That, at last, had convinced her that maybe he was telling the truth.
“I’m here,” Mitch said evenly. “You may as well invite me in.”
The judge shook his head, as if chasing away cobwebs.
“Why are you here?”
“I came to see Mother’s grave.”
“A little late, aren’t you?”
Mitch felt his face twitch with anger before he could control it.
“There’s coffee,” his father said, abruptly. He turned his back and led the way into the kitchen as if expecting Mitch to follow after him.
After a moment of inner debate in which he seriously considered stalking out and slamming the door, Mitch took a step forward and then kept going into the kitchen.
“House looks mostly the same,” Mitch observed, over a cup of the atrocious instant coffee that his father still seemed to prefer. “So do you.”
“Yes. It was your mother who changed.”
Mitch’s hackles started to rise, he started to snap out something argumentative, but then he realized his father had said it in a neutral tone and that he was only talking about her illness. If the old man so much as hinted it was Mitch’s fault, that she had got sick because of him, Mitch was going to tell him to go to hell. But so far, everything was diplomatic, safe. Instead of cursing his father, Mitch reached for a sugar bowl in a futile attempt to improve the coffee. When he had left home, he wasn’t a coffee drinker. Now he was. Now he was many things that were different from the way he’d been before. Being a coffee addict was probably one of the more benign of them, he thought.
“Was it Alzheimer’s, for sure?”
“Don’t know. I wouldn’t let them do an autopsy on her.”
Mitch didn’t know much about the disease, but he did know that it took a brain dissection to find the telltale plaques that screamed “Alzheimer’s!”
“Why not?”
“What would be the point?”
“I guess.” Mitch stirred his coffee. Seated across from him at the kitchen table, his dad wiped an invisible spill with a napkin. “Was it hard? Her illness?”
“What do you think? It wasn’t easy.”
“How bad did she get in the end?”
“Some days she knew me, some days she didn’t.”
“What was it like for her?”
His father frowned slightly, as if Mitch had thrown him a curve, a question whose answer he had not previously considered. “How would I know?”
Mitch supposed it was a fair answer. But he thought there were other ways his father might have answered it. He could have said she didn’t suffer. He could have said she suffered all the time. He could have found a million different ways to describe the daily life of a sharp-witted woman who was losing her mind. But Mitch noted, like a doctor picking up clues to a diagnosis, that his father’s first answer to the question, “How bad did she get in the end?” had been purely solipsistic. It was all about him, not about her. As would his mother’s answer have been, Mitch thought, if their roles had been reversed. Two more self-absorbed people he did not think he had ever met. He suspected they had been perfect for each other, existing in one intimate world on parallel tracks.
“She lived in hallucinations and the past,” his father said, in the same neutral tone, “but at least she always knew who Jeff was.”
For a second, Mitch didn’t know who he was talking about. Then he remembered, with a start of rueful realization that left him feeling stupid and foolish and even jealous: his brother, the adopted son who had come to take his place in the strange scheme of things in his so-called family. They had brought four-year-old Jeff to Mitch’s graduation. His own son had an uncle, Mitch thought, whom he might never meet. For a moment, it rushed over him that an entire family life that he didn’t know anything about had unfolded in this kitchen in his absence.
“I’d like to see him,” he said, though he wasn’t sure that was true.
For the first time, his father looked unsure, too. “He’s not here right now.”
“Okay. Some other time. Can he drive?”
“He’s seventeen.”
“That’s a yes?” Mitch regretted his sarcasm the minute it appeared. He wanted information, and getting the old man’s back up too far wasn’t going to accomplish that aim. “The reason I asked is, I thought he might drive out to see me if he wants to. I’m staying at the ranch, Dad.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I let myself into the ranch house and I’m staying there.”
His father’s eyes narrowed as he took this in. “You might have asked permission first.”
“I might have, yes, but I didn’t, and now I’m there.”
“For how long?”
Mitch bit back the bitter retort on the tip of his tongue. “As long as it takes to straighten some things out, Dad.”
His father reared back in his seat, instantly getting the point. “You leave it alone.”
“Leave what alone?” Mitch asked with a softness that only barely hid the venom beneath it, and with every subsequent sentence he spoke, his voice rose and the poison leaked out. “Leave her name off her grave? Leave people thinking nobody around here has any idea what happened to her or who she was? Leave people wondering why the hell I left like that and never came back until now? Is that what you think I should leave alone, Dad?”
His fury didn’t move his father, who was accustomed to passion-both real and phony-in the courtroom. “You’ve intelligently left it alone for all these years.”
“So why mess with success?” Mitch’s laugh was bitter.
“That’s one way to put it, yes.”
“Jesus, you’re a cold bastard!”
“And you’re an ungrateful son,” his father shot back at him.
“Ungrateful?” Mitch stared at him.
“I protected you!” his father roared, suddenly as furious and animated as his son.
“You never believed me!”
“Don’t you get it, son? All these years and you still don’t understand it?”
“What? What don’t I understand?”
“Of course I believed you! Your mother and I both believed you. She did to the day she stopped remembering anything, and I still do. My God, of course I do. But that doesn’t make any difference, because nobody else will believe you. It was a teenager’s word against two of the most respected men in this state and it still is. It still is, Mitch.”
“You’ve never heard of lie detector tests?”
“Inadmissible in court,” his father said, with a dismissive wave of one hand. “Good God, Mitch, you’re a lawyer, you know that. And just what other evidence do you think you would have anyway? If Quentin and Nathan did what you said they did, there is no way in hell you will ever prove it. Nathan was the sheriff! Do you think he hung on to evidence? Quentin was the doctor, do you think he did? And even if you had evidence that they covered up her identity, what would you have then? No evidence about how she died or who killed her. You don’t have anything except your own wounded ego, Mitchell, and it is seventeen years past the time for you to force yourself to get over that, because there is absolutely nothing that you, or even I, can do to change things.”
Mitch stared at him and for a long time his father stared back at him.
Finally, Mitch said, “You chose them over me.”
“We had to live here,” his father said in the cold blunt way he had always used when stating what he believed to be unalterable facts. “You didn’t. And besides, I trust them.”
“What?”
“They are my best friends, just like Abby and Rex were your best friends. I have always believed that even if they did what you saw them do, then they must have had a good and decent reason for it, and I trust them enough to leave it alone.”