking pounding all throughout her, at her heartbeat, twinned together, double time—then, inside the rhythm, she could see again, and she could stand.
At the door, through the thick peephole, the sweating mother saw a man. Not the man she’d hoped to see there, he with such hands, but her husband, balding. Here, the father, at his own door: a lock to which he had the key. The mother breathed to see the father upright, glistening in outdoor light—she could not remember the last time she’d witnessed him outside the house since they moved in.
And yet this father was not the father, the mother saw then, looking longer, her brim shifting—no, not quite. This man clearly had aged less than the current father. His cheeks were tight and eyes were clean. He had another way about him. Kempt clothes, casual. A fine set of clean black driving gloves. The mother saw some kind of promise in his posture, days yet coming, the expectation of a life. For years all the males the mother looked at looked like the father—every single one—though that was in the years when he was thinner and she quicker and them strong.
The mother looked and looked and looked again, her eyelids flitting. This man was beautiful, she knew. Like her husband except newer, neater, which could have made him anybody.
The mother unlocked, unlatched, and opened up the door.