Chapter 9 - Saturday
He was taller than I'd pictured. I don't know why I'd pictured anything — I had one photo of him at seven. But when the rental car stopped in front of the house and he climbed out — tall, dark hair going silver at the temples, dark coat — my first thought was just: taller.
My second thought was that he walked like Walter. The same slight forward lean. The same unhurried step.
Nancy was next to me at the window. "Go," she said. "Don't make him stand on the porch."
I opened the door before he could knock.
We looked at each other. Fifty-four years old, with my mouth and Walter's eyes, a face I had never seen and somehow already knew.
"Ruth," he said.
"Andrew." My voice held. Barely. "Come in. Please."
He stepped inside and looked around the hall — the pictures on the wall, the coat hooks, the worn runner — the way people study a room when they're trying to learn a place fast.
Nancy came out of the kitchen. "I'm Nancy. I made way too much food. It's a nervous thing I do."
Andrew looked at her a moment. Then he smiled — my smile, on his face — and said, "I stress-clean. My wife says the house has never been this spotless as it's been this week."
Nancy laughed. Actually laughed.
The three of us sat at the kitchen table and ate Nancy's too-much food, and Andrew told us about Spokane, and his wife — her name was Karen — and Ava and Claire, and the cross-country team, and how Claire had cried when he told her, and how Ava had gone straight to asking about flight times and the difference in time zones.
"She's practical," he said. "Gets it from Karen."
"How's Karen feeling about all this?" Nancy asked.
"She's the one who told me to keep looking, every time I thought about quitting." He wrapped both hands around his coffee. "She said, 'You'll regret it if you don't.' She was right."
I looked at him across the table. "I want to answer your questions," I said. "Whatever you've got."
He nodded. He'd been building up to something. I could see it.
"My childhood was good," he said. "I want you to know that first. My adoptive parents were good people. I wasn't an unhappy kid."
"I'm glad."
"But there was always a shape missing. Like one piece of the puzzle that should've been in the box and wasn't." He looked at his cup. "I want to know about you. Not just 1969. Who you are. What you care about. What your life's been."
So I told him. Growing up. Meeting Walter. The note that ended it. The years after, the man I married, the life we built, losing him. Nancy and Paul and Janet. The garden, the roses, the cross-country team I ran on in high school — which made him go completely still.
"You ran cross-country," he said.
"Four years."
He looked at Nancy. "She ran cross-country," he said, like he was confirming it to himself.
"She did," Nancy said.
He shook his head slowly. Not disbelief. Something quieter.
"I coach it because I ran it," he said. "I ran it because I was good at it. I was good at it because—" He stopped.
"Because it was in you," I said.
He nodded.
We sat with that a while. Then his phone buzzed on the table. He looked at it and his face changed.
"Unknown number," he said.
"Don't answer it," Nancy and I said at the same time.
He looked up. "Kevin?"
"Probably."
He declined the call and set the phone face-down.
"You told me everything on the phone," he said. "The will, the clause, all of it, what he was going to try."
"Yes."
"So he's too late."
"Yes."
Andrew nodded. He picked his coffee back up.
"Then let him call," he said.
That afternoon the three of us walked out in the garden. Andrew stopped at the roses.
"They come back every year," I told him. "I put them in after my husband died. I didn't think they'd make it through the first winter."
May you like
He looked at them a long moment. "Things do," he said. "Sometimes."
It was a small thing to say. It landed exactly right.
