Of course, I never thought once about staring at Ruth Plynk through the small space in that parted door when I was in the several hotel rooms I visited with Anna. It was only when I had to tell my son I'd had an affair that the moment returned to me, but it has not gone away in all the months since, whenever I see Nat's evident confusion in my presence.
That look is on his face now as he stands on my back doorstep. He told me last night, when I called to say I was finally headed back to sign the agreements Sandy has worked out, that he wanted to visit, but he has arrived earlier than expected. The first fall air has brought intermittent storms today. He wears a hooded sweatshirt, and his dark hair tosses in the high wind.
I am happy in the most fundamental way to see my son, although the sight of him is also accompanied by faint distress. We mean well by our children, but so much rests beyond our control. There is a nervous distraction to Nat, a looking here and there that I suspect will be permanent, and an ingrained frown that I realize I have seen for more than sixty years in the mirror. I pull open the door, we hug briefly, and he steps past me, stamping the rain off his shoes.
"Coffee?" I ask.
"Sure." He takes a seat at the kitchen table and looks about. This is surely hard for him, to return to this house where so many charged moments have passed in the last year. The silence lingers until he asks how I enjoyed Skageon.
"It was fine." I debate saying more but decide for many reasons that candor may be best. "I actually saw a bit of Lorna Murphy. The next-door neighbor?" The Murphys' vast summer house sprawls over several lots next to our little cottage.
"Really?" Despite all that has gone on in the last two years, he seems more amazed than troubled.
"She wrote to me last fall after your mom died, and we sort of stayed in touch."
"Ah. Grief counseling," says the permanent wise guy.
There is actually something to that. Lorna lost Matt, some kind of construction king, four years ago. A lithe blonde, an inch or two taller than I am, she has expressed a stubborn faith in me. I thought that was because she had been so long getting to the point of thinking about another guy, she simply couldn't change her mind after I was indicted. She wrote to me every week I was in prison and was my first call as I drove to Skageon on the morning of my release. I had no clue if I had the courage to suggest meeting up there, and in the event, I didn't have to. She said she would come up as soon as I told her I was headed that way. It was time for each of us to be with someone else.
She is a dear woman, quiet, warm but contained. I suspect she is not my future. Time will tell. But I learned one thing with her. If I don't fall in love with Lorna, I will fall in love with someone else. I will do it again. That is my nature.
"I was going to ask if you fished while you were up there."
"Oh, I fished. I fished from the canoe. I caught two nice walleye. Great meals."
"Really? I'd love to fish with you one weekend this fall."
"It's a date."
The coffee is done. I pour for each of us, and I sit down at the cherry kitchen table, with its wavy edge. It has been here throughout Nat's life, the story of our family written there in the stains and gouges. I can remember the origin of many of them-misfired art projects, temper tantrums, pans too hot for bare wood I stupidly set down.
Nat is looking away, lost in something. I stir my coffee and wait for him.
"How's all your work coming?" I ask eventually. Nat will continue subbing here in Nearing this fall, but he was also hired at Easton Law School to teach a jurisprudence course in the winter term, filling in for one of his former professors who will be on leave. He has been spending much of his time preparing for that. And he is back to work on his law review article, comparing the law's model of knowing conduct with what's suggested by the latest neuroscience research. It could be a pathbreaking piece.
"Dad," he says without looking at me, "I want you to tell me the truth."
"Okay," I say. I feel a stitch draw in my heart.
"About Mom," he says.
"She killed herself, Nat."
He closes his eyes. "Not the party line. What actually happened."
"That's what actually happened."
"Dad." He shows again some of that perpetual agitation, the birdlike glancing about. "Dad, one of the things I really hated about growing up in this house was that everybody had secrets. Mom had her secrets, and you had your secrets, and you and Mom had secrets together, so I had to have secrets, and I always wished everybody would just fucking talk. You know?"
This is one complaint I fully understand and would probably be powerless to change.
"I want to know what really happened to Mom. What you know."
"Nat, your mother committed suicide. I don't kid myself to think that my behavior had no role in it, but I didn't kill her."
"Dad, I know that. You think I don't know that? But I'm your son. I get you, okay? And I've thought about this. And I know two things. Number one. You didn't sit here for twenty-four hours after she died to handle your grief, because frankly, that's not you. You've always pushed emotions down like somebody sticking wadding into a cannon. Maybe it'll blow later. But you go on. You always go on. You'd have cried or frowned or shaken your head for a while, but you would have gotten on the phone. You were sitting here trying to figure something out. That's one thing I know. And here's the other. I watched you when you pled guilty to obstruction of justice. And you were serene. You said you were guilty with absolute conviction. But since I know you didn't screw with that computer-because you told Anna that-that means that whatever lying and messing around you did, you did a long time ago. And I say it was when Mom died. Am I right?"
Smart kid. His mother's son. Always a very, very smart boy. I manage a small smile, a bit proud, when I nod.
"So I want to know everything," he says.
"Nat, your mother was your mother. What I was to her or she to me doesn't change any of that. I wasn't trying to treat you as a child. The truth is that I asked myself if I'd want to know the things I never told you, and I really believe I wouldn't. And I hope you'll take a minute to consider that."
Nat never really gets angry at anyone the way he does with me. Anger at his mother was too dangerous. I am a safer target, and the fashion in which I have always eluded him, or tried to, as he sees it, infuriates him. But the rage that closes his brow, that darkens his blue eyes, is, of course, Barbara's.
"Okay," I say. "Okay. The truth, Nat, is your mother killed herself. And that I didn't want you, or anybody else, to know that. I didn't want you to be upset, or to have to shoulder the weight the children of suicides always carry. And I didn't want you to ask why. Or to know what I'd done to provoke her."
"The affair?"
"The affair."
"Okay. But how did she die?"
I raise a hand. "I'm going to tell you. I'm going to tell you everything." I take a breath. Sixty-two years old, I have the vulnerabilities of the Serbian kid who was never considered cool in school. I was smart and, as a young boy, no one to mess with on the schoolyard-I was vicious when provoked. But I was not cool-not someone anybody cared to hang with on the weekends, to invite to parties, or to joke with in the hall. I have always been alone and feared the meaning of my isolation. Although I have lived in Kindle County my entire life, attended grade school, high school, college, and law school here, practiced in this place for more than thirty-five years, I lack a best friend, especially since rheumatoid arthritis drove Dan Lipranzer, the detective I preferred to work with as a prosecutor, to Arizona. Not to say I don't have good times or enjoy the company of close professional acquaintances, like George Mason. But I lack a figure of essential connection. That was something I think Anna knew about me and seized upon. But my greatest hopes somehow have always been pinned to my son. Which is not a fair assignment for a child. Yet as a result I've always had a special fear of being rejected by Nat. I need to steel myself now.