Maggie had long finished her food and lay chewing on a bone over by the stove. Moa poured our coffee. “Jenny’s right that she knows most everything we’re about to tell you. I just didn’t want her to see your reaction, which is me asking you to keep as calm as you’re capable of while we give you the news we’ve got to give. Can you do that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Thank you, Ross,” Wilson said.
Trouble was growing in me.
“Now, you’ll have to go through this whole thing again with Gerry when he visits next, but I suppose it’s best you hear it from our mouths so you have a chance to calm down before seeing him. He’s missed you, Roscoe, and he wants you in his life.”
“All right.”
Wilson took over. “Whether the blame of our hardships fell squarely on you or not, Marie put it there, and she did her best to get Gerry to put it there, too.”
Moa was nodding. “Wilson tried to talk to her about it a couple times. Imagine you know as well as we do how stubborn Marie can be. There was no budging on this particular matter. But I bring this up only to assure you that none of this is Gerry’s doing.”
“You’re making me nervous, Moa.”
“Hell”—Wilson chuckled—“me, too.”
Moa held tight to her mug with both hands. She took a breath that seemed to last minutes, the inhale draining all the air from the room, the exhale bringing it back. “Marie’s divorced you, Roscoe. It’s been years now.”
I expected anger, a great circulating current. I waited for it, clenching my fingers round my mug, readying to throw it against that damn wallpaper, splattering those tiny people with their huge flowers, a great stain to mar that shiny room.
Moa and Wilson watched me.
But my hand couldn’t bring that mug high enough to throw it. Instead, I took a sip of the coffee Moa had brewed for us. Coffee was a treat still, having been gone for so long. I worry that I’ve grown too used to some comforts now, coffee just a part of my life like sleeping in a bed and waking in a room and working my own hours. All these things are privileges.
“Ross?” Wilson asked.
“Just taking it in.” Then I found a question. “How?”
“She got your signature on the papers the one time she visited,” Wilson said. “You were injured. She told us you were fully conscious and in agreement, but I recognized the lie in that the day I picked you up — asking me about whether she’d visited at all.”
“Why didn’t she just ask me when I was awake?”
“We can’t answer that, Ross.”
“But there are things we can tell you,” Moa assured. “It’s this next part that we wanted the time for — the time with you here.” The swiftness in her speech felt like panic. “Once Marie paid off the power company and we got back the electricity, the farm did well. We all did well. Six months after Wilson returned, Marie chose to leave, though. She moved down to Mobile for a teaching position. She took Gerald, against his wishes, and she insisted we move in here to keep up the maintenance. A little over a year later she came back with a lawyer who’d drawn up a bill of sale for the house and property.”
“She sold it to us for a hundred dollars,” Wilson said.
“A hundred dollars we’d already given her — taken from wages. She wouldn’t let us argue.”
I was thinking of the divorce, trying to see it, to place it within the time I’d known in Kilby. Marie had been absent, but she had played the role of wife in my mind, a silent wife, an absent wife, even at times a figment of a younger wife, but she was still—always — the woman I had married, the woman I was married to still.
“Ross?”
“It’s a lot to take in,” Moa said.
I traced the story they’d given me — from my furtive divorce to the lawyer’s visit. “This is yours? You own the land?”
“Yes,” Wilson said.
“And you chose to bring me back here?”
They nodded, and I looked between them, a foreignness settling around me. Marie’s father’s land handed over to the people hired to till it, and those people my new custodians. I was in the cottage because of them, because of the mercy they’d shown.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” I told Wilson and Moa, a desperation stirring, a need for escape so fierce I couldn’t finish the thought. I couldn’t even say I was going before I was moving away. I paused only for a moment — there at the door, long enough to call Maggie to my side.
I spent the next days burning the old roof mulch and laying tarpaper across the dry planks. Twice, I’d packed and then unpacked a bag. The second of those times, I’d left, making it to the original power line running along Old Hissup Road, belongings on my back, dog at my side. My transformers stopped me, all three of them there, rusted, quiet ghosts of the creations they’d been. The combination sent me back to the cottage, unsure of the part that was mine — the wires with their live currents or the broken-down transformers that’d long been replaced.
Then Jenny arrived. “Will you come up to the house? Gerald’s here.”
I’d slept fitfully since my talk with her parents, questions keeping me awake, wispy things, crippled and dark.
I let Jenny lead us into the meadow, the grass crumpled, the burned mulch a dark circle, and then the big house came into view, its glinting windows and bright siding.
I stopped at the porch steps, Maggie’s nose in the pits of my knees.
“Come on,” Jenny said, but I didn’t know that I was ready for another conversation about my former wife and her property.
Finally, Jenny took my hand.
My toes caught on every stair, and only Jenny’s grip kept me from stumbling. We climbed for hours, it seemed, though there were only six steps. The porch, too, had grown. Its planks stretched far away to the front door, a mile at least.
“I can’t make it,” I told Jenny, but she pulled me forward. Maggie lay down on the brick walkway without being told. The heavy oak door was open, as it was every day of every summer I had lived here. Even the lightest hint of a breeze helped in fighting the heat. People were in the front sitting room, taking me in. My trousers were gritty, my hands calloused. My shirt hung loose, the cuffs ratty and threadbare. My nose and forehead were burned red by sun, and the beard I’d finally grown to cover the slack skin of my cheeks hung uneven off my chin. I still have that beard, though there are patches along my jaw that will never grow.
Jenny brought me into the room where Moa and Wilson stood with the stranger I now recognized as my son. I was surprised again by his appearance — his height and thickness and clothes.
“Hey, Pa.”
Next to him stood a man closer to my age. His suit was dark blue, his tie gold. His hair was gray at the sides, but dark on top and greased back from his forehead.
“Mr. Martin.” He lifted an enormous hand in my direction. “Good to meet you.” His voice was like Ed’s, something foreign to it. “My name’s Robert Hill. Gerald’s retained me to help with your situation.”
“We’ll go through it all,” Gerald said.
“I’m staying.” Jenny settled herself into a chair, and no one argued.
Gerald reached for me, and I allowed myself to grip hold of him.
Moa passed me a glass of iced tea, cold and slick in my hand. Wilson and Gerald took the chairs on either side of Jenny, leaving Moa and Robert Hill and me the sofa to share. We squeezed ourselves onto our own cushions. My glass poured its sweat into my hand.
Sips were taken. The house creaked in the walls with the breeze outside.
I wondered again how old my son was — eighteen? Nineteen? His birthday was in March. Maybe March 16? That didn’t sound right. Marie’s birthday was July 16. Mine is September 10. I would turn forty that coming fall. I feel like an old man.