Buckeye: A Novel
Author: Patrick Ryan
Date: 2025-09-01T14:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Literary; Family Life; General; Historical; 20th Century; World War II
Description: Hailed as “an American epic” (NPR), this captivating story weaves the intimate lives of two midwestern families across generations, from World War II to the late twentieth century. “I love this book with my entire heart.”—Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful One town. Two families. A secret that changes everything. In Bonhomie, Ohio, a stolen moment of passion, sparked in the exuberant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, binds Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, to Margaret Salt, a woman trying to obscure her past. C

By Patrick Ryan

Send Me

The Dream Life of Astronauts

Buckeye

Random House

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Copyright © 2025 by Patrick Ryan

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Hardback ISBN 9780593595039

International edition ISBN 9798217154234

Ebook ISBN 9780593595046

Book Team: Production editor: Ted Allen • Managing editor: Rebecca Berlant • Production manager: Sandra Sjursen • Copy editor: Claire Maby • Proofreaders: Cathy Sangermano, Kathy Jones

Book design by Jessica Shatan Heslin/Studio Shatan, Inc., adapted for ebook

Illustration by NPL—DeA Picture Library/Bridgeman Images

Cover design: Anna Kochman

Cover art: Private Collection Photo © NPL - DeA Picture Library/Bridgeman Images

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Contents

Dedication

Part I

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part II

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Part III

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Acknowledgments

About the Author

_152995942_

To Ann and Karl VanDevender

Part I

Chapter One

Cal Jenkins was born in the spring of 1920 with one leg shorter than the other. Just two inches shorter, but that was enough to make plenty of things difficult. Balancing on a bicycle took twice as long for him to learn as it did for other kids. Track and field was out of the question. So was walking without a pronounced limp or going up and down a set of stairs without securing himself on the railing—until his father, amateur carpenter and junk collector, improved Cal’s condition by carving a new, thicker sole out of tire rubber and nailing it onto his left shoe. At school, boys made fun of the way Cal walked, then made fun of the shoe with the extra-thick sole (someone noticed within an hour of the first day he wore it). But one boy—flush-cheeked and small for his age—pulled Cal aside during morning assembly and told him he was unique in God’s eyes. “I know,” the boy said, “because I am too. I can’t touch my toes, you see. I have unusually tight hamstrings.” He bent over to demonstrate, and his fingertips barely reached his kneecaps. “We’re each meant for a special thing,” the boy said, and when Cal asked what his special thing was, the boy shrugged and said the two of them would have to wait to find out.

What they found out—separately, and years later, after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and threw the country into a panic, after young men stopped waiting for their numbers to be drawn and began to volunteer—was that having one leg two inches shorter than the other was enough to make a person unfit for military service, while having unusually tight hamstrings wasn’t. That boy, Sean Robison, was sent from Ohio to Mississippi for basic training, and was then sent to Tunisia, and from Tunisia to Sicily, and from Sicily to Germany, where he was shot through the neck in the Hürtgen Forest while reloading his rifle and reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Cal remained in his hometown and got a job in a concrete plant. He read comic books and adventure novels into his twenties. He married a local girl named Becky and eventually went to work in her father’s hardware store. Sometimes he wondered if he would ever discover what his “special thing” was—his purpose, he’d decided—especially in the face of a world war that wouldn’t have him. He was so conscious of not being overseas that he found his limp worsening all by itself. He told people about his leg, people who hadn’t asked and didn’t care. Sometimes he even pointed to his shoes, ordered now from a medical supply company in Dayton. “My condition causes hip problems,” he’d say. Which was true, though he had yet to experience any.

Bonhomie had been founded in a northwest pocket of Ohio in 1857 by a small group of merchants and their families, on land transformed by the Last Ice Age, when a glacier nudged its way down from Canada and melted, creating not only Niagara Falls and the Great Lakes, but also a vast swamp across the top of Ohio and Indiana that took thirty years to drain and left behind soil densely ripe for farming. The town was built with local lumber, shale, and limestone, and with granite from North Carolina, marble from Vermont and Colorado, and steel from Pennsylvania—all of it brought in by rail. For a time, the town was a grid of nine streets, four running north–south and five east–west. The population grew from within as much as it could manage, and from without as much as it needed to. It swelled with migrant workers and their families during harvest time—corn and wheat and tomatoes and sugar beets—and shrank again when the workers moved on. Others moved into the area for the jobs created by the factories that sprang up around Hancock County. Immigrants from Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and many other countries were processed through Ellis Island and absorbed by the cities and towns of the east, though some went west—and some of those stopped and settled down in Bonhomie, which seemed as good a place as any. Over time, the original grid became known as downtown, and what wasn’t downtown became known as neighborhoods. Not sections, which would have suggested clear dividing lines and the need for those lines, but general neighborhoods that took shape as people found their people. There were well-to-do neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods, and there were all the neighborhoods in between. There was a neighborhood called Tiller’s Flat, where several Mexican families and nearly all the Black families in town—less than a dozen—lived, many of whom had moved from the South for the industry jobs (and to get away from the South). There was a neighborhood of apartment buildings and bungalows called Chesterton that was made up mostly of migrant families from out west, and a neighborhood situated between the two synagogues that was thought of as mostly Jewish. When people wanted an Irish neighborhood to point to, they could always refer to the block with St. Catherine’s and Good Shepherd School as Vatican City. And scattered throughout these neighborhoods were all the people who didn’t think they belonged to any group, most of them Protestant.

By the time the U.S. got into the Second World War, the population of Bonhomie had topped six thousand. The town had its own police force, fire department, and vocational college. It had two dozen restaurants (if you counted coffee shops and soda fountains), five banks, four dry cleaners, two record stores, and a movie house. Industry thrived in and around town, such as J & J Concrete, Tuck & Sons Aluminum, and the Mid-American Canning Company; and industry died, such as Ingleton’s Fizzy Pops, Dilco’s Feed & Supplements, and the Hancock Bell & Skillet Company. There was a horseshoe-shaped lake with a fetch of a quarter mile just south of town off Route 18. To the north, where the exit ramp off Cooper Road fed onto Highway 23, the neon Tuck & Sons tulip—twenty feet in diameter, pink and flat as a stencil—stood atop a hundred-foot pole, visible for miles. A rusted grain elevator still bearing the checkered Purina logo loomed like a monolith at the east end of Main Street. Passenger and cargo trains came through town day and night, and some of them stopped to deposit or collect people and mail and goods, but most of them bypassed the railyard and the station and town altogether.

Bonhomie wasn’t nearly so small that everyone knew everyone else, but it was small enough that, sooner or later, most everyone felt as if they’d laid eyes on most everyone else. Since the start of the war, fewer and fewer young men were seen on Main Street. Meanwhile, there was no shortage of old-timers—fifty and up—who’d fought in the last big war. One who’d lost an arm and wore his sleeve pinned, another who got around on wooden crutches because one of his legs had been blown off just below the knee. Cal’s own father had been awarded a Purple Heart for taking a bullet through his shoulder while pulling a wounded officer into a foxhole in the Meuse–Argonne—though the medal was not to be seen in his increasingly cluttered house and he didn’t want to talk about his war days.

Cal was astounded by the impact two inches of leg could have on a person. Being deprived of those inches, he’d gained what seemed to be a full and healthy life. But feeling happy about it didn’t seem right—not when a million young men were inducted during the first year America got into World War II, and ten million by early May of 1945. That Tuesday morning, Cal had just opened Hanover Hardware on Sutton Street and was sitting on a stool behind the counter, sorting a box of washers, when a woman walked in and asked if he had a radio.

Her forehead was high and her red hair was done up in Victory Rolls. Her mint-green dress and matching pillbox hat, her white gloves, and her coral lipstick suggested money to Cal. Her eyes latched on to his as she crossed the linoleum floor. He told her yes, the store had a Zenith, but it wasn’t for sale; it was in the office. She asked where the office was. “Basement,” Cal said, nodding toward the stairs just past the end of the counter, and without another word she walked past him—right past the handwritten sign that read Employees Only—and started down the stairs.

“Ma’am?” Cal said. He dropped the washers into the box and followed her.

The basement was used mostly for overstock—though there hadn’t been much to store in the past few years, with production focused on the war effort. Cal caught up with her as she made her way between two tall sets of half-empty shelves. He indicated the area in the corner that the store’s owner, his father-in-law, Roman Hanover, had designated as the office.

Across from the cot where Roman took his naps was a pint-size desk where they did paperwork and where Cal ate his lunch, listened to radio programs, and read adventure novels. He was currently halfway through The Bold Buccaneer. He tugged on the string for the overhead bulb, and in its glow he noticed the deep jade of her eyes and saw how pronounced her cheekbones were, giving her face a V shape over the smooth stem of her neck. She was beautiful, he realized. But she looked agitated, impatient. She motioned toward the radio with one of her gloved hands. “Why isn’t it on?”

He switched on the Zenith, surfed the wheeze and static for whatever she was hoping to hear, and within seconds he found it: Truman, informing the country that Germany had surrendered to the Allied forces. It was the announcement everyone had been anticipating. Hitler had been dead for a week. The Nazis had surrendered the Netherlands to the British five days earlier. Still, the news was breathtaking. Through the hopper window that opened onto the street they heard shouts and whistles. A car horn tap-tap-tapping. Then another, and another.

“Jeez,” Cal said. “Can you imagine what it’s like in Berlin right now? I probably would’ve been there, if it weren’t for…” He wobbled his shoe with the extra-thick sole.

But she was looking at the caramel-colored radio. Her eyes were glistening. “Do you think—” she said, then paused as if unsure of what she wanted to ask him. She took a breath. “Do you think people will start coming home?”

“From Europe? I hope so. But Hirohito’s still giving us a run. They might send those guys over to the Pacific.”

The woman blinked against the sting in her eyes and, as Truman continued talking, looked at this hardware store clerk who, when he’d been sitting behind the counter, had been almost handsome with his gray-blue eyes, his wavy blond hair that looked as if he’d just raked his fingers through it, his narrow jaw, and an early set of lines framing his mouth. Now that she could see all of him, he was still almost handsome but in a different way. He wasn’t very tall, and his stance was off, his hips pitched at an almost uncomfortable-looking angle. His gold-and-black-striped tie was tucked between two buttons halfway down the front of his oxford shirt and looked wrong that way; she wanted to pluck it out. Instead, she took him by his shoulders, pulled him toward her, and kissed him.

Cal would have gasped if his lips weren’t against hers. They kissed until Truman finished speaking. When they stepped back, she turned off the radio. He heard her sniffle, offered her his handkerchief. She touched it to the outside corners of her eyes as she glanced at the cot and pint-size desk, the brown bag with the apple beside it, the library book with the swashbuckling cover. “Does a child live down here?”

“No—” Cal couldn’t account for the alarm in his voice. The awkwardness of their proximity, maybe. Now that the announcement was over, they had no reason to be in the basement. “This is just where we do the invoicing and ordering, and—”

She said, “I’m Margaret, by the way. Salt, like the shaker.”

“Cal Jenkins.”

They shook hands—and smiled at how formal that felt, given what had just happened between them.

“I should go,” Margaret said.

He followed her back upstairs, his shoes clomping unevenly. She told him she’d been walking down the street and had noticed people rushing to their cars, everyone switching on their radios, she could tell something was happening but hadn’t known whom to approach. She thanked him, then ran her eyes over the shelves, the endcap displays. “I’ve lived in this town for almost six years and I’ve never been in here once.”

Cal just nodded, thinking, I would’ve remembered you.

He watched through the front window as she made her way up the sidewalk. Car horns were still sounding off. A boy had climbed onto the mailbox across the street and was making a bullhorn with his hands, broadcasting the surrender. Cal ought to call home, he knew, see if Becky had the radio on. She would want to know, even if she wouldn’t want to talk to him. He dragged the back of his hand across his mouth and spotted a smear of coral lipstick on his thumb, astounded all over again by what had just happened. As long as he remained standing at this window, he told himself, as long as Margaret Salt was still in his sight, he was still the guy who’d had to wipe a beautiful stranger’s coral lipstick off his face.

She turned the corner onto Durbin Street and was gone.

—

Three and a half years earlier, one look at Jenkins, Calvin M. had told the Army doctor all he needed to know. Barefoot, Cal was unable to stand completely straight or even hold his shoulders level. “Try the Citizens Defense Corps,” the doctor said. “I’m sure they can use you.” It was January of 1942, less than a month after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Bonhomie recruitment center was full of symmetrical young men waiting to enlist.

“Would I get a uniform?”

Someone behind Cal snickered.

“An armband, I think,” the doctor said. “Thanks for coming in, son. Get dressed and go on home.” He wrote something on Cal’s card, stamped it, and handed it to the nurse for final processing.

But Cal had gotten the afternoon off from the concrete plant for this, not knowing how long it would take, and he was living in a single room-with-kitchenette in Mrs. Gautier’s creaky Queen Anne on Third Street—not exactly a place where he wanted to sit around and sulk. He steered his chalk-red Nash through the snowy streets to Paulson’s Food Market, instead, and bought groceries with his father’s ration book, then drove them out to the old man.

The acre of land just west of town and the yellow, two-story house that stood on it hardly resembled the place where Cal had grown up. His brother, Robert, had died of influenza when Cal was six; his sister, Grace, of tuberculosis when he was nine. Also that year his mother, Dora, of several ailments but mostly pneumonia. That had left just Cal and his father, and Cal had moved out as soon as he turned eighteen. It was hard to know what shape the house and the old man might have been in if it weren’t for the war—not the current war, the one before it—and all the unrelated death in the family that had come after, and all the drinking that fueled his father’s hardship. There was a willful out-of-reachness to Everett now that seemed to deepen with his pitted cheeks, an appetite for suspicion and a compulsion for stockpiling that became more ravenous with each passing year—all of which made it a good thing the house wasn’t in town. On a regular basis, Everett was seen pedaling his cart through the streets of Bonhomie and stopping to pull items out of dumpsters and trash cans. Now and then, someone hollered at him or complained to the town. More than a few times, a .22 was fired at a passing car from one of his attic windows and a deputy had to be sent out, the old crackpot on Compton Road was at it again.

The trouble was the way his father’s brain worked, Cal thought. The trouble was also all the stuff. Everett had just barely managed to scrape his family’s way through the Depression and couldn’t abide by waste. He kept clothes from decades past—his own and what he found. He kept food he was never going to eat, food that had gone bad. He kept magazines, newspapers, calendars, can labels. Buttons, matchbooks, pencil stubs. The skulls of rabbits and squirrels he’d shot and eaten. Spools of thread and coils of rope and wire. Cast-iron skillets and rejected bells and clappers from the defunct bell factory. He kept every make and manner of kitchen utensil he’d found by rummaging through the town dump or through other people’s garbage cans. He kept envelopes, catalogues, birthday cards sent to strangers. He maintained no liquor cabinet, but stationed (and hidden) around the house were bottles of all kinds of booze he’d bought or found or been given as payment for some odd job. In the backyard were five Model Ts, none of them drivable. They’d become receptacles for empty cans and mason jars, for scrap wood and car parts. One car—rolled off the assembly line the year Cal was born—had been turned into a chicken coop.

The old man was sixty-one, had lived under fourteen presidents (six from Ohio), and, though his vision was teeming with floaters and cataracts, he’d been writing letters to all of them since Woodrow Wilson. He had no interest in barbers, cut his own hair, let his graying beard grow wide and wiry. He was thin; if you were to encounter him naked, you would see his bones poking to get out, not because of any ailment but because food was an afterthought to him now that he lived alone.

He was in the backyard when he heard Cal’s tires roll onto the gravel driveway. He heard the engine shut off and, a few moments later, he heard Cal’s knock on the front door. Then footsteps rounding the side of the house, soft-shattering the thin layer of new snow that had frozen to a crust during the night.

“Pop?”

A cardinal drew a crimson line across the snow. There was Cal: standing between the pint-size Coca-Cola chest and the wardrobe. A sack of groceries under his arm.

“Ears working today, Pop?”

“Fine.” Not fine since Saint-Mihiel, actually, but functional.

“If I didn’t know better,” Cal said, “I’d think you were getting fat. How many layers have you got on?”

Everett, who had on four jackets, two scarves, a mackinaw, and, under it all, a pair of pajamas, was dragging a wheel with a tire sagging around it toward the garage behind the house. In the few days since Cal had last stopped by, his father had somehow managed to raise each of the five Model Ts and remove all twenty of their wheels. The cars sat on jacks and stump cuts. The wheels and their flattened tires lay in a heap beside the garage, except for the one he was dragging through the snow. All of which suggested to Cal that at least his father hadn’t been on a bender. “What are you doing?”

As if tired of having to answer that question (though he hadn’t spoken to anyone since Cal’s last visit), Everett, dragging the tire another few feet, said testily, “Keeping my rubber and metal out of certain clutches.”

There were trails through the snow connecting each of the cars to where the wheels and tires now lay. “What clutches, Pop?”

“Institutional,” Everett said without looking up at him. “Governmental. If you want it typed up, you’ll have to wait till I have time.” He let the tire fall over as he clapped snow off his gloves, powdering it onto his beard.

Cal nodded. “Guess I’ll put these away.”

He carried the groceries up the sagging back steps and into the mudroom, where he’d once sat on a bench to take off his shoes when he got home from school. The bench was buried under newspapers and catalogues now, tools and coats and blankets piled opposite it, so that the path through the mudroom was almost too narrow to walk. Then into the kitchen, where his mother, blond like him and his sister, had once cooked their meals and helped them with their homework and recited the capitals of the forty-eight states by heart. All but one of the chairs were piled with flats and boxes, the table so heaped with junk it was barely discernable as a table. The floor drooped in places and creaked wherever a foot could get to it. The ceiling was a stormfront of water stains. Everett had claimed to be glad when Cal, at the age of eighteen, told him he was moving out. He’d said he was sick and tired of Cal nagging him about the way they lived, about the condition of the house, and his drinking. Nagging, since Cal was eleven. Everett was right on the math; that was the year after Cal’s mother had died, the year everything had somehow gotten worse. Cal couldn’t shake the feeling that, out of the family, he was the last one his father would have wanted to be left with, and here the two of them were.

He stacked the groceries on the only free section of counter he could find, then filled the bag with things he’d brought in weeks past that had gone bad. Collapsed fruit. Rock-hard bread. A soft, slippery onion. He carried the stinking bag through the front door and out to the trunk of his car so his father wouldn’t be able to dig through it after he was gone.

In the yard, Everett unwound the brass wire from the joined handles of the double garage doors and pulled the doors open, making wings in the snow. There wasn’t enough room for twenty tires in there, he deduced, even flat ones; he’d have to pull a few things out, decide what could be sacrificed to thieves, should any come around while he was asleep or away. More than a few things, now that he thought of it, because he also had to make room for the soda chest, all the car parts, the cans, the flashing and lengths of stovepipe. Yes, every bit of metal and rubber visible to the naked eye had to be hidden away.

He was dragging a sideboard out of the garage when Cal reappeared.

“Let me help you.”

His father wagged his bearded head no.

“This wasn’t even ours,” Cal said, touching the wood.

Everett got the sideboard far enough out so the garage doors would clear it, then leaned his elbows on it and peered at Cal. His eyes bloodshot—maybe just with annoyance. “You came to bring me food?”

Cal nodded.

“And now you’ve brought it?”

“Yes.”

Everett shifted his mouth around as if trying to separate a bit of fish from a bone. “I’m busy.”

Cal took in the yard: a disorganized cemetery of crap, all of it covered with snow. From the driver’s seat of one of the Model Ts, a chicken raised its head and cast a sideways eye. “There are a lot of guys signing up at the recruitment center,” he said. “Volunteering. It’s something to see.”

“Mmm.”

“They’re lined up down Union Street.”

Everett tugged on one of the sideboard drawers. He banged it with his fist and tugged again. Empty.

“I wanted you to know—I tried to enlist this afternoon.”

For years, Everett had been bowing to gravity the way old men sometimes do. Now, right before Cal’s eyes, he appeared to straighten, grow taller, till his gray-blue eyes were level with Cal’s. “Why?”

“Why? Because I want to be a part of this thing, that’s why. Fight the Axis. You know what it’s like. You enlisted.”

Everett winced. “Listen to you. ‘Fight the Axis.’ And you didn’t ask me first?”

“I don’t need to ask, Pop. I’m twenty-one. I’ve been registered for three years.”

“Well, it was a waste of time. They didn’t take you, did they? Because of your leg?”

“No.”

Everett’s posture deflated again. He worked open the second drawer of the sideboard, looked in, shoved it closed. “Meanwhile, they’ve bumped the registration age up to sixty-four. They’d probably take me tomorrow, but they turned you down. Isn’t that a kick in the teeth?”

Cal slipped his hands into his pockets. “Anyway, I tried.”

“You shouldn’t have bothered. I keep writing to that son of a bitch in the White House. I keep telling him I see right through him, right through this whole goddamn mess. If we cut off Japan’s oil, I said, Japan’ll come after us. But you know what? He wanted them to come after us, because he couldn’t wait to get us into this thing. He just about puts the whole Navy in one port, and now we’ve got more than two thousand men dead. Some of them didn’t even have time to put their pants on.” Everett leaned sideways and spat. “The day you were born and one of your legs come up short, the doctor said you were healthy except for the deformity and right then I thought, well, that’s it. If we get into another big one, he’ll never be in it.”

Wanting to put space between himself and his father, and the word deformity, Cal said, “All right, Pop, I’ll see you in about a week,” and started toward his car.

“Hey,” Everett called. A moment later: “Goddammit, stop!”

Cal kept walking. How poorly thought-out this entire day had been. When would he learn? When would he stop trying to impress the old crank? He reached the Nash and was opening the driver’s door when something smacked hard against the back of his coat.

A snowball, it turned out. Shaped and hardened by tired, arthritic hands. Everett stood several feet away, huffing from having moved so quickly, his breath crystallizing in front of him. He said, “I’m glad, is what I’m trying to tell you.”

—

The next day, Cal considered growing a beard. He considered moving to a new town where nobody knew him and going by his middle name, Maurice Jenkins, glad to meet you, all for the sake of being able to claim he’d been in the war and had gotten wounded and had been sent back home with a limp. By late morning, he was dollying bags of concrete mix into an enormous, bone-cold shed at work and feeling loathsome for even having such a thought. By late afternoon, all he wanted was to drown his frustrations in a root beer float. He spent the rest of his shift hosing off trucks while he stood in a soup of melted snow and rock paste. Then he clocked out, did a quick washup in one of the utility sinks, and drove through the slush to Fink’s Drugstore.

Before going in, he caught sight of his reflection in the window: the same green-and-black-checkered coat he’d worn in high school, scarf pulled up to his nose, stocking cap. When he pulled the cap off and ruffled his hand through his hair, a cloud of concrete dust rose from his head and drifted down Fordham Street.

There were two people sitting at opposite ends of the long wooden lunch counter and several women in one of the booths, eating sandwiches and drinking sodas. The women wore pastel sweaters with unit patches sewn to the sleeves. One of them had a set of officer’s bars pinned to her collar, a souvenir sent home from her husband or boyfriend, no doubt.

Cal shed his winter gear and piled it onto an empty stool at the counter. He sat down and blew his nose into a napkin. More concrete dust. He asked for a root beer float.

Mary Lisnik, who was nearing fifty and had worked at Fink’s since she was seventeen, raised both eyebrows and, hoping to entice, said, as if surprised, “We’ve got a new dessert item.”

“I don’t think so,” Cal said.

“Give me a chance. It’s made with peanut butter and banana, and it’s called Paratroop Pie.” She motioned with her cigarette toward the grease board behind her, where the name was printed, next to a little drawing of a parachute. “Goes down easy. Get it?”

“Just the float, thanks.”

“God grant,” Mary Lisnik said, pushing the cooler lid open with the heel of her hand.

—

Four seats over, just around the bend in the lunch counter, Becky Hanover sat with an open book and a cup of tea. The book was Murder on the Orient Express. Agatha Christie, Becky knew from a magazine article, had vanished once for ten whole days. It was supposed that she’d been stricken by amnesia and had gone wandering in a fit of confusion. During the time she’d been missing, her friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had given one of her gloves to a spirit medium in an effort to find her. Then, with the help of the spirit medium or not (the article hadn’t said), Christie had been found residing in a hotel several towns away. It was suggested that marriage troubles had prompted her disappearance: she’d simply wanted to be gone for a little while.

Becky had helped solve a mystery once. When she was nine, her friend Norma Shefflin’s father had gone out one evening for cigarettes during a freezing rain and had never returned. Mr. Shefflin became an official missing person, and after the police had looked for him for several days, his wife admitted that the two of them had been quarreling and he’d been angry when he walked out, so maybe he’d just—left. Neighbors went from discussing the mystery of the disappearance to discussing the gall of a man who would cut out on his family. A month later, Becky was in the Shefflin’s yard building a snowman with Norma and a couple of other girls when she heard Mr. Shefflin’s voice in her head, crystal clear.

Tell them I’m not far away.

She stopped rolling her snowboulder. Listened.

Again, Mr. Shefflin’s voice said, Tell them I’m not far away.

“Your dad’s not far away,” she told Norma. In the general commotion that followed—Norma’s confusion, Norma’s mother’s alarm—Becky explained that the missing man had spoken inside her head, twice. Mrs. Shefflin called Becky’s parents, who sounded dismayed and apologized for their daughter’s behavior.

That night, Ida and Roman Hanover sat Becky down at their dining room table and asked her to explain herself. Soon, Ida was looking at the ceiling and Roman was half-squinting at his daughter, as if trying to see behind her face. “That’s it?” he said. “You heard someone speaking who wasn’t there?”

Becky nodded.

“Don’t do that.”

“But what if I hear his voice again?”

“Don’t hear his voice again,” her father said. “No more voices.”

Then spring came, and the nearby Laurie River thawed, and in the stretch that ran alongside the state road a mile outside of town, a man fly-fishing in waders discovered Mr. Shefflin’s car—with Mr. Shefflin in it. Norma stopped being her friend, and the Shefflins moved to Virginia the following year.

But Mr. Shefflin had been right, and so had Becky: he hadn’t been far away. It was frustrating that no one seemed to appreciate that, but it helped explain why, as the years went by, she continued to hear voices in her head—men and women, sometimes children—telling her things she didn’t know. Tournesol, for example. A girl who wasn’t there had whispered C’est un tournesol inside Becky’s ear once while she was drawing a sunflower, and she had to go to the library and look the word up in a French dictionary. After struggling a bit with the spelling, she found it. Tournesol: sunflower.

J’aime tes cheveux. The little girl had said that to her too. I like your hair.

Becky believed the dead lingered mostly because they still had something to say—though a few also showed up to listen. She believed you shivered in this life when someone in the future walked over your grave, and she believed your scalp tingled when a stranger contemplated you. As she sat reading, her scalp began to tingle. She looked up from the book and studied first the man at the end of the counter who had wide, suited shoulders on which his head rested like a sack of potatoes, then the three women sitting in the booth having sandwiches, then the pharmacist in the back who had one pair of glasses on his face and another pair on his bald head, then the woman behind the counter who had a braid sticking out over each ear and was smoking and reading a newspaper, and finally Becky studied the blond young man with his elbow on the bar, his head resting in the well of his hand as he drank from a straw sunk into a tall fluted glass.

She recognized him from school. The cute boy who limped, who didn’t play any sports. They’d never spoken.

She gathered her cup and saucer and book and moved over to the stool next to his.

“Were you just contemplating me?” she asked, startling him.

She wore a black beret and a red cape. Cal said no, but she cleared her throat and told him she was very intuitive.

“They’re bombing Australia,” Mary Lisnik said from behind the counter to no one in particular.

The sack-headed man looked up from his sandwich. “That was last week.”

“This is today’s paper,” Mary Lisnik said, “so I guess they were still bombing it yesterday.”

“I intuited that you were contemplating me,” Becky told Cal. “Which means if you weren’t, you will be soon.”

“Well, I guess I am now,” Cal said.

“This is called Murder on the Orient Express,” she said as if presenting a book report in school. “It’s about a terrible man who does terrible things and then ends up on a train with almost everyone he’s done them to. I won’t spoil it for you by saying more.”

Cal already knew she was Becky Hanover, the compact, pretty, and slightly odd girl who’d been a year behind him in school. He vaguely remembered her reciting “The Raven” at an afternoon assembly. She had a pleasing, round face in the middle of all her curly dark brown hair. He’d seen her sitting alone in the lunchroom, and in the bleachers at an afternoon football game, and he’d thought of approaching her and saying hello but had never worked up his nerve. Hers was the first beret he’d ever seen that wasn’t on someone in a movie.

“I love mysteries. What do you like to read?” she asked.

Scrambling for an answer that wasn’t comic books, which, at that time, still comprised most of his reading, Cal said, “Encyclopedias.”

Becky laughed at that. He asked what was so funny. “There aren’t that many encyclopedias,” she said. She looked at his hair and seemed amused by it too. “You have a cowlick.”

“Every day. My mom gave up trying to flatten it when I was little. She said the cow kept coming back. Not that we had a cow.”

“You’re also a little dirty.”

“Am I?”

“Right here.” Becky lifted her hand and touched a fingertip to the side of his neck.

Cal felt a spark somewhere below his ribs. “That’s from work. Concrete plant.”

“I work at Dixon’s Stationery on Eleventh Street,” she said. “I’m very good at helping people choose which stationery to buy. Have you received some bad news lately?”

Did his 4-F status show on his face? Cal sucked again on the straw.

“Tell the truth,” she said.

He already liked her—she had a soothing, grassy voice, and she held her eyes open in a way that showed her entire irises, which were so dark brown that it was hard to see her pupils. For all her quirkiness, she had a reassuring presence. But he wasn’t going to tell her the truth. He didn’t want to talk about how let down he felt, how frustrated, how inept.

Mary Lisnik scratched the side of her jaw with the hand holding the cigarette and said, “Now they’re rounding up everyone who’s Japanese in California. Even the American ones.”

The sack-headed man balled up his napkin. “If they’re Japanese, they’re not American,” he said. “And they’ve been rounding them up for a while. You sure that’s not last week’s paper, sweet knees?”

When Mary Lisnik looked over the top of the Toledo Blade, pure hatred reigned in her eyes. Then she noticed his empty plate. “How about a slice of Paratroop Pie?”

Becky leaned in closer to Cal. “If it’s bad news, it won’t stay that way forever,” she said.

—

Five weeks and as many dates later, they were standing in line on a snowy sidewalk in front of the Bonhomie Bijou, about to see Valley of the Sun, when she presented him with a small sealed envelope. It contained, she said, a letter to herself she’d written when she was eight years old—a letter in which was a description of a vision she’d had then of her future self. Would Cal promise to keep the letter and present it back to her on her sixtieth birthday?

It was the strangest thing anyone had ever asked him to do. He wasn’t tall but was taller than her by a few inches and had become used to looking slightly down into her dark eyes, had become used to seeing her smile up at him. He’d become used to nearly everything about her, yet she was still capable of surprising him. “Why on your sixtieth?”

“Because by then I’ll have forgotten what I wrote. And I want you to keep it to make sure I don’t peek at it until enough time has passed.”

“But why write it down if you want to forget it?”

“That’s the whole point,” Becky said. “Is the future knowable? Will our older selves be anything like our younger selves thought we would be? We can only find out by writing it down and then putting it out of our minds and letting life take its course. The unraveling of time should be mysterious, don’t you think?”

Cal had never thought about the unraveling of time before. He said, “I guess.”

“So you promise to hold on to the letter for me?”

He nodded, she handed him the envelope, and he slipped it into his coat pocket. Then she asked him if he’d ever written a letter to himself, and he was so worried that the other people in line for the movie would overhear this “future” talk that he kissed her to get her to stop.

This was their first real kiss, and while it was interesting, neither of them really knew how to do it. Their lips fidgeted against one another. Their tongues touched for just an instant, then retreated. Someone behind them in line said, “Let’s keep it moving, folks.”

At the end of the night, sitting in his car in front of her parents’ house on London Hill—which wasn’t really a hill but was one of the more affluent neighborhoods in town—Becky brought up the subject again. “About that letter,” she said. Cal wondered if he’d done something wrong on their date and she was about to ask for it back. But she wanted him to know that if he did ever write his own letter—which she’d deduced he hadn’t—he could give it to her for safekeeping.

It was snowing again. The flakes were fat and stuck like little doilies to the windshield. Cal could think of nothing to say but “Thank you.” She smiled and kissed him. It was a little less clumsy and even more interesting. They kept it moving.

—

They didn’t have a lot of common ground in terms of interests, but as spring gave way to summer, they were savvy enough to realize that their common ground was them. Their desire for each other’s company. Cal’s shifts at the concrete plant started and let out earlier than Becky’s at the stationery store, and he was often waiting for her when she got off work. “I have an idea,” he said one Saturday afternoon that spring, while they were sitting in the backyard of the boarding house, on a bench among the roses. “Why don’t we sneak past Mrs. Gautier and slip into my room? You know, cuddle up.” Cuddle up was the term they used for everything they were doing that didn’t involve taking off their clothes or having actual sex (both virgins, wanting to wait). She gave him a wry smile she was still testing out. Up they went.

“I have an idea,” she said one early summer evening when they were walking the path around Lake Meyer and he was explaining why cops-and-robbers stories weren’t the best fodder for comic books. “Why don’t we stop talking and cuddle up under one of these trees?” He stopped talking, and they cuddled up.

Becky was the first thing he thought about when he opened his eyes in the morning. Seeing her, hearing her grassy voice, kissing her. For Becky’s part, Cal was the sweetest, most considerate young man she’d ever known. (She’d dated several others before him—no one for very long.) When he doted on her, his boyish face became etched with concern that he was doting the right way. At some point that summer, she stopped worrying that he was going to lose interest in her. She started thinking he was someone whose faults she could overlook, when they surfaced. For he was bound to have them; she certainly did. In fact, he already had one she was overlooking: when he ate, sometimes, he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand—or on his shirt sleeve. And she hadn’t said a word about that (yet) because she liked him. She so much more than liked him.

One evening they were sitting across from each other in the Blue Top Diner and she was telling him about a séance she’d recently held with her childhood friend Janice to try to contact the ghost of Joan of Arc, when Cal interrupted to ask what had gotten her interested in séances. She told him about poor, dead Mr. Shefflin whispering inside her head. Cal remembered hearing about the Model A with the dead man in it that had been dragged out of the Laurie River. Then she told him about how the ghost of a Seneca tribeswoman had appeared beside her bed a few years later, when she was twelve. Becky had been sick with the mumps, and the tribeswoman had rubbed some crushed herbs onto her chest, causing her throat to stop hurting. She was gone before Becky could thank her—she evaporated, along with the herbs—so Becky went to the library and began looking up ways the dead communicated with the living.

Somehow the vanishing woman struck Cal as more outlandish than the whispering drowned man. “Well,” he said, salting his hamburger, “you did have a fever.”

“I did. A terrible fever.”

“That’s what it was, don’t you think? Isn’t there usually a scientific explanation for that sort of thing?”

“Does there have to be?”

“Not when you’re a kid, I guess.”

“That,” she said, leaning back in the booth, “coming from the grown man who still reads comic books.”

He hadn’t meant to irk her. Now he thought she was trying to make him feel stupid. “Some are based on novels.”

“Which ones?”

He had to think. “Tarzan.”

“They’re comic books. They’re the funny papers, stapled together.”

“It’s a hobby,” he said. “Like your hobby.”

“You think mine’s on par with reading a picture book about men wearing tights and fighting bad guys?”

“No,” he said. “Forget I said anything.”

“I know what happened to me.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“You don’t sound sure.”

Was this their first fight? Were they fighting? He held up his hands in surrender.

They said little as they finished eating. While he paid the bill, she walked out of the diner. Just to stand on the sidewalk and wait for him, he thought, but as he got his change he began to worry that she wasn’t going to be there when he got outside. That she’d decided he wasn’t worth her time and had walked off. Gone home. Vanished from his life.

It was dusk, late summer. The Blue Top was on Fleming, a wide street that ran between two mostly residential neighborhoods and was lined on either side with lilac trees. People were out with their children, out walking their dogs. Men in uniform, home from basic training, strolled with their arms around their girlfriends, their wives. On a bench, an elderly couple sat, sizing up everyone who walked by. But there was no Becky. Cal felt heat rise into his face. He looked up and down the street, his stomach twisting in panic—then spotted her some twenty feet away, with her back to him. She was looking off into the distance. When he stepped up beside her, she glanced at him, took his hand, and offered him a little smile that conveyed either forgiveness or just the desire to move on. She returned her eyes to the darkening sky over the peaked roof of the Craftsman across the street. “Gibbous moon,” she said.

—

They were married in September of 1942, in the First Episcopal Church. Other than the minister, the organist, the bride and groom, the maid of honor (Becky’s friend Janice), and the best man (Everett, who wore an ill-fitting, oily-looking suit and hummed under his breath like a bee for most of the ceremony), there were less than a dozen people in attendance, including Becky’s parents, Janice’s parents, the principal of the high school they’d both attended, and an elderly woman who lived in a house down the street and went to every wedding and funeral the church had to offer. Becky cried and cried—first through Cal’s vows, then through hers. She cried as they were walking back up the aisle to “Ode to Joy,” and she cried outside the church as rice rained down on them. When Cal, smiling, asked why she was crying so much, she told him it was because she loved him and was just so happy they’d found each other. Cal was happy too.

The fall air was crisp against their faces, cooling the wetness. No one had tied anything to the Nash’s bumper because all the cans had been spoken for, but in exuberant swirls Janice had tempera-painted Hitched! on the back window.

Chapter Two

The town at night, seen from above and from a distance, looked like a swath of sequined cloth laid across a flat trapezoid of land framed by windbreaks. There, just off to the west, a passenger train moved through the darkness, following the southward curve of track that would drag its pinpoint of light past all the pinpoints of light that made up Bonhomie. The Tuck & Sons tulip had gone dark in April of 1942 and would stay that way, the company had announced in a full-page ad in The Hancock Gazette, until the threat of an enemy attack was no longer upon the community. At a town hall meeting for Homefront Safety, the head of the Chamber of Commerce had proposed a search of every home to ensure no one was harboring any persons of German or Japanese descent. That was voted down (since, one of the librarians observed, nearly half the town was of German descent), but the plan for a public smashing of all products made in Japan went forward. There were solemn reminders of the war everywhere—posters imploring all sorts of conservation, posters asking you to buy war bonds and warning you not to sink ships with your loose lips. The list of the local dead was printed weekly in The Gazette, just pages away from the updates on rationing points.

Cal had signed up for the Citizens Defense Corps back when he and Becky were dating, but he’d had to wait three months for a position to open up. When it did, a volunteer had driven him and two old-timers—in a blatting Ford Rheinland—to Lima for training. At the end of it, they’d been asked to swear an oath of allegiance to the U.S. government and been handed certificates of membership signed by Governor Bricker. Cal, who’d hoped to become an air raid warden, was assigned the rank of messenger. His duties would consist of patrolling, observing, and delivering messages to the air raid wardens, if there were any to deliver. Just as the enlistment doctor had predicted, they gave him an armband, one that bore a lightning bolt similar to The Flash’s. Five nights a week, he walked his rounds with a whistle in his pocket, peering up into the night sky, ready to send word if things got dicey.

But nothing got dicey. The war was far away.

—

A honeymoon would have to wait—they couldn’t afford one—but that was okay. He moved with Becky into a furnished one-bedroom apartment above the Winniker Barbershop on Main Street. The communal stairway smelled like Pinaud powder and aftershave, but the rooms were theirs to do in as they wished, and they wished to have sex. Often. Given that they were married now and had waited, they had a lot of catching up to do. She hadn’t really known what to expect but was glad his demeanor in bed mirrored his demeanor upright, was thankful for his patience, his restraint; she found it sexy. He didn’t last long but tried to, and she found that sexy too. They got to know each other from all sides. He found a tiny birthmark she wasn’t even aware of behind one of her knees. She noticed that his pinkies bent backward at the top knuckle.

Marriage, at first, felt like a really long, sex-filled date. Of course, it was much more than that. They had to learn how to cohabitate. They had to learn how to make space for each other in ways that had nothing to do with their bodies. They both worked, so it made sense to Becky—and, almost as quickly, to Cal—that they share the upkeep of the home they were making together.

She didn’t always want him to come along when she dropped by her parents’ house in the evenings, which was fine with him because her father made him nervous. He didn’t want her going with him out to Everett’s because he didn’t want to subject her to the old man and didn’t want her to see the place any closer than from the road. “It was bad when I was growing up, but nothing like it is now,” he said. Becky told him she didn’t scare easily, but she understood.

Her friend Janice came over to their apartment once a week for “girl night,” wherein she and Becky did pretty much the same things they’d done when they were in middle and high school: ate Twinkies, drank Coca-Colas, painted each other’s toenails, and held séances. The crystal ball came out—the one Becky had ordered from the back of Haunted Tales when she was twelve—and while Cal sat in the living room listening to the radio (if he wasn’t out on one of his Citizens Defense patrols), they turned off the kitchen lights, lit candles, and tried to summon Catherine the Great, or Paul Revere, or Rudolph Valentino. Janice had a startling laugh, and a lot struck her as funny during the séances, which made Becky laugh, too, though not as often. Cal was glad they could enjoy themselves with him there but thought it all a little silly as he leaned sideways to better hear Chip Davis, Commando.

Husband and wife, they were the same people as before, but when they had spats now, it felt so grown-up. They were proud of themselves for rising above their hiccups of irritation, especially when they each knew they were in the right. Gestures of kindness felt different too. They went further, meant more, because, technically, they were no longer required; the wooing part was over. She admired a little blue ceramic owl in a gift shop downtown; he bought it for her the next day on his lunch hour and slipped it into the pocket of her robe that evening. On a daytrip into Findlay, she bought him a copy of Daredevil #13, a double issue he’d missed because it had come out the month they got married. She also took him to the library, got him a library card, and showed him a whole section of adventure and crime novels that were geared toward adults but seemed to have been written for someone weaned on comic books.

They weren’t sure if they were doing marriage right, but they were happy to figure it out as they went. All but the sex. That, they had down to a science.

Before long, the science worked.

—

Dear President Roosevelt, Everett typed at home, with two fingers, on the Olivetti he’d found in the Recycle for Victory bin,

As it is now August of 1943 and we are more than a year and a half into our involvement in the carnage of young men dying on land and at sea, I think it is high time to ask if you have noticed that the ones who do the talking in war are never the ones who do the dying? Woodrow Wilson was a talker and also a shitbird. You, sir, can certainly talk a blue streak from your chair. No offense intended regarding the specifics of your health.

If I had neighbors which thankfully I do not and saw them engaged in bloody carnage with people down the road, would I not be a fool to rush out of my house and throw myself into the middle of it without knowing if I could afford to do so? Would I not be both a fool and a coward to send my children in my place?

When your son was on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, your wife went on the radio and told us she understands the sacrifice that war demands. Respectfully, I believe she was thinking wishfully. Like any good mother she just wants her son back.

I accuse you and the organization you currently run of purposefully selling U.S. steel to Japan for years. I accuse you of capitalistic greed and murder. You do not have my vote for a fourth term.

Most sincerely.

Lance Corporal Everett B. Jenkins.

US Army Retired.

The letter—folded into an envelope addressed to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.—was tucked into one of the leg pockets of Everett’s dungarees as he pedaled his tricycle and cart into town. He tipped his straw fedora and waved it in the general direction of Dora and Grace and Robert as he passed the cemetery, then rounded the statue of St. Christopher and turned onto Carson Street, the cart clattering behind him all the while, loudly announcing its condition: empty.

Downtown was, to him, turbulent, almost feverish. He remembered Main Street with wooden sidewalks, gas streetlamps, dirt that was always somehow both dry and muddy. (Pavement didn’t reach Bonhomie until just before the turn of the century.) Now the street was twice as wide as it used to be, and seemed wider still. They’d taken out the median to make room for more cars, and they’d parked cars diagonally all up and down either side of the street, like tugboats trying to nudge the businesses back—to make room for more cars. Even with all that space to move around in, someone honked at him. It was another reason he never wanted to leave the house. People honked and hollered because he was in their way, or because he was digging through the Salvation Army donation box or a garbage can, or just because he was a grown man on a homemade man-size tricycle. He did his best to ignore them all—though sometimes people waved and called out because they had something to give him, and those people he couldn’t ignore. Here was Mrs. Crenshaw, clutching the throat of her pink housecoat, waving to him from her front porch as he turned off Main and onto First Street. She was a little younger than him, around sixty, and a decade ago, out of the blue, she’d asked if he wanted to have sexual relations with her. Her phrasing. Certainly not, he’d said. But he thanked her and then avoided First Street for a year.

Come, her wave said now.

Fair maiden, Everett thought, I have turned the handle of my nickelodeon for the last time.

Not that, the wave said. I have something for your cart.

He stopped.

—

Cal’s Nash was parked in front of the house when Everett got home, the driver’s door standing open. Cal was on the porch, peering into one of the windows.

“Trespassers get shot,” Everett said as he turned the tricycle onto the gravel drive.

“Nice to see you too.” Cal came down the porch steps.

Something was missing from his son, Everett thought. The only thing that brought him around anymore. “Where are the groceries?”

“I don’t have any, I’ve got something to tell you. What’s in the wagon?”

Everett got down and showed him. A pair of snowshoes in need of mending. A box of Zane Grey books with frayed brown covers. A twist of metal flashing and, beside that, a dirty towel. Everett pulled the towel back to reveal a puppy. Light-brown coat speckled white around the legs and muzzle. Bone-thin.

“Somebody threw out their dog?”

“He belonged to Mrs. Crenshaw,” Everett said. “Her bitch had four pups, she found homes for three of them, but this one was the runt nobody wanted. I think he stopped eating.”

“Because he’s dead.”

“He’s not dead.” Everett kicked one of the cart wheels, and the puppy’s eyes opened. Its chest swelled and shrank. “Mrs. Crenshaw couldn’t bring herself to drown him.”

“So you’re going to do it?”

Everett shook his head. “I thought I’d open up some of those cans you keep bringing me, see if he takes an interest. He might get a tooth for something he hasn’t tried yet.”

There was kindness in this, Cal knew, even while it meant his father had brought home yet another discard.

“You said you wanted to tell me something,” Everett said.

“Becky’s pregnant.”

“Little Tramp, by the way.”

“I’m sorry?”

“That’s what Mrs. Crenshaw named him. Little Tramp.”

The end of the puppy’s tail shivered.

“I’m more of a Keaton fan myself,” Everett said.

“I’m trying to tell you something important, Pop, some good news. Becky’s going to have a baby.”

As he sometimes did when speaking to his father, Cal put more volume into his voice than necessary, trying to compensate for the mortar blasts that had taken their toll on Everett’s eardrums, each of which had been ruptured probably a dozen times. But hearing wasn’t presently the issue. Everett just never knew what to do with someone else’s good news. He wanted to get the pup onto the back porch, put some food in front of him. “Good for Becky,” he said, hoping that was enough. Apparently, it wasn’t.

“Pop,” Cal said, “you’re going to be a grandfather!”

“Oh!” Everett said, earnestly trying to mirror his son’s enthusiasm. “Then good for me!”

—

The Hanovers, on the other hand, were elated by the news. Ida and Roman had Becky and Cal over for Sunday dinner at their Dutch Colonial Revival house on London Hill. They raised glasses in the living room, toasted the baby and new beginnings, then Ida put on some Woody Herman and they sat down to vegetables from the Victory Garden and a black market ham. When the meal was finished, Becky said she and Cal would clean up, but Roman said he wanted Cal all to himself. He poured two brandies and handed one to his son-in-law, though he’d never seen him take a drink, then asked him down to the basement. Cal followed.

Except for his medicine ball stomach, Roman was small and compact, like his daughter. He combed what was left of his graying hair into a thin glaze across his forehead, wore his trousers belted high, tucked in his sport shirts on the weekends. He had a dry, clipped laugh that was seldom heard and a way of smiling that had nothing to do with his eyes, which peered out at the world from under the protective eave of his brow. Along with the hardware store in Bonhomie, he owned a lamp store in nearby Fostoria, where he hovered one day a week, and a luncheonette in Tiffin he checked on from time to time. He was a business owner, not a businessman, he liked to say, always happy to make the distinction.

He lit a cigarillo at the bottom of the stairs. Switched on the light and walked over to the train set and miniature village he’d been working on for years. As big as the ping-pong table it sat on, it had little streets and buildings and trees, little people positioned here and there, a papier-mâché mountain rising up in the middle, and tracks laced throughout. “I’ll say it again,” Roman said, glancing at the hot box on his cigarillo, “I’m happy about this baby.”

Cal thanked him.

“Told your father?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll bet he’s beside himself.” Roman had met Everett twice: at Becky and Cal’s wedding, and at a barbeque the Hanovers hosted in their backyard, where Everett had pulled a lawn chair away from everyone and sat with his back to the fence, rolling and smoking cigarettes. Prior to that, Roman had known of him only as the somewhat disheveled-looking vet who rode a tricycle around and dug through garbage. Roman understood the war had done a number on a lot of guys. Thankfully, he wasn’t one of them—the Armistice had been signed twenty-four hours after he’d landed at Saint-Nazaire—but he’d heard plenty of stories and seen plenty of vets on shaky ground, had seen a man drop onto the sidewalk at the backfiring of a car. Digging through trash was a little different, though. In broad daylight.

“He got himself a dog,” Cal said. “I don’t know if he’s up for taking care of it, but he got one.”

“That’s terrific,” Roman said. “How are things at home? You and Becky, I mean. They’re good?” Before Cal could speak, Roman answered for him: “They’re good.”

“Yep.”

“Marriage can be a pickle sometimes, can’t it?”

Cal shrugged. “It can.”

“It’s not always a walk in the park.”

Cal swirled his brandy the way he’d seen Roman do. Then he set it down on the edge of the table. “Not always, I guess.”

Roman eyed Cal’s snifter. “That shouldn’t be there.” He held out his hand.

Cal apologized, handed him the snifter, and Roman added Cal’s brandy to his and set the empty snifter on the cabinet behind him. “I find, in a marriage, it’s the differences that sweeten the mix.”

“Ha ha. We do have our differences.”

“It’s healthy to have them. It strengthens the bond.” Roman picked up the train’s transformer box and turned a switch; something whirred, and the train began to move. “And now you’ve made a baby,” he said, his eyes following the train. “What could be better than that? There’s just one thing that concerns me.”

Cal waited. The train threaded through the middle of the village, disappeared into the mountain, came out the other side. Two full rotations on the figure-eight track before he finally gave in and asked Roman what his concern was.

“You seem content to be a bum.”

Cal forced a chuckle. “Thanks.”

“I’m talking about your finances. By which I also mean my daughter and grandchild’s future.”

As if Cal wasn’t already crunching numbers in his head: his salary at the concrete plant against their rent and other monthly bills; their savings (just over two hundred dollars) against all the things they were soon going to need—baby clothes, a crib, a playpen, a stroller. Cal wanted to sit down on one of the chairs tucked under the table, but Roman was standing, so he stood. “We’re doing okay,” he said. And then, his cheeks flushing a bit, “I’m not a bum, Roman.”

“You’re living in a tiny apartment with your pregnant wife. Over a barbershop,” he added, as if that made it even worse.

My recently pregnant wife, Cal thought. Were they supposed to have moved already? “We’re going to start looking for a bigger place.”

“She shouldn’t have to work.”

“Becky likes working. It’s just a few days a week, and she can stop whenever she wants. We’re getting by fine.”

“You’re twenty-three years old. You have a family now. How long do you think ‘getting by’ is going to pass muster?” Roman picked up a mailman and moved him from one side of the street to the other. He tapped the cigarillo against an ashtray in the middle of the baseball diamond and arrived at his point: he and Ida were going to buy them a house. They would make the down payment, put the deed in Roman’s name, and pay the mortgage for the first year, at the end of which time—Cal being on more solid financial ground—the deed and the mortgage would become the Jenkinses’. “Do you care about concrete?” Roman asked.

Cal blinked. Was it a trick question? “No.”

“Quit your job and come work for me. The last two guys I hired, one got called up, one enlisted. It’ll get you out of the plant and be more money. Plus, it’ll be like a family business. I mean, it’s mine, but you’d be part of it.”

So there it was, on the table: a house and a job—so long as Cal planned on being a good husband, a good father, and not a bum. It was a blueprint, Cal realized, and if it had been presented to him in a different way, he would have felt nothing but grateful. As it was, he felt grateful and insulted. He shifted his weight from his low heel to his high one and said, “I don’t know how to thank you.”

Roman’s eyes and lips glistened with Hennessy. He nudged a switch on the transformer box and the train picked up speed. “Thank Ida for not having a boy,” he said. “I love my daughter, but I always wanted a son.” He grinned. “Seems I got you instead.”

—

They knew if they didn’t squeeze in some kind of honeymoon before the baby came, it might be years before they got around to it. So that fall they picked a weekend, saved up gas, and drove an hour and a half east to Seneca Caverns, where they descended a hundred feet into the Earth and dragged their hands across cool limestone and dolomite. Then another hour north to Cedar Point, an amusement park built right on Lake Erie, where they rode the Cyclone roller coaster and the double Ferris wheel; then to Huron, where they stayed two nights in a hotel near the lighthouse. The combination of being in a hotel room together and looking out the picture window at that vast body of turquoise water made them feel as if they’d traveled to a whole different country. They nearly had—Canada was just across the way. They’d glimpsed its shoreline from the top of the Ferris wheel, and it had impressed them almost as much as the stalactites.

—

The house on Taft Street had been purchased from a Sears catalogue in 1916 and delivered to its previous owner in pieces, but you wouldn’t know that from looking at it. It was a solid two-story house, plum-colored, with a gabled roof, white gingerbread trim, and wagon-wheel brackets framing the entryway. The backyard was fenced in and had a sycamore and a pair of white birches; the front was planted with hostas and had a young buckeye tree growing in the middle of the yard, just ten feet tall, its autumn leaves bright pumpkin-orange. The biggest bedroom was at the front of the house, at the top of the stairs. The room closest to that would be the baby’s room, they decided. The room at the end of the hall would become the first baby’s room when the second baby was born (for the plan had always been two). When the Jenkinses stood in the parlor for the first time, in November of 1943, Becky, then just starting to show, pushed up onto her toes and kissed Cal’s cheek, as if he were the one responsible for having brought this marvelous thing into their lives, when she knew full well it had been her parents’ doing.

Taft Street was in a neighborhood called Brookdale, which boasted of no particular architectural style; prefabs stood alongside Craftsmans, Tudors, front-gabled cottages, and ranchers. Roman’s only lament, he said—because he’d gotten a very good deal—was that Brookdale was dead center between Camden (poor people, Europeans) and Tiller’s Flat (Blacks, Mexicans). “You’re kind of in the crosshairs here,” he told his daughter and son-in-law. “Crosshairs of what?” Becky asked, knowing what he meant and not wanting him to get away with his outlandish remarks, but Roman either wouldn’t say or didn’t feel like he should have to explain. Ida shook her head at him.

The residents of Brookdale, the Jenkinses learned as they settled into the neighborhood, were a broad mix of Bonhomienians. There were families with husbands who worked at the railyard. Families with husbands who were off in Europe and the Pacific. Young, childless wives who went off to work five days a week at the refitted canning factory or the refitted textile plant or the packing house a half mile away. Company buses came and got them. Between their neighborhood and the ones on either side that Roman was wary of, there was—nothing. No demarcations, no real sense of boundaries, just the streets that officially ended one and started another. The children—regardless of their color, Becky noticed—spilled over in both directions. The adults did not. She turned up her social dial when she and Cal took walks through Brookdale in the evenings. She not only said hello to people but remarked on the weather, or complimented someone’s coat, or their child, or their dog. She laid a hand across her stomach as she spoke, so that everyone asked when she was due, which led to introductions and handshakes. Cal followed her lead, and took the opportunity to plug the hardware store, but he couldn’t help feeling self-conscious about his very presence, in the absence of so many husbands.

At the store, he wasn’t self-conscious at all. He was so happy to be out of J & J Concrete that he arrived at work each morning with a smile on his face. He couldn’t imagine, now, why he’d stayed at the concrete plant for as long as he had—two and a half years—and why he’d spent a year at the box factory before that. Crap work that had him hauling things around, wearing his back out every day, making his leg and hip ache. Was it just that he hadn’t been able to conceive of anything better for himself all that time? Now he worked on salary and commission. He had a trade; he sold hardware. Even with Roman hovering, Cal felt as if he’d stepped up to a new level of adulthood he hadn’t known before. When you worked in a hardware store, people assumed you were smart. They came to you with questions, wanted advice, and no one seemed to notice when you weren’t quite sure of what you were saying. Cal was good at faking it. Also, selling hardware didn’t seem that tasking. He didn’t share these observations with Roman, who wasn’t big on praise and sometimes talked to Cal as if he thought Cal were slow.

Becky, meanwhile, kept her job at Dixon’s Stationery till the end of her sixth month. Her parents were relieved when she stopped but dismayed when, almost immediately, she began to volunteer at the recycling center two days a week. There, she saw how the war brought out every type of person in town: young, old, men and women, deacons from the Baptist church, rabbis from both synagogues, even Mr. Deng, who’d been working at Shipp’s Candy Store for as long as Becky could remember and now was shouted at on the street by people who thought he was Japanese—yet here he came with a box of flattened cans and scraps of foil. The war seemed to pluck at a filament that ran through everyone, a vibration she could feel throughout the day.

At home, she set up a card table and two folding chairs in the extra bedroom at the end of the hall. She put out a votive and burned some sage.

Cal’s voice came down the hall: “What’s that smell?”

“Sage. Need a break?”

They’d been doing so much settling-in work together, one activity feeding into the next. They’d hung curtains and blinds. Scrubbed down all the baseboards, painted the kitchen, wallpapered the nursery. Cal was walking around the second floor with a putty knife and a hammer, unsealing windows he’d accidentally painted shut. A break sounded good.

“Would you be willing to sit with me?” Becky asked. “It’s no fun if it’s only one person.”

A first. In the past, she’d always done her “sessions,” as she called her séances, with Janice. But Janice hadn’t been coming around as often lately—either because of her job at Ohio Bell or because she was giving them time to settle into the house, or both.

As Cal sat down, he asked where the crystal ball was. Becky pointed to the ceiling, meaning the attic—that raw, gabled space that was buttressed with cobwebs, where Cal had just yesterday hauled up several grocery bags of old comic books. She pulled the shade, lit the votive, and sat down across from him. “I know this isn’t your cup of tea,” she said, and he said, “Stop,” and, “Just tell me what to do.” She smiled, asked him to close his eyes. He did. She told him to breathe deeply and evenly, and he breathed deeply, evenly. He asked if they could hold hands, but she said that would be distracting.

She wanted to try to contact Nikola Tesla, asked if Cal had heard of him, told him Tesla was an inventor who’d recently died. He’d experimented with electricity, she said, and she wanted to ask him about a machine he’d been working on to end war. A machine to—? End war, Cal had heard her correctly. All he had to do, she said, was sit there and focus with her as she made an attempt to communicate with Tesla’s spirit.

Cal soon discovered that focusing on something that wasn’t there—with your eyes closed, no less—was like waiting for paint to dry that you couldn’t see. His thoughts turned to chores, errands. After a couple of minutes, he opened his eyes to see if the séance was still underway.

“Eyes,” Becky said. She was peeking at him, he guessed, through her lashes.

“I don’t understand what’s supposed to be happening.”

“Maybe because you’re not concentrating.”

“I am. I swear. I just—is he going to rap on the table? Is that what we’re waiting for?”

“No.”

“Is he going to speak? Does he speak English?”

She didn’t answer that.

“Okay, okay.” He closed his eyes again.

As it turned out, Nikola Tesla had better things to do in the afterlife that afternoon than pop up on Taft Street and say hello. That didn’t surprise Cal. What surprised him was Becky’s face when she told him it hadn’t worked. She looked disappointed. Not overly so, but he could see the letdown in her eyes and hear it in the brush of her voice.

“So it works sometimes?” he asked, a little wary of the answer.

She blew out the candle and raised the shade. The room filled with gray, midwinter light. “I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work at least sometimes,” she said.

How to respond? He was already nodding a little, so he went with that—makes sense—then kissed her on the cheek and collected his hammer and putty knife.

—

For Christmas that year, the Hanovers gave the Jenkinses a grandfather clock. It’d been made by a company in Cleveland back before the start of the war and had been sitting in a warehouse for two years. The moon dial had a schooner, and the pendulum bob was stamped with a starburst. Cal and Becky placed it in the parlor and closed the pocket doors against it at night while they were getting used to its chimes.

The Hanovers came over to see the clock (having only seen it before in a catalogue). Roman found a flaw in the lower glass door and said he was writing to the company. Ida, taller than any of them, admired the finials and fretwork at the top. They stayed for dinner. Becky served a casserole she’d learned how to extend with rationing guidelines and they discussed baby names while they ate—until Roman changed the subject to ask them how things were working out with the neighbors.

Becky pretended not to understand. Did he mean the Hautons, to the left? The Neels, to the right?

He meant, he said, the surrounding neighborhoods. When Becky answered in a level voice that things were “working out” just fine, Roman looked a little disappointed, switched tracks. He asked if any of them had noticed the recent influx of refugees in town from Central Europe. Trickling in, he added.

Ida said it was just like when the town had been infiltrated by German spies last year—remember that? How Roman had spotted one every time he left the house?

That was reasonable suspicion in the service of caution, Roman said. This was something that was actually happening right under their noses. “Call me a bigot,” he said. It was almost a request. They wouldn’t, so he looked at Cal and said, “Do you think I’m a bigot?”

“I guess it would depend on how you defined the term,” Cal said. The man was not only his wife’s father but his boss, after all, and he’d secured them a house.

Roman said his point was that if he kicked the bucket tomorrow and they were up to their necks in refugees a year from now, he wanted them all to remember he’d told them so.

“If you kick the bucket tomorrow,” Ida said, “I’m going to New York to become a lounge singer.” She slid her plate toward Becky for another spoonful of casserole. “What makes you think they’d want to come to Bonhomie, anyway?” she asked her husband. “The stunning beauty of this place—or the splendor of your company?”

“They don’t contribute anything,” Roman said.

“Dad, please!” Becky said.

Ida burst into song: “ ‘It seeeeems…to me I’ve heard that song before…it’s from an old fa-miliar score…’ ” She had a lovely singing voice, it was like throwing a blanket over a bird cage: they fell quiet for a moment. Then they got back to baby names and made no real progress, which was okay with Cal and Becky, since they’d never asked for her parents’ input.

Becky eased the front door closed as the Hanovers’ Cadillac pulled away, then turned and laid her head against Cal’s chest. “That won’t be us,” she said. “I promise.”

A few days later, she got tired and stayed that way. More tired than she’d ever been in her life. Two weeks of exhaustion she tried to ignore, until Cal insisted they go see Dr. Clements. Dr. Clements checked her over, asked her some questions, drew some blood. When he called the house later, Becky, on edge, asked him to please just tell her flat out if there was any reason to worry.

Not about the baby, he said.

—

Part of it was just the physicality of things. The baby was looking to be on the big side, which was good: big meant healthy. But it also meant there was more to carry around—and more in there to feed, Dr. Clements said, his ear in the vicinity of her stomach. He was monitoring her blood pressure and glucose levels, which had been high since her second month and were currently higher than ever. He was concerned about the toll the pregnancy was taking on her body. Nothing to do but rest and keep an eye on it, he said. Eat fruit. Becky dragged herself out of bed in the mornings, ate a banana while she saw Cal off to work, then either went back to bed, wandered around the house pretending to clean, or just collapsed on the couch and had mean thoughts. I hate my body. I hate Cal. I’d rather be anywhere than on this scratchy orange couch. How was it possible that for every single person who’d ever walked the planet, there was a woman who’d gone through this?

She could panic during those long stretches of the day, while Cal was at the hardware store. She could become hot and short of breath—two things that only underscored her fatigue. She’d read that breathing into a paper sack helped calm you down, so she did that, and it worked. She filled the bathtub with cool water, sank up to the tops of her ears, and imagined that she, too, was a baby in a womb, with a baby inside it, like the Russian dolls her mother collected. One bright afternoon, almost nine months along, she walked out into the front yard and lay down on her back in four inches of fresh snow. The older woman who lived across the street saw her and came rushing out to ask if she was okay. Becky said yes and allowed the woman to help her up. “I was just cooling off,” Becky said. “It’s refreshing.”

That woman—Mrs. Dodson—had a face with no fight left in it. Her dark hair was pulled into a top knot, and her eyes were raccooned. She wore a green woolen coat that all but swallowed her body. She walked Becky up the porch steps. At the front door she put one hand on Becky’s shoulder and the other on her stomach and said, “I know it’s a great burden, but it’ll be worth it, I promise.”

Becky invited her in.

They had coffee and carrot cake at the kitchen table, and Mrs. Dodson told her that when she herself had been past her due date, it was coffee that had done the trick. She normally never had more than a cup, but one morning she had three, and presto: baby.

Becky liked this woman very much. She told her she had a calming presence but very sad eyes. When Mrs. Dodson gave a little shrug as if to say she couldn’t help either of those things, Becky complimented her locket.

The locket had belonged to her mother, Mrs. Dodson said. It still had pictures of her parents in it, but they were hidden now underneath pictures of her husband and her son.

She opened the locket, and Becky leaned in to look at the faces. She could see the resemblance in the son, she said. They were both handsome.

They were both dead, Mrs. Dodson said. Henry, Jr., had been killed on a beach in Algiers. Henry, Sr., had lasted another six months. He’d died asleep in bed next to her, without so much as a groan.

“I’m so sorry,” Becky said.

“Oh,” Mrs. Dodson said. For a while she just looked at the tabletop. Eventually she closed the locket and finished her coffee and cake.

As they were walking to the front door, Becky, curious, chanced a question: did Mrs. Dodson still feel the presence of her son and her husband?

She braced for any reaction, fully prepared for Mrs. Dodson to tell her it was none of her business, but Mrs. Dodson said, “Yes, of course.”

Becky didn’t know if it was possible, didn’t know if it would do any good, but she wanted to help Mrs. Dodson in some way. “This might sound strange, but I dabble in what I call spiriting. We could try to contact them—if you wanted to, that is. If you don’t, please forgive that I asked.”

“I already know this about you,” Mrs. Dodson said. “From ages ago. You’re the girl who found Mr. Shefflin.”

Becky led her upstairs to the spiriting room. They sat down across from each other, and when Becky asked if she would close her eyes, Mrs. Dodson did. Then Becky took a deep breath and began to summon in her mind the husband and son her neighbor had lost.

“Have you started?” Mrs. Dodson asked.

“Yes.”

“Not both Henrys,” Mrs. Dodson said. “Just Henry, Jr.”

Becky nodded again. She re-focused her thoughts.

“Make sure you get the right Henry,” Mrs. Dodson said.

—

Perhaps the strangest thing of all, during Becky’s pregnancy, was the sensation that her joints were loosening. Her bones could seem to be dangling from one another in a way that made her unsteady on her feet (unless that was from all the coffee she was drinking). Just when she felt she might go crazy wanting not to be pregnant anymore, she lost hold of the lid to a soup pot and it clattered to the floor.

The baby, cozied up against her bladder, kicked.

She picked up the lid and dropped it again.

The baby kicked again. Over and over: she dropped the lid, and the baby kicked. She banged the lid against the pot right in front of her stomach, and the baby kicked. It’s listening, she thought. It’s restless. She banged and banged, again and again, thinking, Come out, baby! Come out!

That evening, she went into labor. It lasted for eleven hours, and the birth hurt more than anything she could have imagined. The delivery doctor held the newborn upside-down by its feet, smacked its bottom, and it wailed. He wailed. A boy. Nine-and-a-half pounds and twenty-three inches long. “Looks like a keeper,” the delivery doctor said, as he’d said about every baby he’d delivered in Bonhomie for the past two decades. Becky felt as if she couldn’t move after all the pushing, the huffing and puffing, but when she heard that wail, she found the strength and held out her arms. Cal, when they brought him into her room afterward, was the one who looked exhausted.

She was sore from top to bottom, and she wouldn’t have minded being left alone for a little while, just her and the baby. But here came the nurses. Here came Reverend Toomey, the Episcopal minister who’d married her and Cal, and after him a Lutheran minister she didn’t know, and a priest. (Did these people do nothing but scurry through the halls of the hospital all day?) Here came her parents, her mother teary-eyed, her father’s deep voice cooing and ca-ca-ca-ing—she’d never heard such sounds out of him. When Janice arrived at the hospital at ten in the morning, she was dolled up as if ready for a night on the town, and Becky couldn’t help but wonder if that was maybe because she was hoping to land a doctor. She brought Becky the new Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library, and left a lipstick print on the baby’s forehead.

The only unfortunate news to be had—and it was big—was that both the delivery doctor and Dr. Clements agreed this should be her first and last baby. Her first, and her last. The high glucose levels and high blood pressure she’d endured for seven of her nine months, plus the large amount of blood she’d lost during the delivery, were clear indicators that another pregnancy, no matter how far down the line, would be too risky. So two babies was one too many to wish for. Becky was deeply sad about that, but her sadness didn’t stand a chance against what she held in her arms.

—

The baby’s hair soon turned blond, like Cal’s, but curly, like Becky’s, and his eyes turned dark brown, like hers. He was officially a “Jr.” on his birth certificate, and they’d planned on calling him by his middle name, Maurice. But he didn’t seem like a Maurice to them, or a Maurie. On a whim, Cal started calling him Skipper, and before long, Skip. That felt right. Ten fingers, ten toes, normal legs. Ida pointed that out, the legs, and Becky nodded. Cal realized they’d both been worried—as he had—that his shortened leg might be passed on to the child. But Skip was symmetrical. He also had a strong grip and a pair of lungs that could rattle the windows.

Becky, who’d come out of the delivery with burst blood vessels speckling her face, was still tired, but she took to mothering like an old pro. She nursed and bathed and diapered with ease, and she could stop the baby from crying sometimes just by talking to him, could elicit a smile from his bubbling mouth just by tapping a finger against his chin. Meanwhile, the baby terrified Cal. Skip wouldn’t let them sleep for more than two hours at a time, and Cal didn’t want to make a sound when he finally went down. If he stayed down, Cal couldn’t stop worrying that it was because he’d stopped breathing. But that first week passed, and then another, and Cal began to get used to it. When he wasn’t at work, he helped out as much as he could. He rocked. He burped. He’d never changed a diaper before but tried—why not?—and managed never to stick Skip with safety pins, only himself. Then one day he was giving the baby raspberries on his belly when Skip, who had a remarkable ability to stare into the middle distance, looked at Cal in a single-brow-lifting, James Cagney kind of way. It broke Cal up, and suddenly the whole baby thing seemed manageable. He began to anticipate the Cagney look, began to elicit it, and laughed every time.

As they had with their marriage, they figured out how to care for a baby by doing it (and by asking a lot of questions of Ida, who was giddy about being a grandmother and more than happy to advise). They disappeared into the task, shoveled themselves night and day into the furnace of their intention to keep Skip safe and healthy. Cal staggered back to work a week later, but Becky decided not to return to the recycling center or do much of anything besides be a mother until Skip was at least three months old. She stayed with him twenty-four seven, fed him and bathed him and talked to him and listened to him, had lunch with him every day at the kitchen table and took a nap curled around him on the couch. On the map of her life, there were already plenty of pins where she’d been happy, and over time there would be plenty more, but none would mean as much to her as those first three months with Skip, when there hardly seemed to be a world out there beyond the two of them and Cal.

One cold, clear Saturday afternoon in April, when Skip was almost a month old, it occurred to Becky that Everett had never laid eyes on him. She asked Cal if that was going to change—if, now that there was a grandchild to visit, Everett might start coming around. Cal shrugged and said his father was the kind of person who liked to be alone.

“You see him,” Becky said. “You bring him groceries. He’s not that alone.”

Cal clarified: his father wasn’t the kind of person who came around.

But Becky didn’t want to leave it at that, she wanted Skip to know both his grandfathers. She told Cal that if Everett wouldn’t come to the baby, they would take the baby to Everett.

Cal thought of the many times he’d found his father too drunk to hold a conversation. He thought of the times he’d found his father too drunk to get up off the couch, or the floor. He pictured a baby in that house. “I’ll go get him.”

Everett’s place was a ten-minute drive away. While Becky waited, she changed Skip’s diaper on the dining table. She put him on a blanket on the living room floor and gathered up the newspapers and comic books that lay scattered about. She fluffed the couch pillows. Found some big band music on the radio.

It was over an hour before the Nash pulled into the driveway.

There looked to be a small hairy person sitting in the cab between her husband and her father-in-law, and when the doors opened she saw it was a spaniel of some kind. It cleared Everett’s lap and ran across the grass to lift a speckled leg over the bluebeard shrub. Then it came bounding up the steps after Cal and his father.

Everett had on a drooping straw fedora, a once-white button-down shirt, frayed overalls, and a bolo tie. His steps were short and his hands shook. As the dog scraped around the hardwood floor, Becky invited her father-in-law to sit down and have some iced tea. Everett declined the tea but sat, then said, “Buster! Mind yourself!” To Cal’s amazement, the dog dropped to the floor and looked up at Everett with rueful eyes.

Becky asked him if he was ready to meet Skip.

“Isn’t that why I’m here?” Everett replied.

She sent Cal into the kitchen for the baby and showed Everett how to hold his arms like a bassinette in his lap, told him how important it was to support the baby’s head. Everett looked overwhelmed at these instructions but nodded several times. When Cal came back in carrying Skip, he said, “He’s sound asleep.”

“That’s okay,” Everett said. “I don’t have to.”

“Nonsense.” Becky took Skip from Cal and laid him carefully inside the well of Everett’s arms. Cal got down on one knee and hovered nearby in case the old man flinched.

But Everett seemed frozen. It had been so long since he’d held a baby that it was as if the world had stopped making them ages ago. Tears disappeared into his beard. When he was finally able to speak, he said, “Look what you did.”

Chapter Three

They’d worried—privately, individually—that the grind of those early days of parenting might have wiped clean the dynamic they’d forged, but it hadn’t. The only part they had a challenge resuming was their sex life. They’d both assumed they would get back to it after the dust settled, but did the dust ever settle? When they had sex now, it felt like a post-baby victory lap they lacked sufficient energy and enthusiasm for. Neither of them could have said what the issue was, exactly. Cal wondered if the fact that they couldn’t have another child was somehow getting in the way of Becky’s enjoying sex. Becky wondered if Cal had gotten too used to the idea of her being “on hiatus” (as she’d called it) for such a long time. They both wondered if the other felt less desire than before. All of that was true, but only to an extent. They still wanted each other, on occasion, but like groggy, thinned-out bears emerging from hibernation only long enough to put something in their bellies before going back to sleep. Usually, when one of them wanted to, the other one didn’t, and the risk of that awkwardness took the fun out of the ask. Weeks went in between. They didn’t talk about it. Neither of them wanted the other to feel bad. Neither of them wanted to be the one with a problem—if, indeed, there was a problem, which there might not be, because neither of them knew how this was supposed to go and who had time to stop and assess? Problems, in this way, win out. Problems conquer the world.

—

Mrs. Dodson came over to check on Becky and Skip a couple of times a week. She crossed Taft Street with sandwiches, plates of ginger snaps. Becky was always glad to see her. Mrs. Dodson had had more than one child, it turned out; along with Henry, Jr., there’d been a daughter who’d died of enteritis before she’d reached the age of three. Becky brought her hand to her mouth when Mrs. Dodson told her. She couldn’t imagine getting through something like that as a parent and said as much, but Mrs. Dodson said time helped. Time was like a rock bed with a lot of layers, she said, then took a moment to find the word she wanted: strata. Even the most unbearable things became fossils, after a while.

They’d located Henry, Jr., back before Skip was born. Or, Becky had located him while Mrs. Dodson sat quietly with her. Henry, Jr., hadn’t taken any sort of shape and had sounded faint but peaceful. Becky hadn’t been able to glean much from him beyond an absence of distress, which she reported to her neighbor. “Well,” Mrs. Dodson said, “I should hope so. Is he warm enough?”

Midsummer, they were sitting across from each other in Becky’s living room, Mrs. Dodson holding Skip on her lap, when Becky said she was getting restless and wanted to do something again. Skip was almost four months old. It didn’t seem unreasonable that she could resume putting in at least a couple days a week at the recycling center; the war was still pounding its drum, after all. As Becky said this, she wondered if Mrs. Dodson would discourage her, maybe even tell her it was her duty to stay at home with Skip.

“I’ll babysit,” Mrs. Dodson said. Something in Becky’s face prompted her to add, “I’m not that old.” She’d been running her hands through Skip’s blond hair but slid them down over his ears now and whispered across the top of his head, “I’m sixty-two.”

“That’s very nice of you,” Becky said. “We’d pay you, of course.”

Mrs. Dodson said no, she didn’t want to be paid. Not that one had anything to do with the other, but what she wanted was another session—to see if Becky might be able to reach her daughter. “Just to see if she’s there. I don’t know why she would be, after all this time, but if she is, it would be nice to say hi. I wanted to ask you weeks ago, but I was waiting for you to reemerge.”

There were others waiting too, Mrs. Dodson said. Just a few. A friend of hers who lived on the next block. And someone from Camden who’d met Becky and Cal one evening when they were out walking. Also, Mr. Timmons, who owned the ceramic store on Fourth Street, had expressed an interest; his son had been killed on Guadalcanal. Mrs. Dodson got around more than Becky had imagined. “Only if you’re interested, that is. If you’re not, I won’t breathe another word about it.”

“What did you tell them I could do?”

“I didn’t tell them you could do anything. I told them what you did. And I didn’t fan it up, either. I said I walked out of that room feeling like I’d been breathing the same air as my son. Which is the truth,” Mrs. Dodson said, bouncing all fifteen pounds of Skip on the knee of her sundress.

—

Walking was still okay, but standing for any length of time became uncomfortable for Cal, even with a corrective shoe. Barefoot, he was more unstable than ever—and uncomfortable even when he stood still. He picked through the wood scraps in Everett’s yard and cut and glued pieces together to make two-inch blocks a little longer and wider than his foot. He kept one of these blocks in the bathroom to stand on while he shaved and brushed his teeth, one at the foot of the bed to stand on while he dressed, and one in the kitchen, in case he was barefoot or in socks when he helped Becky clean up after dinner. He brought a stool to work and kept it behind the counter to sit on during the slow times.

Roman was leaving him alone at work now. Roman had the lamp store in Fostoria and the luncheonette in Tiffin to keep an eye on, and there were whole days when he didn’t step foot in Hanover Hardware. Cal was fine with that. He enjoyed the job even more without his father-in-law hovering over him, felt more at ease with the people who came in. Without trying to—without even meaning to—he sold a toaster oven to someone looking for a pack of Phillips-head screws. It was the last toaster oven the store would see until after the war.

—

Mrs. Dodson’s friend—the one who lived on the next block—was curious about a long-dead cousin. The person from Camden wanted a few words with the mother she’d buried last fall. And Mr. Timmons from the ceramic shop was so bereft over his son that it was hard for him to articulate, at first. Three strangers Becky invited into her home, on three separate occasions, to sit with her in the little room upstairs. They each had questions, and she had to wonder if they were frustrated by the time they left, because the answers she was able to provide were often spotty. Still, each of those people wanted to come back again, and did. And each of them knew someone else who might be interested in sitting with her. “Just ask them to call first,” Becky said. “I’m in the phone book.” But some people were too timid to call—like Mr. Timmons, who preferred to linger on the sidewalk and look up at the house until Becky went out to see what he wanted.

One evening, Cal went out to greet a pair of middle-aged women—sisters, it turned out—who were hovering around the mailbox. When he asked if he could help them, one of them asked if Mrs. Jenkins was at home and the other one said they were hoping she could locate their grandfather. Cal felt the skin go taut across his forehead. He asked them to wait on the porch and went to find Becky, who was toweling Skip off after a bath. Cal told her who was outside, and what they wanted.

Becky groaned. “I wish they would call first.”

“Why would they call? They don’t know us.”

She handed Skip to him and went down. A few minutes later, all three of them came up the stairs.

“So,” Cal said after the sisters were gone, “they just happened to know you did that?”

“They’re friends of friends of Mrs. Dodson’s,” Becky said.

A week later, when he was home from work and pulling into the driveway, Cal saw a woman who wasn’t one of the sisters coming out of the house. Her eyes looked swollen, and she brought a tissue to her nose as she walked past the Nash without seeming to notice him.

“That was Miss Valenz. We met her one night,” Becky said. “She has that little Scottie dog—remember? Her fiancé died on Attu.”

Cal remembered her and said he was sorry to hear about her fiancé. Was Miss Valenz another friend of Mrs. Dodson’s?

Becky shrugged. “I think Miss Valenz just talks to people in the neighborhood.”

How many people?

He was at the store one day when Becky, heading out for a walk with Skip, discovered a pale young woman standing on the front porch, gripping her purse strap. Mrs. Wooters from over in Camden had sent her, the young woman said. She wanted to know if Becky could locate her brother, whom she’d lost on account of the war. Becky invited her up.

At times, the spirit world was as quiet as a monastery. Other times, it could be like an overcrowded party line full of distant chatter, moans and laughter and weeping. No matter what, Becky could always detect a thrum—what she’d concluded was the collective sound of kinetic thought vibrating throughout the preternatural ether. She was getting better at this. But she couldn’t find the young woman’s brother.

“Then he’s alive?” the young woman asked.

“I’m sorry—I thought you said he died in the war.”

“I said I lost him on account of the war. Hey, are you like a priest? Are you not allowed to tell anyone what goes on in here?”

“I’m allowed, I guess. There aren’t any rules. But I wouldn’t.”

“They called him up and he didn’t want to go. He went to Canada instead. I haven’t heard from him in three years, and I’m worried about him. But at least now I won’t worry so much.”

Becky got her walk with Skip in after the young woman left. Later, she was slicing a pawpaw in the kitchen when it occurred to her that someone else who did what she did—or claimed to be able to do what she did—might just as easily have lied to that girl and told her that her brother sent his regards from the afterlife, and she would have walked away believing he was dead. That was power. And not just power, but power that could be misused.

Her ability, she concluded, bespoke a province not to be taken lightly. For the thousandth time, she wondered where it had come from. God, maybe. She’d wondered as much, as a girl, following the Shefflin incident, and it had seemed so easy then. God gave me this. Now she wondered why God would have done such a thing. Clearly there was a need for what she could do; people were always dying and leaving the living in their wake. But if God could zap an unusual ability into Becky Jenkins, why couldn’t He zap the life out of the war? Or keep it from starting? How many people out there were praying right now for their suffering to stop, and it wasn’t stopping? Mysterious ways—that bigger-than-life, worthless, blanket explanation people ascribed to God. The ongoing promise that all would be revealed on the other side. Forgive her (if she needed to be forgiven), but she was beginning to think a grand explanation wasn’t coming.

As August gave way to September, people—clients, she’d started thinking of them as—continued to trickle in. Two or three new ones a week, on average, plus those who came back. Some were just looking for a diversion, Becky suspected, but most were serious.

“Is this going to keep happening?” Cal asked one night after a drop-in had stalled their dinner. “People coming in and out at all hours?” He only saw the ones who showed up when he was home, but he assumed there were others.

“I’ve asked them to call ahead,” Becky said.

“You aren’t bringing any men up there, are you?” he said, wagging his thumb toward the stairs. His joking face was very close to his worried face. She’d noticed that about him on their second date. There was, she decided, no reason to tell him about Mr. Timmons, but sooner or later, if things kept up, she would have to consider these things. She would have to be more proactive in discouraging people from showing up out of the blue, which wasn’t good for her or Cal. She didn’t want to turn away anyone in need, she just wanted them to schedule in advance.

In October, with money from the house kitty, and without telling Cal (yet), she paid for a small ad to run weekly in the back of The Hancock Gazette, then paid a couple dollars more to have the Gazette send it over to the Toledo Blade. The ad contained her married name, the words Spirit Liaison, and “by appointment only,” followed by their phone number. When it ran the following week, it was sandwiched between ads for used fishing rods and farm equipment.

—

Most nights after dinner, Cal donned his armband and whistle and walked his “beat,” as he liked to think of it, with a little notebook and pencil tucked into his shirt pocket to record suspicious activity. There wasn’t any. Nor was there ever any message for him, a certified Citizens Defense messenger, to deliver to one of the local wardens. No news was good news, of course, but he couldn’t help feeling how infinitesimal his contribution to the war effort was.

Becky’s, arguably, was not. Word had spread that there was someone among them who could speak to the dead, who could maybe even find out if your loved ones were still alive, should you be in the dark about such a thing. And there were a lot of people in the dark. No one wanted missing and presumed dead to mean dead, and those who’d received the ultimate bad news—in the form of telegrams from the War Department—wanted some sort of assurance that their sons and husbands were at peace in the afterlife.

Cal understood all that; he just didn’t understand how the word had gotten around so efficiently—as if there were a secret club somewhere of all the people in town who took stock in that sort of thing. He didn’t like strangers coming in and out of the house, and he didn’t like Becky’s spending so much time around people who were upset, especially with the baby there. How could that be good for either one of them?

He sold hammers and screwdrivers. C-clamps and molding planes. He stopped at the Esso station near home to get the Nash’s tires rotated, and the teenager who did the job asked him why he didn’t just get his wife to do it with her magical powers. This kid had a smirk on his face that Cal wanted to make him swallow. He also had all four tires off the car. “She’s got better things to do,” Cal said.

He didn’t mention the remark to Becky. Nor did he mention the pack of boys on bicycles who, unnoticed by her, rode up and down Taft Street one Saturday afternoon in late October yelling “Witch!” at the house every time they passed. No doubt they were the boys responsible for soaping that word on the front-facing windows last Halloween. Cal had cleaned it off, but not before Becky and everyone else on the block had seen it.

Becky claimed not to be bothered, but he wasn’t so sure. He had to wonder if her hobby was getting away from her, if it was becoming more of a nuisance than something she enjoyed.

Then came a weekday morning in early November when they were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table, Skip between them in his high chair, his legs kicking and his cheeks glistening with jam, and Cal, having read up on how all the states had voted in the election that had landslid Roosevelt into his fourth term, flipped through the rest of the B section and wound up on the classifieds page, where his eyes landed on Becky’s advertisement. He looked from the paper to his wife, and from his wife to the paper, as if trying to match her face to a photo printed there. Becky became aware of this without lifting her eyes from her Wilkie Collins novel. Eventually, she looked up.

What he wanted to know—once she’d told him why she’d placed the ad, apologized for not telling him about it sooner, and explained that it had been running for three weeks and was also in the Blade—was, where was all this going? Becky knew he was upset, but the question struck her as obnoxious. How should she know where it was going? What was her intention, then? he asked. To help people, she said.

“Help them what?”

She paused and skated her eyes over him. “I thought you knew.” But if he did, he wouldn’t have that tone in his voice. She told him that, believe it or not, there were people out there who found comfort in getting in touch with the loved one they’d lost. People came to her for that comfort, because she was a sensitive.

Thinking she hadn’t finished her sentence, Cal waited for the end of it.

“Let me ask something,” she said. “Haven’t you ever wanted to get in touch with your mother, or your siblings? Have you ever thought about how that might be beneficial to you? Or to them?”

“To them? No, they’ve been gone for a really long time. My brother died when I was five. What in the world would we have to say to each other?”

“People find solace in what I do, Cal.”

Who says I need solace? he thought. And where’s Janice? He’d always suspected Janice resented him for stealing her best friend away—she’d thrown her rice sideways at him when he and Becky stepped out of the church. Still, it seemed like Janice could start coming around again, pick up the spiriting slack a little. Isn’t that what girlhood pals were for? He asked Becky where Janice had been lately.

“Are you kidding?” Becky said. “Janice moved away three months ago. She went to Kansas City to double up with her cousin and help out with her cousin’s children. I told you that.”

Had she? “Well, I think you know I don’t want to talk to dead people, loved ones or otherwise. And I don’t like the idea of people coming in and out of here whenever they want.”

“Not whenever they want,” she said. “That’s the purpose of the ad.”

“But it’s your name and our phone number in the newspaper.”

“They’re in the phone book.”

“That’s not the same. Don’t you worry about people intruding here? About them robbing us, or—or”—his face flushed—“kidnapping Skip?”

“Skip’s rarely out of my sight, I always know right where he is. And, Cal, what’s there to rob?”

“I can’t believe you did this without talking to me about it.”

“I said I was sorry. I knew you’d be against it. You don’t understand why people would want to come here, because you don’t see the point of what I do. Frankly, I don’t think you even believe in it.”

He’d never weighed in on that officially, though his feelings were probably easily inferred. It felt like a challenge, now. She was folding her napkin, waiting for his response. “Do I have to? Is it necessary?”

Becky had made the claim, but she hadn’t thought it was actually true. She’d thought of him as a skeptic, not a flat-out nonbeliever. “No,” she said, “it’s not necessary. But if you don’t believe in it, your opinion on how I do it shouldn’t carry a whole lot of weight, should it?”

That was mean, even while it made a maddening sense to him. The situation also jabbed at his ego, because it had to do with the house and what happened in it, and he’d always felt that the house was more hers than his. He almost said this out loud. Instead, he left his egg half-eaten, folded the newspaper and dropped it onto the table, then stood, kissed Skip but not Becky, and left for work without saying goodbye. For him, it was a histrionic exit. Her heart was pounding nearly as hard as his was by the time he backed the car down the driveway.

—

Mrs. Dodson was closer, but Mrs. Dodson wasn’t her mother. Plus, Becky didn’t want to complain about her husband to a widow any more than she wanted to call Janice and bend her unmarried ear long-distance. She left the baby with the widow, borrowed the widow’s car, and drove to London Hill.

As soon as she laid eyes on her mother, she began to cry. It was so irritating. So embarrassing. “Good lord,” Ida said. “Where’s my little doughboy?” What she called Skip. He was with a neighbor, Becky said, and Ida asked if anyone was hurt, trying to attach some event to the tears. Upon learning that everyone was okay, she made a cup of Dari-Rich and told Becky to drink it in front of her, then convinced her she needed a nap. “Go to bed and get yourself settled down,” she said, “then we’ll talk.”

It turned out to be an excellent idea—just like when Becky was little. She opened her eyes sometime later to find herself in her old bedroom, and it hadn’t changed at all: same peppermint-striped wallpaper, same white dresser and nightstand and desk accented with pink Bakelite knobs. A lemony light came through the drawn shade. Her mother drifted past the open doorway, stopped, drifted back. Held a lit cigarette away from her body as she walked into the room. “Mr. Tig-Tig!” she said. The stuffed tiger of Becky’s childhood, normally perched atop the pillows, now on the floor. She placed it on the nightstand, sat down on the edge of the bed, and smiled at her daughter. “Tell me what this is all about,” she said. When Becky seemed at a loss for words, Ida tried to be helpful. Was it Cal? Was he drinking? Had he hit her? Forced himself on her? Those were her guesses—except infidelity, and she couldn’t imagine that, with Becky so pretty and her and Cal so obviously in love. It was nothing like that, Becky said, and Ida said, short of something that would land a person in jail, there wasn’t much else. Then went on in her mellifluous voice: of course, there was the constant opinionating, and the contradicting, and the condescending, but wives put up with that all over the world. With her free hand, she held one of Becky’s wrists and rubbed her thumb over the pulse place, as she’d done to help her fall asleep years ago. Becky told all. The ad, Cal’s reaction to people coming over, how he didn’t believe in what she did, just because she was doing something out of the ordinary. The bottom line: he didn’t take her seriously.

“Oh, pumpkin.” There was no ashtray in the bedroom. Ida used the decorative scoop at the base of the lamp and made a mental note to clean it up later. “You’ll find a squirrel who can sing ‘Mairzy Doats’ before you find a man who takes you seriously.”

Her advice was to care less. Even better—don’t care at all. She didn’t mean about Cal, but about the things that came out of his mouth. “You have to love him, and you have to let him love you back. But you don’t have to care about every dumb thing he says, because I can guarantee you, tomorrow he’s going to say something dumber.” Becky’s eyes widened at the irreverence of that. “It’s not just Cal,” Ida said. “It’s all of them. They think they’ve got all the brains, but if they did, they wouldn’t walk around sounding like idiots half the time. When you give Cal a hug, squeeze extra tight. That’s what I do with your father. He says I only know how to give bear hugs, and I want to say, ‘That’s because I’m trying to squeeze the stupid out of you, honey!’ ” She waved that away. “It doesn’t work, but you’ll feel better.”

That said, Ida was still eager to talk to Roman about this. Over the years, they’d had more than a few conversations about the crystal ball business, the ghost-talking, conversations wherein they’d worried no one would ever understand their daughter the way they did—and there were parts of her they didn’t understand at all. They’d crossed their fingers that Mr. Right-for-Becky was out there and would manage to find her. And that’s what had happened. As far as the Hanovers were concerned, Cal and Becky were a fairy tale of chance—one that could have a happy ending if everyone kept a level head. The ad, though. That was hard to swallow.

She called the hardware store and played dumb with Cal, asked if she could speak to Roman. Cal reminded her that Roman was at the luncheonette in Tiffin that day. She called the luncheonette, listened to the bustle through the line, and when Roman got on she said, “There’s trouble in Paradise.”

Roman drove the half hour back to Bonhomie as a light snow wafted slantways through the air. He walked into the hardware store at closing time and told Cal they were going out for a beer. When Cal looked momentarily confused, Roman said, “It’s not an invitation.”

The bar was called the Kill Shot, and there were more dead animals inside than there were people. They hung their coats on hooves. Roman knew the bartender and most of the other men there. He introduced Cal, got them two glasses of beer, and led them to a red leather booth in the corner. “Stardust” played on the jukebox. Cal waited while Roman drank his beer, then slid his glass over when Roman’s was empty.

“You saw the ad,” Roman said.

“What was she thinking?”

“It’s a tough one.” Roman said he’d known about it for a week and had seen the consequences of it firsthand. Two days ago, he’d gone over to retrieve the pruner Cal had borrowed, and who did he see coming out of the house but Fred Yulin. Cal knew who Fred Yulin was, but Roman went on to tell him anyway. “Black guy, works at the Sporting Nook. You know, the type that’s got nothing to prove. In your neighborhood, coming down your porch steps in the middle of the afternoon.”

Roman didn’t seem to be aware that the Yulins lived in Brookdale, on the border of Tiller’s Flat. “Who else?”

“Jesus, you tell me,” Roman said. “I don’t live there. Is it a parade of men, is my question? All types welcome?”

Cal felt a wave of anger at the implication that he was asleep at the wheel. Still, he didn’t know who else there was to step in and help, advise. He certainly couldn’t ask Everett. “Are you going to talk to her?”

Roman pursed his lips and shook his head.

“Then what are we going to do?”

“Not we. You. This is your problem.”

Cal glanced around the bar. “Didn’t you bring me here to tell me how to fix it?”

“What am I, your boss?”

“Yes, actually, you are.”

“Well, I’m not your guru. The training wheels are off, kid. You’ve got to figure out a way to make this not a problem.”

“By stopping it.”

“Noooo…by doing whatever you have to do so that it can still happen and not be something that causes fights.”

Cal watched Roman finish the second beer. “And how would you go about that?”

“Since you asked, I think you should tell her you’re sorry for whatever you said, and tell her you’ve had a change of heart. You believe in the séance stuff now, hook, line, and sinker. Why you felt the need to tell her otherwise, I’ll never know, but you’ve had a revelation and, boy, have you seen the light. You just don’t want to participate in it, because, I don’t know, it gives you the heebie-jeebies. But you couldn’t be happier that she’s doing it. Your only request is that she meets with these people downstairs, in the parlor, which is five feet from your front door. That way, they’re not wandering around the entire house, for chrissake.”

“You want me to lie to her.”

Roman’s eyes dollied forward under his brow. “If it means living in peace? Absolutely. That’s one of the reasons we have lies.”

Cal couldn’t do it, though. She would see through that in a minute. It would make everything worse.

He ended up taking two-thirds of Roman’s advice. That evening, after they’d put Skip down and were getting ready for bed, he told Becky he was sorry for the way he’d reacted to the ad. She apologized—again—for not discussing the ad with him first. Then he suggested the parlor idea, holding out the slimmest hope that she might be so moved by his apology and his (really Roman’s) suggestion that she would decide to nix the ad entirely. Instead, she said the parlor sounded practical and assured him the ad would cut down on the disruption to their lives. It was a mutually considerate but glum endcap to the matter—a stepping-over more than a repair, because there was still the matter of his disbelief. But the day had been long, and they were tired.

—

A month later, they were decorating the Christmas tree when the phone rang. Becky went to answer it in the kitchen, and a few minutes later she came back into the living room with an excited look on her face and said please don’t get mad, but two people from a magazine were coming to interview her. A specialized magazine called The Séance Précis, published once a month in Toledo.

Now? Cal asked. Soon, Becky said.

They were there within the hour. Cal finished hanging the last of the un-silvered ornaments in the living room while Becky sat on the sofa in the parlor and answered questions posed by a nervous young woman with a clipboard and a chewed pencil, while a young man in horn-rimmed glasses sat patiently holding a Brownie box camera in his lap. Neither of them took their coats off, promising not to stay long.

The girl asked Becky when she’d first noticed her psychic abilities, what is was like to speak with a spirit, and if she had visions, and Becky answered. The girl asked if Becky had experienced “tiptology”—spirits tipping the table—and Becky said absolutely not.

“How accurate would you say your communications with the spirits are?”

Becky thought about that for a moment. The question was flawed, she said. Then explained: it was like this sofa they were sitting on. Was it real? It felt real to her. But could she say it was accurate? Not without knowing every sofa, from every angle. Her rule for herself, she said, was that she would only relay to another person what was discernible and felt genuine. Sometimes, that was a voice. A word or two, a phrase, a whole sentence that arrived only after intense concentration that often left her with a headache. Sometimes it was a feeling that was channeled through a conduit connecting her to the spirit, a feeling that translated itself into a kind of cross-dimensional language that was then deciphered as a response. Did that mean the dead spoke to her directly? Now and then. Mostly, the dead conveyed.

The young woman wrote and wrote. The young man asked if he could take a picture to run alongside the profile, and Becky, suddenly embarrassed but excited, too, asked them to wait a moment and ran upstairs, then came back down in her cape and beret. She posed, smiling, on the front porch.

—

The profile, called “Comfort in a Time of War,” appeared in the January 1945 issue of The Séance Précis, and two weeks later the Toledo Blade ran an extract of it in the style section. The Hancock Gazette then reprinted the same extract in a feature called “Notable Local Gals.” As a result, new people began to make their way to Taft Street. Some brought trinkets or articles of clothing that had belonged to the departed. Handkerchiefs and pocket watches. A rosary. An engagement ring. Becky didn’t require these things and certainly didn’t request them, but it seemed to be a commonly held belief that personal items belonging to the deceased would enhance the chances of reaching them. Mrs. Wollack from the Audubon Society wanted Becky to keep her husband’s dog tags—not forever, she said, but for a week or so, just in case Becky felt the need to try to reach Bud Wollack in between their sessions. Becky refused to keep the dog tags and assured Mrs. Wollack that she would never try to contact her husband without her being there. That would be like reading someone else’s mail.

There were some who came just to make contact with their departed. Nothing in particular to convey, just contact. Hello. Others wanted specifics.

“Is he at peace?”

“Does she miss me?”

“Would he mind if I sold his rifles?”

Answers to the more general questions came easily to Becky, but the particular and personal inquiries presented a challenge. One woman wanted to know where the money was hidden. One man asked to be told, finally, the nature of his mother’s relationship with a woman named Pru from Wheeling, West Virginia. There was reluctance on the other side. Resistance.

Other people sent letters. Some requested she perform her services through the mail, but she wouldn’t have known how to do that if she’d wanted to. There was a letter penned by a mocker with nothing better to do; another tried to warn her that she was condemning her soul to hell by attempting to talk to the dead. She threw both into the trash. One letter stood out, though. It arrived several weeks after the extract of her profile ran in the Blade and was from a Mr. Casey LaGrange of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Written, she noticed, on watermarked stationery, the high-end kind she used to sell at the stationery store.

Dear Miss Jenkins,

I hope you’ll forgive my boldness, but I feel compelled to contact you. I am a man of many interests and passions, one being the spirit world and those who are able to communicate with the Other Side. I believe your practice is vital to our living harmoniously with the departed, and I’ve undertaken what I hope will be the definitive compendium on individuals such as yourself. An amalgam of sorts: historical, accurate, and compelling.

How honored I would be if, at some future date, you would allow me the benefit of your further insights. I’ve been told by more than a few earnest souls that you are one of the most skilled mediums of our time. Your insightful (but far too brief) profile published in The Séance Précis laid hint to this.

As you well know, the waters you swim in are teeming with charlatans, one more skullduggerous than the next. I imagine it must be a challenge to exist around such flimflammers, much less succeed! But succeed you have.

I am certain that the portion of my compendium devoted to you, if there’s any justice in this ravaged and war-torn world, would be significant. Regardless, and even if we have no further communication beyond this letter, I thank you for bringing your talent to the people. A gift such as yours, in another’s hands, might have been put to less noble use, or have gone unrealized, and what a loss that would have been, both to this world and the next.

With Awe and Profound Respect,

Casey LaGrange

The letter was not only flattering but affirming. He was right; her profession was as prone to corruption as any other. Recently, an elderly man had sat across from her, clutching his hat to his chest, and asked if the Germans were going to surrender—and if so, could she pin it down to the week? When she told him she couldn’t, that prediction wasn’t one of her abilities, he said, “I don’t want you to predict it. I want you to see it. I’m going to have money riding on this.”

The mothers and wives of men who’d recently died in the war were the most emotional, of course, and were therefore the most challenging, and these were the people who started coming in from surrounding towns after the ads were placed. One young widow and her mother came all the way from Port Clinton.

“Is he in Heaven?” some of them wanted to know.

Becky would always tell them the truth: she’d never been contacted by a spirit who was in either Heaven or Hell. More precisely, the spirits she was in touch with didn’t specify where they were speaking from. It was as if they came to a place of contact—like a pay phone in the desert—and after conveying what they wanted to convey, they went back to wherever it was they resided. “Purgatory,” one woman concluded, but Becky said she had no evidence of that. “If he’s not in Heaven,” another woman said, the flush rising in her cheeks, “ask him what he did that kept him out.”

Most people, though, didn’t ask about Heaven or Hell, and for that Becky was grateful; there were enough tricky patches without bringing religion into it.

“Does he have a body?” a man asked when Becky said she could sense his son’s presence. The man looked as if he hadn’t slept in days.

“Excuse me?”

“Does he have a body, or is he more of a face floating over a wisp?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“The medium in Toledo said he was hovering right over my shoulder, and he had a face, but his body was more of a wisp. She said he look troubled.”

Becky clarified: she couldn’t actually see the man’s son—or any of the dead. Not with any clarity. It was difficult to describe.

She didn’t tell the man this, but, personally, she wouldn’t trust a medium who claimed they could truly see the dead. That begged for embellishment, and embellishment in her field was akin to showmanship, which was akin to fraud. She’d seen appalling evidence of it in a book at the library. The worst frauds, it seemed to her, were the ones from twenty or thirty years ago who’d had themselves photographed mid-séance with “spirits” right there in the photo with them. Eva Carriére, who’d “materialized” a three-hundred-year-old Brahmin Hindu, which turned out to be a cardboard cutout. Jillian Wick, who had someone dress up as Helen of Troy and stand behind her, gazing wide-eyed at the ceiling—her own daughter, it turned out. And the “ectoplasm” spilling from the mouths of so-called spiritualists. Usually a handkerchief or a strip of gauze, sometimes a scratch on the negative meant to be otherworldly vomit. There’d even been one of a woman spewing a twist of cloth that had little human faces the size of silver dollars on it, superimposed there by some conspiring photographer. True and Disturbing Case Studies in Parapsychology, the book was called.

Becky thought again of the young woman who’d been looking for the brother who’d fled to Canada, how exploited she might have been in the hands of one of these charlatans. The sort Casey LaGrange had written about.

She wrote back to him, thanking him for his letter and telling him how moved she was that he wanted to include her in his compendium. She wrote that she found it rewarding to know she’d brought solace to some of the people who’d visited her but was surprised that he’d heard from anyone who’d done so. What a small world. She wished him well.

Small indeed, he wrote back, just a week after receiving her reply. The world is small, wicked, and starved for good news. That’s why such news travels. He himself was about to be traveling for the purposes of his project, he wrote. He was heading to Ann Arbor to interview a psychic, and then to Detroit to interview a past-life regressionist. If only Bonhomie were on his route, how happy he would be to meet with Becky in person. In lieu of that, he wondered if she might answer a few technical questions, then went on to ask whether or not she spoke aloud to the spirits during her séances, and if she employed visuals, and how much compensation she usually received. Also, what was her greatest number of participants to date? Lastly, he asked where she’d “worked” and if she’d ever held sessions in Washington, D.C., or New York City. If not, had she considered it? You could fill halls, he added.

Washington! New York! She was overwhelmed by the thought. He gave her too much credit, she wrote back. To date, six participants at one time (including her) was her maximum. And she’d never accepted money for what she did, though some people tried to pay her. She hoped he didn’t have an inflated sense of her practice. If he ever were to make it to Bonhomie, she would be happy to talk further with him in person. She felt a little less isolated knowing there were people like Casey LaGrange in the world, and she was trying to think of a way to write that without sounding sappy. Then she just wrote it: I feel a little less isolated knowing there are people like you in the world.

Cal came in from the garage as she was writing. He looked down at the kitchen table and picked up Mr. LaGrange’s second letter, which was signed the same as the first. “ ‘With awe’? Who’s this joker?”

“Do you mind?” Becky snatched the letter out of his hand.

—

The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a miniature Japanese submarine had washed up on Waimanalo Beach, some thirty miles away. It was seventy-eight feet long and cigar-shaped, and after it was stripped of all its useful information, it was put on a trailer and hauled all around the United States as part of a war bond drive. It went from Vallejo, California, to Washington, D.C., and stopped at every major city in between. Then it traveled from smaller city to smaller city, and from town to town. In late March of 1945, it finally made its way to Bonhomie, Ohio.

They parked it in front of the courthouse, between two mounds of plowed snow. Most of the town came out to see it, pat its hull, have their photo taken beside it. For a twenty-five-dollar war bond, you could climb into it. Cal and Becky parked a block away, but as they pushed Skip’s stroller along the shoveled sidewalk and caught a glimpse of the submarine’s dark shape above the sea of hats, eclipsing the steps of the courthouse, Becky changed her mind about wanting to see it. Or wanting to see it up close, anyway. She told Cal to go ahead, she was going to sit down on one of the benches across the street.

“You sure?” Cal asked. He’d been excited about the sub for days. Excited to show it to Skip, for some reason. She said she was sure. She told him to take his time, and off they went.

Was it unrest outside of the sub? Unrest within it? She knew from the article in the paper that it had a faulty navigational system, had never made it into the harbor, had never fired its torpedoes. One of the two-man crew had drowned, the other was in a POW camp. She didn’t believe in embodying things with power. The unrest surrounding the submarine, perhaps, was literal: so many people, herself included, had come out on a frigid day to see a machine designed to kill them. Well, there it was, ringing dull and hollow under the pummel of mittens, its propeller blades streaked with road salt.

The Salvation Army band trudged through the snow and gathered in the gazebo near Becky. They coughed and sputtered like horses, then lurched into “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” A blond woman waved from the submarine’s tower hatch. On the ground, at the edge of the crowd, a mustached man in a beige homburg and matching overcoat waved back at the blond woman, but she’d already turned away.

“Inspiring, isn’t it?” a voice said.

There was, suddenly, a man sitting on the bench next to hers. He was gray-headed and broad-cheeked, wore a hunting parka, and looked vaguely familiar. She realized he was Reverend Toomey, the Episcopal minister who’d married her and Cal. He groaned as he stood up, moved over to join her on her bench. He was grinning, as if they were both in on a joke. “You might think I’m about to give you a hard time for not coming to church more often,” he said. “I’m not. That’s your prerogative, of course.” He changed the tilt of his head and, looking almost proud, said, “I would like to have a word with you, though, about Saint Peter. Can you guess why?”

Becky couldn’t, and didn’t try.

“Saint Peter,” Reverend Toomey said, “is as holy as they come, yes? And he’s been assigned the sacred duty of greeting the souls of the departed at the Pearly Gates, yes? And determining if they’re worthy to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, where they’ll be reunited with their dearly departed—yes?”

It all sounded very thought-out to Becky. Was he really asking her if she concurred? “I’m sorry—what is the question?”

“No question, I suppose. I’m sure you understand—the news of whether or not departed Christian souls will be reunited with their loved ones is something that’s conferred by the Divine, outside the Gates of Heaven. Not on Taft Street.”

“I’m still not sure what you mean,” Becky said icily.

Reverend Toomey said he hoped the stories he’d been hearing weren’t true, and that she wasn’t presenting herself to people as some sort of detour or shortcut. Claiming to have a direct connection with the dearly departed was a disservice to the living, and was—or could be seen as—an insult to God.

“By whom? You?”

He looked surprised by her tone and glanced down at the snow, then back into her eyes. “By God. And, yes, by me. In my authority—”

She stood, wished him a nice afternoon, and walked back toward the crowd.

“Perhaps we should discuss this further at another time!” he called after her.

Perhaps not, she thought.

She walked with her hands pushed into her coat pockets. A breeze had picked up, flapping the red-white-and-blue bunting strung across the fence surrounding the courthouse yard. The crowd wasn’t enormous, but people had spilled out onto Main Street and the police were diverting traffic. She stepped out into the middle of the street and pushed up onto her toes, looking for Cal and Skip.

A hand touched her arm.

It was the mustached man in the beige homburg and matching overcoat. He had a round face and dark little eyes that shrank to folds when he smiled. He asked if she was Rebecca Jenkins. So close to her encounter with the minister, she thought, Who wants to know? But she said yes, she was.

He introduced himself as Casey LaGrange.

Chapter Four

The exposed wooden trim, the bull’s eyes in the doorframes, the corbels bookending the fireplace all were to be admired, LaGrange said. Apparently that’s what he was doing as he shifted from one spot to another in the parlor: admiring things. His overcoat shed, he wore a brown gabardine suit with a yellow pocket square. His flat, dark, shiny hair was parted down the middle, and his face, with its full cheeks, looked babyish—even with the mustache. He was in his midthirties, Cal guessed.

LaGrange admired the little shelf of ceramic owls. The grandfather clock. “Swiss?” he asked.

“Cleveland,” Cal said. He sat on the couch, holding Skip’s hands while Skip pistoned his body up and down, still not clear on what his feet might be for. Becky had excused herself to the kitchen to put together what she referred to as light refreshments. This gabardined baby-man was here for a session, Cal assumed, but they were acting as if he were a special guest. Cal asked where he was coming from, and LaGrange said Fort Wayne, by way of Ann Arbor and Detroit—all by rail. Cal asked where he was headed after this, and LaGrange said Boston, but he was in no hurry. He’d taken a room at the Whitman Hotel, which he found to be grand and charming, if a bit run-down. Cal, who’d lived his whole life in Bonhomie and never once stepped foot in the Whitman, asked what LaGrange did for a living.

“So hard to describe,” LaGrange said. He drew a breath. “I’m a scholar attached to no university. A researcher attached to no institute. I study humanity and try to give platform to its brightest psychic minds—Rebecca’s among them, I hope. What line of work do you find yourself in?”

“I find myself in hardware.”

“Wonderful!”

Was it? Light refreshments were taking a long time. “Would you excuse me?”

He carried Skip through the living room and dining area and backed his way through the swinging door that led into the kitchen. When the door had settled behind him, he whispered to Becky, “What’s this guy want?”

“He wants to talk to me,” Becky said without looking up from the cutting board, where she was chopping carrots and celery into little sticks. “He wants to observe me, in-session. For a book he’s writing—about people like me.”

“He needs a hotel room for that?”

She shrugged.

“Did you know he was coming?”

“I most certainly didn’t,” she said. “He mentioned that he might in one of his letters, but he didn’t say anything more specific than that.”

“He’s the guy from the letters? Mr. Awe?”

“Shh. Plug in the percolator, would you? And mash up some plums for Skip.”

—

At Becky’s invitation, LaGrange came back to the house the next afternoon, a Sunday, for a couple of hours of conversation Cal steered clear of (though he ate one of the sugar-dusted crullers LaGrange had picked up from the bakery near his hotel).

On Monday morning, Cal was on his way to work when he spotted LaGrange coming into the neighborhood on foot, clutching another paper sack. He waved as Cal pulled up to the stop sign. Cal rolled down his window.

“Such a beautiful day!” LaGrange said.

It was cloudy and cold, actually. “You’re going to see Becky?”

“Armed to the hilt.” LaGrange opened a wing of his beige overcoat and showed Cal a wide inner pocket with a notepad and pencils sticking out of it. He shook open the paper sack and held it forth. “Corn muffin?”

Yes, because they were still warm and smelled good, but was Cal supposed to just be okay with all this? All this what? a voice in his head asked, because he wasn’t sure he knew, having excluded himself from the whole enterprise. Was it really just research for a book about séances? Or did this clown have something else up his sleeve? Cal opened the store, then called home just to say hi. An hour later, he called again to ask how things were going, and Becky said fine and that he didn’t need to keep checking on her. When he called a third time, at noon, there was no answer.

Then the phone rang, and it was Roman. “Who’s the suit?”

“How did you find out about him?” Cal asked.

“Estelle Crowley. She had dinner at the Blue Top last night with a couple of friends and said this slick type was at the next table and struck up a conversation with them, admiring their brooches and whatnot and saying how friendly it was in this town, and then he started talking about Becky. How amazing and treasured she is. What do you know about him?”

Cal told Roman all he knew about Casey LaGrange, which wasn’t much. He was keeping an eye on the situation, he said; he had it under control. But Roman said, “I don’t know if you do,” and went on to tell him how this guy had asked Estelle and her friends if they’d been to Becky’s house for one of these séances—none of them had—then said they should, because Becky was going to be famous one day with his help.

Jesus, Cal thought. What kind of help? The kind that involved hands, no doubt. He assumed Roman was thinking the same thing.

But Roman said, “If this goes anywhere, it’s got to be in writing. And tell her not to sign anything without showing it to me first.”

When Cal got home that evening, Becky was just taking a lasagna out of the oven. He asked how long the muffin man had stuck around for. Half the day, she said. Doing what? “Talking,” she said, then clarified: she’d done most of the talking, and he’d written a lot of things down. She was kind of talked out, honestly. Cal wanted to relay to her what Roman had told him, but maybe this wasn’t the best time. For all he knew, Roman had called and told her himself.

“So…did he get what he needed? For his book?”

“No,” she said. LaGrange had observed one session—with Mrs. Dodson—but wanted to sit in on at least a couple more, and she’d told him he could. She had one scheduled for tomorrow, and one for the day after.

Cal didn’t want to ask but felt like he ought to—and had a right to. “Do you enjoy having this guy around?”

Someone in her field who took an interest in what she did? A colleague who was impressed with her? She twirled an oven mitt on her hand and watched steam curl up from the lasagna, then turned, almost smiling, to Cal. “Believe it or not,” she said.

—

It was a deliberately vague answer that had probably sounded like a yes to Cal, and she was okay with that. She did enjoy Mr. LaGrange’s company—just not as much as she’d thought she would. She was flattered by his attention and his questions, but a little of those things went a long way. She didn’t know much about his background but sensed a long-term aloneness, and a sad determination, and a frantic energy just below the surface, scissoring like ducks’ feet. She suspected the world received him in much the same way it received her: as an odd commodity. Someone even loved ones glanced at sideways. (Did he have loved ones?) By his third day in town, it was clear he’d brought with him just the one suit, and a handful of different pocket squares to go with it. She’d noticed his shirt collars were a little dirty and his cuffs were a little ragged—not that she cared. She’d also noticed that when she answered his questions, he doodled sometimes instead of taking notes.

Among other things that afternoon—while Mrs. Dodson babysat Skip across the street—they discussed the people he called “pioneers” in Becky’s field, though Becky didn’t consider them pioneers at all: the Davenport Brothers, who’d claimed to have a cabinet that held supernatural powers, only to be debunked when their trapdoors and hidden ropes were discovered; the Fox Sisters, whose ghostly rappings were revealed to be nothing more than the cracking of their own double-jointed toes.

“Houdini wrote an excellent book exposing the lot of them,” Becky said. “Have you read it?”

“Oh, certainly,” he said, and changed the subject to props. Did she ever use any? Talismans, or atmospheric adjusters?

Atmospheric adjusters sounded like something Nikola Tesla might have worked with. She burned sage, she said. She lit a candle because she thought it helped bring the room into focus—though she didn’t like keeping the candle on the table. She sometimes liked to have flowers in the spiriting room.

He told her about the other mystics he’d encountered and wanted to write about—the Belgian psychic in Ann Arbor, and the past-life regressionist in Detroit whom he’d mentioned in one of his letters. Also a healer in Indianapolis, and a medium back in Fort Wayne who had an unusually high-pitched voice and was half-blind—but both those things only added to it, he said.

“Added to what?”

“The effect. On everyone in the room, from what I could tell.”

She was about to ask how many people had been in the room, but just then the doorbell rang.

Mr. Gonzalez from Defiance. He’d called the day before to make an appointment—a first-timer for her—and had said over the phone that he wouldn’t mind at all if one of her colleagues sat in on the session. His accent was thick but he’d spoken slowly and carefully, and Becky had suspected he was elderly. In person, he looked eighty if he was a day, and moved slowly, but he’d driven himself there and was eager to get started. She took his coat and led him into the parlor. With the two of them at the spiriting table and Mr. LaGrange in the background, on the sofa, Mr. Gonzalez told Becky about how his brother, Rodrigo, had died in a highway accident last year. Just before he died, the two of them had a terrible argument about old grievances, stupid things. They said mean things to each other. He’d had no idea it would be their last conversation, and now he felt terrible. He didn’t mean any of it and wanted to say he was sorry. Could Becky find Rodrigo and let him know?

Harsh words followed by sudden death. It happened all the time. Becky tried—to no avail, at first. Unhelpfully, after several minutes of silence from the void, she caught herself anticipating the reactions of both Mr. Gonzalez and Mr. LaGrange, should the session be a dud—much as she tried to have no ego at all when spiriting. Then, in a flurry of presence and communication, like someone running down a hallway and shouting over the sound of their shoes, Rodrigo was there. Soy yo! Soy yo! Sin rincores! No grudges! He missed his brother terribly. He was okay, though. Becky relayed that, and tears leaked out of Mr. Gonzalez’s closed eyes. Then Rodrigo said something about mocha, and Becky relayed that, and Mr. Gonzalez looked confused for a moment, then, smiling, corrected her. “Moco! I used to call him that. It means booger.”

He tried to hand Becky some money before leaving. She refused. As she and Mr. LaGrange stood on the porch watching Mr. Gonzalez’s Woody Wagon make its way up the street, Mr. LaGrange said, “Tell me—was it luck, or a little pre-digging around?”

The question took her aback. “Neither.”

He smiled and his little eyes shrank. “You really hold your cards close, don’t you? You live by the cardinal rule of the magician. I admire that.”

“I’m not a magician.”

“But you are! You make it seem so real! And you have such conviction!”

“Because it is real,” she said.

“I believe you!” he said. “That’s what’s so incredible!” He touched his chest, took in a breath. “May I talk to you about something quite serious now?”

“Okay,” she said.

He stepped over to the lime-green glider, brushed from it a few winter leaves, and sat down, then nodded to the space next to him. As her backside met the cold metal she thought, Please don’t make a pass at me, for it suddenly seemed like he was about to do just that.

Gently rocking the glider forward and back with his feet, he told her of his plan to put together a group of top-notch spiritualists, regressionists, healers, and soothsayers, and hold sessions in theaters around the country. An event people would pay to see. American Mystics, he wanted to call it.

Becky burst out laughing. She didn’t mean to and stopped as soon as she could. “I’m sorry. It’s just—you mean, like an act?”

“Not an act. An entertaining resource. A portable, entertaining resource, going from city to city. Managed by me, with care and precision—in a hopefully soon-to-be post-war booming economy.”

It sounded not only wrong to her, but ill-fated. “It’s hard to picture.”

“Dream with me,” he said.

“What about the compendium you’re writing? Would that be alongside this?”

“Alas, there’s no compendium.”

“Since when?”

He smiled.

It wasn’t the lie so much as his casual admittance of it that surprised her. “I just can’t see myself a part of what you’re describing.”

He said, “I have a head for business, you know. I’m quite smart! And your talent is above and beyond any I’ve encountered.”

“Ability,” she said softly. “Not talent.”

“Ability. Exactly.”

His round face was turned toward hers now. Please don’t make a pass at me, she thought again. Please don’t do something embarrassing, like put your hand on top of mine, or shift your leg over so that our knees touch.

He did both those things. But the extra glimmer in his little eyes wasn’t because of the pass, she thought; it was because of the trick he was convinced she had up her sleeve—a trick he believed people would applaud and throw money at. A trick that didn’t exist. Holding her hand, his knee just barely touching hers, he asked her to consider his idea, at least, and because she wanted this particular interaction to be over with immediately, she said she would. But she also stopped the glider with the toe of her shoe. She had to retrieve her child, she said, taking her hand back. She had to get dinner started.

“Tomorrow?” he asked before she disappeared into the house. “Mrs. Ross at eleven?” And she nodded, wishing she hadn’t invited him.

—

That night, with a toothbrush sticking out of his mouth, Cal asked how things were going with LaMustache. Becky had decided not to tell him about the pass; it would only confirm his grumbling about strangers coming into the house. But she told him she was ready for Mr. LaGrange to move on. Cal swallowed some toothpowder, hearing that. He spit into the sink, waited for her to say more. LaGrange was just too…fawning, Becky said.

Had she talked to her dad? Cal asked. Did she know that, when LaGrange wasn’t planted in their house, he was going around town telling people he planned to make Becky famous? She didn’t know that, she said, but she wasn’t surprised, given that he wanted her to join his traveling show.

Cal straightened up. “His what?” She explained, stressing that she had no interest in being in a show, or in traveling with Mr. LaGrange. Cal asked what happened to the book. She shook her head. “There’s no book?” he said, as if he’d been looking forward to the book. “He got handsy, didn’t he?”

“No,” she said.

“Then he’s going to get handsy. Give him an inch, I know his type.” Cal didn’t, but the stuff rolled off his tongue and felt good to say. “Does he make you uncomfortable?”

“I wouldn’t say uncomfortable.” Becky’s face, however, said otherwise.

“Why’s he still around? Why don’t you tell him to shove off?”

“I will. We said three sessions, and tomorrow’s the third. I’ll talk to him after that. I’ll take care of it,” she said.

But he heard in that what he wanted to hear: a subtle cry for help—an admittance that she would appreciate his stepping in and taking some sort of action. But what action? He couldn’t fall asleep for wondering, went downstairs to pace the floor while he mulled the situation over. It was late, he thought, but then the clock chimed and it was only nine-thirty. Not everyone kept the hours of people raising a toddler.

He went over to the wall phone and dialed.

“We don’t want any,” Roman said—which was how he always answered the phone after seven p.m.

—

For a brief stretch of Cal’s life, then—a matter of hours—he stepped into a movie. That is, he became someone else, a guy in a crime caper. Later, he would wish he had been someone else.

Roman had been keeping an eye on LaGrange. He had a buddy who worked the front desk of the Whitman who said for the past three days LaGrange had had breakfast at the restaurant across from the hotel at seven-thirty, then had come back for a bath before heading out for the day. He was staying in the cheapest room they had, the bath down the hall.

Cal had called his father-in-law wanting to know how to approach LaGrange, what to say to him to convince him to leave. Roman saw things differently, thought the situation called for more drastic measures.

Early the next morning, they were sitting in his Cadillac, parked half a block away from the hotel. Most of the last snow had melted and the sky was clear.

“I want this to be my thing,” Cal said.

“It’ll be your thing,” Roman said. “You’ll do the main thing.”

But Cal wasn’t clear on what the main thing was, because Roman hadn’t told him. All he’d said was that they were going to make an “irrefutable” point, and to do that, they had to take LaGrange somewhere.

It all happened quickly. At seven thirty-five, LaGrange walked out of the hotel securing his homburg on his head. He crossed the street, bought a paper at the newsstand, and entered the restaurant. Roman told Cal to wait in the car. He and his buddy Abe Lincoln had an errand to run, he said, and left, and came back ten minutes later with a wicker suitcase he tossed into the trunk. “LaGrange’s?” Cal asked, his eyes wide. Roman nodded. When LaGrange emerged from the restaurant a little while later, they rolled up between him and the hotel, got out and said hello, invited him into the car by holding both his arms, and in he went. It was disturbingly easy. Cal got into the back seat with him; Roman got behind the wheel and put the car into drive. Cal’s limited instructions had been not to let go of LaGrange’s arm once they were in the car, to hold it tight, and Cal held it tight while LaGrange smiled and pinched his eyes and asked where they were going. To talk, Roman said. He leaned sideways and took a hammer from the glove compartment, handed it over the seat to Cal. When Cal asked what he was supposed to do with that, Roman said into the rearview mirror, “Don’t play dumb. I just wanted to talk to him. You’re the one who wanted to get mean.” He shifted his eyes over to LaGrange. “My son-in-law’s crazy.”

LaGrange had a look of scared confusion on his mustached baby face. He glanced at the hammer. Cal brandished it.

At the train station, Roman got the suitcase from the trunk, and he and Cal helped LaGrange out of the car. Cal slipped the hammer into his coat pocket but kept his grip on it, pushing the head of it against LaGrange’s hip. Each on an arm, they walked him inside. Bought him a ticket on the 8:22 to Toledo. From there, Roman told him, he could go anywhere in the world except back to Bonhomie, and he was never to contact Becky. Not a letter, not a phone call, not a psychic vibration. Not if he didn’t want to be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life.

“Does Rebecca know about this?” LaGrange asked as they stood on the platform.

“Rebecca’s fine,” Roman said.

“Yeah,” Cal said, “she’s fine.”

LaGrange looked from one to the other of them, as if trying to detect a crack in their combined front. His shoulders dropped as much as they could, given that they had hold of both his arms, but he held his head high. It wasn’t his first booting, or even his most dramatic. They heard the train approaching from the east, saw its headlight straining against the dawn and a column of black smoke unrolling across its spine. “Can I just say something?” he asked. They waited. “I’ll go. I won’t write or anything. But she’s remarkable. I’ve seen a lot, and I don’t know how she does what she does. She has some kind of gift.”

“Duly noted,” Roman said coldly.

The train stopped with a loud screech. A conductor opened one of the middle doors and stepped down, but no passenger left the train and no one else was waiting to get on. It was as if the 8:22 to Toledo had been sent for the sole purpose of picking up Casey LaGrange and whisking him away.

—

Cal’s reception that evening was not the hero’s welcome his imagination had allowed for. Becky was waiting for him in the wingback chair. Skip sat on the braided rug, surrounded by building blocks. By then, Roman had told her everything they’d done—including a few choice details Cal would have omitted. Roman had bragged about it all, canceling out any chance of Becky’s seeing even a shred of their good intention.

“I honestly thought it was what you wanted,” Cal said. “You said you wanted him gone.”

“I said I was going to take care of it. I was going talk to him. You threatened him with a hammer!”

He burned with embarrassment. He felt as angry as she looked, and she looked angry enough to tip over the furniture. Was there, he wondered, zero room in this situation for him to have stepped in? How was he supposed to have done nothing, given what she’d told him? What kind of spineless chump lets a huckster try to lure his wife away? He wanted to argue with every reaction she was having, but what came out of his mouth was, “The hammer was Roman’s idea. I just went along with it.”

No wonder there’s so much war in the world, Becky thought. She told him they’d pulled the rug out from under her. Stuck their noses into her doings, uninvited. She told him they’d treated her like a child who couldn’t manage her own affairs.

“Speaking of that,” he said, “if you’re so clairvoyant, why didn’t you know what a creep this guy was going to turn out to be?”

“Because I’m not clairvoyant, Cal. I can’t see the future. You know that much, surely, by now? I can’t look ahead and see how things are going to turn out. If I could, maybe we wouldn’t be having this argument at all.”

“Meaning what? You’d rather be with that exploitative clown?”

“Don’t act virtuous. You can’t stand that people admire me for something. You’re so insecure that you have to sabotage my efforts to try to do something with my life!”

Skip, two weeks past his first birthday, stepped away from the coffee table, waved his hands, smiling, and fell. His lip connected with the table, and the amount of blood that came running down his chin alarmed them both. After calming him down and inspecting the cut and determining he didn’t need stitches—Cal holding a cloth to his mouth and shh-ing him for a solid fifteen minutes—the argument seemed to be over. Cal got out of his blood-spotted shirt and the rest of his clothes for his evening shower, wondering if it really was over or if they’d just put a pin in it. He gave thought to apologizing for the way things had happened—owning up to his part of it—but he wasn’t about to apologize for ousting that carny. He was still mad. She was still furious. Two and a half years of marriage, and they’d never once gone to bed with a dispute left unresolved, they’d always managed to make at least a little headway, so that the next day had a foundation for moving forward. It was her rule, in fact. He wondered how they would possibly manage to follow it this time.

She answered that question while he was in the shower. When he emerged, the pajamas he’d laid out for himself on the bed weren’t there. He found them in the bedroom at the end of the hall—formerly her spiriting room, now the guest room—along with his toiletries, the block he stood on when he shaved and brushed his teeth, and the copy of The Grapes of Wrath he was a third of the way through.

—

The war in Europe was either winding down or had yet to plateau, depending on who you talked to. In the Pacific, things seemed as dire as ever. There was a small parade down Main Street for a soldier returning from Germany, his head bandaged, one of his eyes ruined by shrapnel. Days later there was another small parade for a sailor who had both arms bandaged wrist-to-shoulder and had survived an attack on a destroyer in the Philippine Sea. But people were getting used to the parades, and the parades were starting to feel sad.

Then, in April, Roosevelt traveled to Warm Springs, Georgia, and sat for the painter Elizabeth Shoumatoff. During the sitting, on his 4,422nd day as president, he complained of a headache and slumped forward, breaking his pose. He died that afternoon.

The Gazette only printed one edition per day and so didn’t have the news, but someone in Paulson’s Food Market had a copy of the evening edition of the Blade. Cal joined a huddle of people craning to read the story. The cashier was crying. The man holding the paper said he didn’t want to believe it, and the woman next to him said she only wished the president could have lived a little longer to see the end of the war. The cashier blew her nose, said the war was never going to end.

But nine days later, the Americans took Nuremberg and the Russians closed in on Berlin. Nine days after that, Hitler, hiding in his bunker, married his fiancée, watched her bite into a cyanide capsule, and shot himself. And two days after that, Mussolini and his mistress were executed in northern Italy and strung up by their feet in front of a gas station.

Such was the light at the end of that particular tunnel.

—

When Cal answered the door one afternoon in late April, there were two women who lived on the next block standing on the front porch and a third woman from down the street walking up the driveway. Mrs. Dodson was crossing the yard. Fred Yulin was coming up the sidewalk.

The Jenkinses were still living apart, within their house. It had been weeks, their mutual stubbornness, as much as their anger, perpetuating the arrangement. They functioned as parents and maintained the household together, but they lived as begrudging colleagues when it came to their interaction. The matter remained pinned. Apparently for the foreseeable future. Seeing all of these people show up at the house at once made Cal think Becky was throwing a party he wasn’t invited to. Then Mrs. Dodson showed him the special ad Becky had taken out in the Gazette, inviting people to a group séance for the purpose of communicating with FDR. Express your grief. Express your gratitude. Let him know. Today’s date. Now.

Cal carried extra chairs into the parlor to accommodate everyone, then excused himself.

—

May came. He sorted hinges and cabinet handles. He sorted washers. Along with wondering, now and then, what his life would have been like if he’d been born with symmetrical legs, and what it would have been like to have a different father, and a mother and siblings who’d lived, he sometimes wondered—alone, at work—how things might have gone for him if he hadn’t married the first girl he’d ever gone on a date with. There was no knowing, of course, and even wondering about it made him feel terrible. But he did wonder.

He couldn’t imagine getting the attention Becky got for something no one could see or touch. He wouldn’t want that kind of attention for anything, wouldn’t take it if they handed it to him. But on a deep and very private level, he envied her. She mattered. And to people she barely knew. Back in the fifth grade, Sean Robison had told him that some special thing was waiting for each of them in life—and look how that had ended up for Sean. He’d died at twenty-four, gotten almost no life at all, and here was Cal, selling hardware and waiting for—nothing. Killing time with both hands. He worried that the years would start passing more quickly, that the holidays and birthdays and anniversaries would domino. He and Becky would stay roommates for the rest of their lives, become wrinkled while they were still mad at each other. Skip would grow like a tree, get married, have children. In no time Cal would be one of the old-timers hobbling up and down Main Street, known as a respectable, retired member of the business community. Would that really be enough, if he were to keel over at seventy? Or fifty?

The bell sounded over the shop door. His first customer of the day, wanting to know if the store had a radio.

Chapter Five

Margaret—soon to be Margaret Anderson, and, eventually, Margaret Salt—was just Margaret when she was dropped off in the middle of the night at the Open Arms Orphanage in the Township of Doyle, Ohio, a hundred and forty miles southeast of Bonhomie. It was the first of October 1918.

Open Arms, by then already a relic from another time, stood on a side street between a milliner’s and a leather goods shop, in a small, defunct dressmaker’s factory. The orphanage had been born as the passion project of a Cincinnati steel heiress and was privately maintained throughout what would later be called the Gilded Age—a time before world-size wars, when railroads were spreading across the country like kudzu and the rich were being photographed and seen by the poor for the first time and wanted to be well thought of. When the steel heiress died, she left paperwork in place for the orphanage to qualify for government funding. She also left a small annuity that was managed by a board of trustees at one of the local banks. For all of that—or because of it—the orphanage remained pretty much the same as it had always been: six dormitory rooms, each housing up to four girls (never boys) who slept in bunk beds and kept their donated clothes in apple crates that sometimes doubled as nightstands and chairs. The day-to-day operations of Open Arms were in the hands of its live-in administrator. The previous administrator had depended heavily on her secretary and chloral hydrate, and by the time that administrator retired the secretary had been running the place for several years. The board wasn’t blind to this; they promoted her. So when the handbell clanged in the middle of the night, it was thirty-five-year-old Lydia Verts who sprang out of bed.

The handbell was tied to a basket Lydia kept on the deep sill of one of the orphanage’s three front windows. It was a just-in-case basket that had a history of false alarms. Clang, clang for an empty Cracker Jack box, a discarded wingtip shoe, a watermelon rind, a dead blue jay—left, she suspected, by boys on their way to and from the school a block away. No matter; the bell had to be answered. Never before in the middle of the night, though. She tied her robe as she walked, her long auburn hair—already streaked with gray—flowing behind her, her slippers whispering across the creaky floor. She pushed in the button on the wall and waited for the overhead bulb to spark; she was still learning to trust electricity. Then she pulled back the curtains, opened the metal shutters, and there, of all the things to be found in a basket meant for a baby, was a baby.

Wrapped in a cream-colored blanket. Wide awake, green eyes peeking out of the folds. Lydia pulled the basket inside and closed the shutters against the cold night air. Instinctually—and against the whole premise of the basket, she supposed—she set it down, ran to the front door, drew back the bolt, and went outside to look up and down the street, thinking, Are you sure? Have you thought this through? But it was a short block lit by a single streetlamp and not far to either corner; no one was there. She went back inside.

When she lifted the baby out of the basket and unwrapped the blanket, she discovered a head of bright red hair that was almost orange in the electric light. The baby was eight, maybe nine months old, Lydia guessed. Pinned to her tiny shirt was a handwritten note. Please take care of this baby as I cannot. I named her Margaret, but call her what you like.

Lydia was overworked and Open Arms was understaffed. If the baby’s name was Margaret, so be it. But Margaret what? Anderson would do for now, Lydia decided. It would change.

She carried the baby to the apartment she lived in at the back of the facility and, with her free hand, pulled the bedspread off her bed and laid it across the floor. She set the baby on the middle of the bedspread and wrapped it around her to keep her in place, then went back out into the hall, trying to think of everything she was going to need. There was a donated crib in the storeroom; it was filled with clothes, also donated and in need of mending. She emptied the crib, wiped it off, wheeled it down the hall to her apartment, and put the baby in it. She walked back to the storeroom and dug through the chest of leftover baby supplies and found diapers, an aspirin box of safety pins, a bottle with a nipple cap. Even a tin baby rattle.

You never know where the day’s going to take you, she thought, shaking the rattle.

What else?

Milk.

In her apartment, she got the bottle from the icebox and poured some milk into a pan to warm it. Margaret never cried, never made a sound. She remained upright in the crib, just as Lydia had positioned her, and looked about the room with what seemed to be guarded curiosity. She stared at the headless seamstress’s dummy that was a leftover from the building’s dressmaker days; Lydia kept an old light-blue cardigan draped over its shoulders, and a plastic necklace she’d won at a carnival. “That’s just a dummy,” she said to the baby. “I call her Truly. She’s truly headless, ha ha.” She picked Margaret up and carried her around while the gas hissed and the ice dripped into the pan beneath the icebox. She whisper-sang “Love Sends a Little Gift of Roses” into the baby’s ear. She said, “My little firefly.”

Margaret had fallen asleep in her arms. Lydia kissed her on the forehead, laid her in the crib, and tucked a clean blanket around her. Then she turned off the stove and crawled back into bed.

—

Lydia had help at Open Arms, just never enough. A state-appointed staff of two showed up each day for a few hours to prepare lunch and dinner (the former they served in the little dining room, the latter they put away for later—breakfast was in Lydia’s hands), and a state-appointed staff of two came once a week and washed the massive amounts of dirty laundry the orphanage generated, then strung it out and left it to dry on clotheslines that zigzagged the factory yard. A volunteer nurse from the hospital came by every few days to take temperatures and listen to lungs. A rotating handful of volunteers took “babysitting” shifts and corralled the girls to and from school. Lydia tended to the administrative side of things and the general upkeep, and organized the army of little folding hands needed to keep up with the laundry, and performed the occasional disciplining and mothering the job required.

She also worked with the state to help find the girls homes. Or, she didn’t help find the homes, since she had no means or time to do that, but she made sure the girls were properly recorded in the state system (through a series of phone calls and letters) and were ready to go, once homes were found, and she made sure they went. Sometimes the girls were adopted. More often, they were placed with foster families who were in need of the money the state ponied up, and then lived in limbo, Lydia imagined. For her, it was bittersweet sending the girls away—every time. It was bittersweet welcoming them back, too, if they returned.

She’d had to estimate a birthday for Margaret’s records. It was probably March, but that was always a dreary, dead-cold month, so she made it April. April 9, because she had to pick a date on the calendar, and her own birthday was as good as any.

Margaret was assigned to her first foster home not long after her second birthday. The family lived one county over, and she was brought back a year later when the mother contracted polio.

She went into her second foster home, two counties over, when she was three, and she was brought back six months later when that foster mother was put in jail for pickpocketing.

The third foster home was even farther away, and Margaret’s stay there lasted for almost three years—until the summer of 1925, when a state inspector deemed it necessary to have her removed. “Unsanitary conditions,” the report read, and Lydia felt terrible and guilty about that, though she couldn’t have known.

Margaret was seven now and eyed the orphanage with as wary a look as a seven-year-old could manage. She smiled when she saw Lydia, though, and hugged her. She also seemed to remember the layout of the building, reclaimed her old, lower bunk. In no time, she was darting around the halls, playing with the other girls, her red hair zipping past the gray walls like a flame.

—

None of the girls, of course, were to be thought of as Lydia’s family. Lydia had a family—or had what was left of the one she’d grown up with. Her mother, still in Galena. Her younger sister, married now and living in Mt. Gilead. Lydia had been married once, too, back in her early twenties, to a young man named Bo—a hod carrier who brought them to Doyle for a construction job, favored a plum-colored baker’s boy cap, and hit her as a matter of course, because he’d grown up watching his father hit his mother. Bo didn’t see the need for Lydia to take a correspondence course in secretarial training. He didn’t see the need for her to go out after dark without him. One day at work, less than a year into their marriage, a horse kicked him in the head. A foreman came and got Lydia and hurried her to the building site. Bo’s skull was partly flattened and she had no idea how he was still alive. He looked at her with his working eye and breathed heavily for several minutes. Then he died. Someone brought out a tarp and, glancing respectfully at Lydia, laid it across him. Someone went for the undertaker. Lydia walked back to the boarding house, and within a week she was enrolled in a correspondence course.

The boarding house was down the street from Open Arms. For a year, she’d watched from the window as the girls were walked to and from school, and to and from the park, always accompanied by this woman or that. The girls looked to be a handful. Lydia needed a job.

Her mother, she felt certain, would want her to remarry and have a family. Her sister would beg her not to take the job at the orphanage because it would keep her in Doyle. But both of them knew what she’d been through, and neither of them said a word against the decisions she went on to make in her life.

—

Back into the local school Margaret went. (They were understanding about the precarious geography of the girls at Open Arms.) She did well—in part because she did nothing but pay attention and made no close friends; orphans and non-orphans didn’t interact.

When she was sent off to her fourth foster home, at the age of nine, it was 1927 and Lydia had grown fondest of her out of all the girls she’d ever taken care of. Margaret was, after all, a special case: the only baby ever deposited in the basket (which Lydia no longer kept in the front window after she found a stray cat sitting in it). She was also the only girl Lydia had ever allowed herself to nickname—because nicknames led to attachment, and attachment made everything harder. Firefly. She teared up helping Margaret pack her few things into a little suitcase—even as she told her she was going to an exciting new place with lots of fun adventures. She then asked the social worker to make sure that the home Margaret was going to was clean and that the foster parents were good, caring people. She expected reports now and then, she said, knowing she wouldn’t get them because that wasn’t how things worked.

The new foster home was on the Pennsylvania border. The new parents, Selby was their last name, seemed okay to Margaret at first. But there was another girl in the house, a foster from a different orphanage who was fifteen and had been living with the Selbys for a year by the time Margaret arrived. Her name was Thelma, and she had no interest in pretending to be Margaret’s sister or even her friend.

“Don’t you ever blink?” was the first thing Thelma said to Margaret, the day she arrived.

Margaret said yes and proved it by blinking, but Thelma didn’t think that was funny. Nor did she seem impressed when she asked Margaret what she liked to do and Margaret said, “I like to dance.”

Thelma had on a loose light-blue cotton dress that came to her knees. She sat on the floor of the bedroom they shared, pulled that dress down and tucked every part of her body into it until just her head was showing. “Let’s see.”

Lydia had given herself dancing lessons for her thirtieth birthday. At first, she’d danced with Truly, the dressmaker’s dummy, to make Margaret laugh. Then she’d taught Margaret some steps. Shown her how to jitterbug and taught her how to do Charleston knee swaps. Margaret did a few knee swaps for Thelma.

Thelma rolled her eyes. “That won’t get you anywhere. The warden and his wife are all giggles now, but wait till you’ve been here a while. He’ll get bossy, and she’ll start walking around like somebody shot her dog.”

“Mrs. Selby said we could make cupcakes.”

“She lies.”

Thelma did sloppy Charleston knee swaps and crossed her eyes and said, “Am I doing it right?” Every few days, she reminded Margaret that they were orphans. And not just orphans, but “dirty, stinkin’ orphans. Just because we’re here doesn’t mean we’re not.”

“You’re mean!” Margaret yelled at her, crying. Just once.

“It’s the only way to survive,” Thelma said, rocking on her bed and drawing herself into her dress.

True to Thelma’s word, one morning whatever kindness had been in Mrs. Selby’s face was gone, her cheeks went slack, and her eyes went vacant. She worked in a laundromat and brought home handfuls of loose soap flakes in her pockets that she put into a big coffee tin.

Mr. Selby wore his kindness like a hat; it was either on, or off. He had a little red storm in the white part of one eye. He worked on cars in a nearby garage and came home early sometimes in the afternoon dressed in his smudgy coveralls, just as the girls were returning from school. When that happened, he sent Margaret out into the yard to play, though there was nothing to do out there, and he spent time with Thelma, helping her with her homework. Then he went back to his job. Thelma never told Margaret what homework he helped her with.

The only decoration the Selbys put up for the one Christmas Margaret spent with them was a sprig of mistletoe between the dining room and living room, and while she never saw anyone kiss under it, it hung from the lintel for months, like a bat.

There were arguments late at night, as loud as cars. She and Thelma buried their heads under their pillows to try to drown them out.

Once, at the table, Margaret accidentally knocked a bowl of cereal milk onto the floor. Thelma laughed and said, “Don’t cry over spilt milk!” and it was so unusual to see a smile on her face that Margaret laughed too—until Mrs. Selby slapped Margaret so hard that little flecks of silver swam in the air for a minute. Thelma hollered, “Stop it!” at Mrs. Selby and knocked her hand against Mrs. Selby’s arm. Mrs. Selby chased her with a wooden spoon into the back of the house.

Thelma ran away not long after that and was brought back in a police car. A few days later, a man and woman from the state came and collected her and her few things. Margaret never found out where Thelma went. She didn’t want to ask the Selbys, and they didn’t seem to want to tell her. It didn’t matter, because within days the same two people from the state came and collected her, and took her back to Open Arms.

—

She’d been gone for more than a year. Lydia, who knew nothing of Thelma, only that the state had wanted to pull Margaret out of the Selbys’ home because of a “contentious arrangement,” was both heartbroken and overjoyed to see her. She did her best to tamp down both of those reactions and noticed that this time, Margaret didn’t look wary of the orphanage. The Selbys left their mistletoe up. That was the one detail the girl had to share with Lydia about her year in their house. As time passed, that year began to feel like a long, fitful dream they had endured together. Lydia put Margaret back in school again—this time in the fourth grade. Margaret had been in and out of so many different classrooms that she’d fallen behind some, but her reading skills were fine; she’d read all the way through The Corner House Girls series while she lived with the Selbys (the books had been left behind by some previous girl). Lydia found her one day looking at the illustrated copy of the Rubaiyat she kept on her coffee table. “He was the Astronomer Poet of Persia,” Lydia said, nodding to show that Margaret should be impressed. Margaret looked bored. There were plenty of other things to read, though. Books of all sorts found their way into donation boxes and ended up on the shelves that lined one of Lydia’s peach-colored living room walls. Setting the Astronomer Poet aside, she introduced Margaret to Heidi, and Black Beauty, and Emily of New Moon.

—

At eleven, Margaret began to tend to the younger girls, look out for them in little ways. She walked around with a hairbrush and brushed the backs of their heads while they ate breakfast. She lined them up when it was time for an outing, tugged their stocking caps down on their heads.

You never have to leave again, Lydia wanted to tell her.

Margaret couldn’t help noticing that the girls who got adopted (as opposed to fostered) were all little, five or under. The youngest was in and out in a month. Your chances diminished as you got older, it seemed. Ten was old enough to understand that her situation wasn’t a simple one. She wanted to have a house and a yard and parents, but not if they were like the Selbys, and how many Selbys were out there? Twice she was called into Lydia’s office to meet couples looking to adopt, and both times she could easily picture them turning mean, or strange. She tried to be polite, though, and watched them take their business elsewhere.

She asked Lydia if she was still an orphan.

They were unpacking a food donation, stacking cans of vegetables and boxes of flour and rice in the pantry.

“That’s what it says on paper,” Lydia said.

“What paper?”

“Everyone has a paper. That’s what yours says.”

Did it say Orphan, Margaret wondered, or Dirty, Stinkin’ Orphan?

—

One evening, late, during a thunderstorm, Margaret did what she hadn’t done since before the Selbys: she left her room, came into Lydia’s apartment, and crawled into bed with her. Lydia was reading. She set her book aside, picked up her knitting from the nightstand, and as they watched the lightning flash beyond the window panes and counted the seconds till the thunder, they tied yarn into loops and made Jacob’s Ladders and Witches’ Brooms.

Somehow—along with the questions that were asked repeatedly over the years—there were things that hadn’t come up before. Margaret asked if Lydia had parents.

“I do. Well, one. My mother. My father died when I was little.”

“Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“I have a sister. My brother died in France, in the war.”

“What did my note say?”

“Oh, Firefly, I told you.”

“Tell me again.”

“It said, ‘Please take good care of this little baby named Margaret, who I love very much but can’t take care of,’ ” Lydia said, hoping that was the way she’d worded it the last time Margaret had asked. She’d lost track of the note over the years.

Lightning in the distance. Five Mississippis, then thunder. The storm was moving away.

“Why couldn’t she take care of me? Was she really poor? Or really busy?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know anything about her?”

“I know she had to be kind and loving to write a note like that.”

Kind and loving didn’t square with leaving a person in a basket, and they both knew it. Margaret made a Star. She made a Moth. Lightning flashed, and she zigzagged her fingers through the yarn, trying to finish before the accompanying thunder. “Fishing spear,” she said, holding up her hands.

They heard the distant, rolling boom.

—

Sometimes, she imagined her mother as very young and having patches on her clothes and coal smudges on her face. Sometimes, she was a beautiful woman of no age at all, with a purse on one arm, a baby on the other, and things to do.

She never gave a thought to who her father was.

None of the other girls talked about their birth parents, she noticed. Maybe they didn’t know any more about them than she knew about hers. They also didn’t talk much about any of the homes they’d lived in before Open Arms, those who’d been previously fostered, unless it was to mention a game they used to play or a friend they used to have. One girl, tall and blond, talked about her next parents.

They were in the yard, ten of them, folding sheets and towels and blouses and skirts and underwear, slowly denuding the clotheslines. The blond girl standing beside Margaret said to her folding partner—and to the rest of them within earshot—that her next parents were going to have servants to take care of the washing and folding, and all she was going to have to do, besides go to school, was ride horses.

“How do you know?” Margaret asked.

“Because they’re going to be rich and own a horse stable.”

“But how do you know that, for sure?” Margaret didn’t mean it as a challenge; she thought the blond girl had heard something in advance about where she was going to be sent, and she was genuinely curious. The other girls were too.

It turned out the blond girl didn’t know anything about where she was going. She’d just been wishful thinking out loud. She went quiet instead of answering Margaret’s question, and Margaret was sorry she’d asked, because it made her feel like one of those girls at school who asked, Why didn’t your parents want you? How come no one’s adopted you? What’s wrong with you?

—

In the summer of 1931, at three a.m., Lydia was awakened by something much bigger than a thunderstorm. The wind smacked against the windows, the lightning was constant, the thunder sounded like the fists of giants pounding on the roof. She was on her way to the girls when an especially loud bang made the lights go out. The wind got louder and changed into a high-pitched screech, and the floor shook beneath her feet. She put her hand against one of the walls to try to stop it all—

And it stopped: the rumbling, the screeching, even the lightning. Through the mesh windows—two of which were cracked, she noticed—the sky had somehow taken on a yellowish hue.

She ran down the hall to the dormitory wing. Why was no one crying? Where were the girls? Their rooms were empty, one after another. Her heart beat hard and fast in her chest. It hurt, beating that way. But the girls were all in the last room, it turned out, the supply closet she’d converted into a private room for Margaret when she’d turned thirteen. Margaret had either corralled them or they’d run to her; she’d lit a lantern with matches she wasn’t supposed to have and was consoling them and counting heads at the same time.

A tornado, they found out the next day. People down the block had seen it jump right over the orphanage and touch on the milliner’s next door. The orphanage’s clotheslines were snapped, fallen, some of the T-posts carried away, and there were hats all over the yard. Hats!

—

Lydia gave Margaret different kinds of books to read as she got older. Little Women. Anne of Green Gables. All the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. She pulled Great Expectations off the shelf, and that took forever because they read it aloud to each other in little increments, but Margaret loved it. A dirty, stinkin’ kid no one wants who gets a benefactor and falls in love—what could be better than that?

Lydia also gave her more and more to do, believing that tasks and responsibilities helped pass the time and made a person feel useful. After her friend Wendell made them new posts for their clotheslines, she put Margaret in charge of the folding brigade, and Margaret took right to it. She also started helping with the general cleaning and straightening Open Arms required on a daily basis. (It was a treat, Lydia discovered, just having someone pick up all the handkerchiefs, buttons, and barrettes twenty-four girls could shed in a day.) At fourteen, Margaret was helping out with the filing, and it became one of her official duties to keep an eye on the new arrivals—most of them between the ages of four and eight—and to make sure they behaved themselves and were treated well by the others. At fifteen, she was running errands alone in town.

Lydia began slipping her a quarter on Saturdays—she called it mad money—and sending her off to have fun. Margaret had no idea what her options were. “Get ice cream with some of your school friends,” Lydia suggested, because she didn’t know that, at the end of the day, you either went to your house or to your orphanage, and that was that. There were girls who said hi to Margaret in school and ignored her in town when she was running errands.

She went to the pictures instead. Her favorites had dancing in them. Footlight Parade. Flying Down to Rio. The men were all narrow and dashing and rubbery; the women were funny and sophisticated and able to travel at a moment’s notice, because they always had a steamer trunk packed and ready to go. If there wasn’t a dance picture showing, it was usually a cops-and-robbers picture, and there were two types of women in those, as far as Margaret could tell: the ones with class, and the ones without. The ones with class worked as bank tellers and secretaries, went on dates, and fell in love with handsome men who were in the act of either committing or solving a crime. The ones without class were disheveled-looking, dated cop-killers, and grabbed the steering wheel at the worst possible moment. Every opening title lifted her from her seat and invited her on a little trip. Every THE END brought her back to Doyle, and Open Arms.

—

Lydia’s friend Wendell had an ear that looked like it was trying to tuck itself into his head. It turned out he used to be a professional boxer, which surprised Margaret because he didn’t look like someone who could punch people for a living. But what was even more surprising was that he was sweet on Lydia—and she was sweet on him! They had a standing weekly date that just happened to overlap Margaret’s movie time.

On her seventeenth birthday—and Lydia’s fifty-second—Lydia surprised her with blueberry pancakes for breakfast and a new dress she’d just finished making for her: bright yellow with white piping. When Margaret finished eating, Lydia told her to put on the dress and her good shoes and meet her out front.

Wendell’s tan Ford Roadster was parked on the street. Top down, white interior gleaming. He stood next to it in a jacket with a carnation sticking out of the lapel, and he pretended to be a professional chauffeur as he helped Margaret into the rumble seat, then held the passenger’s door open for Lydia—who, Margaret noticed, had put on lipstick and her fancy shawl.

“What about the girls?” Margaret asked.

“Jeanette and Doreen have come in for the day,” Lydia said.

“Where are we going?” Margaret asked, thrilled just to be in an automobile.

“I’m awaiting orders,” Wendell said.

“Out to the old mud puddle and twice around the turnip,” Lydia said, and Margaret knew they were at least getting out of town.

They drove fifty miles away, to Columbus. It was her first city, the first tall buildings she’d ever laid eyes on, the first time she’d seen that many people, everywhere she looked, moving around like the feeder fish in the tank at the pet store. Wendell parked on Rich Street and put coins in the parking meter, and the three of them walked through the throng, past buildings that made her dizzy to look up at. They rode the streetcar up and down Cleveland Avenue. They ate in a fancy coffee shop with printed menus, and she ordered an éclair just because she’d never eaten something that had an accent mark. She smiled more than she ever had in her life that day; her face hurt from it. Wendell pulled two tiny candles out of his blazer pocket, stuck one in her éclair and the other in Lydia’s cucumber sandwich, and lit them both with his Ronson.

—

So Columbus became the place she thought about when she saw the exciting hustle and bustle of the city—any city—in the pictures. Columbus was the opposite of Doyle, it was the opposite of Open Arms and her little room that she was happy to have but was ready never to see again. Columbus was where the handsome young men were, where she might work at a nightclub and meet the person who would dance her into another world, another life. Columbus was where she could become sophisticated—which, to her, meant go to museums and eat in restaurants and wear nice things and laugh ha ha ha in a soft, low voice when something funny was said and speak an occasional phrase in another language. Columbus was the place where she could become someone other than the girl no one wanted.

She decided, walking home from the pictures one Saturday, that she would move there when she turned eighteen. The very thought of it made her heart quicken.

“We’ll have to talk about that,” Lydia said brightly the first time Margaret mentioned it. But they didn’t talk about it.

Six months went by, and when Margaret brought up wanting to move to Columbus again, Lydia had the same response.

Two months from their shared birthday, Margaret brought up the move a third time. “This topic again!” Lydia groaned. She said she wished they hadn’t gone. She said whatever Margaret thought Columbus was, it wasn’t. It wasn’t filled with benefactors, or guardian angels, or tap-dancing, or any of the snaz Margaret might have seen in the pictures. She pointed out that Margaret didn’t have to go anywhere. No one was kicking her out. She was welcome to just—stay.

Was it unreasonable for Lydia to suggest that this suddenly grown-up person remain fixed to the spot she was in? Yes. But Margaret wasn’t just any girl. She wasn’t just the sole infant orphan Open Arms had ever received anonymously. She was also the only girl to spend the majority of her childhood within its walls. What was Lydia supposed to do without her? “Just know, it’s an option if you want it,” she said. Then, alone in her room, she broke down sobbing.

But in the coming weeks, she set about doing everything she could think to do for a naïve, city-bound, beautiful young woman in 1936. For Margaret had grown into a true beauty, with flowing red hair and bright-green eyes, good cheekbones and a wry smile. She had a fox’s coloring and a fox’s face, that beautiful. Her parents, Lydia thought, must have been lookers. She wished Margaret were less of one, though. The world was hard enough on women with average looks, like her; she could only imagine how it must come down on the beauties.

She checked to see if any of Margaret’s clothes needed mending, culled the donation box. She made a few phone calls to Columbus and secured a room for Margaret at a women’s lodging house she knew about through social services. She gave Margaret the name and address of a large cafeteria on East Long Street owned by a Mr. Anton, where someone named Delores, a friend of a friend of Lydia’s, worked and said they were often hiring. She insisted Margaret take enough money from her for three months’ rent, and some extra just to get on her feet. More times than Margaret could count, Lydia reminded her that she was going to have to be careful.

The day of Margaret’s fifth and final departure from Open Arms, the sky was gray and heavy with the look and smell of rain, but it didn’t rain. Wendell drove, and this time Lydia claimed the rumble seat, thinking she would be able to cry the whole way without being noticed. In front of the women’s lodging house at the edge of Weinland Park, she pushed her handkerchief into her face and gave Margaret fifty extra dollars she said was from Wendell, who’d wandered down to the corner to smoke and give the two of them some privacy.

“Use good judgment,” Lydia said, holding both of Margaret’s hands, looking her right in the eye.

“I will.”

“Don’t talk to anyone who doesn’t seem nice. Don’t talk to any man who has his pants hiked up and his business shoved over to one side, on display.”

“I won’t.”

“Oh, Firefly!” Lydia let go—only to throw her arms around Margaret and hug her tight and cry into her neck.

Margaret was crying too. Into Lydia’s ear, she said, “Thank you.”

Lydia made her promise to call her collect in three days, and then once a week for the first month, reverse-charge, just to let her know she was okay. And she made Margaret promise to write.

In Wendell’s car, with Columbus receding behind them, Lydia cried and cried, feeling as if she were one more person to abandon that redheaded child. Wendell talked to her, tried to comfort her, and what he said made sense. Wendell always made sense. But it also made sense that Lydia felt gutted and irresponsible and unbearably sad, and what did he know about that? Gradually, the thought of all she had to do that evening washed over and settled her some—which girl needed cough syrup before going to bed, which two had been fighting that morning and might need to be checked on after dinner. She pulled Wendell’s arm around her shoulder.

He kept it there all the way back to Doyle.

Chapter Six

Only in Columbus, a city of more than 250,000 people in 1936, did Margaret realize what a child she’d been in the orphanage. And what a grown-up she needed to be here, where almost everyone walked briskly and either didn’t see you or noticed you too much. Here and there, men whistled at her—that whistle: straight up, straight down. She didn’t feel ready for that sort of attention, not yet. Those first few days, she ate in diners and rode on streetcars and was bumped into and pardon-me’d, and she held her nose as she walked past garbage cans, and stepped over a line of blood running down to the curb from an alley beside a butcher’s, and it was all interesting to her, even the gritty parts. Her heart jumped at the slamming of a delivery truck door or the honking of a horn. A boy who couldn’t have been more than twelve asked her for directions, and when she apologized for not being able to help him he said, “That’s okay. Nice gams, toots.” An old man on a bench was holding a dozen or so roses and held one out to her, saying she should have it. She thanked him, then gave him the nickel he wanted for it.

As she walked with the rose in her hand, her eyes drank in the shop windows filled with everything from ladies’ shoes to necklaces to sausage links to guitars. One store sold nothing but gloves; another, toupees. She found an alley off High Street where a palm reader sat out on a chair in front of her narrow storefront waiting for customers. Right next to her was another palm-reading place, and beside that a signboard advertising predictions of the future read in your palm. All of them together in one stretch, as if the city had zoned it that way. She felt surprisingly grown-up in her decision to waste twenty-five cents on the palm reader. The little room they sat in had no ventilation; someone hammered down the hall. The woman wore a sequined scarf tied around her head and ran her finger up and down Margaret’s palm. She predicted romance. That was exciting, until Margaret saw the woman eyeing the rose in her lap. “Whoever gave you that rose is going to be your husband,” the woman said.

“God, I hope not,” said Margaret. She paid the woman and left her the rose as a tip.

From there, she went to the fine arts museum and looked at paintings by people she’d never heard of. Picasso, Degas, Braque, Matisse. Then she walked through the narrow park along the Scioto River, where she came upon artists with sketchpads and canvases set up on easels. The painters painted the river, the American Insurance Union tower, the statehouse dome. The sketchers sketched portraits of people willing to sit (and pay a little). The likenesses they achieved were remarkable.

But perhaps her favorite thing about the city, those first few days and nights, was the signs. Block after block of projecting signs that snatched playfully at your eye as you rode past on the streetcar. And the neon! The Rexall sign in Doyle had been neon, that was it. In downtown Columbus, she spotted neon almost everywhere she looked. In the evening, on the way back to the lodging house, she rode the streetcars and stared at the signs as she passed them, then closed her eyes and saw them on the backs of her eyelids.

—

The lodging house was filled with young women who seemed drained of most of their hope by the end of the day, and in that way it was like an orphanage for grown-ups. Some of the women were Polish immigrants who worked in the nearby Ford factory; they kept mostly to themselves. The rooms were all single, but the walls and doors, even the floors were thin; Margaret heard every sneeze, every cleared throat. Still, it was a luxury to have a place to be alone when she was tired—especially those first few days, when she was feeling so excited and overwhelmed.

As promised, she called Lydia at the end of the third day—from inside the phone booth in the lobby of the lodging house. Lydia wanted to hear about everything, but she had so many questions that it was hard to get a word in, at first. Margaret told her she was fine and safe and happy and yes, she wouldn’t eat every meal in a diner for the rest of her life but would buy groceries and use the shared kitchen in the lodging house, and no, she wasn’t talking to strangers, and yes, she was going to that cafeteria the very next day to see about a job. And she would call again in a week.

Another lodger—standing just off to the side of the booth in the lobby—was waiting to use the phone. Margaret pulled the door open, smiled at her, and stepped out. The young woman smiled back and said thank you and stepped in. Just like grown-ups, Margaret thought.

Then came her fourth day in Columbus.

—

The cafeteria was on East Long Street and had an orange brick façade and an orange awning sticking out over the sidewalk. It was still called Anton’s, but it wasn’t owned by Mr. Anton anymore. It was owned by a Mr. Higgs, who was around forty and wore a shiny brown suit and had Valentino hair and full, almost feminine lips. Margaret could see how a person might find him attractive. He invited her into his office, which had an overseer’s view of both the twin serving lines and the enormous dining room with its dark-paneled walls and field of orange tablecloths. He offered her a chair, told her he ran a “tight ship,” went over the rules of the place, and, without asking her a single thing about herself, told her she was the most promising candidate he’d met for the position he was presently looking to fill: line server. But he was just on his way to lunch at the moment; would she care to join him?

“Is there a Delores who works here?” Margaret asked. The friend of a friend Lydia had mentioned.

No Delores, Mr. Higgs said. But what about lunch? His treat, of course. “Mind you, I’m not the kind of boss who fraternizes with his employees.”

Whatever kind of boss he was, she needed a job and had planned to eat a bologna sandwich for lunch. She accepted his invitation.

They walked several blocks to a place called Kuenning’s. There, he recommended the lobster. Margaret admitted she’d never had lobster before, and soon there were two dead, pink prehistoric creatures on platters between them. The waiter startled Margaret by tying a bib around her neck. Mr. Higgs said, “Follow my lead,” and selected from the instruments lined up beside his plate. As he worked, he talked about the cafeteria business, federal interest rates, and—licking his fingers—the Smoot–Hawley Tariff. He talked about how he was expanding into real estate, and as they were leaving the restaurant, he asked if he could show her a nearby apartment he was thinking of purchasing—a place that turned out not to be empty, as she’d imagined, but fully furnished and decorated. Someone’s name was on the buzzer, and that person’s mail was on the table. But Mr. Higgs had the key. Once they were inside and the door was closed, he said, “Good, then,” and began kissing her neck.

When Margaret was sixteen, Lydia had explained sex to her in flat textbook terms—Tab A, Slot B, baby—adding, “You don’t ever have to do it if you don’t want to.” Margaret had also heard about sex from the last girl to be older than her at Open Arms, a girl named Sophia who’d told her it hurt like hell the first time. It hurt the second and third time too, she said, but after that it was Fourth of July, siss-boom-ba. Margaret asked how many times Sophia had had sex and Sophia counted on her fingers and said five. You just had to make sure all the boy’s yoke went into his poke so that he didn’t knock you up. (An explanation of all those terms followed, and Margaret never looked at eggs the same way again.)

Mr. Higgs’s almost feminine lips didn’t feel bad on her neck, actually. She wasn’t sure how far he wanted to take things—this was always the part in the picture where the view switched to curtains billowing or a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray—but if he wanted to go further, maybe she could kill two birds with one stone. Get the painful part over with (since it had to happen sometime) and secure employment. She needed to survive in order to find a husband and have a wonderful life; she needed a job in order to survive.

He wanted to go further. He took off his suitcoat, his shoes, his pants, and his underwear, but left on his shirt, tie, socks, and garters. He had a poke with him and kept his yoke in it. And it hurt like hell, just as Sophia had said it would. His tongue tasted like lobster and his breath smelled like cigarettes, and all Margaret could think about as he grunted over her was that Thelma might have suffered this very thing under Mr. Selby. Poor, fifteen-year-old Thelma.

Afterward, she gathered her clothes and carried them into the bathroom, where she was tempted to draw a bath and climb into it (since the tub at the lodging house was usually claimed in the evenings). If only she were alone. When she came out, Mr. Higgs was back in his shiny brown suit and standing before the mirror over the fireplace, combing his hair with a little tortoiseshell comb. How fun that was, he said. He hoped it was fun for her, too, despite the timing. He’d noticed the blood on the sheet and assumed she was having her period.

“It was fun,” Margaret said, thinking, It’s over. Catching his eye in the mirror and realizing they hadn’t discussed the job since leaving his office, she added, trying to sound playful, “But I thought you told me you weren’t the kind of boss who fraternized with his employees.”

“Ah,” Mr. Higgs said. “Good then. On to business.” He snugged up the knot of his necktie. “The only reason this happened is because I haven’t hired you yet.”

There was a smaller mirror with a stamped tin frame on the wall next to the door. Beside it, a desiccated Palm Sunday palm tied into a cross. Who lived here? Margaret checked her hair. “Yet?”

“The job is yours, of course.” He mentioned the salary, which sounded low, but she had nothing to compare it to. “And I keep my word,” he said. “This won’t happen again, now that you’re on the payroll. I’m a married man, after all.” He told her she could start the next day, that she should be there at 7:30 a.m. and report to Mrs. Conroy. There was, by the way, no need to mention any of this to Mrs. Conroy.

“Any of what?” Margaret asked. She hated the sight of him.

Mr. Higgs smiled. He said he could envision her as a greeter one day. He took out his wallet. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but as soon as you can get around to it,” he waved a hand at her blouse and midi-length skirt, “mind the store a little better, would you?” He produced a ten dollar bill. “This”—he said, waving the money—“has nothing to do with what just happened. This is a favor, because I see such potential in you. Spruce up to match those looks, and I’ll tell Mrs. Conroy to make sure you’re on track to become a greeter.”

Margaret just looked at the money and thought, This is one of those decisions people in movies make. What would Bette Davis do? As sweetly sharp as she could muster, she said, “You think that’ll be enough?”

Mr. Higgs looked impressed and pulled out an additional five.

—

That night, when she got back to her room, she cried and pounded her head against her pillow. Never again, she told herself. Never, ever again. Because somehow it became, in her mind, something she’d decided to do. Or something she’d allowed to happen, at least. Was allowing the same as deciding? She didn’t know! And had no one to ask. She wasn’t about to call Lydia reverse-charge and ask her. Should she keep the job?

She couldn’t do this—start her new life—feeling bad about herself. She had to feel good about herself, somehow. Lie to herself. You did nothing wrong. Of course she was keeping the job. That was the whole point.

She got out of her clothes, pulled on her robe, and walked down the hall for her second shower of the day.

—

Smiling at customers, spooning food, and moving pans around for eight hours: that was a part of grown-up life she wasn’t wild about. The hourly wage part. It was so tedious. At least at the orphanage there’d been folding day, and hose-off-the-porches day. (Who would have thought she’d miss hose-off-the-porches day?) Anton’s was hours of serving meats and green beans and potatoes and cobbler to snooty women and leering men and children who picked their noses and ordered by pointing. The best part of the job, besides the paycheck, turned out to be the absence of Mr. Higgs, who never came to the lines and rarely showed his face to his employees.

At the end of her first week, with the fifteen dollars in her purse, she clocked out, walked with her sore feet and aching legs up to High Street, and rode the streetcar to a department store a co-worker named Dotty had told her about, a place where they had just about everything you could want, not bad prices, and sales, she said, don’t forget to look for the sales. The store was called Lazarus.

Margaret had walked past Lazarus several times and had admired its window displays and neon and revolving doors. Entering, she felt her breath leave her lungs, and for a moment she forgot to take a new breath in. The store was like nothing she’d ever imagined, the size and scope of it, the high ceilings, the leaf-topped columns. The mirrored panels placed throughout that gave the whole inside a wonderful endlessness. Entering Lazarus was like stepping into a city within a city, and finding a thousand villages. Every department had its own industry and its own smiling people. And while the lights were bright and dazzling throughout, the look of the departments kept changing. Dark polished wood, mustard-colored paneling, white lacquer, metal-framed glass, row after row of clothing racks and display tables and mannequins. It took five floors to contain it all, linked by elevators and escalators. Music sifted down from hidden speakers. And the things you encountered! An actual rowboat in the middle of the sporting goods department with a mannequin sitting in it, holding a fishing pole. She’d never seen so much in one place before, all of it displayed so beautifully. She felt as if she’d fallen into a Hollywood musical. At any moment she expected everyone—even the mannequins—to start dancing.

In Women’s, she went systematically from department to department and from counter to counter, reinventing herself. People were much nicer when you had a little money. It was like a secret handshake that gained you admission to a friendlier world. When she agreed to buy three lipsticks instead of two, the woman behind the counter gave her the warmest smile she’d ever received from a stranger. The saleslady who helped her choose skirts and blouses complimented her legs. The shoe salesman told her she had elegant feet.

Even at work, in her dress uniform and apron, people were more patient with her now that she wore makeup and had her hair styled. Fellow servers who stood in line with her at the time clock said good morning. More than a few customers began to thank her for the food she spooned onto their plates. Every now and then one of the men tipped her—against policy—as discreetly as a bank robber slipping a note to a teller.

—

One Saturday afternoon in the middle of that summer, she was sitting on a bench in the park by the river, watching the artists, when a voice asked if she had the t-t-t-time.

He was standing a few feet away. Boyish but around her age, she thought. His olive blazer was buttoned across his shirt, his hands were sunk into the pockets. He had a simple, straightforward face and a brown porkpie hat raked so far back on his head, she didn’t know how it didn’t fall off.

He didn’t strike her as someone who needed the time. She told him, though, glancing at her watch, and because he lingered she asked him if he’d like to sit down. He sat and held out his hand. “I’m B-B-B-Bernard,” he said.

An attractive stranger introducing himself to her in a beautiful city park was exactly the sort of thing she’d imagined might happen to her. Feeling emboldened, she introduced herself, said she was new to town. He asked how she was acclimating, and she said she was acclimating just fine but didn’t really know anyone yet, hadn’t had the time to make acquaintances. She said, “Tell me about yourself, Bernard.”

He told her he was a deed researcher for the county. That seemed to be about it. He couldn’t stop smiling at her.

Two sandwiches and a shared Pepsi later, they were in his apartment, where he had a bed that pulled down from the wall. He had to move a chair and the coffee table to make room for it. “G-G-G-God,” he said when he went off into his poke, holding her, breathing into her neck. It turned out he was an excellent person to have second sex with. Third and fourth sex too. With him, it dawned on her why people had sex: because it was—or could be—extremely fun.

A month later, she was going on dates with a sheet music salesman she met on the streetcar, who took her to the theater and liked bubble baths. She was going on dates with a high school English teacher who wanted to walk across Tibet and who was like a rabbit in bed, hopping from one part of her to another, a real thrill, but he sure could go on about Tibet. Then there was the docent at the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, who had an attic apartment with a nice view of the Citadel and wanted her to pound his buttocks with a tiny mallet he called a plum blossom. He walked her through the museum, told her, with his hand on her bottom, about the work of the Impressionists and Cubists that caught her eye. He also told her about the free drawing classes the museum offered, and she signed up for one the next day.

And throughout those initial months in Columbus, there was Bernard, who never asked her on a proper date but called from the pay phone near the lodging house every other weekend and invited her to share a walk and a sandwich and his Murphy bed. She always said yes, and he, when climaxing, always said, “G-G-G-God.”

She enjoyed all the contact, had her first orgasm with another person (Bernard), and forged an appreciation for sex that cast new light on the adult world she’d seen in the movies. Nothing progressed with these men, but that was okay. She couldn’t imagine any of them as husbands. Bernard came the closest, but she suspected there was someone else he saw on the alternate weekends because he was never available.

This is the department store I told you about, she wrote on a postcard to Lydia. It’s very beautiful inside. I’m working hard at the cafeteria and dating—nice men only! I like it here. I miss you. When you didn’t want to say too much or explain anything, postcards were just the ticket.

—

In October of 1936, she was in line to clock out at Anton’s when Dotty asked if she wanted to go bowling. Margaret said she didn’t bowl, and Dotty laughed and said she didn’t either, but she had a fellow waiting for her, and that fellow had another fellow with him. If Margaret didn’t have anything better to do, why not come along?

Margaret had just changed out of her uniform and back into her cerulean skirt and lavender sweater. Did she look date-worthy? Dotty thought so, but offered her a tangerine scarf from her locker if she wanted it, it would look so cute with her hair. Margaret tied the scarf around her neck.

Dotty’s fellow was named Larry something, and he was nice but loud. The other fellow was named Felix Salt. Like the shaker, he said. Felix was twenty-five and as handsome as someone in a cigarette ad, tall, with a strong cleft chin, an aquiline nose, amber eyes, and raven hair that shined with pomade. When he leaned in to shake her hand, he smelled of cinnamon and vanilla. His Adam’s apple bore a recent nick that had been tended to with a styptic pencil.

The four of them got shoes, and when the women took their turns at the lane the men instructed them, which was funny and broke the ice.

Felix bowled well—not that that mattered, but it was nice to watch his athletic frame deliver the ball to its mark. In caramel-colored trousers, no less, and a red, blue, and gold plaid shirt that seemed tailored for his broad shoulders. She found it hard not to look at him. He’d gone to college in Akron and had studied business and minored in engineering, he told her. He’d been engaged once for six months to a woman named Helen, and they’d seemed like a good fit, but she’d gotten cold feet and broken it off. He’d been hired for product development by an aluminum plant in Akron not long out of college, and within a year he’d been promoted and transferred to the Columbus home office. He didn’t design products or engineer anything now, he said; he was a junior executive who oversaw the production of girders and rebar—two items that were seeing an increase in demand, thanks to the WPA. He used to play a little football in college but not anymore. All of this Margaret learned while he blinked his dark lashes at her and bowled a 195.

At the end of the evening, he asked if he could take her out sometime for a piece of pecan pie at the Waldo Hotel restaurant. She accepted that very specific offer and was surprised when “sometime” didn’t turn into right that minute. Instead, he suggested the following Saturday. They parted ways, and she held on to her formula of pie + hotel = sex. He was, after all, the most attractive man she’d ever met. And fun to be around. And sweet-seeming. She was eager to get undressed with him.

But pie at the Waldo Hotel restaurant turned out to be just that, with ice cream on the side. Followed by a walk in the chilly October air. Felix was extremely pleasant but also a little formal and nervous on that first official date. Still, she enjoyed being with him. She said yes when he asked her out on a second date a week later. And yes the third time he asked, a week after that.

—

They graduated from pecan pie to whole meals, and over a series of dates they made their way through his favorite restaurants. They bundled up, darted from place to place to stay out of the cold, found themselves ducking on a regular basis into the cozy warmth of the Drexel and the Ohio Theatre. They both enjoyed the W. C. Fields shorts, and Margaret pretended to like the Three Stooges the way Felix did (though she hated them so much she wanted to close her eyes and plug her ears while they were on the screen). Dinner and a picture became one of their weekly dates that winter. Pennies from Heaven, Born to Dance, The Bold Caballero. She was prettier than those women in the movies, he told her on more than one occasion, and she loved that. She couldn’t get over the fact that this gorgeous sweetheart of a man thought so highly of her—and didn’t seem to want anything from her except her company. That was honorable of him, even while she thought, Come on, already, let’s go to bed!

He took her to a nightclub with dancing. The musicians sat behind stands that matched the walls. Margaret remembered some of the basic steps Lydia had taught her and discovered she had a knack for dancing. Felix didn’t. Dancing with him was like walking a cabinet across the floor. He seemed to enjoy himself, though, and she didn’t mind.

He was a model of propriety—that was a phrase she’d picked up from a movie somewhere along the way, and it fit him well. Propriety signaled to her a seriousness she’d never encountered in a man before. Even when he tried to be funny, he seemed serious. It was like watching Gary Cooper trying to do a Red Skelton impression. Before dinner one evening, he took her to the aluminum plant and showed her the display of casting molds in the front lobby, and the map of all the plant locations, and his office, where there hung a group photo of the Columbus executive team: twenty-six suited men, including Felix, all standing in a row outside the building with one of the founders, Lucian Tuck, in the center, bow-tied and spectacled.

At the beginning of each date, Felix waited for Margaret just inside the front entrance of the lodging house, catching coquettish glimpses from the other young women as they came and went, and even from the dour old tight-lip who sat at the front desk. At the end of each date, he walked her home to the front of the building and, when saying good night, kissed her like people kissed on the silver screen: eyes closed, lips together.

He never asked if she was seeing anyone else. It either didn’t occur to him, or he didn’t want to know. As soon as dating other men began to feel wrong to her (which was about a month after she started seeing Felix), she dropped them. Bernard was the last and the hardest to say goodbye to. Whoever this guy was, he told her, he was lucky.

Margaret hoped so, and hoped the same could be said for her.

—

In December, they were strolling through the kaleidoscope of holiday decorations in Lazarus—the endless twists of garland, the oversize tree bulbs, and red-saddled white reindeer hanging suspended over their heads—when Felix, out of nowhere, asked about her family. She’d already told him she’d grown up in Doyle. Now, having thought about it more, she told him her parents had both died of influenza when she was a little girl and that she’d been raised by her aunt Lydia. There was nothing fancy about the way she’d been brought up, she said; they didn’t have much, but they got by. She ran her hands over a table of scarves, the smoothest wool she’d ever touched. “Tell me about Akron.”

“Cleveland. Akron’s where I went to school.”

“Tell me about Cleveland.”

He was no more forthcoming than she was. He’d been glad to get away, go to college. His parents, he said, still lived there and were “real doozies.” She was going to ask what he meant but saw a slight tremor run through his face—as if some memory had chivied him and he was resetting his thoughts.

Santa’s Workshop stood in the tiled intersection of aisles ahead of them, and Felix asked with a grin if she wanted to go see Santa. “Oh, sure,” she said and hooked her arm around his, and he walked them to the end of the kiddie line. She balked, thinking he would pull them right back out again, but he just looked around and pretended to whistle. When one of the elves asked them where their child was, Felix said, “Around here somewhere,” and bumped his elbow against Margaret’s. They got all the way to the front of the line and even managed to make eye contact with the bemused Santa before they broke into laughter and darted away.

Such fun! The Great Santa’s Workshop Infiltration, Felix was calling it before they were even out of the store.

—

In January of 1937, three months to the day after they’d met in the bowling alley, in the middle of that same intersection in Lazarus where Santa’s Workshop had stood, Felix got down on one knee and proposed. Ring and all.

A small emerald, from what she could tell, surrounded by tiny diamonds. There were twenty or thirty other shoppers milling about the vicinity. Did someone gasp? Maybe. Did she love him? She didn’t look around to see how many people had noticed what was going on. She was thrilled. She would describe this to Lydia in a postcard—how time seem to have stopped. But did she love him? How could she? She hadn’t been to bed with him, hadn’t been passionate with him. She liked him—very much. She liked everything about him that she knew, right down to his smell. But love?

No. She trusted him. She would trust him with her life, in fact. Who else besides Lydia could she say that about? Still, she didn’t love him. She didn’t even feel the spark with him that she’d felt with Bernard.

But couldn’t she grow into it? Just as she was growing into every other aspect in her life? She felt another deal in the works—nothing like the one-off she’d made with the awful Mr. Higgs, something much more tender and significant. Marry me, Felix seemed to be saying, and you’ll fall in love with me. Marry me, and I’ll make you happy. Just marry me. Maybe it really was that simple. If their intentions were in the right place, they would land in the right place. She wasn’t even nineteen yet, after all. There was time.

She smiled and felt herself nod.

The salesman in Accessories had been leaning forward to listen, almost to the point of lying across the countertop. When he heard her response he sprang upright and announced, “She said yes!”

A few people clapped. Someone called out, “Can I kiss the bride?” and someone laughed.

Felix seemed to remember it then, the kissing part. He closed his eyes, leaned down, and planted his best one so far on her lips.

—

Neither of them attended church, so there was no talk of a religious service. There was no talk of any kind of service, in fact, for over a month. But as soon as they went from dating to engaged, Felix started saying “I love you” when he told her goodbye at night, and Margaret started saying “I love you, too.” So that was something.

She wondered if he was a virgin. Had his six-month engagement to his ex-fiancée been chaste? And if it had, was it by his choice, or Helen’s? Margaret couldn’t ask—she didn’t want to embarrass him and, more important, she didn’t want to talk about her own (quite recent) sexual adventures.

Then, in late February, five weeks into their engagement, Felix took ill in a restaurant before they even had a chance to order, and he had to dash off to the men’s room to be sick. He came back to the table looking pale and sweaty, and had to dash off again. He didn’t know what was wrong with him, he said. He hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. They took a cab to his apartment building, but he didn’t want her to come up, paid the driver to take her to the lodging house.

She didn’t see him or hear from him for three days. He’d gotten cold feet, she thought. He was trying to figure out how to let her down easy.

But on the fourth day, Felix called and said his stomach was better, his fever had broken. Did she feel like going over to City Hall?

They said their vows the next day, and he got them a room at the Deshler that evening, where he became chatty and jittery as they undressed. He shouldn’t have had all that wine with dinner, he said—but he’d only had one glass and hadn’t finished it. He turned off most of the lights. “I’ll make this work, don’t worry,” he said, then asked her to lie under the covers while he, still in his shorts, sat on the edge of the mattress, facing away from her, his hand moving in his lap.

She wanted to tell him it was okay, they didn’t have to do anything (even though it was their wedding night and she’d been waiting for months to be with him). But he turned to her and asked if she was ready. She nodded. He grinned in the near-dark, said, if she heard him right, “Let someone in,” then climbed onto the bed and under the covers and pulled off his shorts. A few moments later, he eased into her with the care and precision of someone parking a new car.

“Oh,” he said, as if caught off guard. He closed his eyes and readjusted his approach. “Oh,” he said again, figuring something out. Then, more softly, “Oh,” as if he understood.

Soon, he finished and rolled off her and let out a long, happy sigh.

She lay against him, her head resting on his chest. “Why did you say ‘Let someone in,’ just before?”

“What? Oh—not ‘Let someone.’ ‘Let’s elbow.’ It’s just something we used to say on the football field. ‘Let’s elbow in.’ You know, when we were in a huddle, before a big play.”

Not the sexiest pillow talk she’d ever heard, and not an improvement over let someone in.

“Are we okay?” he asked, sounding hopeful.

It was such an open question. She hadn’t had an orgasm; did he mean the one-sided sex? The fact that they’d eloped that afternoon, and here they were? He was asking, at least; he was thinking about her. Yes, she told him, they were okay. She turned her head slightly and kissed the vicinity of his heart.

—

They called his parents in Cleveland. Felix and Margaret shared the receiver in the hotel room while Russ and Lillian Salt shared the receiver in their house. When Felix told them he’d gotten married, the Salts took so long to respond that Margaret thought they’d hung up. Then they congratulated him. Felix glanced at Margaret, urging her to speak, and she told them what a wonderful son they had and how she was looking forward to meeting them. They congratulated her too. Lillian Salt asked Margaret where she was from, and when Margaret said “Doyle,” Lillian said, “Ah,” and, thankfully, didn’t ask anything else. They exchanged a few more pleasantries and hung up. “Not the warmest people in the world,” Felix told Margaret.

At least your doozies didn’t abandon you, she thought. “Will I meet them?”

He said he supposed that would have to happen eventually, but he was in no hurry. What about her? Didn’t she want to call her aunt?

Margaret still hadn’t told him about the orphanage and couldn’t see how a group call was possible without that being revealed. No, she said. Aunt Lydia was traveling right now; Margaret would call her when she was back.

She almost wished she’d told Felix the truth about her past in the beginning. It might have made things a little easier. But she hadn’t known how the facts of her upbringing might affect his regard for her. No matter how well she presented herself, if he knew she’d been born unwanted and had slunk away from an orphanage, wouldn’t he see her differently? As lesser, maybe even desperate? Her two pairs of shoes, her sad little lodging house. The last thing she needed—then, and now—was for him to see her as a charity case. And the longer it went, the more difficult it was to even contemplate telling him.

He gave up the place he’d been renting, she moved out of the lodging house, and they took up residence in a furnished one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a perfectly nice building just off Broad Street. The walls were a smoky shade of blue and the living room furniture was a smoky shade of green (the previous tenants had smoked), but the place was grand, really, the ceilings high, and she got no end of joy walking around dusting and straightening things. Not that there was much to dust or straighten.

Alone on the sofa one evening after work, she called Lydia, who was delighted to hear Margaret’s voice. She’d had a feeling it was good news, she said, when the charges weren’t reversed.

—

He convinced her to quit her job, which was never going to pay much—even the greeter position Mr. Higgs had nodded toward wouldn’t have come with much of a raise. Felix was making plenty for both of them, he said, and he was expecting a promotion before long. So on the following Friday, at the end of her shift, Margaret hung her uniform in her locker and told Mrs. Conroy she wouldn’t be coming back. Mrs. Conroy was complaining about getting no advance notice as Margaret walked out the front door.

She had so much catching up to do. Movies, restaurants, a nightclub here and there. They went out three, sometimes four nights a week and did something—Felix was always game, so long as he could be in bed early enough to get a full night’s sleep.

They kissed good morning and good night more deeply now. He’d got better at it. He got better at sex, too, and learned how to give her an orgasm—but the whole enterprise remained a challenge. They did it, to the best of her calculations, an average of once a month. They tried to do it more often than that, but those times he either couldn’t stay hard or couldn’t get that way to begin with, which was embarrassing and frustrating for him, she knew. The closest he’d ever come to being short with her was to ask her to please stop telling him he had no reason to be embarrassed. It wasn’t her, he assured her; it was him, and it was temporary. She soon figured out that their best shot at avoiding yet another awkward foundering was in the foreplay. She tried all sorts of things to loosen him up. Playful things. Creative things. (Bernard things.) Felix had the sexual creativity of a turnip, but he took instructions well and was always optimistic. She used her hand and whispered into his ear, “You can do it, honey,” and “That’s it, baby,” over and over, and sometimes that was effective, like pulling a cord to start a lawn mower. When it wasn’t, well, she had to stop whispering at some point, and that was awkward.

She asked him, one evening, the two of them lying side by side in the dark, after another abandoned attempt, if he and Helen had been compatible, sexually.

He took a while to answer. “We didn’t get that far, because we weren’t married—she wanted to wait.”

“But you were attracted to each other?”

“Oh,” he said, “yeah. We sure were.”

Until they weren’t, Margaret guessed.

As for the two of them: once every four or five weeks the tumblers clicked, and there he was.

—

During the first two years of their marriage, she bought a cookbook and taught herself how to cook beyond the basics she’d picked up from Lydia. Felix’s favorite was her chicken and dumplings, though she never thought it came out the same way twice. She learned makeup and housecleaning tips from a magazine called Best Wife. She took more art classes at the museum—drawing and painting—all taught by a woman named Mrs. Parrish, who looked to be in her sixties and had apricot hair. “Don’t be ashamed of having no talent” was her motto. Also, “Use your frustration.” But Margaret wasn’t ashamed or frustrated. She just enjoyed being in class.

She attended talks at the museum too (steering clear of the docent she’d dated). “The Arc of Nineteenth Century Painting in America.” “From Cassatt to Braque: A Journey in Paint.” She joined a women’s social club, where she was, by far, the youngest person. She learned how to play backgammon and hearts but, to her great embarrassment, discovered that she didn’t know how to make small talk. She must have been quiet on all those dates—including the ones with Felix; she couldn’t remember a single thing she’d said.

She got to know some of the neighbors on their floor. The wives, anyway. The woman with the dachshund. The woman with all the lovely handbags. The woman with the little girl who always waved hello. Margaret always waved back.

She dressed better. Nothing over the moon, no furs, just pretty things she noticed when she and Felix were walking past the display windows, things he bought for her. Her sense of color, in clothes, became more sophisticated and urbane. She liked dressing up to go about her day because it felt like wearing who she was now for people to see. She still turned heads on the street. She still got whistled at, on occasion.

The classes she had the easiest—and most enjoyable—time with were those she took at a dance school. She had a flair for the samba, a flair for the Balboa, a flair for any step she tried, really; she could always remember where to put her feet and was a favorite partner among the other students.

She visited the smaller art gallery shops, the ones that sold work by the artists who were still alive and not well known (meaning affordable), and she began to figure out what she liked and what she didn’t. The smoke stain on the walls of their apartment bore the footprints of other people’s picture frames. Having nothing of her own to put up felt like a little failure to her. Felix didn’t have anything, either, but he didn’t seem concerned with interiors—or even aware of them. On a walk one Sunday, when she mentioned how nice their apartment would look with a little art up on the walls, something to contrast all that light blue, he looked mildly surprised. “The walls are blue?” But he supplied her with a modest art budget—carved out of his Christmas bonus. She kissed him and thanked him and went straight back to the galleries, where she chose a few landscapes and still lifes and—her favorite—a Leon Dolice cityscape with explosive pinks and oranges and a sky the color of saffron and lemon chiffon.

She ate at cafeterias like Anton’s, though never at Anton’s itself, and made a point of saying thank you to the girls on the serving line. She ran into Dotty downtown, and the two of them had a coffee together and caught up. Dotty told her what a louse Larry had turned out to be, and Margaret said there were plenty of fish in the sea, but she was speaking from the opposite shore and they both knew it. When Margaret asked how work was, Dotty said, “If it were any more fun, I’d pop a vein.” On the sidewalk, she hugged Margaret and said how happy she was for her and that she wanted to keep in touch. Margaret said the same, but she had the feeling they would never see each other again. And they never did.

She really was on the opposite shore of something. She had accounts under her married name at Lazarus and several other stores. The salespeople knew her. At times, it almost felt as if Felix, who was only seven years older than she was, had swept in and adopted rather than married her. Finally adopted, she would think, smiling wryly, for in a strange way she felt more like a little girl than she ever had. Almost as if this were her childhood, the one she didn’t get to have growing up.

The only hitch—other than the bedroom hitch, and the fact that she wasn’t entirely sure she was in love with him hitch—was that Felix wanted to have a child. He started suggesting, each time they were about to do something, that she not use her diaphragm. Was this something new, and sudden for him, or had he always wanted a kid (or kids) and hadn’t mentioned it? Of course she should’ve expected as much; how many movies had she seen where, if two people got married, there was a baby by the time the lights went up? The world wanted a baby, it seemed; it just hadn’t wanted her. Well, guess what? She didn’t particularly want one of her own. She didn’t see the point. So, gently but out loud, she told Felix she’d prefer if they waited. She didn’t feel ready, was still getting her bearings, she explained—and there really was no rush, was there? He said of course not, they could set the matter to the side and revisit it at a time that felt right for both of them.

He was polite, he was gentle. All this was so very Felix. He put things down at right angles, she’d noticed. The newspaper, when he was finished with it. His comb and his razor. She rolled his socks, the way they had at Open Arms, and tossed them into his sock drawer; when she wasn’t around, he took them out, unrolled them, folded them in half, and lined them up vertically.

—

One evening in early summer 1939, he came home from the plant wearing a new chocolate-brown fedora. He was holding a bottle of champagne and a box of LaFourche Hard Candies. His promotion had finally come in, he said. The one they’d been waiting for, for two years. He was going to be the Manager of the Quality Control Division at one of the western branches of Tuck & Sons. Technically an executive-level job, he said, and it meant a bigger salary—which was really something, given that so many guys were out of work right now. It meant they could buy a house. Have room for a family. Get a second car. She could learn to drive! It also meant moving to a town called Bonhomie.

Margaret was sitting on the couch, cross-legged, holding the two goblets he’d handed her from the drink cart. “Where’s that?”

“West. Northwest, actually. About an hour from Toledo.” He picked at the foil on the neck of the champagne bottle, fiddled with the cage. “Beautiful country, they told me. Lots of farmland.”

“But I like it here.”

“You’ll like it there too. And I’m telling you, we’ll have a house. And I’ll get a bonus just for moving, and probably another raise after that.”

“But, Felix, no—I really like it here.”

“Margaret,” he said, his eyes gleaming as his hands kept fiddling, “this is how people get ahead. This could really change things for us. Will you trust me?”

The cork shot from the bottle and bubbles flowed into the goblets.

Chapter Seven

When they arrived in Bonhomie in the fall of 1939, the horseshoe-shaped lake that came into view as they turned off the highway was stunning, the leaves an explosive array of reds and yellows and oranges and rusts reflected down onto the water like paint pulled with a fan brush. The vast unbroken sky over the town could be breathtakingly star-filled on clear moonless nights. The twenty-foot-tall Tuck & Sons tulip—a reminder of Felix’s ascendency to the executive level—glowed pink and reassuring in the distance.

But this place, which to Margaret seemed too big to be a town and far too small to be a city, had only one museum and it was devoted to agriculture. There was a vocational college but it didn’t offer classes in art or art history; it offered classes in auto repair and plumbing. There was no dance studio. There was no nightclub, unless you counted the Bric-a-Brac Lounge, and that was attached to a liquor store out near the highway; she couldn’t picture herself stepping foot in there, much less dancing.

The house, though, was a castle compared to anything she’d ever known. It was in a nice neighborhood, on a street called Roswell Lane, which she liked the sound of. Dark brown trim and white wooden shingles, tapered columns on a front porch deep enough to keep the snow away from the door. Three bedrooms (two up, one down), an expansive living room, a separate dining room, and more closets than she could keep track of. Tuck & Sons had found the house for them and had helped with the down payment. The company had even furnished the place (modestly but with new things, at least), so that it was almost ready to sleep in by the time the Salts arrived. Shining floors, pristine white walls. At her suggestion, they turned the downstairs bedroom into a den for him. They hung about half of the art she’d bought in Columbus; the other half, including the Dolice, she leaned in various places, considering. It was a truly charming house, a beautiful house, and she couldn’t wait to write to Lydia about it.

But once they’d settled in, she also wondered, what now? Was this (a promotion, a house, a new town) what Felix meant when he’d said things were going to change for them, or was this where they had to come for things to change? She found herself wishing—stupidly, ungraciously—that they could pick up this house and move it to Columbus, in the vicinity of Broad and High Street.

The closest thing to a ladies’ social club she could find was an establishment on Sutton Street called the Swan’s Nest—“A Place for Ladies to Dine,” the ad in the paper read. One afternoon, while Felix was at work, she got cleaned up and put on one of her last Lazarus purchases: a royal blue two-piece suit of knop-woven wool, and a black velvet half-hat. She wore these to the Swan’s Nest—only to find herself overdressed in what was essentially a restaurant with a game and reading room attached to it. There, she sat with a deck of cards, hoping to strike up a game of gin or whist with someone—if for no other reason than to make an acquaintance and be able to talk about how she’d recently moved here from Columbus—but the place was nearly empty and she ended up having a Russian tea and an iced triangle cake while she played solitaire on one of the sofa cushions. At home, for the first time since marrying Felix, changing out of her nice clothes felt like taking off a costume.

The feeling pervaded. In Columbus, she’d been a young bride for two and a half years. Here, she felt like—and was—a housewife. A homemaker. A helpmeet. How many names did they have for it? Rather than the woman with the dachshund and the woman with the fancy handbags and the woman with the little girl, she had for neighbors the woman with the baby (Mrs. Burke), and the woman with the baby (Mrs. Lane), and the woman with two babies (Mrs. Talbot, next door). Also the pregnant woman with three small children who weren’t even triplets (Mrs. DeForest—what was she thinking?). Not all of her neighbors had children, but they were all ready to ask her when she was going to start having her own. Put just that way, as if she were holding in a litter as she went about her day. “Someday,” she’d say, thinking, Why do you care? But she still had small talk on her list, and she learned to do it, taking walks with the stroller brigade or chatting at the foot of the driveway with whomever might be passing by. The first time she ran into one of her neighbors in the grocery store and stopped to shoot the breeze felt like an accomplishment. When Mrs. Mitchell—Ruth—from two streets over knocked on her door one afternoon to ask about her rhododendrons and then invited herself in for a drink, it might as well have been a badge of honor. They were all nice (to varying degrees). Some of them were impressed that she used to live in Columbus. Some made a point of not being impressed. Most of them waved if they saw her on the porch or in the driveway. All of them, to a one, perked up and turned like flowers toward the sun when Felix emerged.

Felix, meanwhile, seemed happy in his new job. He had a hundred and fifty men and eight different departments answering to him and sometimes spent so much of his day in the vicinity of the cast houses that his suits had to be dried out and aired in the backyard when he got home. He was tired in the evening but always asked about her day, and he always told her about his—over dinner, anecdotally, and at length.

In May of 1941, they bought a second Packard, this one dark blue and just slightly used. He taught her to drive. She stopped-and-started them on the farm roads outside of town, then smoothly delivered them to a donut shop.

Did she miss Columbus? Every day. Did she miss Doyle? Open Arms? She missed Lydia. They still wrote, but only a postcard every few months and birthday cards on their shared birthday. The house is heaven, she’d written. Huge living room! Felix as handsome as ever. And he was, including when he allowed himself to un-dapper a little on the weekends and sat around in his pajamas, unshaven, reading the sports page. Dishevelment on him was just another kind of handsome. He always seemed glad to see her, even if she was just coming back into a room she’d stepped out of minutes ago. He held her hand when they walked downtown. He put his arm around her when they sat on the sofa and listened to the news at night, which, lately, was more and more about the war in Europe.

Almost exactly, Felix fit the picture she had in her mind of the perfect husband. If only their sex life had more than a faint pulse. They started going longer in between attempts. He continued to say it wasn’t her, it was him, and that it wouldn’t be forever. She felt reasonably sure there wasn’t someone else, so how could it not be her? It wasn’t a matter of broken equipment, on his part. The flesh was often willing at first, then wasn’t. The same flesh, she noticed, that had no problem rousing itself when he was asleep and his brain was unplugged from his life.

There were mornings when she woke up and felt so lonely, lying beside him, that she could have screamed. There were mornings when she opened her eyes and took in the sturdy posts of the four-poster bed, the enormity of the room, the way the sunlight spread across the smooth white plaster walls, and she felt as if she’d pulled off the greatest bait-and-switch imaginable: she’d swapped the world she’d known as an orphan for this one, and God or whoever hadn’t batted an eye. Look how far she’d come. Look at this raven-haired man sleeping next to her, lying on his side, his broad, pajamaed back one more solid surface in a room dappled with sunlight.

—

He’d been a senior at the University of Akron. His roommate that year, Gil Meade. Their friendship forged by living down the hall from each other the previous year as rising star athlete for the Zippers and sports reporter for the student paper, The Buchtelite. Different as night and day, Felix rock solid, a fullback who also swam and wrestled and struggled to keep a good grade point average, Gil lanky, a bookworm and budding gumshoe whose horn-rimmed glasses often sat crooked on his face and who, at twenty-two, smoked a pipe and wore corduroy blazers with patched sleeves. A straight-A student, Gil helped Felix with his essays. Felix checked Gil’s sports coverage for accuracy of both fact and phrasing before Gil handed in his copy.

Their running joke was that when Gil wrote about the Zippers, he always found a way to mention Felix. Even when Felix was stuck on the bench with a sprained thumb for three weeks. The Zippers were victorious over Baldwin-Wallace, six to zero, Buchtel Field swarming with people before the clock ran out, and Felix had to watch from the sidelines—but the next day, in Gil’s write-up for The Buchtelite, “ ‘The only disappointment for the crowd was in not getting to see Felix Salt, the Zippers’ lightning-fast fullback, in action.’ ” Gil read that aloud as they walked across campus that evening, and they laughed at Felix’s uncanny ability to be lightning-fast while sitting on a bench with a sore thumb.

They went on double dates now and then, sometimes took a meal together in the dining hall. Went their separate ways early in the morning, most days, and didn’t see each other again until they were back in the room at night, where they stayed up late studying and playing cards and lying on their beds, talking. They talked about their families, their high schools. Their dogs. Movies they liked. They’d both seen Wings several times when it came out. They’d both been sixteen when Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, and it was all any kid could talk about for a while, remember? They talked about golf and gymnastics—the two most recent additions to the university’s sports roster. Later, in the dark, they talked about girls.

Sometimes they ended up sitting on the same bed while they talked. When that happened, they turned out the light and kept talking, and scooted down until they were lying on their backs, shoulder to shoulder on the narrow mattress, both of them stiff as boards, and after they’d been talking for a while, a hand would cross paths with a hand in the dark, and find its way across the other’s stomach and into his pajama bottoms. Fingers trembling, warm, suddenly slick. They never talked about it.

Of course, the argument they got into was over a girl. Tess Martin, who’d gone on dates with both of them and had decided she only wanted to date Gil—and for some reason Gil got a little soused before he delivered this news to Felix, and when he did he was full of braggadocio and said things like, “She picked me over the leatherhead, how about that?” Kidding around but not in a good-natured way, and he said it a few more times with his pipe wagging in his teeth, until Felix said he didn’t care, not one goddamn bit; if Tess was so into guys from Marietta, she could screw Gil on the roof of Kolbe Hall. Felix hoped they did. He hoped they fell off. He stood from his desk to leave the room, and Gil, half-tanked and even lankier than usual because of it, got in his way and yanked the pipe out of his mouth to say, “Listen here, Salt—” A minute later, Felix was down to his socks and Gil was down to his glasses.

They went further then, did more than they’d done in the past. They didn’t really know what they were doing, but, clearly, they did it right. Afterward, Gil crawled into his bed with his back to Felix and stayed there for the rest of the night.

The next day, Gil left early. He started going to Mass again, having not been since high school. He put in a request and within a few weeks got himself transferred to a different room with a different roommate, on a whole different floor.

The mentions of Felix in The Buchtelite stopped.

The two of them cut each other a wide berth on campus. On graduation day, Felix spotted Gil across a shifting field of mortarboards and wanted to call out, have one last exchange, even if it was to say Have a good life, but he didn’t, worried that if he got Gil’s attention, Gil would turn away from him, and that would be their last exchange. The mortarboards wavered; the moment passed.

In dreams, though, he didn’t freeze up. In dreams, he was determined to get Gil’s attention, and that was what made the dreams so frustrating. He tried to wave his cap but found it was too heavy for him to wave. He tried to shout, but all the volume was gone from his voice. Not unlike the dreams where he was trying to dial a telephone and couldn’t get his fingers to work. Failure dreams, he thought of them. Objective never reached.

—

Awake, he had to stay on the ball and had his work cut out for him. Every situation, every interaction was a proving ground. When he was in high school, he’d been in the backyard stacking cords of wood with the curly-haired teenaged boy who delivered them, and, after exchanging with the boy a look he both did and didn’t understand, Felix followed him around back of the toolshed. The boy wasted no time, got down on his knees and opened Felix’s pants. Somehow, not a minute later (perhaps he’d been watching from the kitchen window), Russ Salt happened upon them. In the same instant, he said, “Ah, then,” and turned away. Walked back into the house. The curly-haired boy fled.

There was no mention of the incident then or any time soon. Six years later, however, Felix was just out of college, living in Akron and looking for a job when his father called from Cincinnati late one night, very much in his cups. Speaking in the burdened voice of an emerging elder statesman, he said he had an opportunity to call in a favor with a metal foundry that did their banking where he worked. A foundry with a facility in Akron. Good salary, he said. Good company, solid future. Felix asked who he should contact. Not so fast, Russ Salt said. The position wouldn’t open up for a couple of months, so there was time. Time for what? Felix asked.

Russ said he was getting to that.

He cleared his throat, waffling his phlegm against the receiver. He said he couldn’t help noticing that Felix had dated very few girls in college, and didn’t seem to be dating any now. He said he couldn’t stop thinking about that business with Felix and that little fairy boy behind the shed—as if it had happened last week, instead of six years ago. Here was his question, before he cashed in a favor with a valued colleague and put his reputation on the line: was Felix a fairy?

Felix hated his father in that moment, but he’d hated him before this call, and he would go on hating him after it. Consider it an early lesson that would help him navigate life: good opportunities sometimes come wrapped in garbage. He wasn’t a fairy, he said; he was particular about who he dated.

Russ was relieved to hear that but said he’d like Felix to provide evidence. When Felix, bewildered, asked how he was supposed to do that, Russ said he was confident his son could figure something out.

Enter Helen Greene: a friend of Felix’s from the Booster Club. Lively, blond, a head-turner. Helen roomed with a girl named Mabel, brunette, also a head-turner, and after college the two of them got an apartment together and both worked for the water department. When Felix sat down with them and explained the situation—without getting into specifics, and without ever asking them if they were a couple—they understood and went along. The engagement helped out all three of them, since they all had families with raised brows, wondering.

Felix wrote to his parents about Helen and sent them her picture. Helen wrote to the Salts saying that she looked forward to meeting them, and she wrote to her own parents and included a picture of Felix. Mabel even mentioned Helen’s engagement in her letters home. Alas, the romance between Helen Greene and Felix Salt did not pan out, but it lasted long enough for Felix to become firmly installed at Tuck & Sons. In their breakup period, Helen and Felix joked, with Mabel, about how they were splitting the house and the kids right down the middle, King Solomon–style—their lightheartedness a kind of salve because each of them presumed, with apprehension, that a traditional marriage lay in their future.

—

Felix threw himself into his work. He made the right jokes, ingratiated himself to the right people. There was, he discovered, a mold for a successful businessman—for a successful man—and it was right there in front of him. Now and then he was invited home with the executives to have dinner with their families. Sometimes, at these tables, there was a grown sister or cousin present, and Felix would wonder if that had been the reason for his invitation. At the end of these nights he would drive himself home or, depending on how far away he lived, walk, admiring the sloped lawns and big houses as he wended his way out of their neighborhoods.

The look—the same one he’d first seen in the eyes of the boy who’d delivered the firewood—didn’t happen very often, but over time he learned that it could happen anywhere. Waiting in line at the bank. Sitting at a red light. Walking across a parking lot. The first look meant nothing, maybe. The second look opened a door that might slam shut again, but it was there, however briefly, between the two of you. Felix was walking home after having dinner at one of these executives’ homes when he happened upon a man at the foot of his driveway, taking his mail from his mailbox. The man looked to be in his midthirties and had an appealing Buster Crabbe quality. He wore a smoking jacket and slippers. “Good evening,” he said brightly to Felix. “Fine night, isn’t it?”

Felix was twenty-four, figuring things out. The look. The door. “It is,” he said. “A fine night.”

And it was.

—

Sex with men was rare, he enjoyed it every time he was lucky enough to find it, and every time he told himself it would never happen again. Not because of any moral quandary but because such activity (that was how he thought of it afterward, activity, as if it were a sport) didn’t fit the mold. Or wouldn’t, down the line.

There’s no future in it, he told himself each time he slept with a man. Back to the directives. Be a good person, a good worker. Be a man. He resumed dating, as he had in college. His attraction to women wasn’t what it should have been, he knew, but he still managed to go on some perfectly nice dates. Though after one or two dates, he usually pulled away. He was confident he could change what was wrong with him but knew it would only happen with the woman he had the right response to—in his gut, his heart, his brain. And whoever that was would have to have the right response to him on all those levels. If he could find that woman, he could put this other activity and all thoughts connected to it away forever. He believed that down to his core.

Then they promoted him, and relocated him from Akron to the main branch in Columbus, and three months later he met Margaret. From the first minutes he spent with her in the bowling alley, he was drawn to her. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever been on a date with, there was that, but, more important, she was the least intimidating. The most pleasant and carefree. She bowled strong and hard and didn’t care about all the gutter balls; she cared that he was watching her when she turned around, after pitching them. Still, all those weeks they dated, he wondered if she was just biding her time until something better came along. Even when he proposed—since he’d always pictured himself as married, a family man, and they seemed so easy together—he half-expected her to say no. But she said yes.

He didn’t take it lightly. He’d been with no one for months before he met Margaret—no one in Columbus—and as soon as it felt like they were getting serious, he put an end to the second looks. As for the first looks, well, you couldn’t stare at the ground all the time. First looks were just a part of life—and he had directives for them too. Don’t move your brow. Don’t move your mouth. Don’t turn your head. Don’t follow with your eyes.

Put it out of your mind.

By the time they moved to Bonhomie, he’d been married for two and a half years and was submerged in his job. At the Bonhomie plant, he spent the beginning and end of every shift in his office, and in between he walked the walk in his hard hat, shirtsleeves, and tie, talked with a hundred different people—shouted with them, actually, because the plant was always loud. It was a massive complex made up of one main building and half a dozen smaller buildings, with a moat of asphalt yard. In one part of the yard, mountains of scrap metal waited to come in; in another part, stacked and cut ingots and coils waited to be sent out; in still another, uncut ingots, some weighing thirty to forty thousand pounds, sat cooling and steaming in the winter air. Inside, scrap rode conveyer belts into the cast house, where the furnaces were lined up like hungry mouths and pure, molten aluminum was shoveled in, then raked out in troughs, first to the Hot Mill, then to the Cold Mill, while the dregs were sent to the dreaded dross house (hottest of all, at 120 degrees). Crisscrossing over everything were the catwalks Felix plied for hours every day, to inspect the machinery from observation platforms and take readings. To check in with supervisors whose offices were in corrugated rooms attached to the catwalks. To interact with the machine shop guys and the jeep and forklift mechanics who sweated it out in coveralls. Felix was the only suit those guys saw regularly and was generally thought of as a no-bullshit supervisor, a company man who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. If he was in the vicinity, he would always help put out the ash fires in the dumpsters when they flared up. He loved this work, loved the idea of being well-thought-of by the people he assisted and supervised.

Even at the plant, with all that going on, he got the look. Once in the plant’s business wing, and once out on the catwalks. Nothing overt. In fact, the look was so subtle in each instance that Felix had to fight the urge to take a second look just to confirm it had happened.

Every day was a series of tests, accompanied by a litany of directives: be a good person, a good worker, a good husband. Don’t slouch, don’t shirk, don’t stray from the intention. Was he capable? Melt him down in a crucible and pour him into the mold. Let him cool and harden, melt him down, try again. Mark these words, Felix Salt will take the form he’s meant to take.

—

Within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, it seemed, Tuck & Sons had secured government contracts to produce tank parts and helmets and shell casings. The aluminum plant in Bonhomie didn’t require refitting, because it was already set up to convert all kinds of scrap metal into ingots and plates and sheets. In other words, it was contracted to keep doing what it had been doing all along, which was make aluminum and send it out on trucks and by rail—most of it now bound for factories refitted to make parts for planes. Many, many planes. Felix was sending his QC reports not just to the senior executives upstairs but to a General Lewis at Camp Perry.

By the middle of winter 1942, some of his co-workers—fellow executives, themselves husbands, fathers—were enlisting. Felix mentioned their departures to Margaret as if these men were close friends of his, when she’d only heard their names in passing. He began to talk about how likely it was that Roosevelt was going to expand the draft to include fathers, and how he could see himself enlisting ahead of the draft, if things kept heading in that direction. With his college degree, he said, he could go in as an officer. If he did it early enough he could choose which branch he served in.

“What do you mean?” Margaret asked, feeling the floor tilt. She knew what he meant, and she knew she couldn’t do much to stop the way he was thinking. By April, he was resolved. He wanted to be a pilot, he said. Maybe even for one of the big birds: a B-17, a B-32.

He’d talked about wanting to fly before. Kid dreams. What did it have to do with climbing into a giant bomber in the middle of a war? That sounded like a death wish to her. Or, at the very least, a strong yearning to be somewhere else. She tried to talk him out of this flying business but couldn’t.

As it turned out, she didn’t have to. He went in for his physical and came out with a piece of information that surprised them both: he was colorblind.

“This chair?” Margaret asked, touching the wingback in the living room.

“Red. Is it red?”

It was dark green. Could he really not see that? “What about this pillow?”

He shrugged, dropped onto the sofa. “Brown.”

“Red!” she said, laughing.

He didn’t want to joke about it. She didn’t either, but she felt such relief, she was almost giddy. They were just starting to enjoy the extra money he was making. They were talking about a vacation to the Grand Canyon. She wouldn’t say it aloud and was ashamed to even think it, but let other husbands go off and fight the war.

Felix, however, had already reset his sights on the Navy. No issue there with his eyes, he’d checked.

“I don’t think I could do this without you,” he said several times in the weeks leading up to his departure for basic training, and she thought, Yes, but how am I going to do this without you? On his last night, after saying how strange it was that he didn’t have to pack anything, his eyes glassed over as he pulled her into a hug. “It’s going to be a comfort, at least, knowing you’re safe back home,” he said.

Weren’t they in this together? Hadn’t they made a deal, even if they didn’t call it that? She felt like she was living up to her half of it. She was patient, she was here.

Hold down the fort, he said—as if the fort might leave, when he was the one sailing away.

—

He did not, necessarily, want to die for his country. Not if he didn’t have to. But he wasn’t ignorant of the horror happening in the world and the possibility of where it might lead, nor was he immune to wanting to take part in handing it back to those bastards who were devastating whole countries, whole bodies of people. He wasn’t about to sit around watching aluminum melt while half the country went off to fight. He also didn’t want to be drafted into the Army and end up a foot soldier. He wanted to go in with a little status, if he could get it. For all he knew, this was the experience he needed. The refitting that would finally move his interior gears in the right direction.

The discipline that would reset him.

The distance that would give him the required torque.

Chapter Eight

It didn’t occur to her until she got back to the house after seeing him off for twelve weeks of training—basic in Michigan, officers’ in Illinois—that she’d never been alone before. The closest she’d come was when she’d lived at the lodging house in Columbus, but she’d been surrounded by people there, even if they were strangers. She’d certainly felt alone many times, living with Felix, but this was something new. The house seemed like an echo chamber of plain white walls. Many times a day she had to remind herself that Felix wasn’t going to walk through the door. In the evenings, she listened to Edward R. Murrow, flipped through catalogues and movie magazines, read Up at the Villa, Mildred Pierce. Thrillers that pulled her away for a chapter or two. She found she was going to bed earlier and earlier.

The wives up and down the block got together with other wives in the neighborhood for mutual support—also for cake and coffee, drinks and cigarettes—and when Margaret got wind of these gatherings, she started attending, reconnected with Ruth Mitchell (whose husband was now in France), and met some new faces. War wives, they called themselves, as if they’d said their vows with a war. They sat around their living rooms and talked about where their husbands were stationed and how much they worried, and sometimes one or two of them cried, which Margaret always found awkward; then they talked about things like rationing and repurposing and extension recipes, and that was what made Margaret want to cry, it was so boring. Yet she knew it was good for her to be out, and to be around people. She hosted, too, served carrot cake and tea to seven of them, and one, Mrs. Luft (a little frosty, midforties, husband in Italy) looked around the living room and asked Margaret if she’d finally decided what she was going to do with the place.

“Sorry?” Margaret asked, sitting forward just a bit, holding her cup by the handle and palming the saucer beneath it.

“The décor, dear,” said Mrs. Luft. With a smile, no less.

Margaret was so upset about that remark that she crawled back into bed after the war wives left. But later the phone rang, and it was Ruth. She wanted to thank Margaret for hosting them that afternoon. She and Agnes (husband in the Pacific) had had a lovely time. Also, just in case it wasn’t obvious, Mrs. Luft was a grumpy old battle-ax, and Margaret shouldn’t give her another thought.

—

Still, the battle-ax had a point. Margaret could have done something more than just hang pictures in the year and a half they’d been living there. Put some color up on the walls, at least. In the coming weeks, she picked out a color for the kitchen (a soft yellow) and the living room (robin’s-egg blue), and when Ruth and Agnes got wind of what she was up to, they insisted on coming over to help paint. They put on the new Tommy Dorsey record and threw drop cloths over the furniture, and Ruth, eyeing the bottle of Dewar’s on the drink cart, asked if they might have a little snort to get things going.

Like Agnes and almost every other wife in the neighborhood, Ruth was a few years older than Margaret. She had prominent eyebrows and an expressive face and often wore her brown hair done up in as many Victory Rolls as she could fit across the top of her forehead. Paintbrush in one hand, Dixie cup in the other, she asked where Margaret volunteered, and when Margaret said nowhere, Ruth said she highly recommended it. She and Agnes had learned: staying busy was the best way to fight the doldrums. She said this as if she assumed Margaret also had doldrums. What Margaret had was a feeling of emptiness in the pit of her stomach that she carried around every day and that didn’t seem to have anything to do with hunger; was that a doldrum?

Ruth and Agnes had grown up in Bonhomie and quipped about how small the town must have seemed when Margaret first arrived. No, no, Margaret lied, she’d found it charming—though she told them how she wouldn’t have minded a museum or two, maybe an arts center that offered classes and lectures.

“That’s why God made Toledo,” Agnes said. She had dots of robin’s-egg blue in her platinum hair.

When Margaret expressed a desire to go dancing somewhere that wasn’t the Bric-a-Brac or the USO, which was meant for single ladies, both Agnes and Ruth exchanged a glance. They’d been getting together downtown once a week with some other people—friends of theirs, they said, not the neighborhood brigade—to practice dance steps and unwind. A casual thing, they emphasized, at a little place over the Dads & Lads on Irwin Street. “Nothing fancy, like you’d find in the Big City,” Agnes said. “It’s us and a record player. But we’d be happy to have you.”

How nice it was to know that someone still regarded Margaret as a Big City person—even if Columbus sometimes felt to her like nothing more than a stepping stone between Doyle and here. She showed them the wallpaper she’d picked out for Felix’s den: a geometric pattern of purple and orange lines against a creamed coffee background. Was it too much? she asked, holding open a roll.

Agnes didn’t think so; she thought it looked distinguished. Ruth said she thought it had pizzazz.

—

In September, Felix returned—for one week. His hair was shorter, and he was even bigger in the shoulders, arms, and chest. He seemed happy to see her, happy to be home, happy to be shipping back out in seven days. He didn’t notice the fresh paint in the living room and kitchen until she pointed it out to him. The wallpaper in the den stopped him in his tracks.

“Do you like it?” she asked.

He said he did. She led him into the bathroom to show him the seahorse-patterned wallpaper she’d hung (with Agnes’s help), then upstairs to the guest room to show him the new canvas window shades she’d put up (with Ruth’s help). Everything looked wonderful, Felix said and asked roughly how much it cost. When she told him, his teeth flashed—not in a smile. But he said, “The house is within your purview. Just keep an eye on the bank balance.”

He’d had his photo taken in his dress blues in Chicago. She put it in a frame and set it on the mantel. That week, he talked optimistically about the war. In bed, he was ambitious—and even successful. Then, all too soon, they were saying goodbye again and he was off to San Francisco, where he would finish his processing and wait to be deployed. When he left that time the look in his eyes, and both what he said and didn’t say, told her that he would most likely be gone until the end of the war, which meant indefinitely. The openness of that folded in on itself and formed a constant knot of worry in her stomach. In her gloomiest, most selfish hours, all reason and circumstance fell away, and she could think only that he’d chosen to go.

—

San Francisco was all waiting and paperwork, he wrote. Forms for the government. Forms for the Navy. Allotment forms. Life insurance forms. He was going to arrange to have his pay sent home while he was gone, not that she should get too excited about that, because it was a pittance. The life insurance was more, but he hoped she never had to see that check. He wanted to get assigned to an aircraft carrier. If not one of those, a destroyer or a tender. (Margaret wasn’t sure what a tender was, but it sounded nicer than a destroyer.)

Then his assignment came in. He was to report to an auxiliary cargo ship that would run supplies from the West Coast out to various ports in the Pacific and move supplies from base to base out there, as needed.

A month later, his first letter arrived from sea. Greetings from the SS James Teague, it began.

The Teague was a Liberty ship, he told her. 440 feet long, 14,000 tons empty. Can go 12 mph on calm seas. It’s a fairly new ship & a solid one. Welded together instead of riveted. The Navy can knock one of these things out in under a month.

They traveled as part of a convoy. Anywhere from twenty to sixty ships at a time, he wrote, and it was quite a sight to see them all lined up in three long columns. Battleships. Carriers. Tankers. Tenders. The closest ship five hundred yards away. He was writing from the third position of the port column. It had taken him a few days to get his sea legs; now he barely noticed the motion of the ship, unless they were in bad weather. The skies were huge and the nights were a vast canopy of stars. He wished she could see it. He also wished she could meet the guys he was sailing with—dead serious, some of them, but some were real cut-ups. There were seventy men on board at present: thirty-nine civilian merchant sailors and thirty-one regular Navy, and because of the dregs of a typhoon they’d encountered, half of the guys on board were seasick. Not him yet, luckily. His quarters—shared with one other officer—were near the engine room, and the engine was incredibly loud, but he’d been told a person got used to it after a while. He had springs in his mattresses and a built-in reading light over his bunk. He was reading the Armed Services edition of Look Homeward, Angel.

There was a barbershop on board, a post office, a tailor, a cobbler. Even a makeshift movie theater; they were showing Abbott and Costello’s Hold That Ghost on Saturday—again.

Don’t worry about me, he wrote in a letter that arrived just before Christmas. We aren’t in anything heavy, & who knows, we might not be. Essentially we’re a big, armored truck with a lot of deliveries to make. Not exciting, but maybe that’s good, & onward to victory. Happy Thanksgiving.

Without having much to say, she wrote back far more letters than she received, not knowing how many of his were hung up in limbo somewhere, or how many of hers managed to reach him once she’d dropped them into the mailbox on the corner.

—

In the spring of 1943, after hemming and hawing, she ordered from the Montgomery Ward catalogue a vertical wall-mounted terrarium that was six feet high and, when installed, ran the length of the foyer. It had a rocky façade made of Bakelite, and little plants, and water trickling through it fed by a pencil-thin pipe that ran up through the floor from the basement (the installers had to drill a hole). The fact that the plants were plastic made the water-infused terrarium absurd, perhaps. The fact that she’d gotten it at the height of rationing and conservation made it irresponsible—but the entire kit had been sitting in a warehouse since the start of the war, and the sound of the water was soothing. The plants snapped into little indentations in the Bakelite and could be moved around. She bought a tiny ceramic alligator at a gift shop and tucked it under a gasteria leaf.

The terrarium was a pick-me-up in that first year of his absence. So was the quartzite façade she had installed over the brick of the living room fireplace. The new Detrola with the automatic record-changer. The deep red Adirondack chairs she purchased for the backyard. Pick-me-ups. Bright spots—the kind that pulsed.

—

As time went by, Felix’s letters—some of them written on V-mail forms that had been microfilmed, reduced, and reprinted, so that she had to hold the paper close and squint to make out his handwriting—began showing up in batches of three or four, with large gaps in between. The tone of them had changed somewhat, she noticed. He wrote—in a voice sometimes suited for a training manual—about being an officer-of-the-deck, which seemed to have a lot to do with watching other men load, unload, and clean things. He told her the unloading could take up to three days on either end of a five- or six-day run, and that he often stayed up two or three days in a row making sure the work got done. Unloading in port was easier than unloading onto landing craft because the loading booms were more manageable, he said. He had to crack down on the men who let the monotony make them careless. He had to remind them—at the top of his lungs, because of how noisy it always was—that some of what they were loading and unloading was explosive. He yelled so much that he was often hoarse by midday.

For as dangerous (and tedious) as it all sounded, she wished she could have seen this version of Felix. She knew at the foundry he’d overseen many men, but she’d never gotten to see him in his role there. Felix giving orders. Felix standing on deck, calling out instructions in a uniform while booms swung overhead. Strangely, she longed for that version of him—a version she didn’t know.

She wrote to him every few days, even if there was little to say. The blank V-mail forms she got from the post office were tissue-thin and sucked up ink like a blotter if she let the nib linger. She was volunteering at a war bond booth several days a week now, she wrote. She was learning how to pickle and preserve. She’d found a dance studio that wasn’t a USO. She missed him.

He provided her with updates on the weather, which didn’t seem to vary much. He said there were men who occasionally slept on deck because of the heat, and that he was lucky to have procured a fan he could aim at his bunk. Their days were filled with routine, he said. Everything they did, they did over and over again, until they could do it in their sleep—and then they did it in their sleep. Air raid drills were constant and brought all other activity to a halt. General Quarters, we call it. The alarm sounds & everyone scrambles to their post, whether it’s a drill or the real thing. So far, the real thing has always been happening to another ship.

There were many alarms, most of them false. He seldom slept more than four hours at a time. Six months along, he still hadn’t been directly involved in any skirmishes but had witnessed the sinking of a Wickes-class destroyer with a crew of over a hundred men—most of whom they’d managed to pull out of the water.

A different letter in that same batch mentioned a school of Pacific bottlenose dolphins. A sea turtle as big as a picnic table.

—

She breathed a sigh of relief whenever his letters arrived, knowing he was okay—or, at least, okay at the time he’d written them; it usually took around a month for them to arrive. But they were sometimes so chilly that they were hard to read. Not chilly—impersonal, even though they were addressed to her, saluted her at the beginning, and were signed off to her with love.

Not that her own letters were any warmer.

He’d taken a liking to Fig Newtons, he wrote—that letter, the most personal one he’d written in months, took seven weeks to reach her. Just in case she was thinking about putting together another care package anytime soon, would she mind throwing in a couple boxes of those, if she could find them? Also, some king’s crowns from Luzzo’s, if they were still making them? And some licorice?

He’d hated licorice before the war. Living on a ship seemed to have altered his taste buds. The biggest surprise, though, was his request for cigarettes. Winstons. As many packs as she could fit into the care package; what he didn’t smoke, he’d trade, though he’d probably smoke them all. Sorry, he wrote. She didn’t smoke, so she probably didn’t want him smoking, but he admitted he’d been doing it almost from the day he first stepped onto the ship. Just about everyone smoked on the Teague, and it helped pass the time. She could imagine. He smoked along with the rest of them while he was spending thirty consecutive hours supervising the unloading of a shipment of cargo. He smoked alone. He probably smoked when he had no intention of smoking, because someone he was talking to struck a match, lit up, then offered him the flame.

He was unaware, however, of the dwindling supply of cigarettes in the States. For months, they’d been hard to come by—precisely because the government was having them sent directly from manufacturers to all the men and women in the armed services who wanted to smoke. But Ruth and Agnes, Margaret noticed, never seemed to be without cigarettes. They put her in touch with their black market source—not a shady character in an overcoat, as Margaret had pictured, but the elderly man who owned the office supply store on Jones Street. He seemed amused when she requested a specific brand. He had Viceroys, he said, and Lucky Strikes. She bought a carton of Lucky Strikes.

She also bought Fig Newtons, and licorice, and some Sen-Sens, and Goetze’s Caramel Creams. She couldn’t find the king’s crowns but doubted they would have survived the journey. Love you and miss you, she wrote on the note she included. She drew a heart, added X’s and O’s, and threw in some taffy.

—

By 1945, his presence had all but dropped out of his letters. He rarely had the need for “I” anymore, because it was always “we” and “the ship,” the same sort of company jargon he’d always used when he spoke of Tuck & Sons. It didn’t, however, make some of his accounts any less harrowing.

One letter began with a description of dehydrated carrots and potatoes (the carrots were like wet sand, he said, the potatoes mysteriously black), but it went on to tell her they’d joined a convoy several days ago and a squadron of torpedo bombers had come down on them—going for the destroyer, not the Teague. One of the torpedoes hit the destroyer’s port side and must have gone right into the boiler, because the boiler blew, and, soon after, the depth charges the ship was carrying detonated. He’d been on deck, felt the impact across his ribs. In less than nine minutes, the ship was on its side. Felix watched through his binoculars—specs, he called them—as men jumped over the side, down into the fiery water. Five lifeboats made it away, men covered in oil hanging on to the sides. There were men aft, too, but they didn’t stand a chance. One more depth charge and the ship went under, nothing left but debris and a giant ring of fire.

She’d seen the news reels, but as hard as it was to imagine Felix taking and giving orders, it was even harder to imagine him watching hundreds of men die. She couldn’t even imagine him eating dehydrated food. Then one morning while she was standing at the kitchen window with her coffee, watching the Talbot girls next door have a snowball fight in their front yard, she realized with a start that not only could she not imagine Felix on a cargo ship; she couldn’t imagine him, period. She’d lost a sense of him. She’d been eighteen when they’d met, had been married for five years when he left, and had been living without him for two and a half. She knew what he looked like, of course; there were photos of him on the mantel and in her wallet, but what was it like to be in the same room with him? His voice was gone from her ear. If she’d been a widow, it would have been tragic to lose these things, and tragic to lose him, of course. But to lose a solid grasp of him while he was still alive felt…shameful. She couldn’t remember the sensation of his hands on her skin—in part because she’d barely known that sensation when he left.

All of his clothes were still here. She opened the closet and looked at his suits, his ties and shoes. She pulled out the drawers on his side of the dresser and ran her fingers over his dress shirts, still folded and banded from the dry cleaners. In the bathroom, she uncapped his bottle of Old Spice and breathed it in. She dabbed a little onto her wrist. It smelled just like him but brought none of him back. It was an artifice, like the icicles melting along the eaves, which, at that moment, looked like rain on a clear, sunny day.

—

The woman in front of Margaret at Food Town was arguing with the cashier about her ration stamps. “I’ve been shopping here for years,” the woman said.

The manager came huffing over and said, “Step back!” with unwarranted alarm. He put on his glasses, assessed the situation, and reminded the woman that all stamps had to be removed from the booklet at the time of purchase. Government rules.

“They take them like this at Paulson’s,” the woman said.

“They’re not supposed to, Mrs. Leckie.”

“I guess Paulson’s values its customers more.”

Then go there, Margaret thought. Had she said it out loud? She hoped not.

They were all a bit tired, perhaps. A bit on edge. It was early May 1945. Margaret stepped forward and asked Mrs. Leckie if she had another family member’s ration book at home she might use.

Mrs. Leckie swung her head around. “No one said anything to you, Mommy Warbucks.”

Then she left without buying anything. The cashier moved her things to the side while the manager said, “Christ in Heaven,” lit a cigarette, and walked back to his office.

“Sorry about that.” The cashier rang Margaret up and gave her her change in colored wooden tokens.

By noon, Margaret was almost home, walking down Roswell Lane with a grocery bag under one arm, when she spotted what looked like a token on the sidewalk up ahead. She heard the clop of feet and looked up to see a boy running toward her. He was around seven or eight and was hell-bound for that token, she was sure of it. But when he reached it—and her—he stopped. His chest was rising and falling inside the folds of his jacket, and his face was pulled back with excitement.

Smiling down at him, Margaret said, “You ran all the way over here for that token, didn’t you? Well, apparently I’m rich, so you should take it.”

The boy didn’t seem to know what she was talking about. Then he spotted the token, bent over, and scooped it up. “Somebody died,” he said. He pointed down the street in the direction of her house.

She felt needles along the back of her neck. She could see her front porch from where they were standing, and there was no sign of anyone waiting to deliver a telegram. Still, after years of worrying, the thought that something had happened to Felix sucked the air out of her. The boy turned and ran back the way he’d come. She followed him.

There was an ambulance. But it was three houses down from hers, its back door standing open. The O’Conners, who’d been at the Abrams’ New Year’s Eve party. Married for fifty-two years, and at midnight they’d kissed so passionately that Margaret had looked away.

As she and the boy came up the sidewalk, a pair of medics emerged from the house, on either end of a stretcher bearing what appeared to be a person. Covered head to toe in a white sheet. They made their way down the porch steps.

“See what I mean, lady?” the boy whispered. “See what I mean?”

Mr. O’Conner appeared in the doorway, looking confused. The stretcher was loaded, the doors closed. The ambulance backed out onto the street and rolled quietly past Margaret. No siren. She looked around for the boy, but he was gone.

—

Later, Ruth called to invite her to a bandaging class the Red Cross was holding at the library that evening.

Ruth had more energy than anyone Margaret had ever known. She had two boys, had her sister and her sister’s two kids doubled up with her, and volunteered four days a week. She ran a weekly bingo game at the Veterans’ Community Center and never failed to show up for dancing at least two nights a week. Now bandaging class. Was there no end?

But as Margaret listened to Ruth strike a match and breathe through a cigarette on the other end of the line, she decided a little first aid was appropriate on a day when she’d watched an ambulance cart a body away. She said she would go. Then she told Ruth about poor Mrs. O’Conner. And poor Mr. O’Conner. “I thought something had happened to Felix. This little boy ran up to me on the sidewalk and told me someone had died.”

“They wouldn’t send the news by child.”

“Of course not. But this was before I saw the ambulance. I couldn’t move. Do you ever think about what you’d do if something were to happen—”

“Oh, honey, don’t.”

“I know, I know. But I worry. I don’t know how I’d feel.”

“I’m not following. Feel about what?”

“Felix.”

“But there was no news about Felix. Felix is fine, as far as you know, right?”

“The last letter was over a month ago. I’m being stupid. A woman in Food Town called me Mommy Warbucks this morning.”

“Jeez, you’ve had a tough day. Just keep telling yourself Felix is safe and sound. That’s what I keep telling Agnes about George, and that’s what she keeps telling me about Vic. We can’t all be wrong.”

“I guess,” Margaret said.

Ruth suggested they make a tray of sandwiches and bring them to Mr. O’Conner. Then she remembered the other reason she’d called (there was always another reason): a four-star general’s wife was coming through town tomorrow to give a breakfast talk at the Swan’s Nest—“How Women at Home Can Win the War.” Did Margaret want to go?

—

The Red Cross instructor at the library that evening inspected the gauze Margaret had wrapped around Agnes’s ankle and said it was cutting off all the circulation.

“I can’t feel my toes!” Agnes declared, wiggling them and winking at Margaret.

After class, in the parking lot of the library, Ruth, who’d driven them there, said she had an eighth of a tank of gas to burn in her Chrysler and suggested they cruise around town, like the old days. She meant her and Agnes’s old days, of course, since they’d grown up there. Margaret was happy to tag along.

The first stop was Ruth’s house. She had them wait in the car and came back out a minute later holding three beer bottles and a church key. Three more bottles were sticking out of her purse. The best part of doubling up with her sister, she told them, was having a live-in babysitter.

They drank and smoked in the front seat while Margaret sat in the back, in the middle, sipping a beer. They pointed out spots where they’d kissed boys, and more than kissed them. They sang along with the Andrews Sisters on “Rum and Coca-Cola.” Ruth showed them the spot where a certain debate team captain had proposed to her right out of high school and said she’d declined him because of the way he laughed, which was like a mule. Agnes pointed to the mouth of Clarkton Road, just past the grain elevator, and said down there was where she and George had done it for the first time, right after they’d both turned eighteen.

“For me, it was Toby Ulner,” Ruth said. “In the loft over his father’s garage, and the whole time we were afraid we were going to get caught. Didn’t stop us, though.”

They already knew these things about each other. Margaret wondered if they were trying to draw her out a little, get her to talk about her own childhood and adolescence, topics she always skirted because she never felt up to the invention it would require. “What about you, Margaret?” Ruth asked. “Who was your first? Don’t be ashamed to say it was Felix.”

The dark cloud of Mr. Higgs passed through Margaret’s mind. “It was Felix,” she said.

“Have you seen his Navy photo?” Ruth asked Agnes.

“Several times. He’s very handsome. So’s Vic.” Agnes was being diplomatic; she only had eyes for George.

Ruth produced a flask and uncapped it with one hand. “To the wives,” she said, and drank, and handed the flask to Agnes. “To us,” Agnes said, and drank, and tried to hand the flask to Margaret, but Margaret waved it off.

“You could use a tug,” Ruth said into the rearview mirror. To Agnes: “Our Margaret has had a rotten day.”

“To Margaret,” Agnes said and drank again.

Margaret toasted herself with a sip from her beer. She said, “Isn’t it all unbearably lonely?”

They waited to see if she had more to add to that. Agnes said, “The war?”

The war. Marriage. Life. Margaret nodded.

“Told you,” Ruth said to Agnes.

Agnes turned around and leaned over the seat, philosophical. “War is hell. We’ve all had to get used to being alone. It doesn’t mean it’s forever. They’ll come back.”

That was just it. Margaret felt lonely because of Felix’s absence, but she also felt lonely at the thought of his return.

—

Breakfast at the Swan’s Nest. The general’s wife. She would have skipped it if Ruth didn’t call at seven forty-five the next morning to remind her. Margaret brushed something of a shape into her hair, put on some makeup, and stood in front of the closet snapping through hangers, wondering how gussied one should get for a general’s wife. She settled on her mint-green dress, white sling-back shoes, white gloves.

Her stomach was rumbling as she pulled the Packard into a space along the curb on Sutton Street. On the sidewalk, she nearly bumped into a man who wasn’t looking where he was going. He apologized, tipped his hat, and hurried over to a station wagon parked a little farther down, but after getting in behind the wheel he left the car door open and just sat there pushing buttons on his dashboard. She walked on, and before long a woman came out of a flower shop, followed by a man in an apron, and the two of them ran across the street and climbed into a sedan, but they too appeared to have nowhere to go; the man was pushing buttons on the dashboard as the woman turned an ear toward it. The radio, Margaret realized.

All along Sutton Street, people were sitting in their cars but not going anywhere. A man dashed up the steps of the Gazette building, beckoned by a second man, and the two of them disappeared inside. The clock standing in the middle of the roundabout at Sutton and Main struck nine and sounded to her like a song. Something was happening. What did Felix call it? General quarters. The alarm sounds & everyone scrambles to their post, whether it’s a drill or the real thing.

She looked around, a needle of panic standing in her throat. The record store hadn’t opened yet. Neither had the camera store, or the shoe store. The closest place that looked like it might be open was the hardware store. She crossed the street and pushed through the door.

Part II

Chapter Nine

The war still raged in the Pacific, Truman reminded everyone, and added that there was a tremendous amount of work to be done to defeat Japan. But for the first time in a long while, the citizens of Bonhomie had something to celebrate and seized the opportunity.

There was an impromptu parade down Main Street that afternoon to honor all of the Bonhomienians who’d fought in Europe and made it home alive (fifty-eight so far). Food Town handed out red-white-and-blue snow cones, and Paulson’s, not to be outdone, pulled up alongside the Union Soldiers Memorial Fountain with a truckload of free watermelons that had come all the way from Florida. When they opened the back of the truck, several watermelons rolled out and smashed onto the street. Grateful just to be feeling happy, people cheered.

The Kill Shot offered free beer while it lasted. Roman bought sidecars for whomever was there, raised toasts, spun war yarns, and was tight by midafternoon. He shuffled home saluting neighbors on their porches and replaying in his head the story he’d told about having a live Stielhandgranate land beside him in a trench and tossing it back at the Germans, kaboom. He almost believed it himself. While he slept upstairs, Ida planned a celebratory cookout and raided his deep freeze in the basement for steaks.

Cal closed the store early that day and drove out to his father’s place to bring him groceries and see if he’d heard about the surrender in Europe. Everett had heard and was toasting the news into oblivion in a ratty wicker fan chair on his back porch. He was telling the dog about the end of the First World War. “…It was a fellow came through the woods,” he said, pointing to the woods behind the house, “and someone’s puffing away and he whispers, ‘Put out that goddamn cigarette!’ Because you never know but we might be surrounded, see, but a minute later, someone else comes along and says the war’s over. Over? Well, we didn’t know what the hell was going on, or who won. For all we knew, we were going to have to start learning German. But ten minutes later, the Germans were out there hugging us, and we were hugging them back, and who won didn’t matter as much as it was over. That’s what mattered, it was over.”

It was more than Everett had ever said to Cal about the war he’d fought in. Cal tried, unsuccessfully, not to startle his father when he stepped out onto the porch. He told him Happy V-E Day and thought to bend down to hug him but ended up shaking his hand instead. Everett kept his grip on his bottle of Old Crow lest Cal try to take it from him, and when Cal asked him to go on with what he’d been saying (to the dog), Everett looked confused, and shrugged, as if he hadn’t been speaking.

The mood on Taft Street—where Cal headed next—was more sober. The living arrangement that had started off feeling punitive now felt like a standoff. Unless it had become a stalemate. Cal had his own bathroom, anyway. He could get up in the middle of the night without worrying about waking Becky. Snore without having her nudge him to turn onto his side. They still interacted almost constantly—they had to; they had a toddler. They still ate dinner together, did the dishes, listened to the radio, and enjoyed their son—but if it didn’t involve Skip, they kept their interaction to a minimum. Fine with me, Cal thought many times a day, even though it wasn’t.

Nor was it fine for Becky. She found it hard to look at Cal and not see him acting like a buffoon all over again. Disappointment in one of her two favorite people in the world was a heavy thing to lug around, and she had enough on her hands. She already had two people scheduled per day, three days a week, and, while she wasn’t clairvoyant, her gut told her the German surrender was going to bring out even more worry in people with loved ones in the Pacific.

Across town, Ruth piled her two boys, her cousin, her cousin’s two girls, Agnes, and Margaret into her station wagon and drove them all out to Lake Meyer for a picnic. Ruth yelled at the children for jousting with oars on the swim raft. When they ignored her, she said to the rest of them, “You know what? I don’t care. I’m in too good a mood.”

Agnes’s mood was elevated too, but her feet were pushed down into the sandy dirt just behind the hem of the blanket she’d brought to sit on. She reminded them all—again—that the war wasn’t over.

“We know,” Ruth said. “But would it kill you and Miss Sunbeam over there to accentuate the positive for five minutes?”

“Miss Sunbeam” was Margaret—sharing Agnes’s blanket, half-reclined, her gaze fixed on the opposite shore as if waiting for someone to appear then.

What she was actually doing was trying to find things to think about that weren’t the man she’d kissed in the hardware store. For example, there was the marble flagging she wanted for the walk that connected the porch to the driveway. She’d found it in the Sears catalogue, but it was too expensive, so it went on her “for later” list. Same went for the pastel-colored mix-and-match countertops and sink basins in the Montgomery Ward catalogue. What were those pastel-colored candies that were round and flat, like little flagging stones? She’d gotten them for Felix’s last care package but had changed her mind at the last minute and kept them for herself. Necco Wafers. He—the man she’d kissed in the hardware store, the one she was trying not to think about—had tasted like a Necco Wafer. The house, though. Didn’t it deserve nice canvas awnings, once cloth stopped being rationed? It did, and he’d tasted like a Necco Wafer dipped in coffee. And he had very soft lips. There was something about him that reminded her of Bernard, in fact, but that hadn’t been why she’d kissed him. She’d kissed him because she saw in his eyes that he wanted her to kiss him. She saw in his eyes something she’d never seen in Felix’s.

Desire.

—

She moved art around. That was a way of tending to the house that didn’t cost anything, since she already owned all the paintings. Some of them she didn’t like anymore. They looked drab, or like valley scenes you’d find in a travel ad. But she was still fond—fondest—of her Leon Dolice. “Ash Can School,” the gallery owner had told her. “The filthy grit of everyday American life. New York, most likely.” But the buildings weren’t particularly gritty, or distinct, just wide, some of them, and tall, others, and to her it resembled Broad Street in Columbus, with the American Insurance Union tower in the background. She’d never settled on a wall to hang the Dolice. She’d leaned it up in various spots around the living room, had it on the mantel for a while, and had finally leaned it against a wall in the bedroom, to be dealt with later—and there it still was. She carried it downstairs to the bay window in the living room and admired it all over again. She walked around with it—eighteen by twenty-four, it needed space to breathe—and finally decided the living room wasn’t right for it at all; the dining room was. Over the sideboard, between the sconces. Perfect.

Only then did she discover the painting had never been wired for hanging.

—

“We certainly do sell picture wire. Hooks, too—all sizes. You came to the right place.”

He, who was not the person she’d kissed a week ago, was an intense little man with recessed eyes and dandruff. Around sixty, she guessed. Checkered trousers hiked all the way up and his business, as Lydia would have called it, shoved over to one side and on display. He was flirting with her, she thought. There was too much eye contact in his sales pitch, too much finger-wagging.

“I’ll bet you thought you were going to have to run all over town looking for what you need,” he said. “Am I right?”

“I hadn’t really—”

“Not that I want to put our competition down, but they don’t have half the selection we do. We’ve got everything you need, right here at Hanover’s.”

Where was Cal? This man tried to sell her a hammer. He tried to sell her a level and a tape measure. When she told him she already had those things, he asked her how she’d celebrated V-E Day. Before she could answer, he said, “You enjoyed yourself, right?”

“I went to the lake with some friends.”

“That’s swell. You and the Mister?”

The Mister, she said coolly, was on a ship in the Pacific. She paid for the wire and eyehooks, and left.

—

The next day, she returned to Sutton Street and peered through the window.

Cal was leaning over the counter, filling out an order form, and when he saw her he pinched the pen right out of his hand and sent it skittering across the wood. She had on a green cardigan and navy skirt and didn’t look nearly as dressed up this time, more like a fancy person having a regular day. He said hello and asked what he could do for her.

She retrieved the handkerchief from her purse and handed it to him; it was washed, ironed, and folded. She’d decided to say nothing about the kiss just in case he regretted it, or felt like apologizing for it or, worst of all, wanted to do it again, because wouldn’t that be the last thing she needed? She told him she was hanging a painting. Something she’d purchased in Columbus—by a painter from the Ashcan School, maybe he’d heard of it?

All the times Cal had looked up at the jangle of the shop bell over the past several days, and here she was, suddenly in front of him. He admitted with a smile that he didn’t know what the Ashcan School was, the closest he came to knowing about art was comic books, and you don’t frame anything from those.

“Aren’t comic books a form of art?” she said.

Cal blinked. “Are they?”

Margaret didn’t really think so, but it was easy enough to fib. “They’re pictures someone imagines and makes. That sounds like art to me.”

“I’ve never met anyone who thought that,” Cal said.

Well, now he had, she said. Then she asked if there was any chance he might be able to stop by her house on his way home that evening—just for a couple of minutes, to help her hang the Dolice. As if she didn’t know another living soul who could help her with such a thing. And, of course, as if she couldn’t do it perfectly easily herself.

—

The painting was representational, there was no denying that, she said. But it was also suggestive. This yellow line suggested a spotlight in the distance. This little patch of red suggested light from an alley. But it was the bold use of pinks and oranges that had drawn her to it, and the offset of deep blue, and the light—the light!—rendered in saffron and a soft lemon chiffon giving way to saffron, warming the canvas and softening all the lines.

Cal, forgetting to take full breaths, saw everything as soon as she pointed it out but never would have noticed on his own. Could he guess her favorite aspect of the painting?

“The colors, it sounds like. Or maybe the size?”

She shook her head, said, “Is it dusk, or is it dawn? It’s up to the viewer.”

True, but Cal’s eye was drawn elsewhere. To her wedding band, for one. To the picture on the mantel of a man in Navy blues. And to that wall in the foyer, with its rocks and plants and running water—like something out of a jungle movie.

While he was preparing the painting—screwing in the little eyehooks and winding the wire—she asked suddenly, “Do you like to dance?” Then remembered his limp and hoped the question wasn’t insensitive. She and a few friends had been running an informal dance studio for the last couple of years, she said. Above Dads & Lads on Irwin Street. It was called Step It Up; maybe he’d seen it?

Cal hadn’t but said he didn’t get over to Irwin much. She invited him to drop in some evening, then mentioned that Wednesdays and Fridays were the nights she was usually there.

Finished wiring, he leaned across the sideboard to hold the Dolice against the wall while she asked him to inch it right, left, up a little. He felt her breath on his forearm as she made pencil marks to indicate where the painting should go. Then he tapped in the nail and eased the wire down onto the hook.

They stood together at the far end of the room and admired their efforts.

“Like it there?” he asked.

“I do. Thank you so much for your help.”

“Glad to. I should probably be heading out, though.”

Of course he should. And would. The moment of silence that followed affirmed that. But before they left the dining room, Cal said, “So, I’m just curious, if you had to choose, which would you want it to be—dawn or dusk?”

Margaret looked at the painting again and narrowed her eyes. “I’d want them both.”

—

Three nights later, his Citizens Defense patrol took him out of his neighborhood and all the way downtown, where, on Irwin Street, he heard music coming from over the clothing store and saw shadows moving against the second-floor windows.

The stairs creaked as he ascended.

Step It Up had been a bleak and musty space when Ruth and Agnes and several of their friends had convinced Mr. Rubinski to let them use it—just a big room with a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, but Ruth had brought in extra floor lamps from home, and, with Mr. Rubinski’s permission, she and Agnes had painted the walls a warm shade of salmon. They’d hung a Spars poster, a Waves poster, a picture of Count Basie, and a tinted photo of FDR. They’d placed a half dozen mismatched chairs against the walls, along with a small table for a portable record player and a wheeled cart for drinks and snacks.

No one pretended Step It Up was an actual business. They didn’t charge money to attend, and Mr. Rubinski didn’t ask them for rent so long as they kept the music down and didn’t disturb the storage room in the back—doorless, but partitioned off with a dark velvet curtain. The studio was usually open three nights a week for anyone who cared to show up, and the number of available dance partners on any given evening could go from slim to plenty. Tonight was a relatively full house: six of them in attendance.

When Cal appeared at the top of the stairs, Margaret was hunched down flipping through the milk crate of records on the floor. She was thrilled to see him but tried not to let that show as she stood and crossed the room to shake his hand, then introduced him to the others. Ruth and Mrs. Cox recognized him from school. Mrs. Fletcher recognized him from the hardware store.

“I’m not here to dance,” Cal said. “Just wanted to watch the fun and say hi. Little break from the rounds.” He tapped his CDC armband.

Ruth reminded Cal that they’d once cut open a frog together in science class. Cal remembered her then—her laugh, and her funny comments about the viscera. Agnes offered him a cigarette, iced tea. He declined both but thanked her.

Mrs. Fletcher whistled to get everyone’s attention and placed another record on the turntable.

Cal walked over to one of the chairs against the wall and sat down. He watched as they tried out something called the European Jive. Margaret danced with Agnes. Ruth danced with Mrs. Fletcher. Brenda Rhodes, who, at twenty-three, was the youngest of them all, danced with Mrs. Cox. Then they switched off.

“I just remembered,” Agnes said, turning to Cal between songs, “I heard through the grapevine you married Becky Hanover. So that’s how you ended up at the hardware store on Sutton. How’s Becky?”

“Fine,” Cal said quickly, from his chair. “Doing great.”

“Does she still”—Agnes held a hand out level, fingers splayed, and see-sawed it—“read tea leaves and things?”

“She must,” Mrs. Cox said. “She advertises.”

Cal said he’d take that iced tea after all.

“You sure you don’t want to dance?” Brenda said, handing him the glass.

He shook his head.

The staircase creaked again. Sam Liddick, the lantern-jawed, dark-haired sprinter who’d earned multiple ribbons in county track events and had been hired to be a coach at the high school just before Pearl Harbor, appeared on the landing.

“Well, well,” Mrs. Fletcher said, “the hero returns!”

Sam was wearing a beige silk shirt and olive-colored trousers, and he was thinner than he’d been when he enlisted, his cheekbones more pronounced, his belt strap curling an extra couple of inches past the buckle. Mrs. Fletcher gave him a hug and asked him how things were, over there.

“We egged Germany pretty good, I guess,” he said.

“But what about the Pacific?” Agnes asked. She tipped her head toward Margaret. “We’ve got husbands out at sea, and nobody seems to know when they’ll be back. Or they aren’t telling us.”

“Lighten up, Agnes,” Ruth said. “Sam isn’t the secretary of war. He came to dance—didn’t you, Sam?”

“Of course he did.” Mrs. Fletcher bent over the record crate. “That’s why I invited him. This boy won the blue ribbon in the Hancock County Dance-Off before he shipped out.” She chose a record and set it on the turntable. “Come on, Sam. Tranky Doo!”

Sam hardly looked fit enough to stand upright for very long, much less dance. But when the music started, it all came back to him and he began to move. He apple-jacked and shorty-Nelson’d, knee-tapped and Suzie Q’d. He didn’t look at any of them while he did this but kept returning his eyes to a spot on the wall in between the Waves and Count Basie. A grin crept into his face.

When he was done, they applauded. Mrs. Cox walked over, took his arm, and motioned to Mrs. Fletcher. “Put on something we can Sweetie Pie to, Addie.”

After the Sweetie Pie came the foxtrot, which was even more demanding than the Tranky Doo and enough to take Sam’s breath away and make him drop down into the chair one over from Cal’s.

“We need another fan in here,” Ruth said, snapping the front of her dress away from her chest.

Sam touched his sleeve to his forehead. He introduced himself to Cal.

“Cal Jenkins,” Cal said and shook his hand across the empty chair. They’d been a year apart in school, had passed each other in the hall countless times, but their worlds hadn’t overlapped.

“You’re not dancing?”

“Not my thing.” Cal waited for the next question: Then what are you doing here? When that didn’t come he said, “You just got back, huh?”

Sam nodded. As the two of them watched the women moving around the room, he leaned in close to Cal and said in a softer voice, “I spent the last four months in a POW camp in Moosburg.”

Cal was alarmed by this, couldn’t even imagine. “What was that like?”

“I saw a guy get shot in the back just for standing too close to a fence, that’s what it was like. I’m sure glad as hell to be back.”

“I’ll bet,” Cal said.

With some guidance from Ruth, Brenda was practicing her box step, but she kept cutting her eyes over to Sam Liddick.

“Not like that,” Ruth said. “It’s slow, quick-quick. Slow, quick-quick. Is that your idea of a box?”

“You serve?” Sam asked Cal.

“Couldn’t.”

“Farm deferment?”

Cal extended his left leg and wagged the shoe with the extra-thick sole.

Sam stared at it for a moment, then said, “Oh, yeah. You were the kid with the limp.”

“I tried to volunteer. Went in for my physical, but no dice.”

Not at all pointedly, just making conversation, Sam said, “How come they didn’t make you 1-B?”

“Full up, I guess,” Cal muttered.

Brenda announced to the room that she was stealing one of Ruth’s cigarettes.

The staircase creaked again.

“Boomps-A-Daisy!” a voice called out.

“What is this,” Mrs. Cox said, “men’s night?”

The old man danced his way into the room. He had thick white hair and wore black-and-white wingtip shoes, black trousers, an electric-blue guayabera, and thick-framed glasses that magnified his rheumy eyes. He danced around Mrs. Fletcher and Brenda, around Margaret and Agnes and Mrs. Cox, and when he reached Ruth he knocked his backside into hers.

“Good evening, Mr. Pruitt,” Ruth said.

“ ‘I like a bustle that bends!’ ” he sang.

“We aren’t Boomps-A-Daisying at the moment, but we’re always happy to see you.”

Mr. Pruitt accepted an iced tea and took the smallest sip from the glass before handing it back to Brenda. When he learned that Sam was just back from Germany, he made a point of crossing the room and thanking him for his service. He himself had fought in the Great War, he reminded the room, then suggested they all pair off for a rigadoon.

What a world of difference between Everett and Mr. Pruitt and Roman, Cal thought. All of them around the same age, veterans of the same war, sent home in one piece. Life chewed you up and spat you out, but it didn’t often spit the same way twice.

“I’m not sure we’re familiar with the rigadoon,” Mrs. Fletcher said. “How about the Big Apple instead?”

“Finally,” said Mrs. Cox, who adored the Big Apple.

This put all of them in a circle, including Sam, just catching his second wind. Before the needle was set down, Margaret looked over and motioned for Cal to join them.

“I can’t,” Cal said, smiling, waving her off.

“You can.”

“I don’t know it,” he said, feeling the same old flutter of panic in his stomach that he used to feel in grade school when kids would try to taunt him into doing any activity that involved running or a ball.

“It’s easy,” Margaret said. “I’ll show you.” Her hand was extended. The look in her eyes was familiar—he realized it was the same look she’d given him in the basement of the store almost a week ago, just before they’d kissed.

The music was peppery with clarinets and saxophones. He stood reluctantly and stepped forward to join the circle—between Margaret and Mrs. Cox. It turned out a person didn’t have to have isometric legs or any particular knowledge in order to dance the Big Apple. A person just had to brook being a few steps behind everyone else, and nothing could have been more familiar to Cal than that.

—

Over the next couple of weeks, two letters arrived from Felix, neither mentioning the German surrender (which hadn’t occurred at the time he was writing), and both telling Margaret the contents of the Teague’s cargo holds, as if he thought that mattered to her, or as if he’d forgotten he was writing a letter and not a ship’s manifest. She wrote to him about the wasps’ nest under the eave of the garage, the warblers in the backyard, what she was reading (Green Dolphin Street, which Mrs. Talbot from next door had lent her because it had a Marguerite in it). She wrote about Sam Liddick and Mr. Pruitt but not Cal. To even think about Cal was to want to kiss him again, and more. Powerful fantasies—but harmless, as long as she didn’t give them anything to work with.

Then, on the last day of the month, just past noon, they ran into each other in the Rexall across from Food Town.

What do you know? they said, almost giddy, and, What are the odds? Knowing the odds were fair. She was holding a bag of Epsom salts. Salts for the Salt, Cal quipped, then rattled the pill bottle in his hand: aspirin for the leg. She asked if he was taking a break from work, and he said Thursdays and Saturdays were his father-in-law’s days at the store.

So that was the unpleasant little man she’d met when she’d first tried to return the handkerchief. Cal’s dark-yellow cowlick stood like an antennae from his crown. Just as she’d had the urge to pluck his tie out of his shirt the day they met, she had the urge to lick her finger and flatten it. She told him again that it’d been nice to see him at the studio. She hoped his leg wasn’t bothering him too much.

Not at all, he said. She expected Nice running into you or something to that effect, but he just stood there, waiting to hear what she had to say next.

She asked if he had any interest in a bit of lunch somewhere. When he shrugged and said “Sure,” she told him to pick the place. “Somewhere fun,” she said.

—

They both had their cars, so she followed him down Osborne Street, past the train station, to a stamped tin and red lacquer diner that looked clean but smelled a little like mop water. They sat at a table by the front, and she glanced at the menu for less than a second before telling the waitress she’d have tomato soup, French fries, and a chocolate malt. Cal ordered a BLT and an orange Nehi, and after the waitress left he told Margaret he admired her decisiveness.

“I haven’t eaten this kind of food in ages,” she said. “I used to—quite a lot, in fact.” Suddenly she missed Columbus all over again.

While they waited for their lunch, she asked him things about himself. Whatever came into her head, she asked, and he answered. He’d lived here his whole life. He’d been to Toledo, yes, and Columbus once. But not Cleveland, or Cincinnati. (When she asked about Chicago, he admitted that he’d never been out of Ohio.) He had no interest in farming, he said. He’d worked in concrete before hardware. He hadn’t seen The Enchanted Cottage, but he’d seen Objective, Burma! “What about you?”

She told him she’d grown up outside of Columbus and moved into the city when she was eighteen. Had been married for eight years, had come to Bonhomie because of Felix’s job.

Cal said, “The man on the mantel.”

“That’s him.” Margaret’s eyes landed on the hand wrapped around his soda. The ring there.

“Becky,” Cal said. “And we’ve got a boy. A junior—fifteen months.”

“No kids.” She raised her hands and showed him her palms, for some reason.

Cal asked where Felix had worked before the war, and she said Tuck & Sons. He asked what Felix did there and she said he was in charge of Quality Control. Then he asked if Felix was stationed in the Pacific and she thought, Why are we talking about Felix? But she nodded.

The food arrived. While they ate, to get them away from her husband and check all the polite conversational boxes, she asked about Becky. Did she work somewhere, or volunteer? Agnes had said something about her reading tea leaves. “She tells fortunes?” Margaret asked, remembering the sequin-scarfed woman she’d wasted a quarter on when she first got to Columbus.

Cal shook his head. He took an extra-long time chewing and swallowing a bite of his BLT. “Becky doesn’t tell fortunes,” he said. “She holds séances. On a pretty regular basis. And people come—people take them seriously.”

“To your house?”

He nodded.

“What’s that like for you?”

He thought of the first thing he’d seen when he opened his eyes that morning: a hairline crack in the ceiling of the guest room. “Strange and not strange,” he said. “Lately, somewhat annoying.”

If that was bait to have a discussion about his marital problems, she wasn’t biting. “What do you do for fun?”

He had to think about that. “Stuff with the kid. Gardening. And I—I know it sounds goofy, but I enjoy selling hardware. I enjoy selling things people need.”

She could feel their encounter cresting—tipping toward its end, or at least toward something that wasn’t this. She said, “There’s so much hardship in the world. If we don’t allow ourselves a little enjoyment every once in a while, there’s nothing but hardship, right?” She slurped the last bit of malt through her straw.

Cal insisted on paying, and they walked out to where his red Nash was parked beside her deep blue Packard. When he stepped off the curb he cantered a little, righted himself.

Her direct gaze held his for a moment. “Do you mind my asking—was it polio?”

He shook his head. “Born this way.”

“Does it bother you? Often, I mean.”

“Sure,” he said. “But I wouldn’t know who I was if I started moving around on an even keel.”

They had their keys out and were about to part ways, which was for the best, they both knew. There’d been nothing wrong with going to lunch, but now lunch had been eaten, and it was time to say goodbye.

It almost went that way.

—

There were woods on either side of the railroad tracks just east of the diner. The gravel bolstering the tracks had been washed away in places, the ends of some of the ties seeming to float in midair (infrastructure was on hold while the country fought a war). Margaret wanted to walk alongside them, but Cal talked her into walking between the rails. More fun that way, he said. It was June and the air was hot, stagnant. Gnats spun around them. Margaret waved them away and kept glancing over her shoulder. Checking for trains, Cal realized. He told her she didn’t have to worry; trains don’t sneak up on you.

She felt so strangely okay around him. She had the impulse to tell him about her past. Her upbringing. Not because she wanted him to know but because she wanted there to be something between them that didn’t exist with anyone else. Hadn’t they earned a little harmless conversational intimacy? Instead, she said, “Tell me something most people in Bonhomie don’t know.”

Cal thought about that for a moment. “Chester Arthur once spent a whole summer here with his family, in a house out past the lake.”

“Something about you, I mean.”

Me? Ah, well, I ran a guy out of town a month ago. He was making moves on my wife, and I got tough with him and put him on a train and sent him on his miserable way. Now my wife and I hardly speak, and I’m sleeping in the guest room. It was a rich story and one he couldn’t tell for so many reasons, not the least of which was that it made him feel a little queasy to think about it. After mulling over an answer for the distance of several ties, he sank his hands into his pockets and told her no one really knew what it had been like for him, living with his dad after his mom and siblings had died. Their house was just far enough past the edge of town that people didn’t pay much attention to all the junk in their yard, and no one but him and his dad ever saw what the inside was like. Cal described it—a little—and told her how it all got there, and said it had been a challenge just to exist around all that crap by the time he started high school. So he’d never really had any close friends—not outside of school—because he didn’t want other kids to see how he lived. Plus, he never knew what shape his dad was going to be in—drunk, or ranting, or both. “The last war did him in. And the Depression. Let’s just say it wasn’t a Norman Rockwell painting.” He shrugged. “Maybe nothing is.”

Rockwell’s ability to paint a thing that resembled itself was impressive, but his work was too exact for Margaret’s taste. He was always capturing perfect moments and then putting them under a microscope to find the cute parts. Too many people turned in exact profile before some perfectly balanced backdrop, their cheeks ruddy, their skin egg-washed. Cal was right, nothing was like those paintings. And what he’d said about growing up without any friends outside of school struck a familiar chord with her. She knew what it was like to live with that hard divide between the rest of the world and home. She wanted to hold his hand.

“And you?” he said. “What’s something the people of Bonhomie don’t know about you?”

As soon as she started putting the words together in her head—I grew up in an orphanage and was never adopted—she lost her desire to say them. She didn’t want their bond, if that’s what they were forging here, no matter how small and ephemeral it was, to be about their lonely childhoods, their impoverished upbringings. You didn’t leave that to go out in the world and tell people about it, she reminded herself. You left so that you wouldn’t be that person anymore. Still, she wanted to tell him something no one else knew. “I don’t want children,” she said. Four words she’d never strung together for anyone, before now.

When she glanced at him he looked a little surprised. “Really?”

“I never have. I didn’t get bitten, I guess. By the motherhood bug.”

Cal, wondering how that would have played out in his own marriage, said, “What about Felix?”

“He wants them. One, at least. Everyone wants children. There’s probably something wrong with me.”

“No,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

Some twenty feet ahead of them, a speckled deer was sniffing at the hackberries growing alongside the tracks. It raised its head as they neared, then leaped over the rails and vanished into the trees. A smaller one appeared, and followed it.

“Do you hunt?” Margaret asked.

Cal shook his head. “When I was twelve, I shot what I thought was a possum with my BB gun. Turned out to be a shrew. That was it for me.”

“Because you’re fond of shrews?”

“Because people don’t eat them.”

“People eat possums?”

“During the Depression, we ate a few possums, yeah.” He gave her a go-figure smile that dimpled one of his cheeks. “My old man cooked squirrels too. But no shrews.”

“I don’t think I’d know a shrew if it bit me on the toe.”

“You’d know,” Cal said. “They’re poisonous.”

The rails began to hum on either side of their feet. A deep wet-throated whistle came from somewhere behind them, where the tracks bent around the trees.

“See?” Cal said. “Trains don’t sneak up on you.”

The engine came into view, pulling a long line of freight cars behind it. As Cal and Margaret moved onto the grass, Cal dug a penny out of his pocket. “I used to get in trouble for doing this when I was a kid,” he said. “My dad would find flattened pennies on my dresser and blow his stack.” He leaned forward and set the penny on one of the rails, but the coin stuck to his finger, then dropped out of sight.

“Leave it!” Margaret said.

He picked it up and placed it back on the rail. As the train neared, he reached down and centered the penny. He was showing off, she knew; he’d done this a hundred times. Still, she grabbed his arm and pulled him away from the tracks seconds before it seemed like the train would smash into him. He laughed, nearly toppled. He couldn’t find the penny afterward and was disappointed; he’d wanted her to have a souvenir of the afternoon, he said.

“Does the afternoon have to be over?”

He wasn’t sure what she meant by that, so she clarified: she had no volunteer shifts for the rest of the day, and no plans; her dance card was open.

—

He told himself they were only entering the house on Roswell Lane together a second time to continue the conversation they’d been having on their walk. But they’d talked a lot already. She invited him to sit on the sofa, then opened all the windows and pulled the curtains closed against the sunlight and turned on the standing fan in the corner. As the air began to move in the now shadowy room she went to get them some iced tea.

Cal could see three different wallpaper patterns from where he was sitting. The sofa was light blue, shimmering. He ran his hand over the cushion and watched his fingertips make lines in the short piling, then smoothed them over, erasing them.

“Are you comfortable?” she said, coming back into the room with two tall glasses. He seemed to be perspiring down to his feet. One of his shoes was wobbling against the carpet as if trying to cool itself. She sat down next to him.

“Sure, sure,” he said. He accepted the tea and took several large gulps from it.

She was almost grateful he seemed nervous, because she was nervous too. Even if there was no reason to be. All she wanted was to kiss him one more time. To feel wanted by him. Was it too much to ask for, just that one small thing?

He set his glass on a coaster on the coffee table, looked toward the fireplace, and said, “I shouldn’t stay too long, probably,” and when he turned his head back, their faces were much closer than he’d remembered them being just a moment ago.

Who knew that the kiss they’d shared in the basement of the hardware store had been restrained? It hadn’t felt like it then, but this he didn’t even recognize as kissing, because it didn’t end. They went horizontal on the sofa, still doing it. She untucked his shirt and slid a hand beneath it, so that, along with the pressure of her entire body against his and the feel of their mouths together, he felt her smooth hand on his chest, and she seemed to like the feel of it. When her fingertips grazed one of his nipples, it sent sparks down to his calves. He was hard against her, through their clothes. With one hand still on his chest, she slid her other around his lower back and pulled him even closer to her. They kissed and ground against each other and came up for air with amazed faces. There were lines of gray in his blue eyes, she already knew, but now she saw there was also a circle of gray around each of his pupils. Every time she looked at him, he was looking back at her. In fact, with the exception of a few enthusiastic glances downward, Cal looked into her eyes the entire time. She wanted to tell him: You’re amazing. But she also wanted to keep doing what they were doing, and more—today, if there was time.

Chapter Ten

After that, they each thought privately: never again. Cal was mortified, panicked, disgusted with himself. For the first time since moving down the hall, he was truly grateful he and Becky weren’t sharing a bed because he needed the alone time to recover, and stew in his shame. Never in his life, he kept thinking. Never in his life would he have thought himself capable of what he’d done. He knew he’d stumbled—in a big way. Their clothes were strewn about, he’d kicked a clock off her end table, it looked like a mini-tornado had swept through the room. Never again.

Only, the following Thursday he drove past Margaret’s house as he ran errands, even though her house was on the way to nothing. And he drove past it a second time a little while later, and a third time at a snail’s pace, until Margaret finally saw him and came out and said hello. This time, they went upstairs. Funny, he said—nervously, as she led him by the hand—he’d somehow known she’d have a four-poster bed. But she ignored that and led him past her bedroom and down the hall to what he suspected was the guest room. From guest room to guest room, then. He’d become a guest in his own life.

They had a conversation about what they were doing. How they both felt bad about it, how neither of them had done anything like this before, and how they weren’t looking to upset their marriages. That wasn’t what was happening here. What was happening was something that was clearly outside of their marriages, and physical, and needed—for different reasons, maybe. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that they found a way not to be so eaten up with guilt that it would cause disharmony in their marriages. Thus, they managed to cast themselves as at least somewhat thoughtful and even responsible people.

Thursday afternoons—just for an hour or so—became their time. They were careful in every respect. They used protection. He parked in various spots on the surrounding blocks, walked up the alley behind her house, slipped in through her gate, then through the unlocked kitchen door. He wore a hat, and made an effort to conceal his limp. He felt sleazy, coming in this way, but also a little mysterious.

He thought: there really is little distinction between having sex and making love. He thought: don’t think that. The duality their involvement required meant that he was constantly at odds with himself. On the third Thursday, for example, he couldn’t wait to get to her house. Afterward, he stood in her shower, alone, slapping his forehead.

For Margaret’s part, all she wanted was to feel and be desired. To be physical with someone she desired. Was that too much to ask? Call it a fling, an affair, a lapse in judgment. She believed in her heart that if she could have this with him, here and now, she could deal with whatever the future held for her and Felix.

Cal, in bed, made her feel alluring, provocative. She made him feel sensations he hadn’t known existed before (it was amazing what you discovered when you just slowed down a little). More than that, she made him feel deserving of an adventure.

In a postcoital, breath-catching moment, he laid his head on her stomach and she toyed with his hair, and after trying to get his cowlick to go down (and joking about that), she noticed the reason he always had a cowlick was because his hair, wavy and almost wheat-colored, grew out from his crown in two different directions, like swirls in a Van Gogh sky.

—

In mid-June, two weeks into Margaret’s involvement with Cal, a letter arrived from Felix about how the Teague had had to sit anchored in a bay somewhere for an entire week, waiting for its turn to unload. Felix mentioned some upcoming R & R the crew was scheduled for on an island base, the name of which had been blacked out by the censors. Seven well-deserved days off they were all looking forward to. She read the letter at the secretary’s desk in the living room, then put it in the special satin-lined stationery box in the bottom drawer, where she kept all of his letters. She was aware, then, of her guilt, because she felt its dull ache diminish a little at the thought of his not working himself to the bone while she slept with someone else halfway around the world. At least he had a holiday.

Later, as she lay in bed trying to fall asleep, she realized this wasn’t true. Time was being stretched yet again: hers into his past, his into her future. He’d written the letter over a month ago. His R & R was long over.

—

In some ways, the ship wasn’t so different from the aluminum plant. Both were massive, amalgamated machines that took crews of people to maintain. Both stank of metal and grease and exhaust. Both had catwalks and platforms and constant, broiling heat (though nothing on the Teague was as hot as the plant’s dross house). The biggest complaints Felix heard about ship life—other than tongue-in-cheek ones like “too much work” and “no dames”—were about the food and the heat. The food you couldn’t escape. The heat you could dodge the worst of by working at night, above deck, should that option be open to you. It was open to Felix, and he took it in early 1945. The heat, though, wasn’t the worst of it for him, nor was the food. For Felix, the worst thing about the Teague was the noise. Sailors were loud. Men, when they were working together, were loud. The ship’s engine was loud (they’d told him he would stop hearing it after a month; two and a half years later, he still heard it just fine). The ship itself was loud. It moaned and groaned, jostled and screeched, shivered and knocked. Even in calm waters, it cracked its welded knuckles. What was the life expectancy of a ship built in under a month? he wondered. He’d spent close to a thousand days and nights on it.

The Teague had gleamed when he first saw it. Now, it was hard to tell if it needed a new coat of paint or a complete overhaul. He’d been thirty-one and rock-solid from basic, in the best shape of his life since college, when he’d first walked up its gangplank. Three birthdays later, threading around the Pacific, he’d thinned out. Most of them had. Their ability to work exceeded their appetite for bad food. Sometimes, instead of eating, they smoked.

Anyone he’d gotten to know to any degree onboard, he’d gotten to know over a cigarette. Work friendships, he guessed they’d be called. Though one of the many differences between working in an aluminum plant and working on a ship was that you got to leave the plant and the people who worked there at the end of your shift, whereas you were stuck on the ship with your co-worker friends (and everyone else) twenty-four seven. Felix did okay, held his own and was generally well-liked, but the common ground the rest of them shared was never his. Wives, fiancées, girlfriends, sure, but not the constant talk of tits and ass and this one was like butter and that one was like a glove, all of it sounding desperate and wolfish to Felix. He could fake being interested. He could even fake being amused. He just couldn’t fake participate. He compensated for his lack of racy material by acting even more amused by theirs. He’s tightly wound, that Lieutenant Salt, they said. He’s tried-and-true married, but you can tell he gets a kick out of hearing the racy stuff.

There was also a lot of talk among them about the willingness to kill, but no talk of actually having killed. None of them had done it, Felix suspected, which was why they could wax on about it so easily. Having been trained to be a killing machine, you were either the kind of person who was relieved to be running supplies instead, or the kind who was antsy to put your training to use. There was a lot of talk about winning the war and teaching the enemy a lesson they’d never forget, the hatred for the Japanese extending to other, sometimes random-seeming groups. Cocksucker, Felix noticed, was the go-to term for someone you wanted to kill (or just hated). The more time he spent listening to his crewmates, the more it became clear that they were all—including him—fighting to protect a way of life that didn’t include everyone back home, or even right here on the ship.

—

And yet, even here, he encountered the look. There were transfers, new faces that made his guard drop for an instant, now and then. You could get the look and return it unintentionally, in such a confined space. He wondered how he imagined it sometimes. A handful of them stood on deck one morning after loading engine blocks for new PBY Catalinas. A match went around. Seaman A. Varick, twenty-nine, a farmer from Scottsbluff, Nebraska, asked if anyone could spare a smoke. He’d been on the Teague for a month. Tawny-haired, lean, but as strong as two men, somehow. Felix had listened to him talk about his Pentecostal upbringing, Foursquare Gospel, snakes. A. Varick—Augustus, the A stood for—shook his head and laughed when he talked about the snakes but not when he talked about the laying-on of hands. That was like a force you didn’t know you had, traveling from you into someone else. He’d done it both ways, he said. He’d laid hands and been touched, and both times he’d thought he was faking it—until he couldn’t tell anymore. It was intense.

Augie, he went by.

Felix still had his Lucky Strikes out. He offered one. Flipped open his lighter. A moment later, Augie was coughing up a storm. He apologized to the rest of them, said he didn’t smoke. Goretsky leaned back against a mooring bit and laughed. Carazzo asked why Augie had bummed one if he didn’t smoke, and Augie said he thought it was about time he started. Felix watched without watching as Augie placed the cigarette slightly off-center in his mouth and held it there, the hazel-colored eye on that side squinting slightly. He looked younger than he was, probably got tired of being treated like a kid. Still, Felix—five years older, if not any wiser—took him at his word: he didn’t smoke, just wanted to belong, socially, to this group of men he was floating around with. Which was how Felix had started smoking, too, and now wished he hadn’t.

In a gesture infused with both rank and a touch of avuncularity, he reached over and plucked the cigarette from Augie’s lips. Their eyes met for an instant as he did, and Augie didn’t resist as he felt his upper lip stick to the paper and pull away from his teeth. Felix’s fingers were just an inch from his mouth. His lip let go, and he smiled as Felix tossed the cigarette over the side of the ship.

Something hummed between them after that: a live current of signals sent, signals received.

Their week spent anchored in the lagoon at Majuro was long and stifling. Stagnant water, stagnant air, nothing to do. One ship after another moving in ahead of them to dock and unload while they sat low and heavy with tires and medical equipment. You were never more tired of the war than when the war gave you nothing to do. But at the end of that wait, just as they were finishing unloading, word came of their upcoming R & R.

An island in the New Hebrides, twelve hundred miles off the coast of Australia. They’d been to it a number of times before, but only ever to unload the Teague and load it back up, never for R & R. Espiritu Santo.

—

By then, Felix and Augie had leaned into other people’s conversations many times. They’d laughed at some of the same things and, by participating, had collected some basic facts about each other—Felix was married; Augie had girlfriends back home, no one he was ready to settle down with yet. They’d also exchanged the look almost without any eye contact at all, had nodded to each other without nodding. The awareness each had for the other was palpable.

With all five cargo holds full of still more plane parts, they steamed along in a convoy of forty ships at eleven knots, toward Espiritu Santo. When they arrived, a foreboding (though expected) site awaited them: the shipping channel where the massive troopship SS President Coolidge lay on its side beneath the surface, having struck mines meant to protect the port two and a half years ago. Only two men had died, thankfully; more than five thousand had managed to get themselves ashore before the Coolidge slipped down into the channel.

This time, the Teague didn’t have to wait to dock. Thirty-six hours later, they were finished unloading. They were exhausted, but the Germans had surrendered two weeks earlier. They’d just delivered parts that would help make planes for the planned invasion of Tokyo. The base on the island was enormous—and busy. The Army, Air Corps, and Navy were all there together. Planes were under repair out on the airfield. A squadron of Hellcats sat parked alongside a runway made of steel-mesh Marston Mats. In the harbor, ships were in dry dock, and those dry docks were feats of engineering Felix might have been drawn to investigate if he hadn’t been thoroughly sick of all things ship-related—and officially on R & R.

They were directed to follow the walkway through the scrub and were given their pick of subdivided Quonset huts, two men per hut. As they neared the huts, they began to break off and claim their spots. Felix walked all the way to the end of the row he was on, where he could see the beach through the palm trees. At the second-to-last hut, he pulled the thin screen door open and Hicks said, “Thank you, kind sir,” and stepped around him. Keane followed. Felix walked on to the last hut. When he glanced behind him to see if anyone else had come down this far, there stood Augie, holding his duffel bag and doing his best to look a little confused as to why there were no more huts in the row. Felix waved him in, and they each took a room.

A shuttle boat took them all across a different channel from the one they’d come in through—to Aore Island, which was as big a recreational center as Felix had ever seen. Baseball diamonds, squash courts. Lagoons of clear blue water to swim in, sandy shores. In the same heat they complained about on the ship, they spread out like flotsam on the sand, some naked, some in their skivvies, napping with their shirts over their faces, sitting around wheelbarrows filled with ice and cans of Lin-8 beer, passing an oyster knife to crack the beers open. They drank and held the cans against their foreheads and chests. They thrilled at seeing iguanas clinging to the tree trunks, were told by some of the men stationed there to keep their eyes open for dugongs in the lagoons—creatures that looked like big, smiling dumplings—and giant bats with orange faces in the evening sky. They saw neither. They drank coconut milk and traded socks and bars of soap and cigarettes for laplap wrapped in banana leaves.

Everything about being on the island felt new to Felix. The solid ground underfoot, the food, the sense of space. Augie’s presence. All through that first afternoon, now that they were off the ship, Felix wondered if the tension he’d felt for weeks between him and Augie was only in his head. Late in the evening, he took a walk alone along the beach, and when he came back to the Quonset hut and was entering his room, Augie called out, “See any dugongs?” from the other half of the hut, his side. Felix peeked in. Augie was stretched out on his cot, on top of the blanket, in just his shorts, reading a dog-eared Armed Services edition of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. His freckled shoulders, Felix saw in the light from the overhead bulb, were pink from the sun. As was the bridge of his nose. Felix was in shorts and a worn-out T-shirt, deck shoes, a floppy straw hat he’d found on Champagne Beach. “I didn’t,” he said, “but it was pretty dark. Like the hat?” Augie shook his head a definitive no, grinning, and it occurred to them both that they didn’t have to look away. So they didn’t look away. A moment later, Augie scrambled up from the cot. The book tumbled. Without breaking eye contact, he closed the distance between them, reached for the lightbulb chain, and tipped Felix’s hat off his head. In the dark—in the quiet—they took hold of each other and kissed as they got out of their clothes, and kept kissing as they moved, naked, touching from their shoulders to their knees, each with his hands open wide upon the other’s back, drawing him in, as if they were trying to press themselves into one person. Soon, they were on Augie’s cot. They were sweaty before they even started and had to thumb the dampness from their eyes and rake it into their hair with their fingers. They said little—and that, they whispered. For half the night, they went at each other, finding confidence, feeding appetites they’d thought would never be fed. They went to sleep a couple of hours before dawn, each in his own room. It went like that every night they were there.

On the third morning, just after the sun came up, they were both still asleep when the outer door squeaked open a bit and a monkey sidled into the hut. A foot and a half high, with gray-brown fur, a whiskered face, and a long thin tail. It belonged to the local man who was there to sell them eggs—the same man who sold them laplap in the evening. From him, they learned that there were no other monkeys on the island, only this one. A sailor had brought him here from New Guinea and left him, the man said, and the monkey belonged to him now—unless Felix and Augie wanted to buy him. They didn’t.

The following morning, when the man came to sell eggs, the monkey was back. He took a liking to Felix, sat on his shoulder and picked at his hair and tried to dig his fingers into Felix’s ears. The sailors traded bars of soap and wool socks for eggs, and every morning they turned down the offer to buy the monkey. Keane hated the thing (it had run off with his toothbrush). Hicks said it smelled like wet rope. But Augie liked the monkey and named him Jamoke. That was the name of the retriever he’d had growing up, he said. One night, as if they’d been weighing the option, he suggested they buy Jamoke and bring him back on the ship—what did Felix think? Augie wasn’t serious, Felix knew, was just wanting to see his reaction. “As your superior officer,” Felix said, “no.” The two of them were a little drunk on Bir Kar. All Jamoke needed, Augie said, was to learn some manners. Felix joked about sending him to finishing school. Then the two of them bantered about how Jamoke would become refined, go out into the world, and return decades later having made a fortune and wanting to support them in their old age. Neither of them acknowledging what this scenario was really painting.

Then came their last night on the island. As rested as they were, they were exhausted too. They winced when the sky began to lighten.

—

Back on the Teague, it wasn’t quite business as usual. For all of them, the hard-won turn of events in Europe indicated that they were either contributing to the next big victory or were now consigned to the part of the war that had no end in sight. Felix and Augie, in this heightened atmosphere, did their best to settle back into their roles but had to be even more careful about casual interaction and the occasional glance. The difference in their ranks, the fact that they’d shared the Quonset hut, seemed risky in hindsight. Not that anyone had seemed to notice.

They hadn’t talked about how what had transpired reflected on who they were and what they each had back home. The island—not the ship, as he would have expected—had shifted Felix’s sense of balance. His sense of gravity. He’d been expecting some kind of moral crisis for having stepped outside of his marriage vows. What he found instead was confusion, and a cautious swell of gratitude. He longed to talk to Augie. He longed to do more than that, of course, but he wanted to have a conversation about what they’d shared. More than once, Augie had mentioned wanting to have a family one day. Was he truly that gung-ho, or was he more like Felix—and Helen and Mabel—assuming marriage and traditional family life was unavoidable and so bracing himself for a life within the status quo, and crossing his fingers that he was up for the task? Felix had been serious—heart serious—in his vows to Margaret, and he still was. He loved her, cared about her, and at the same time he felt that this part of himself—with Augie—was more than just excess to be trimmed from the edges of the mold, more than just sprue to be diverted. Talking to Augie, he knew, would have to wait till they got to the next port and there was an opportunity to get off the ship again and stretch their legs, carve out a little privacy for a walk and a chat.

But when the opportunity finally presented itself—not in New Guinea, where they didn’t get an hour’s rest, but at the base on Nouméa, two weeks after they left Espiritu Santo—Felix lost his nerve and didn’t seek Augie out when they were docked. He had no idea if Augie wanted to talk to him, wanted to see him, and he was afraid to find out. So he dodged him, which wasn’t hard to do in Nouméa, there was so much going on. He went to the commissary and to a pub, and he kept his head down, in general, avoiding the very person he wanted, confused by that, irritated with himself. Back onboard, when Augie passed Felix on deck, he saluted, and Felix felt a surge of longing as he saluted back.

Next port, he thought. New Guinea again, in six days.

—

On the evening of June 25, 1945, they were out to sea, packed to the gills, the sky a pearly scrim of clouds laid across a waning moon.

The torpedo—a Long Lance, Type 93—came in just after 0400 hours, drawing a thin spine along the smooth, dark surface, traveling at thirty-six knots when it struck the hull on the port side, between the engine and the boiler. The impact and explosion shook the entire ship. Felix had just completed his watch ten minutes earlier, was on the second floor of the deckhouse on the ship’s starboard side, almost to his quarters, when he was thrown sideways into the wall.

The alarm sounded. He righted himself but could tell the ship was already beginning to list to port. Doors up and down the passageway fell open; men scrambled out, half-dressed, half-awake.

Behind or beneath the commotion, Felix noticed the engines had stopped.

He was making his way toward the phone box at the end of the passageway, moving past men headed in the other direction, bound for the deck, when a second blast—somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship—made him stumble. A hand took his arm, pulled him up. Lieutenant Nowak from Alaska. “Abandon,” Nowak hollered over the alarm, just as the order came over the loudspeaker. He motioned for Felix to help him as he pulled on an emergency cord hanging down from a wall-mounted netting of kapoks—fat-necked, olive-gray life vests spidery with straps and buckles. When they were released, the kapoks didn’t fall so much as tumble down the sloping wall to their feet. Nowak grabbed one and tossed it to someone behind him, who tossed it to someone else. He tossed another, and another, up the passageway, and Felix tossed several to the men filing down the ladder at the other end. Then Nowak hollered for Felix to put on a kapok himself, and by the time Felix got the straps buckled, the list was so bad that he had to stand with one foot on the floor and the other against the port wall. Nowak was gone.

Where was Augie? His quarters were one floor down. The ship had to be burning even as it took on water; it was moaning in ways it never had before. Listing by at least twenty degrees. Then the lights cut out.

At the top of the ladder, a red emergency light came on, and he climbed toward it, but a third blast from somewhere below made him lose his grip, and he landed hard against the number four hatch. His left arm and shoulder exploded with pain. His forehead felt wet; when he touched it, his fingers came away bloody.

He got to his feet, thinking how, in the number one and two holds closer to the bow, there were a hundred and fifty motorcycles. Behind the engine, two hundred jeeps. The stern was lower than the bow now, but the ship wasn’t going down that way; the ship was flooding through the hole that had been blasted into its port side, and it was listing more than thirty degrees. The ship, he felt certain, was going down sideways. Or rolling.

There were two other men against the outside wall of the deckhouse with him. One was Anders, the barber from San Antonio who’d cut his hair for the past three and a half years. The other was Turowski, from Ipswich, who worked maintenance on all the cranes and winches. Like Felix, they had kapoks, but Turowski had injured his leg. Felix knew they had to pull themselves up to the bulwark on the starboard side while they could still get there. Only, up wasn’t up; up was across. Cut through with pain—he couldn’t even tell where it was coming from—he stretched and managed to get his good arm, the one that used to be able to throw a fifty-yard pass, around the bulwark, and extended his foot, and Turowski used him like a rope to get himself up. Then they helped up Anders.

Across the water came distant booms. Cauliflower flashes of orange-yellow etched in black. The entire convoy, most of it ahead of them, was under attack.

There was no sign of Augie.

Up and down the starboard side of the ship, men reached for the bulwark, some of them tumbling backward onto the men clinging to the port side. When the roll reached forty-five degrees, the cables snapped and the foremast and jumbo boom broke off with ear-splitting cracks. Felix and Turowski and Anders straddled the bulwark as it rose into the night sky.

Anders lost his grip and fell. Turowski jumped. All along the bulwark, men were either jumping or falling.

Felix jumped.

Nine minutes had passed since the torpedo had struck. On its side, the Teague was still smoking, the water churning around it, the stern sinking ahead of the bow. Then the bow, its two anchors snug against the hawsepipes, was all that was left and seemed to be dissolving on the surface. The suction—not as strong and vast as they’d been told to expect but still powerful—pulled some of them under, and not all came back up. Many of them had leaped into a scrim of oil that coated them, burned their eyes, funneled down their throats. Some were still on the ship. Later, more than one survivor would say the Teague became illuminated: a brilliant green that flashed once beneath the surface, then went dark.

Chapter Eleven

The courier from Western Union was dressed in a little gray suit with a pointy cap and couldn’t have been more than fifteen. He looked at his feet as he handed Margaret the envelope and was on his way back to his bicycle before she could open it.

THE SECRETARY OF WAR REGRETS TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR HUSBAND, LT. FELIX L. SALT, IS REPORTED MISSING IN ACTION AFTER THE SINKING OF THE SS ROBERT TEAGUE IN PHILIPPINE SEA ON 25 JUNE 1945 WITH FEW SURVIVORS AND MOST CREW MISSING AND PRESUMED DEAD. IF FURTHER DETAILS OR OTHER INFORMATION IS RECEIVED YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY NOTIFIED.

R. KELLUM, THE ADJUTANT GENERAL

Margaret eased herself into the wingback chair in the living room and for a long time just sat there holding the telegram in her lap, her ears filled with the sound of trickling water from the terrarium in the foyer. June 25. It was now July 2. Making this the fastest-traveling piece of information about Felix she’d received since he went away.

She sat with the information.

What was there to do except sit with it?

Good lord, she thought.

Good lord, good lord, good lord.

She was going to have to call Felix’s parents. She’d met them just once in the nine years she’d been married. It had been while they were living in Columbus, and Russ and Lillian Salt had called out of the blue to announce that they’d be stopping by the next day, on their way to an air show in Pittsburgh. They wanted to have lunch somewhere nice and finally meet their daughter-in-law. What Margaret remembered most from that meal was that Russ made the waitress stand there and watch while he took a full minute doing origami on a dollar bill he then pocketed, and Lillian sent her steak back three times before canceling her order. The whole visit had lasted less than two hours, and at the end of it Margaret had hoped never to see those people again. But she at least had to call them.

His boss at the foundry.

Ruth, she supposed, who would tell all the other ladies at the dance studio. Agnes had received a telegram just two weeks ago informing her that George had been killed on Okinawa—unthinkably tragic—and she’d been staying inside. A large black wreath, given to her by the Red Cross, hung on her front door. When Margaret, Ruth, and Mrs. Fletcher had brought food to her, there’d been almost no place to put it because people from her church had already filled the icebox and cupboards.

Margaret would reread the telegram before she did anything else.

FEW SURVIVORS AND MOST CREW MISSING meant the Navy had misplaced him. PRESUMED DEAD was what you’d say about anyone who’d been on a ship that had gone down, if that person’s whereabouts were unknown. She didn’t want to tell Felix’s parents anything just yet—especially not when better news might be on the way. She didn’t want to tell Ruth or Mrs. Fletcher and have to endure all that consoling, and receive all those covered dishes, only to then have to inform everyone it had been for nothing. IF FURTHER DETAILS OR OTHER INFORMATION IS RECEIVED YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY NOTIFIED. Yes. Let R. Kellum sort it out and get back to her. Then she would figure out what she had to say, and to whom.

—

But what to do with the burden of carrying around such a secret in the meantime, that she did not know. She broke into a sweat holding the telegram, and when the sweat cooled, it felt like a thin layer of frost on her skin. She got up and pulled on the baby blue robe Felix had given her the Christmas before he left. She carried the telegram into the dining room and sat at the head of the table, in Felix’s chair. She and Cal had hung the Dolice behind where Felix sat so that she could look at it while she ate. It didn’t dawn on her until now that Felix had nothing to look at from his end of the table. But Felix didn’t care about art. She could hang anything there or nothing at all and it wouldn’t matter to him. It certainly wouldn’t matter if he turned out to be dead. Her eyes spilled over with tears. She’d cheated on him, and he was probably dead.

And where did that leave her? Better off by far than she deserved to be. And yet. And yet. Also with a mortgage and store accounts that had outstanding balances, and with no plan for the future. How had she come all this way—from nothing—only to have it all come crashing down? Felix was the only future she’d set in place for herself, the only one she’d considered, once they were married. Felix! When had she let go of the constant, daily worry that something awful would happen to him? He was writing to her about cargo and cigarettes and bad food. He was always telling her not to worry, that he was far away from the action. Was this not true, and did he just not tell her how much danger he was in? How was she supposed to function with so little information?

Be strong, is what they always said. But for whom?

She put her head in her hands and began to sob. Sweet, kind Felix. Well-meaning, well-thought-of, beautiful, strong Felix. Gone, killed at only thirty-four. She didn’t want to be a widow. She didn’t want to hang a wreath on the door or put a gold star in the window and be one of those women she saw in town, wearing black armbands and looking shattered as they did their shopping. She wanted Felix back, changed by the war for the better and eager to make up for lost time. She didn’t want him to not come back at all. Who wanted to see that movie? She lifted her head, reread the telegram, and sobbed all over again.

More information would come, and there was nothing to do but wait, in the meantime. Wait by writing out a list of the people she would need to call. Wait by washing the linens, washing the floors, the windows. Wait by fixing something to eat; she was starving. But before getting up, it occurred to her that, if this was to become her chair at the dining table, the Dolice ought to be moved to the other side of the room. Cal could help her with that.

She pushed her robe sleeve against her nose.

No. Cal couldn’t help her with that. Cal couldn’t help her with anything. Cal was married, she was married, and while neither of those facts had stopped them from rolling around naked for the last four Thursdays, this message stopped everything. Written by a stranger and delivered by a child, a single telegram stopped everything dead in its tracks.

—

There followed a very difficult stretch of days. She stayed in her robe, the telegram folded and tucked into one of its pockets. She slept little and spent her waking hours in a fog of worry.

Two days after she got the news, she called Ruth and begged out of the Fourth of July War Bond Fundraiser Dance they’d planned for that night at Step It Up, claiming to have a cold. She made no mention of the telegram.

“Summer colds are the worst,” Ruth said, and then proceeded to tell her that Brenda Rhodes and Sam Liddick had become an item.

“Who’s Sam Liddick?”

“That young man who got back from Germany not long ago—the one who came to the studio and cut a rug with his Tranky Doo.”

Ah, yes. The night Cal showed up.

“The two of them are hard to look at, if you want the truth,” Ruth said. “They’re so damned happy. Makes me wish Vic would get home, already.” She advised Margaret to take two aspirins and climb into bed, and Margaret, who’d already forgotten she’d lied about having a cold, thought that sounded like a good idea.

She bided her time. How long did it take to search the Philippine Sea? That wasn’t the question, she knew. The question was, how long would they search before they gave up? Maybe they’d already given up and just hadn’t gotten around to telling her.

The next afternoon, the telephone rang and she dove for it, her heart pounding. But of course it was Thursday, and it was Cal, this being the system they’d worked out: he called first from a pay phone downtown, just in case Ruth or Agnes or one of the neighbors had stopped by unexpectedly; he called for the all-clear. She told him she couldn’t see him, she had people coming over and was very busy—throwing excuses into the phone, hoping one would convince him. He acquiesced but asked if everything was okay. Yes, she said, everything was fine, but she had to go.

Because it was too painful to look at, she moved the framed portrait of Felix in his uniform from the mantel to an end table, then from the end table to the secretary’s desk. A day later, she moved it from the secretary’s desk to a spot on the bookcase.

A day after that—or was it two?—she’d apparently moved it again, because she couldn’t find it. She looked in the den, and in the formal sitting room they rarely used. She looked in the dining room, and even in the guest room—though she hadn’t been in there since Cal’s last visit and didn’t like stepping into the room alone now. Framed photographs of husbands didn’t just disappear. Especially when you live alone and you were waiting for the kind of news she was waiting for.

She finally found it in her bedroom, lying face-up on top of the dresser. She had no memory of putting it there or even bringing it upstairs.

—

Every ring of the telephone was the Navy calling. Every letter through the mail slot was from the Navy. Every creak of the house was the Western Union boy on the front porch, about to ring the bell. But there was no telegram, no letter, no call about Felix.

On the twelfth day of her secret widowhood—and the second Thursday since the telegram arrived—she spied an envelope lying on the floor under the mail slot, long after she’d collected the mail. Nothing but the letter M. written on it, and inside, a note that said, You okay? Just wanted to check in. Hope all is well. C.

Please go away, she thought. She tore the note in half, and in half again as she carried it to the trash.

—

The following morning, just before dawn, the phone rang. “Hello?”

“Margaret?”

She sat up. Purple light pushed in around the shades of the east-facing dormer windows. She said yes and hello again and listened. The connection was bad. But there he was: his voice weak, gravelly, but recognizable. She wondered if she was still dreaming. “Felix?”

“Hi.” He cleared his throat and coughed some distance from the receiver.

“Felix. Felix! Where are you?”

He was in a military hospital in Manila. His ship had been torpedoed—had they notified her? They’d told him they had.

“I got a telegram, but nothing else. Are you—” She almost said, Are you alive? “Are you alright?”

“I nearly drowned,” he said, then told her of his breaks: shoulder, collarbone, a couple of ribs, and a humerus they’d had to re-break to get it set right, that re-break being near the top of a long list of things he never wanted to experience again.

“My God. Are you…healing? You sound awful.” He sounded like someone was standing on his throat.

“They say I’m healing. I swallowed a lot of seawater. Oil too. We got a little fried by the sun waiting to get pulled out of the ship’s debris. It was a real mess.”

“Thank God, thank God, though, Felix. Did anyone die? From the ship?”

If it weren’t for the static, she would have thought the line had gone dead. “Quite a few,” he finally said.

She tried to grasp this, tried to picture it. “Oh, Felix.” She couldn’t stop saying his name.

“I know,” he growled through his damaged throat. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. How long have you been there?”

“A week, I guess. Apparently, I didn’t have much to say when I first got here, so that didn’t help with the processing.”

“Are they keeping you there?”

They were moving him to San Francisco, he said. They wanted him to see a couple of specialists. The kind they didn’t have where he was now. He coughed again. They’d told him they’d only be keeping him for about a week, if all went well. As soon as the doctors cleared him, he’d be a civilian again.

This time, he was the one who wondered if the line had gone dead. “Margaret, are you still there?”

“I am,” she said as the room took on texture around her. “I’m here.”

“I’m coming home.”

—

Two weeks had passed, and other than that brief, curt phone call when she’d told him not to come over, Cal had had no contact with Margaret Salt. He didn’t understand why she hadn’t at least dialed the store or stopped by. After leaving that note (which he wished he hadn’t), he drove up and down Roswell Lane a few times looking for an indication that something had happened—a wreath or a star, even a For Sale sign in the yard. But there was none of that. Had her husband returned? Wouldn’t she have told him? He went from feeling worried about her to feeling dismissed, and from feeling dismissed to feeling a little used. He actually didn’t mind feeling a little used, because when had anyone ever seen fit to use him? Sexually, no less. But it was jarring the way the whole thing had come to a sudden halt, and it made waking up in the guest room of his own house feel that much more pathetic. There were mornings when he had to remind himself that his sleeping down the hall from his wife had nothing to do with his having slept with Margaret Salt.

Had it just been a whim for her, then? He was as relieved as he was disappointed that it was over (if it was). And he was grateful to have gotten away with it (if he had). He couldn’t un-sleep with Margaret, un-oust LaGrange, but he could throw himself back into those parts of his life that would have him. Guilt was the sound a tree made when it fell in the forest, and he plugged his ears. He did a full inventory of the store, re-mulched all the flower beds around the house. He took Skip to a petting zoo at one of the local farms (Becky declined to join them). He bought groceries and drove them out to the house on Compton Road, and there he found his father on the living room floor. Barely responsive. Again.

—

Everett’s breath was steaming the floorboards, but the rest of him had let go. He’d thrown up. Soiled himself. His skin looked so gray when Cal got him into a sitting position, he might have been bleeding out from some invisible wound. Two empty whiskey bottles sat on the coffee table. A third lay on the couch. Buster, his dark-brown fur speckled with white, hovered nearby, worried and vigilant.

Cal got his father cleaned up. As he worked, Everett came to his senses a little, mumbled that Cal should stop it, and Cal said, “Yeah, yeah.” He told Cal to leave him the hell alone for once, and Cal snapped, “Why don’t I do that, Dad? Why don’t I just leave you alone out here so you die on the floor? Is that what you want?”

Then, sorry he’d said it, he brought Everett and the dog home with him to Taft Street.

Becky had never seen Everett in this state before, though she’d often heard about it from Cal. It broke her heart for so many reasons, not the least of which was that she still didn’t know this old man very well, and she was beginning to wonder if anyone besides Cal did—or ever would. Together, they got Everett out of his clothes (the cleanest ones Cal had been able to change him into) and dressed him in a pair of Cal’s pajamas. They didn’t want him to have to contend with stairs so they set him up on the living room couch. There, he promptly passed out, and they went on with their lives around him, hoping he wouldn’t need to urinate or worse.

“Sorry,” Cal whispered to Becky. She shook her head and made a face that somehow exactly conveyed that this was a situation apart from their situation—the one that had them living like strangers who just happened to be married and raising a child together. Her understanding was a relief, but he was so upset and irked by his father’s behavior—and his timing—that his jaw hurt from clenching.

Everett slept for most of the next day.

In the evening, when he tried some toast Becky offered, he barely made it to the downstairs bathroom before retching. Cal turned on the news to mask the sound. They learned that Italy had declared war on Japan.

The next morning, Everett showed signs of improvement. He was at breakfast, Cal’s extra bathrobe knotted around him and his hair wetted and combed. Buster, who’d hovered next to the couch for two days, circled the table and curled up under his chair.

As he moved about the house, Everett seemed reluctant to touch anything. Becky watched him pick up a copy of The Saturday Evening Post and look through it carefully, without creasing any of the pages, then gently set it back in the magazine rack beside the couch, his hands trembling. She asked if she could get him something to read, and if so what he’d like.

“Westerns,” he said, as if that should’ve been obvious.

She went to the library in the afternoon and came back with The Ox-Bow Incident. Everett read the first third of the book that evening, then paged through the rest, not very interested. He didn’t understand why anyone writing a western wouldn’t write it like Zane Grey.

He wanted to go home. He missed being able to wander through the canyons of his own possessions. Plus, he found it humiliating to have to walk around his son’s fancy house in his son’s fancy clothes. Just one more day, they told him. They wanted to make sure he was eating and keeping everything down before they brought him back.

On the third day of his stay, he knocked on the pocket doors to the parlor—just as Becky was making contact with Mrs. Isaacson’s great-great-grandfather—to ask if there was any more coffee. “Can’s empty,” he said, wagging it in the doorway. Becky had to apologize to Mrs. Isaacson and holler for Cal.

Cal suggested he and Everett and Skip go into town for a while. Buy some coffee. Walk Buster.

—

In Paulson’s, Everett was amazed that so many things, aisle after aisle, were just sitting there waiting to be bought by anyone who walked through the door with a little money and enough ration points.

“War bonds!” a boy called out to them as Cal was untying Buster’s leash from a post in front of the store. The boy held up the bonds and rattled a cigar box. “War bonds!”

“Murder!” Everett yelled at him. “Murder!”

The boy ran off.

“Take your dog, would you, Pop?” Cal handed Everett the leash, shifted the grocery bag to his other arm, and pushed the stroller forward.

They rounded Jessup Circle and made their way up Sutton Street.

“Isn’t that your store?” Everett asked, spotting Hanover Hardware.

“Maybe one day,” Cal said. “For now, I just work there.”

“Why aren’t you there now?”

“Because it’s Saturday. I don’t work on Saturdays.”

“I need a saw.”

“For what?”

“For me, okay? I need a saw.”

They crossed the street as a man with a paper sack under his arm was leaving the store; the man tipped his hat and held the door open for them as they entered.

Roman was standing behind the counter, massaging his forehead. When he saw Cal and Everett, he muttered hello, but when he spotted Skip, his whole face brightened and he came out to greet him.

“Howza Dutch Clark?” he said as Skip squirmed out of the stroller and ran over to him. Roman scooped the boy up in his arms.

“I could use an awl,” Everett said, eyeing the shelves.

Roman said, “Awl bet you could.”

“And a saw.”

“What for?”

“For me.”

Outside of Everett’s periphery, Roman caught Cal’s eye and teetered his free hand, miming a drink. Cal shook his head no. “I mean,” Roman said, “what kind of performance do you want from it? Different saws do different things.”

“Short blade,” Everett said, yanking Buster’s leash a little, to keep the dog still. “No waffle. I want to build a doghouse.”

Still holding Skip in one arm, Roman led Everett over to a pegboard and showed him several different handsaws. When Everett asked how much they cost, Roman told him he was family, whatever saw he wanted was on the house. That went for the awl too.

Everett took his time. He leaned in, squinted at one of the handles. He asked Roman if the screws were split nut brass.

“I don’t know what kind of brass they are. What’s it matter?”

“Split nut holds better.”

“I’m giving it to you, for God’s sake.”

Cal wandered away from them, toward the front of the store. Through the glass, across Sutton, he spotted Margaret standing by the curb. She was dressed in a dark blue skirt and a white blouse, framed perfectly by the arched entrance of the record store in the background. She looked a little like someone in a Norman Rockwell painting, in fact.

He waved.

She waved back. Then she motioned him across the street.

He re-tucked his shirt. Glanced behind him to his son and father-in-law, his father and the dog, then ducked outside and fast-walked over.

He’d never seen Margaret look worried before. Her eyes were the same beautiful green but her lids were crimped around them, pulling the outside corners down. Her brow bore a new horizontal crease. He wanted to fall into her, hold on to her. But something had happened, he could tell. He asked her how she’d been.

Poorly, she said. She asked if they could talk, but not here and not now. Later, she said. Could he do eight o’clock? Not at her house but at the studio—if he was going to be out on one of his patrols.

—

Step It Up was sometimes busy on a Saturday, but on this particular Saturday evening Margaret knew it would be empty. Ruth and Mrs. Fletcher were both out of town. Mrs. Cox had her son and daughter-in-law visiting from Chicago. Brenda Rhodes was on a date with Sam Liddick, and Agnes was still sequestered in her widowhood.

They didn’t turn the lights on, just in case anyone else—the effervescent Mr. Pruitt, for example—should happen to look up from the street and think the place was open. They sat side-by-side on two mismatched chairs pushed against the wall, their faces lit only by the glow coming from the streetlamp. Cal listened as Margaret told him everything she knew about what had happened to Felix, and she tried to explain why, in the time since receiving the telegram, she hadn’t been able to see him or talk to him. Not when she didn’t know if Felix was dead or alive. And after Felix had called, a week ago, she’d just felt paralyzed. She hoped Cal understood.

“Of course,” he said. “What a relief this must be for you.”

She nodded.

“I was worried it was bad news.”

“Me too.”

“This is going to be such a”—he couldn’t think of how else to say it—“big change for you.”

Oh yes.

“Have you been preparing?” He forced a little laugh into his voice, trying to lift the moment. “How do you even do that?”

By not having you naked in my house, she thought. She’d taken all of Felix’s shirts, clean but folded in a drawer for three years, to be washed and re-pressed. She’d gone to the grocery store and bought all the things she could think of that he liked to eat (including licorice) and as many Lucky Strikes as the elderly man at the office supply store would sell her. She’d been saving the weekly sports roundup sections and had them stacked beside Felix’s recliner in the den. She didn’t want to talk about any of that with Cal, though. She just wanted to tell him, face-to-face, that they had to stop seeing each other.

“I’m glad you did,” he said. “I mean, I sort of thought we already had, but I’m glad you told me.”

“Not that what we had wasn’t—well, you know what it was. Anyway, thank you.”

He was devastated and relieved at the same time. Mostly relieved. He said, “My pleasure,” and she smiled just a little.

They heard footsteps on the stairs. Soft voices.

There was no door at the top of the staircase, just the little vestibule that opened onto the room they were in; if they turned on the lights now, whoever was coming up would notice because the stairs would suddenly become illuminated. It was either the fire escape or the storage room for them. The door to the fire escape shrieked terribly, Margaret knew from all the times she’d opened it to let out the cigarette smoke. She took Cal’s hand and led him through the dark velvet curtain and into the storage room—just as Brenda Rhodes and Sam Liddick reached the top of the stairs.

Sam had taken Brenda out to dinner, and over dessert he’d fished from his shirt pocket a ring—his grandmother’s, it turned out—and proposed. He said he knew it was soon because they’d only met two months ago. Brenda said she’d been waiting for a month, and yes. To celebrate, Sam had bought them a pint of whiskey and they’d come to Step It Up to dance.

They left the room dark. There was barely light enough to see into the record box, but Brenda knew what she was looking for, and in a minute she was setting the needle down on “Where or When.” It was her favorite song, she told him as they slow-danced. Recorded on New Year’s Eve of 1941, in New York City, just three weeks after Pearl Harbor. Wasn’t that buttery clarinet beautiful? Poor Glenn Miller, playing his heart out. And Peggy Lee’s voice was like a whisper. “But now I’ve talked through it,” Brenda said softly into Sam’s neck. “Let’s hear it again.” She stepped away just long enough to reset the needle.

The song had a dreamy, irresistible lull. The volume was so low that Cal and Margaret, behind the curtain, could hear the shuffle of Brenda’s and Sam’s feet. In a sliver of moonlight penetrating the storeroom’s skylight they saw that they had about six-foot square to stand in, the rest of the space taken up by a rack of big suits (for dads) and a rack of little suits (for lads), upright bolts of fabric, and a dressmaker’s dummy that evoked, for Margaret, Lydia’s Truly. How glad she was that Lydia couldn’t see her now—a married woman hiding in a darkened storage room with a man who wasn’t her husband, while her husband recovered from his war wounds in a faraway hospital.

And so it seems that we have met before

And laughed before and loved before

But who knows where or when?

When the song started for the third time, she heard Cal exhale through his nose, almost laughing at their predicament. He took a step forward, put one hand on her hip, and held the other out to the side. She took that hand, and they danced, barely moving their feet for fear of making the floor creak. They danced through yet another playing of the song, and the thought flashed through Cal’s head that they wouldn’t be doing this if Margaret had found out her husband had died, they were only doing it because he was coming home, and wasn’t that strange? A version of this same thought occurred to Margaret, as well, but by the time the newly betrothed couple turned off the record player and wandered out into the night, Cal and Margaret had other things to think about. They both knew they were never going to be together again, this way. While they hadn’t come looking for the opportunity, now they couldn’t see the sense in letting it go by. Maybe it was in the nature of last hurrahs, Margaret thought in the darkness of the studio with the echo of the music still in their bodies, that they could be just a little bit reckless.

Chapter Twelve

Piecing it together as best he could, Felix had landed not just in tepid water but in netting or rope—some kind of tendril-y substance—that held him and bound his legs, tugging him down. He grappled and spiraled, trying to get free, and went below the surface over and over, the surrounding cries muffled by the water and louder each time he came up, gasping.

At last, he kicked free of whatever was entangling him and used his good arm to turn himself all the way around. Had Augie made it off the ship? The sea was white and churning—not from the Teague, which at that moment was settling on its side at the bottom of the sea, but from what seemed to be a thousand flailing bodies around him. Men who had kapoks, men who didn’t and had nothing to hold on to.

Felix kicked and one-arm scooped his way toward a life raft—yellow, glistening, one of a half dozen or so that had appeared on the surface. He was halfway to it when someone took hold of him from behind, and in the next instant he was dragged below the surface once again. He struggled, shot through with pain, came up coughing and felt an arm around his neck, a cheek pressed against his.

Augie, he thought. Somehow.

But after breaking the hold enough to turn around, he saw it wasn’t Augie but the purser, a big guy named Baxter from Monterey. No kapok. Blood flowing from his mouth and a hungry look in his eyes as he grabbed for Felix again. He was trying to steal the kapok, Felix thought—or trying to use Felix as a flotation device. Either way, he was out of his mind and was going to drown them both. Felix hollered for him to stop, hollered that there were rafts they could get to. Baxter wasn’t listening. He knocked at Felix’s good arm—the one trying to hold him at bay—and, in doing so, landed his fist against the side of Felix’s head. In the next moment, he was around Felix like an octopus, squeezing, bringing Felix’s head back under the surface. Felix twisted and fought and managed to get a handful of Baxter’s shirt and use that as leverage to push with his legs. When he broke free, he kicked hard to put distance between them. Baxter lunged, and the sole of Felix’s shoe—the only one he still had on, it turned out—landed flat against Baxter’s face. Baxter let go, and Felix grabbed at the water to get away from him. When he looked back several moments later, Baxter was floating face down.

To the west, the bottom half of the sky popped yellow and orange against the deep blue.

Some thirty feet away, a man was attempting to climb into one of the rafts. The raft flipped over on top of him. Felix tried to swim toward the raft and realized he could hardly move. This is how you’ll die, he thought. Even in a kapok, it was possible. But eventually he reached the raft, and as he tried to lift it the man underneath shoved, and the raft flipped back over. Felix held on to steady it, and the man—Durst, from the engine room—used the rope skirt to crawl in. Durst held out his hand for Felix. But where was Augie? There were men still flailing and hollering in the water, there were rafts and lifeboats scattered among the debris, Augie might be in one of those. “Get in!” Durst shouted, but Felix hesitated, scanning the water. The man reached over and grabbed the fat collar of Felix’s kapok, and a moment later Felix was being lifted out of the water and sliding down into the raft. An ancient sound rose out of him. A deep, hollow wail. Durst pulled paddles out of the webbing in the raft’s floor and tossed one to Felix, who picked it up and did his best to paddle on his side. They made their way toward the nearest men in the water.

Flare after flare went up into the night.

By dawn, they’d managed to tie themselves to two other rafts, seventeen men splayed across rubber and canvas. Only two of the Teague’s four lifeboats had made it into the water; they could each hold twenty-five, but one had nine men in it and the other had six. Thirty-two, then, out of seventy-six. The surface was blotched with oil and dotted with desks and chairs and crates and pallets and boxes and shirts and pants and shoes and blankets and books and bundles of letters, and among those things the slumped heads of men who had drowned—with or without kapoks—but were still afloat. The death and detritus elongated with the current.

Just after dawn, a PBY Catalina, one of several sent to look for survivors of the attack, spotted them. Within an hour, the USS Rigdon arrived, its massive putty-colored hull towering over them, and Felix would have cried at the sight of that ship if there’d been any moisture left in him.

The doctor in the Manila hospital listened to this recounting in a chair next to Felix’s bed, then leaned close to Felix and said gently, “My advice? When they ask you again what happened on the Teague, don’t tell that part about the purser. To anyone, ever.”

—

Felix was on morphine. His pain wound around him like barbed wire, was pulled tight by an invisible hand and let loose over and over.

The doctor who’d told him to bury the story about Baxter was long and thin and looked like a praying mantis. The room was cavernous and gray, a hangar with beds all around. The doctor showed up to speak with Felix twice a day, as far as Felix could tell. There were no clocks, no partitions, no change of light. They went over where Felix was when, and what he remembered, until Felix began to wonder if this was an attempt to pin the sinking on him. The opposite was true.

“Do you feel responsible for the forty-four men who died in the sinking?” the doctor asked.

That number. All around them were bandaged men attached to IV bags. Most from the Teague, Felix assumed. He asked how many men in the ward were from the Teague, and the doctor looked around and said, “I don’t think any of these men are from your ship.”

“Why do you want to know if I feel responsible?”

“Because you told us, and kept telling us, that it was your watch. But it wasn’t. Your watch had ended.”

His dose was wearing off. The barbed wire was being pulled tight again.

The doctor flipped a page on his clipboard. “Should we talk about Seaman Varick?”

Augie. Was there news? Felix made to sit up and winced. “Why?”

“You’ve been asking about him. Urgently.”

So what if he had? A lot of people had died. “I still don’t see why we need to talk about him.”

“You asked us three times to confirm that he wasn’t among the men picked up by one of the other ships, or among the dead that were recovered.”

Once. As far as Felix knew, he’d asked them to confirm both those things once.

—

That was Manila. In and out of pain, he floated as much as he could in the opiate slack and answered questions and was told he wasn’t responsible. At one point, he was asked if he wished he’d gone down with the ship, and, thinking in that moment only of Augie, he said yes. That’s when they decided to send him to San Francisco before letting him go home.

He called Margaret on his last night in Manila. He went to sleep with a general dull ache but floating an inch above the mattress.

Men screamed at all hours. It was a very disturbing thing to wake up to. That last night in Manila, he was awakened once again by a scream and was thinking about how much he was looking forward to getting out of there when the man in the bed next to him said, “Buddy. Hey, buddy.”

Felix looked over.

“Shut up,” the man said.

—

They lowered his pain medication so he could travel, told him it was okay to sit upright on the plane, but it was a cargo plane and the only place to sit was on a bench of stretched canvas. His arm was in a sling to reduce his shoulder’s mobility, his forearm was in a cast, and whether he tried sitting up or lying down, the motion of the plane sent spikes into his shoulder and his chest.

The doctors and nurses who inspected his injuries in the San Francisco hospital were so friendly that he kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. The psychologist was around sixty and had white hair and black-framed glasses and a weariness in his face that Felix trusted. They met a half dozen times in the pale-green examination room that doubled as his office, Felix resting almost comfortably in a drawn metal chair while the doctor sat behind his desk in a creaking Windsor. He told Felix in their first conversation that he wasn’t looking to drag this out any longer than necessary, that he wanted to get Felix on his way home as soon as possible.

Felix had no idea what was a reasonable amount of time to spend in the hospital after your ship got torpedoed out from under you, but it had been over two weeks since the Teague had gone down, and he was starting to get a little concerned about his diagnosis. Were his discharge papers being delayed? Were they in limbo?

“Understand,” the doctor said, “it’s our job to make sure our boys are in sound shape in every way before they reenter civilian life. It’s what we do.”

Felix appreciated that, but he also knew that these doctors sometimes stamped NP on your record. Neuropsychiatric. He’d heard stories about that over the past three years. An NP never went away, once it was in your file. It was there every time you went to a doctor at a VA hospital, there if you ever applied for a government job. An NP could be denied his honorable discharge and his benefits. An NP, Felix had heard, could be held in medical facilities indefinitely.

“What I’ll need from you,” the doctor said, “is some reasonable thinking. Convince me you’re in a sound state of mind.”

“I’m in a sound state of mind,” Felix said.

The doctor was looking at the chart. The same goddamned chart from Manila, Felix suspected; they’d flown it over with him. “Convince me you don’t wish you’d gone down with the Teague.”

It was so frustrating. Was he not allowed to be devastated? “Isn’t it normal to wish that, given what happened? Just in terms of how simple it would have made everything? Isn’t that a common reaction?”

“No.” The doctor backed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “The common reaction to having survived a deadly event is to feel grateful you survived it. So that’s our starting point.”

—

Logic was supposed to fix this. And for all Felix knew, logic would. Why had he tried to get off the ship? Because he was going to die if he didn’t get off the ship. Did that tell him anything? And what he’d done with the kapoks. Did that tell him anything? Around and around.

Finally, Felix said, “You want me to tell you I’m not sad because of what happened? I can’t tell you that.”

“Do you still feel like you were abandoning some of the men—one in particular—when you jumped ship?”

“Did I say that in Manila?”

“You said that here, yesterday.”

“I don’t know. No, I guess not.”

“Let’s talk about…” The doctor’s eyes scanned the file. “Augustus D. Varick, Seaman, First Class.”

“Why is that name there?”

“You mentioned him a number of times in your previous care. It says you asked after Seaman Varick’s whereabouts”—he squinted, hoisting his cheeks—“ ‘repeatedly and in a distressed state.’ And you were concerned that his remains weren’t recovered. A lot of deceased weren’t recovered. Were the two of you close?”

Felix went to speak but stopped himself.

“Do you know why his death, in particular, is so upsetting for you?”

Because the best parts of Felix had been knocked out in the blast and leached out of him in the salt water. Because the rest of him, the worthless parts, had been hauled up onto the deck of the USS Rigdon by means of a rescue harness, while Augie drifted beneath the surface or was trapped in the hull of the Teague. Felix hadn’t been able to come up with a single scenario in which Augie had survived. The muscles in his face began to tremble. Tears fell from his jaw.

“He was my friend.”

—

Out the window, in the distance, the spires of the Golden Gate Bridge pierced a dense, stagnant fog. He lit his fiftieth cigarette of the day.

“This whole war has been a pain in the ass,” he said. Which didn’t sound like him, but that was the point; it made the doctor chuckle. It also opened a portal in their dialogue that Felix could start to pull himself through, broken shoulder and all. “I have a wife. I had things going on, before I left. I want to go home.”

“I know you do. But I’d like to be a little more certain that it wouldn’t be all the same to you if you’d died. You just gave more than three years of service to your country. You survived something traumatic. This isn’t the time to be indifferent about your future.”

“I won’t be,” Felix said. Then, feeling that wasn’t the right response, “I’m not.”

“I’ve been wondering if you might want to write to Seaman Varick’s family. A letter about Augustus. It seems the two of you were close, and you’re particularly bereaved. Writing to them might help both them and you.”

“Maybe,” Felix said, knowing he couldn’t—and wouldn’t—write to the Varicks. He couldn’t imagine touching his grief to theirs. He smoked and watched the doctor scribble in his file.

Finally, the doctor sat back in his creaking Windsor, set his pen down, and folded his arms across a stomach that was like a small casting drum. “I’m just going to take a shot in the dark and say something. Things happen in war, son. There’s a lot of separation, a lot of uncertainty. Some incredibly—intense—friendships are forged in a war, that’s for certain. And we don’t all come back. You need to let yourself off the hook, whatever hook you think’s got your name on it. Go easy on yourself, so you can get back to your life. Back to your family and your plans, like you were saying. The only way to move on from something is to put yourself where it’s not. You agree with that, don’t you?”

Wholeheartedly, yes.

—

He was given the name of someone else to report to, and inwardly he reeled, but this man wasn’t a doctor. He was a soft-eyed business school graduate from Mississippi who talked rights and benefits, explained how Felix could roll his life insurance, told him he was still accountable for his outstanding debts, if there were any, and he should look into his back taxes, see how much he owed and get that squared away. He had a six-month grace period with the IRS as a veteran; after that, all bets were off.

The Mississippian sent him to an Oregonian, who explained the G.I. Bill and the unemployment insurance it offered. Then came a medical examination as thorough as the one he’d received going in. From there, they sent him to the finance office for his back pay—in cash, plus a bonus for mustering out and a stipend for getting home.

He was so exhausted from it all that he nearly asked if they could give him a bed in the hospital for just one more night. But he didn’t. He had three days of sleeping on a train ahead of him. He called Margaret again to update her on his arrival day and time, and when he said he loved her and couldn’t wait to see her, his voice cracked and wouldn’t work for a moment. He’d forgotten how to express certain emotions, maybe. Margaret, saying it all back to him, sounded a little rusty herself.

He had no luggage, not even a duffel bag. They gave him a new toothbrush and razor. When he stepped onto the train, there were nearly a dozen people already onboard, and a woman near the front smiled at him and started clapping. A few others clapped too, and then it seemed that everyone in the car was clapping. Not since he’d proposed to Margaret in Lazarus had he warranted the applause of strangers. This time because of the uniform, he knew; because of the arm in a cast, the sling. Still, they applauded—and all he’d had to do was spend three years on a ship, almost drown, and go a little crazy.

—

Margaret was waiting for him at the train station in Bonhomie. It was late afternoon and bright, the summer air, far removed from all coasts and oceans, still and heavy. Margaret looked beautiful, and just slightly older. She hugged only one of his shoulders because of his injuries. She kissed him, and got up on her toes to kiss his forehead, and squeezed his right hand and kissed that too, smiling, trying to get used to the sight of him. He looked like he hadn’t slept in months.

They went to Wickersham’s Steakhouse for an early dinner. Felix asked her everything he could think to ask so that he wouldn’t have to talk about himself, then the food arrived, and Margaret offered to cut his steak, and he thanked her but managed on his own. Because he was so accustomed to eating quickly on the ship, he ate without stopping; when he looked up, he was almost done and she’d barely started.

So much had changed about the house that he questioned his memory of it. At Margaret’s suggestion, he sat in the backyard in one of the new Adirondack chairs and smoked and drank a Coca-Cola. She brought out a plate of macaroons and Fig Newtons. She brought out the newspaper, and in the waning light he paged through it, its content artificial to him, the leaves of the oak tree peeking over the top of the page unnaturally green.

When dusk came, they went back inside.

Felix climbed the stairs first and changed out of his uniform.

When Margaret walked into the bedroom, he was standing shirtless before the dressing mirror. He was thin, she thought. Thin, and wrapped in bandages that went from the base of his neck to his ribs on the opposite side, back to his armpit and over his collarbone. His ribs were wrapped crossways too. First aid class was going to come in handy, after all. She smiled at him in the mirror.

“Do you want to get into bed?” he asked.

She realized he meant with him. It was eight-fifteen. His amber eyes were alight on her face, tracing it, relearning it, maybe, and he looked as handsome as he ever had to her. “Yes, Felix,” she said, adding quietly, “and you can just relax.”

But he seemed to really want to go to bed with her. It seemed important to him to try to make that happen.

They moved together quickly but, due to his condition, carefully. She couldn’t get to her diaphragm, because pausing for it would put at risk an already delicate undertaking. She hadn’t used it with Cal, either, because she hadn’t had it with her at the studio. She reflected on these two things before she took Felix fully inside, surprised at how readily sex with him came back to her: his breathing, the way he so carefully parked himself, his slow, cautious movements. She’d learned how to enjoy this with him, and she was grateful for the way the desire she’d always felt for him came back into her body. She moved with him, holding the back of his beautiful head, her other hand low on his slender hip, pulling him deeper into her. Later she would marvel at how different their lives would have been—hers, Felix’s, Cal’s, the baby’s—if she and Felix hadn’t had sex that first night he was back. If he hadn’t managed it, or if she’d felt differently about giving it a go. But with some skillful maneuvering and verbal encouragement they were successful, and that wound up saving her, for a while, from having to explain so many things.

Chapter Thirteen

By the middle of August, the war was over. Because it had started with killing, and because everyone knew it was going to end with killing, the fact that it had ended with the most killing of all was layered uncomfortably into the celebration. A single bomb two thousand times stronger than any used before, dropped onto a densely populated city in Japan. As many as a hundred thousand people dead in an instant, nearly all of them civilians. In his radio address, Truman called it “a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.”

“We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely,” he said, and then listed all the things that would be obliterated. Two days later, when no surrender came, another of these new bombs was dropped, and another densely populated city was wiped off the face of the Earth. They were two places many in Bonhomie had never heard of before and for the rest of their lives would know only for having been destroyed so that, as teachers and schoolbooks would reiterate for generations, American and Allied lives could be saved, and the long war could finally be brought to an end.

When Everett heard about the bombings on his Silvertone, his mind went to the clouds of gas that had been let loose to drift and kill, back in 1918. On top of the constant shelling, machine-gun fire, flamethrowers, and snipers, the gas, to Everett, had seemed unconscionable. A weapon without shape that moved with the breeze and took down every living thing in its path wasn’t warfare. It was extermination. And look how busy the tinkerers had been since his war, making an even bigger monstrosity. Calling this new weapon “a harnessing of the basic power of the universe” was, he knew, horseshit. It was a harnessing of the hubris of men.

On Taft Street, Becky was as relieved as anyone that the war was over, but troubled. Her heart swelled, thinking of all the people who’d be returning to their families, and it deflated when she thought of all the people who’d died fighting, and all the grief that would flow out of those deaths for decades. When she read about the atomic bombings, she gasped at the number of people who suddenly found themselves spirited—like the pictures she’d seen from Pompeii: casts of men and women holding one another, or frozen mid-crawl. What did they all do, suddenly, without their lives? Nothing, perhaps. They drifted and cried, not yet realizing they could be done crying. Or they drifted and waited for bearings, not yet realizing that bearings didn’t matter anymore. She didn’t know, knew only that the land of the living was a fractured and smoldering place at the moment, and it was leaking heavily into the other side.

In town, and on her neighborhood walks with Skip, she saw people she’d had at her table, one-timers and repeaters. Some of them waved and even stopped to say hello, but some kept their eyes down and continued walking. When she told Mrs. Dodson about this, Mrs. Dodson asked her if she was in it for the hellos. No. She was in it to help people, and the last twelve months had convinced her she could do just that, if she tried. Maybe it was the slowly growing population—the town seemed to take on a thousand people every few years—or the fact that she was becoming better known among those who might be interested in what she did, but the number of people seeking her out had remained steady, at least five or six per week. Since grief was a byproduct of war that no one had figured out how to repurpose, she had a feeling that number might increase.

The Heaven question came up more and more. (The Hell question almost never came up.) Was he? Was she? Please, please say yes. Becky never would. And while she didn’t like the frustration she sometimes saw on their faces, she wasn’t about to play into the idea that God was taking care of all the “righteous” dead up there, when He didn’t seem very interested in taking care of the living down here. Not across the board, anyway. She was tired of wondering if her ability came from God. If it did, it was clearly still up to her to make sure she did something worthwhile with it. The question that rose to the top more often now was, why her? Out of so many other people? She sometimes thought that if she had the answer to that, she wouldn’t care about where the ability came from, or the fact that her own family didn’t believe in her.

But she did care that Cal didn’t believe. More than she wanted to. It wasn’t just his opinion of it; something in his heart wouldn’t let him believe in it, or even try. Why? Because it took something away from him? Because it touched something he didn’t want touched? If ever there was a time to throw your arms around the people you loved the most, it was now, but she hadn’t been in a frame of mind to throw her arms around Cal since April. When they heard news of the war’s end and his eyes welled up, she reached across the kitchen table and squeezed his hand, but the person she threw her arms around was Skip.

Still, their lives were moving on. She considered her practice a practice, because she was still learning how to do what she did. She considered Cal as much a work in progress as she was. She couldn’t shake the feeling that one day, as unlikely as it seemed, he was going to come around. He would see his way into believing in her—and probably through no action on her part. It was the closest thing to a premonition she’d ever had.

Their ongoing stance-taking that they were both in the right about the LaGrange incident, and that the other had overreacted and behaved unfairly, had had its place. But they were getting along a little better, and then a little better still, and they were tired of living like two people who didn’t care for each other. The truth was they cared for each other a great deal—around the things that angered them. And the fight that had sent them to opposite sides of the house so many months ago began, in the weeks after the war ended, to feel like something from another time. The world was moving forward, picking up the pieces. They picked up the pieces. By early fall, with the open windows bringing in the crisp night air, they were back beside each other when they turned off the light.

—

Years later, she would remember how quiet he was as he settled back into their bedroom. How she caught him shaking his head to himself more than a few times, the creases around his mouth deepening. She would remember how rueful he seemed, for weeks. How apologetic—even while he hadn’t apologized for anything; neither of them had.

She would remember thinking his remorse seemed to be weighing him down, and watching him slowly pull out of that. She would remember thinking—with such confidence—that it spoke well of his character.

—

Margaret was one of the many wives in town who started to show in the months following the end of the war. Ruth was right there with her, neck and neck. Even Brenda Rhodes—now Brenda Liddick—was in her second trimester by February. Expectant mothers were everywhere: smiling at one another as they went about their swollen days; filling their carts at Paulson’s and Food Town because they were finally free of rationing (except for sugar); attending knitting and sewing circles to make baby clothes, now that they could buy as much yarn and cloth as they wanted. Agnes knitted right alongside the rest of them, though she and George hadn’t gotten the chance to make a baby. She was finding more and more comfort in prayer lately, she said.

Margaret had to get used to the attention pregnancy garnered. People loved to smile at a pregnant woman, you felt so grand just stepping out of your car downtown. And of course you smiled back, even though sometimes they went on to ask you things that were none of their business—things you were trying not to think about, like When are you due? and Is this your first? and How many do you want? Her face hurt from smiling after running errands—but not as much as her feet.

She hated the retching. And the queasiness that made her wish she could retch. And the sensations! Butterfly wings, they said. Brenda and Ruth at Step It Up. Several women at the hair salon. Fluttering around in your belly, they said. Do you feel butterfly wings?

Snakes, Margaret told them. It felt like there were snakes in her stomach.

When she asked the doctor at the VA hospital if it had ever been the case that a mother was allergic to her baby, he looked taken aback. It seemed like a reasonable question to her.

Sitting at home in the armchair in her living room, staring out the window at the crisp roof peaks across the street and the soft gray sky above, she wondered at the trap she was in. She felt stupid for having marched so confidently into Columbus. Stupid for letting Mr. Higgs just have her like that—as if she were a matter of course. Stupid for marrying Felix with no indication that he was attracted to her, or that she was in love with him, and expecting both of those things to just happen overnight. Stupid for not telling him up front, before they were married, that she didn’t want children, because all her stalling had accomplished was to land her on the other side of a war with a baby coming—a baby she had no choice but to act delighted about.

She could stew over these things for whole stretches of the day, growing bigger by the minute, before remembering that she wasn’t sure who the father was.

The last time she’d spoken with Cal had been at Step It Up, when, as they climbed back into their clothes, they agreed to have no more contact. For everyone’s sake. She still felt that was the right thing, though she missed him a little. She missed them, for exactly what they’d been. Happy, sexy, fun—and ephemeral. That had been part of its appeal: they were like an ice-cream cone you’d be crazy to let melt.

She wondered, anew, about the circumstances surrounding her mother’s pregnancy. To be pregnant and not want to be, to carry a child you’d rather not have inside you—she understood that much now, at least. The desperate desire to be past the whole physical experience. Had her mother, pregnant, known she wasn’t going to keep the baby? Or had she decided that after the fact? Margaret couldn’t ask Lydia these things, because Lydia didn’t know. Lydia also didn’t know she was pregnant, because Margaret hadn’t mentioned it—even in a postcard. She wouldn’t have been able to bear Lydia’s excitement, the questions her follow-up letters would contain, the demands for updates.

She missed her body, from before.

And she worried about Felix—because, for all her worry that he would return the same way he’d left, he hadn’t.

—

By March of 1946, Felix’s body was fully healed, if a little battle-worn. His left wrist clicked when he moved it but didn’t hurt anymore, his shoulder only hurt when he slept on it wrong. But he was far from his old self. It was as if the war had taken him apart and the Navy had put him back together differently. After eating heartily for the first couple of weeks, making up for the less-than-stellar meals he’d been describing in his letters for the past three years, he now had almost no appetite. He seemed always lost in thought—as if an undertow were tugging him away. He stepped into rooms and seemed to have to wait for his compass needle to align. There were times when she spoke and he didn’t hear her—not a word, until she raised her voice. She’d watched him loosen his tie at the end of the day and then just stand there with his finger hooked around the knot, staring off somewhere. Then he was back again—as if his mind had different frequencies, and some of them were at home, but much of the time the dial was tuned elsewhere.

“Vic’s like that,” Ruth told her. “Then out of the blue he starts yelling—at me or the kids, it doesn’t seem to matter to him. Plus, he’s drinking more than ever. I keep reminding myself, I don’t know what went on over there. I don’t know what he had to do. At least he’s back on his mail route and enjoying it.”

That sounded bad, but it also sounded different from what Margaret was experiencing with Felix. Felix rarely drank. He never yelled. On good days, he went to work in the morning and came home in the evening, tired but alert and steady. On bad days, he left the house a little late in the morning, got home a little early, and went the entire evening with hardly a change in his glassy expression. On the worst of the bad days, he called in sick, though there didn’t seem to be anything physically wrong with him. On those days—and on the weekends—he stayed in his robe and pajamas until noon, at least. If he went outside at all, it was to sit in the backyard and smoke. He kept telling her he was fine—until she asked the obvious question: if he was fine, why wasn’t he going to work?

A checkup at the VA hospital in Findlay revealed nothing and resulted only in a recommendation that he take vitamins and eat more meat.

He couldn’t explain his debility, even while begging her, now and then, to call the plant for him and tell Mr. Westbrook that he was once again under the weather. She worried he was going to get in trouble because of so many missed days, and she didn’t want to prod him or do anything to impede his recovery—though at this point she wasn’t sure, beyond the obvious facts of three years at sea and at war, what he was recovering from. He’d told her almost nothing about what had happened to him. He’d said it was too difficult to talk about.

—

It was too difficult to carry around too.

People at the plant had tried to see things in his eyes, when he first got back. He had nothing to show them. He went into that category of guys who won’t talk about it. The days when he arrived at work late were the ones when he’d had to coax himself out of bed. The days when he didn’t go in at all were the ones when he couldn’t see a way out of his sadness. Or, he could see a way, but it was at the end of a tunnel that was always protracting before him, so that he was never even close to the mouth, that little disk of light where the house was, and where Margaret lived, and, soon, their child. Everyone thought he was back, but he was still trying to get there.

After all that had happened with Augie, he felt awful for Margaret—not just because he’d slept with someone else, but because he felt like he understood her a little better now. He understood more about what she wanted from him, what she needed, and how he didn’t have it in him to give to her.

—

The pregnancy was his bright spot, she could tell. The news had brought momentary life and light into his eyes—as if someone had found his master switch and was toggling it. He’d sat down on the ottoman and put his ear to her stomach. He’d started talking about names. Thomas, he said. Thomas Aquinas. He quoted: The things that we love tell us what we are. His reading had gotten heady overseas, apparently. Thomas Aquinas Salt it would be, if it were a boy. The girl’s name was up to her, and she picked Lydia. For a middle name, she went to the First Lady: Bess.

Other than his reaction to the pregnancy, the most impacted she’d seen him was when he discovered how much money she’d spent while he was away. He stood at the threshold of the living room holding the bankbook in one hand, his other hand open beside it as if trying to catch the numbers that might fall out. She reminded him that he’d been gone for three years.

His eyes went from the quartzite façade on the fireplace, to the new sofa and chairs, to the wallpaper in the connector hall, to the Detrola, to the terrarium. “I wish you’d asked me about all this.”

She reminded him, also, that before leaving he’d told her the house was within her purview. How was she to know the war would go on for so long? Could they talk about this later? Could he not see that she was about to burst?

—

Nine months and one week into the pregnancy, on a brilliant Saturday in the third week of April, they were sitting in the living room, Felix on the sofa, reading Thurber, Margaret in the wingback chair holding her stomach and watching him read. She took off her slipper and threw it at him. He flinched as it bounced off his stomach. “What the hell?” he said.

She begged him to take her for a drive. Anywhere. She wanted to roll down the window and stick her head out, she felt that miserable. He went for his coat and keys. She was walking to the front door when her water broke.

—

Thomas Aquinas Salt came into the world while his mother was drenched in sweat and screaming at the ceiling. There were five babies in the baby room, and since Felix couldn’t really see their heads or tell whose was whose, he made faces and waved at all five of them—until a nurse came along and asked who he was, then went in and brought a baby to the window. When Felix found Margaret in her room, he told her Tom’s hair was a beautiful strawberry blond, probably on its way to being red, like hers. Margaret knew that already. Then Felix started talking about what a good brother Tom was going to make one day, whenever they got around to having a second child.

Margaret’s labor had lasted eleven hours. She looked at her husband, his face fresh, his suitcoat pocket sprouting cigars. She said, “I’m never going through that hell again.”

—

She tried breastfeeding. It took the baby a while to latch, and when he finally did, she thought he was going to pull her nipple off. She endured it as much as she could, kept switching sides, but it was too painful. And the baby wanted to eat every two to three hours. How? Dr. Clements told her some women experienced more pain than others when they breastfed, and that some women found it intolerable. If her pain was extreme, she could switch to formula. She shouldn’t feel like it was a reflection on her mothering skills, if she did.

“I don’t,” Margaret said. “Where do I buy formula?”

He told her she couldn’t buy it; she’d have to make it herself out of condensed milk, sterilized water, and corn syrup. She’d also have to forego using a pump of any kind and let her milk evaporate; otherwise her body would just keep producing it. On his advice, she sent Felix to the medical supply store to buy six glass bottles with nipples and a special rack for sterilizing them in a soup pot, then to the grocery store for the condensed milk and the syrup. Her breasts were twice their normal size. They hurt, and not just the nipple. At night, she could only lie on her back and didn’t even want a sheet to touch them. It took a week for the pain to start abating, and another week for them to start going down. Meanwhile, she stood over the stove sterilizing the bottles, sterilizing the water that went into formula, making the mixture and bottling it and refrigerating it, only to take it back out a few hours later to be warmed and served. A constant flow of activity that reminded her of the daily work at Open Arms, only this child was hers, and no one was coming to adopt it.

—

Somewhere along the way, Felix had told his parents that Margaret was pregnant, which made him obliged to call them again to tell them they had a grandson. Within a month, the Salts—who hadn’t had any interest in coming to Bonhomie to see their son when he got back from almost dying in the Pacific—called to say they were coming to stay the night. The start of a little getaway, they said; from there, they were off to Detroit for a boat show.

Russ Salt was exactly as Margaret remembered him: a shorter, older, less charming version of Felix. He was impeccably dressed, had a darkly veined nose, and drank martinis as fast as Felix could make them. He was standing with his glass when Margaret walked into the living room and he took her arm and encouraged her to turn in a circle. “Would you look at the figure on that girl?” he asked his wife.

Lillian Salt had thinning blond hair and a face that knew disdain better than any other expression. Drinking French white wine Felix had bought for her, she glanced at Margaret and said, “Don’t be rude, Russ. She just had a child.”

Lillian thought Felix was too thin. She thought Margaret wasn’t feeding him enough. She wanted to hold the baby, but never for very long, would ask Margaret to put Tom on her lap and then, a minute later, ask Margaret to come get him. She didn’t understand why Margaret wasn’t breastfeeding. She didn’t understand why a pacifier was necessary.

In the morning, Margaret was so eager for them to be gone that she asked if they needed help packing. As Lillian put the finishing touches on her hair, Russ carried their bags out to their car. Margaret accompanied him, Tom in her arms. She said, “It’s been lovely having you here.”

“We’re delighted,” Russ said, sounding more relieved than delighted. He lowered the trunk lid.

The last thing Lillian said, peering obtrusively at Tom’s face before she got in the car, was that Margaret might have won the hair and the eyes, but the baby’s nose belonged to Felix.

—

Margaret wondered. She didn’t want to wonder, because there was absolutely nothing to be gained from it. But it was impossible not to. Felix walked around shaking his head after his parents left, collecting their glasses and apologizing to Margaret. He crawled back into bed. Margaret sat with the baby next to her in his bassinet, catching her breath from the visit and paging through the latest issue of Photoplay.

Gary Cooper looked handsomer than ever, she thought, and he shared some of Felix’s features. Those slightly sad eyes. That air of calm guardedness. On Gary Cooper it looked like calm guardedness; on Felix it once had, too, but now it looked like sedation. Cal was more Guy Madison, she thought, turning the page. Madison, with a little Jimmy Stewart thrown in (except for the height).

She set the magazine down, picked the baby up and held him in front of her, her hands around his tiny chest, her fingertips almost meeting at the middle of his back. She turned him this way and that, and while he giggled and gurgled, she tried to read lineage into his nose, his ears, his mouth. If you pushed on his nose or tugged on his ears, you could tell he was still pliable, still forming—like a lump of dough that needed time to rise. “Which is it?” she asked him. “Cooper? Or Madison-Stewart?”

But babies have nothing to gain from showing their hands. For all she knew, this one was going to be the spitting image of her father. All Tom was revealing, at the moment, was that he had bright red hair and beautiful green eyes. As if Margaret had made him with no help from anyone else.

—

The sound of the baby crying in the middle of the night was a dreaded thing. It wormed into her dreams, scratched at the insides of her eyeballs. She’d been dreaming of a waltz in a grand ballroom with gold brocade curtains and a light-blue ceiling painted with clouds. All the women in gowns and all the men in long-tailed tuxedos. Belle of the ball, watched by everyone, she danced with Felix, then switched to Cal, then to Bernard, then to the sheet music salesman, then to the English teacher obsessed with Tibet, then back to Felix. How they all laughed! How they all loved her! Then, with one cry from Tom, how they all vanished—even Felix, because, once again, his side of the bed was empty.

He rarely slept through the night anymore. He always conked out promptly but often got up later, unable to stay under. Then he’d either be up for the rest of the night, or conk out again somewhere else; she’d find him on the couch, or in the recliner in his study. Since Tom had come into their lives, she sometimes found Felix awake in the nursery. Holding the baby and pacing the room, or sitting in the green felt rocker, feeding him. At Felix’s request, Margaret had shown him how to warm the formula and test the temperature on the inside of his wrist.

That night, with her dream fading in her head, she walked bleary-eyed down the hall, and when she neared the nursery she heard Felix speaking softly over the baby’s fuss.

“Come on, buddy,” he was saying.

She peeked into the room. He was in the rocker, the baby on his lap.

“We can figure this out, can’t we?” he said. “You and me?”

Parenting, he meant. Or life. He stuck the end of the bottle into Tom’s mouth and wiggled it.

She came in and asked if she could take a look, then showed him that the nipple cap wasn’t on all the way; the baby was only getting air.

“Doesn’t he need air?” Felix said. Trying for a little middle-of-the-night humor, but it only confirmed what Margaret feared deep down: that they had no business raising a child, neither one of them having known a loving bond with a parent. “You’ll be surprised what just comes to you naturally,” Ruth, now on her third, had told Margaret. What came naturally to Margaret was wanting to sleep for more than three hours at a time. Wanting to have long pockets of quiet without the sound of crying. Wanting to feel like her existence consisted of something more than just taking care of two people, one entirely helpless and the other nearly so. She longed for Tom to start sleeping through the night, and she longed for Felix to get back on a regular sleep schedule and take better care of himself. She hated to agree with anything his mother had said, but he was too thin. A year after his return from the war, he was two sizes down in his shirts.

Several nights later, alone again, she awoke to the baby’s crying. Felix wasn’t in the nursery when she looked in, and he wasn’t downstairs. She heated the formula, fed Tom, put him back in his crib, and stepped over to the window that looked down onto the backyard. There was Felix, sitting in the middle of the yard in one of the Adirondack chairs, smoking.

It was late August. She left her robe, walked out in her nightgown. Usually, she didn’t bother him to come back to bed because he would just toss and turn when he got there, but she didn’t want to leave him outside like this. She could just see him falling asleep and waking up in the morning, chilly with dew. She came up from the side so as not to startle him. Laid a hand on his shoulder.

—

In November, she was walking through the Sherwood Garden Shop, looking for decorative pots for the front porch, when, rounding the end of an aisle, she knocked Tom’s stroller into the legs of a man holding the hand of a little boy. Bumped from behind, the man buckled a bit, said, “Whoa,” then turned around.

It was Cal. A beige porkpie hat resting on his head, his brow raised and his mouth just slightly open as he took her in. She was looking far from her best, she thought. Her hair was pulled back because it needed to be washed, and she was dressed for housework. By chance, she’d thrown on an overcoat.

They remained in suspension for a moment. Then she apologized for bumping into him, and with renewed surprise they said hello, and how funny it was that they hadn’t encountered or at least glimpsed each other before now. (They had. She’d crossed the street to avoid him on a few different occasions. He’d sat in his car in the post office parking lot for five minutes once, waiting for her to come out and leave before he went in. And they’d both driven past each other’s houses several times.)

“You look wonderful,” he said.

“I don’t, but thank you.” She could tell he meant it, though. She had the crazy desire to lean into the look he was giving her, to see if his breath smelled like Necco Wafers.

His eyes moved down to the stroller. “Who’s this little redhead?”

“Tom.” She could see the thought surface behind his eyes, the secret she’d told him: I don’t want children. But here they were. Among the many things she wasn’t going to explain to him, her failure to honor that declaration was near the top of the list. “Tell me your son’s name again?”

“Cal, Jr., officially.”

He said the boy’s nickname, but it went right through her head. She asked how old he was.

“Two and a half,” Cal said. “What about this guy?”

“Seven months.”

She’d forgotten how twitchy he could be when he was nervous, how boyish, despite that little V of worry over the bridge of his nose. She warmed from within at the sight of him and had to remind herself: she’d only ever known him as a lover. He glanced into the stroller again and the V deepened. He was doing the math.

She’d already decided that no one—including her—had anything to gain by bringing Cal into this. She didn’t want to be the wrecking ball for two marriages. “I got pregnant at the very end of July,” she said, and let that sink in. Then, just to be sure, she added, “Right after Felix got back.”

Cal’s voice softened. “Is that so?”

Look at you, way over there, she thought. “It might even have happened that first night he got home. That’s what we think, anyway.”

He nodded, and she knew he understood what she was saying: she’d made a choice. She’d had to make a choice. There was longing in his eyes—for their little wedge of shared past? for a different outcome?—but right behind it was relief, and that made her want to cry. It made her wish they’d never met.

Then he began to talk. As the boy tugged at his hand and said, with no particular urgency, “Dad, Dad, Dad,” Cal told her about the trellises he was going to put up in his backyard, and what kind of creeping vine he was going to plant, and shade versus sunlight. She remembered tracing his teeth with her tongue. How he would say, “Oh—oh, here I go,” just before he came. She remembered she was there to buy decorative pots.

“I might splurge on a new garden hose,” Cal said, his eyes moist, ticking back down to the stroller.

All that remained, then, were the pleasantries, uttered with the shared knowledge that whatever words they came up with were intended to close and seal a vault; after that, there would be nothing more to say. But having nothing more to say didn’t change their circumstances. It still left them standing in a garden shop, Cal with a two-year-old tugging at his arm, Margaret with her hands gripping a stroller handle, and between them, a baby: sound asleep, and in question.

—

That was just the way it went with women and men, she thought, shoving the stroller down the pots and planters aisle. Women had the babies, and men, if they felt like it, began to distance themselves the moment they pulled out. Because they had to go to a wife, or to work, or to a war, or to that secret place of stoic brooding all men were given the key to at birth. Had any mother ever had the time for stoic brooding? She was stuck, regardless of who Tom’s father turned out to be. She resented the very fact of that. Women didn’t have the option of just walking away from their children and leaving it up to the world to figure out who was going to raise them.

Only, they did. Sometimes they left them in baskets.

She felt, all over again, like she’d drawn the short end of the stick in this arrangement. Even as she realized there’d been no sticks, and no drawing.

Chapter Fourteen

The early 1950s were a good time to be ambitious and privileged in America. Business boomed big for big businesses already booming, and it boomed medium for smaller businesses hoping to boom, and for those who knew no boom at all and had no chance of experiencing one, well, that’s what the American Dream was for.

In the fall of 1949, a Ford assembly plant opened southwest of town, and a drywall plant broke ground across from it. North toward Rising Sun, a fabric dye plant opened in 1951, and in the spring of ’52, Ingleton’s Fizzy Pops came back into operation—to everyone’s great surprise except for Dickie Ingleton, who said “I have returned!” as he cut the red ribbon across the front doors.

The number of jobs in the area kept going up. More retail came in, and since things were going fairly well for small businesses and few of them were going under and vacating, nearly all of the new retail went into new buildings on the outskirts of town. A shopping center of twenty stores opened out toward the lake. Freestanding “strip plazas” were laid down like windrows, some of them on streets that didn’t even have sidewalks yet. Along the access road to Route 23, several warehouse stores opened—racks and racks of merchandise with fluctuating prices advertised in flyers that landed in mailboxes and on porch steps, along with flyers for pizza and family portraits and oil changes. Some wondered how there could possibly be enough people, local or otherwise, to keep all these businesses afloat. But people came to Bonhomie: to work, to shop, to stay. More doctors came in, more dentists, and lawyers of all kinds—who knew so many were needed to keep a community going: real estate lawyers, agriculture lawyers, lawyers to help you set your business up, to help you take it down, to help you organize your will, and to handle the fighting that happened over it when you were gone. There was a Chinese restaurant now, and, with the wane of anti-Italian sentiment, two Italian restaurants. New housing developments went up in fields that used to grow corn and soybeans (and the corn and soybeans were starting to come in from Pennsylvania, while Pennsylvania’s were starting to come from someplace else). Bonhomie seeped until its outskirts were no longer its outskirts.

Downtown—endangered long before there would be an endangered species list for things like local shopping and culture—was revamped to maintain its appeal. The asphalt on Main Street was dug up and laid with brick. The old, rusted street signs were replaced with new ones. The streetlamps, some of them dating back to the 1920s, were replaced with things that looked like giant insect antennae. The future might be marred by a Communist invasion or an atomic attack (according to movies, radio plays, books, editorials, and investigative reports), but for right now, things were looking spruced.

Walk into Hanover Hardware on Sutton Street and you might find a spry, energetic, thirty-two-year-old man with kind eyes and blond Brylcreemed hair who would very much like to sell you a Coldspot or a Kelvinator if you were looking for a refrigerator, or an ABC-O-Matic if you were looking for a washing machine. The cane he used would suggest polio and might even make you more likely to buy something—not that Cal needed sympathy to boost sales. He’d won his argument with Roman about bringing in large appliances and had narrowed and shortened the aisles to make room for a show area in the front of the store. Right in the window and running all the way down the north wall were televisions: General Electrics, Motorolas, Teletones. “Doesn’t look like a hardware store anymore,” Roman had complained, though they still carried all the same hardware, just in lower volume. He had no complaints after seeing the monthly profit margin.

If you were visiting 17 Taft Street, it would most likely be to sit in the parlor of Rebecca Jenkins, who would be happy to receive you (as long as you had an appointment). At thirty-one, she was roughly the same diminutive size she’d been in high school but had filled out some—to the limb, to the digit—in a way that made her look at home and comfortable in her person. She’d let her dark hair grow long, which, because it was so curly, meant wide; unpinned and ungathered, it reached the width of her shoulders. She wore no makeup, preferred turquoise jewelry (but nothing that jangled), still donned her beret now and then for an outing (but not the cape so much). She did four or five sessions a week on average, many of those being people who’d been coming to her on and off for years, now and then a fresh face who’d seen her small scallop-edged ad that ran regularly in the Gazette. No Fee—Sincere Only Please, it now read at the bottom. And while she had people who tried to insist on paying her, she never had anyone whose sincerity she doubted—not since Casey LaGrange. Her parlor had warm burlap-colored walls, exposed wood trim, and dark green curtains over the three windows. The table in the middle of the room was solid and heavy and hexagonal (bought at a yard sale for five dollars). There were six available chairs, though most often she worked one-on-one. With the exception of some fortune seekers and grudge keepers, everyone who came to her now was grieving someone. She couldn’t always find the sought-after spirit, of course, but she would talk and listen to the people who came to her, which was part of what kept them coming back.

On league night, stop into Pin King, the new ten-lane bowling alley on Lanford Street, and you might run into Felix Salt. Forty-one and thin, graying at the temples and crow’s-footed around the eyes, he was still considered handsome by the wives on the block, but they’d noticed he barely smiled when he said hello. He looked at the world through the lower part of his eyes now, and he exuded melancholy. But he bowled like a dream. The other men in the Tuck & Sons league called him their quiet surprise. They pitched the occasional strike or picked up a spare and cheered and goaded each other, while Felix barely reacted to his own pitches, much less theirs. He might say ten words all night, but he always had the best score.

And if, on a weekday evening or a Saturday afternoon in that spring of 1952, you dropped by the Step It Up School of Dance on Irwin Street, you might see Ruth Mitchell teaching a salsa class, or Brenda Liddick teaching ballet to young girls, or Margaret Salt teaching grown-up couples how to waltz. Margaret was thirty-four and known to be a person of poise and wit, with a quick smile and a short temper. She clapped when she spoke sometimes, as if trying to shout with her hands. Her friends liked her husband but rarely got to see him and accused her of keeping him smuggled away. They liked her son, who was six and precocious and adorable enough, with hair even redder than hers in certain light, but they didn’t like it when Margaret brought him to the studio because she let him run wild. They envied her hair and her face but not her temperament. She never talked about her private life. She listened and spoke her mind and had little patience to work with. But she knew just about every dance there was, and what she didn’t know, she picked up after one go-round. You got your money’s worth in her classes. An hour with Margaret Salt was all dancing, no small talk.

—

How to explain just how challenging it was?

There was the time he looked right at her and pushed a bean so far up his nose that they had to go to the doctor. The time he hid in her closet and didn’t make a sound until she was half-undressed—six years old and giggling like a little demon, scaring the daylights out of her. The many times he wouldn’t stop following her around the house. He crouched down behind things and peeked out, until she yelled at him to stop. As if he were always playing a game with her, but she never knew what the game was.

His temper frightened her. If he couldn’t have something he wanted, he screamed. He held his breath. He stomped so hard she worried he’d hurt his feet.

“That all sounds normal to me,” Ruth said.

“It can’t be,” Margaret said. “He’s entirely unpredictable.”

“Weren’t you, at that age?”

Unpredictability seemed to Margaret like such a luxury for a child to have. Imagine being unpredictable at Open Arms; how would anything have gotten done? “He repeats phrases—little snatches of songs and things—until I think I’m losing my mind.”

Ruth’s solution for how to deal with one child was to bring in more. Have his friends over. Throw a kiddie party. The moms come, she said, and by the time they leave, they’re your new friend and your babysitter. But when Margaret tried this, all the mothers (including Ruth!) dropped their kids off and left, like it was a day care. Just Margaret and seven children—and every one of them complained about how the cupcake icing was peanut butter, because she’d forgotten to make icing. She remembered crying, at one point, and trying to reason with them.

Tom had turned six in April of 1952 but wasn’t to begin first grade until September, and all summer she longed for the school year to start so that she could finally have him out of her hair five days a week. Once it started, some afternoons, she was standing in front of the school fifteen minutes early, waiting for him to come out. She wasn’t the only mother to do that, she noticed. If he wasn’t glad to see her—if he was demonstrative about it, walking with his arms folded all the way home, refusing to speak to her for no good reason—she would ask him what she’d done wrong and become cross when he wouldn’t tell her. She would snap at him, and he would surprise her by snapping back. At home, if they were having an argument, she would turn her eyes and her attention away from him for as long as she could stand it, and sometimes when she turned around, he’d left the room. Which meant she had to be the responsible one and go find him, check on him, because she was thirty-four and he was six, and because that’s what parenting was: endless responsibility.

Felix, she knew—like Ruth, like everyone, maybe—thought she got overwhelmed too easily. He never said as much, but she inferred it in the way he reacted to her complaints, and she resented him for it. She resented the way he methodically straightened all the shoes on the mat in the foyer when he got home, as if that needed to be done, and the way he collected all of Tom’s toys and lined them up on one side of the living room, and the way he gathered the dishes that were sitting around, as if she weren’t about to do that herself. Always the same handshake and kiss on the head for Tom, the same smile and kiss on the cheek for her. Always the same flat look on his face as he took in his surroundings. After which he would go through the mail, tell her that dinner (whatever it was) was delicious, play with Tom for a bit, help tuck him in, watch some television, and go to bed. That was parenting, for Felix. It was also husbanding. And yet, somehow, he thought she had no cause for complaint.

Meanwhile, he was the one who’d gotten a poor performance review at work, and he was the one who’d been demoted last year. He was back down to junior executive now, with half the number of people working under him, and a smaller salary. Yet he hardly seemed bothered by this.

He had no idea what it was like for her. Just the other day, she’d walked Tom home from school and they’d gotten along fine, holding hands as they crossed salt-sprayed intersections clovered with tire tracks, discussing everything he’d done that day. Then, as soon as they walked into the house, he’d charged upstairs to his room and let out a wail.

She couldn’t face another goldfish funeral. He wasn’t even naming them anymore; this latest dead one had been known as Number Six. Tom had netted it out himself, and here he came down the stairs to show her, dripping all the way, both hands clutching the net’s wire handle. She went and got a towel from the linen closet. No burial, she said when he asked; it wasn’t possible, the ground was frozen. The ground wasn’t frozen, he said; she was lying. She wasn’t lying, she said, and even if it weren’t frozen, they weren’t putting their coats back on to go outside and dig a hole for another fish. The toilet would do. As she spoke, Tom’s freckles disappeared into his darkening face. His eyes narrowed and his mouth drew into a plum pit. He snapped his hands and the net upward, dotting them both with fish water, and the goldfish, with startling precision, flew into the air and landed in the terrarium’s highest pool. Carried by the water, it dropped: down to the next pool, and the next, head over tail, all the way to the bottom, where it followed the narrow gutter to the end of the foyer and lay on its side against the drain cover.

“No more fish!” Margaret said. She sent him to his room, and yelled after him as he went up that he had no idea how lucky he was—to have everything he had, to have a house, and to have parents who bought him things—

“I hate you!” he cried at the top of the stairs.

“I hate you back!”

He ran into his room and slammed the door behind him.

The babysitters all said he was easy. His teachers loved him. But there were days when Margaret just didn’t feel equipped to be a mother and couldn’t believe the world was allowing her to do it. They might as well let her drive a tank.

She couldn’t catch her breath. She was mad enough to step on that dead goldfish—

—but in the next moment, she was shocked at herself and misty-eyed. She flushed the fish down the toilet, went upstairs, and pushed his door open to find him curled up on his bed, on his side, looking furious.

“Sweetheart, come on,” she said, getting up onto the bed and lying down beside him, facing and curling around him, their foreheads touching. “Let’s not be mad, okay?” He shrugged inside her arms, wouldn’t look her in the eye. When she went to kiss his forehead, he turned away, turned all the way over, but stayed close. She brought her hand up and stroked the back of his head. She wondered, sometimes, if they would like each other better if they weren’t mother and son. If he were a neighbor’s child she babysat, and they both knew that someone was coming to get him in a few hours. “Let’s not hate each other,” she said. “We didn’t mean that, did we? About hating? Of course we didn’t.” He was overdue for a haircut. She drew her fingers lightly through the waves of his hair…and noticed for the first time the two swirls coming out of his crown, the pattern like a Van Gogh sky.

She kept stroking his head, watching the hair realign itself, inches from her face.

So there it was.

Confirmation of what she’d probably known since the first time she held him. It would’ve been better if it were Felix, she thought. Better for everyone, probably most of all her.

It took some effort to put lightness into her voice, but she managed, saying close to his ear, “We can get a new fish tomorrow, honey. I didn’t mean it when I said no more fish.”

Nothing.

She said, “Wasn’t it funny, Tom, the way it landed up there? The way it went for a ride?”

—

Augie was the one who’d given Felix The things that we love tell us what we are. They’d been in the Quonset hut late at night, lying side by side naked on one of the cots, talking in low voices after exhausting themselves.

“What’s that from?”

“You haven’t read Thomas Aquinas?”

“Should I have?”

“My mom was Catholic before she converted. She put together her own philosophy lessons, part of my schooling.”

“She schooled you?”

“Her and my aunt and two of my uncles.”

“Say it again.”

“ ‘The things that we love tell us what we are.’ If I ever get a tattoo, it’s going to be that, right across the top of my chest.”

“I doubt it’ll fit.”

Augie brought Felix’s hand to his chest and placed Felix’s index finger against his skin, just below the protrusion of his right collarbone. “Start here.”

Too long, the last couple of words fell into Augie’s armpit, so Felix, with the tip of his finger, wrote them again and again—in smaller and smaller letters, Augie sometimes laughing and squirming—until the sentence fit.

In the years since the war, Felix had been amazed by the relentless connection of his thoughts—like a convoy that refused to fall out of line. To think of Augie was to think of the Teague; to think of the Teague was to think of the sinking and the man who, in his panic, had tried to kill him. The man he, in his panic, had killed. Sometimes, to think of Augie was to think of why he’d married Margaret, and how badly he’d wanted to grow into that version of himself. How he’d gone off to the war hoping to finish the process of fitting into a mold made out of ideals. How he’d come back with a damaged mold.

—

For six months, he tried shooting. He bought a rifle, took it out to a shooting range on Saturdays, shot up paper targets, and made his ears ring. For a year, he belonged to a gymnasium, where he put on gloves and head gear and sparred with strangers, punched and got pummeled on a regular basis. For three consecutive winters, until his shoulder couldn’t take it anymore, he chopped their firewood instead of buying it in ricks. Nothing pulled him out of himself or made his prospects of doing so seem any more hopeful—not even bowling, where his game began to slip.

At the aluminum plant, he realized there was a kind of club among the executives, and once they figured out Felix wasn’t tackling his duties with the same old gusto, he wasn’t in the club anymore. Conversations by the water cooler tapered off when he walked by. If he happened upon laughter in an open office, no one would tell him what the joke had been. Their expressions shifted just slightly when they spoke to him. He detected the anticipation of annoyance. Sensed the lowering of expectations. He couldn’t bring himself to care about it; he could only watch as this guy with a shattered heart and a questionable composure (a barely recognizable version of him) spent his days walking around in the extreme heat, writing down numbers.

When they’d demoted him, in early ’52, they’d used his own progress projections to reduce the scope of his responsibilities. They’d cut his pay by a fourth and had tried to ease the impact by telling him the demotion wouldn’t be broadcast throughout the company. No one needed to know, they’d said, and Felix had thought, I don’t care who knows.

He cared about his family, because he wanted it to survive. He cared about making a happy home for Tom to grow up in, because he’d never known that as a child. For all his own shortcomings, he cared about what kind of husband he was to Margaret. But he no longer cared about his rung on the executive ladder.

It was as if that version of him had gone down with the Teague. In fact, it was as if all versions of Felix Salt had gone down with the Teague except for this one, this carapace of a guy with his eye set on nothing.

He tried to get through a day without thinking about all the men he’d sailed with, and couldn’t. He tried to get through half a day without thinking about Augie, and couldn’t. He tried to steer his dreams away from the ship, away from frantic searches, slipping down raked passageways as he hollered Augie’s name, wondering where the hell everyone had gone, realizing he’d stayed too long and was trapped, the ship was taking him down.

Less frequently, there were dreams where he found Augie but still couldn’t save him.

And then—sporadically, never often enough—there were dreams that didn’t take place on a ship at all but on Espiritu Santo, and in those dreams, Augie found him first.

More than a couple of times, Felix saw him on the street. Or thought he saw him. Someone with a lean but strong-looking frame, hair that might have been described as tawny. He knew it was a trick of the brain, grafting, just for a moment, Augie’s smooth, angular face onto a stranger. But Felix peeled his eyes desperately anyway. He stopped dead in his tracks.

—

Then January came, and six days into the new year he was fired.

In the meeting were his boss, John Westbrook; Tom Prout from the Akron branch; and on the leather couch against the wall, dressed in an olive suit with his legs crossed, one brown-and-white wingtip shoe floating, none other than bow-tied, bespectacled Lucian Tuck. The man who’d pulled Felix out of Akron and promoted him to the home office in Columbus. The man who’d approved his promotion and his transfer to Bonhomie back in ’39. Lucian Tuck looked on but didn’t say a word as Westbrook and Prout explained the situation to Felix. They reminded Felix of the reprimands that were in his file (he’d thought those had been stern pep talks), reminded him of the slack they’d cut him after the war—for almost a year—said they’d been glad to see him rally from that, and things had been okay for a while, but the last few years had been filled with errors in his end-of-day sheets and gaps in his reports. The cost-flow chart they’d requested months ago had never appeared. His input to the company had been steadily diminishing over time. Westbrook and Prout spoke in tandem, as if they’d rehearsed who would say what. As they did, Felix kept glancing at Lucian Tuck. When they were finished, Lucian Tuck stood, shook Felix’s hand, and thanked him for all the good years he’d given to the company. He could take a couple of days to “gather” himself if he needed to, Tuck said. And—not to worry—Felix would stay on the payroll until the end of next month.

—

When he told Margaret that night in the kitchen, after they’d put Tom to bed, she looked at him as if she were waiting for the punch line.

Finally, she said, “How?”

He sat down in one of the chairs at the table. She dragged out the chair across from him. As he recapped the meeting in Westbrook’s office and told her about his severance package, she looked at a spot on the enamel tabletop and scratched at it with her fingernail.

“They’re being very good about the house,” he said. “They’re calling it a ‘forgivement.’ It means they don’t want the money back that they put toward the down payment.”

It had never occurred to her that the foundry could take anything back. “But—that’s it? You can’t go talk to them? Reason with them?”

“Not possible,” Felix said.

He’d been sitting on this all evening? Waiting to mention it before they went to bed? “Are you all right?”

“I’m okay,” he said. “Surprised, but okay.”

She squinted at him. “I mean, is there anything wrong with you?” She was used to his not sounding like his old self. She was used to his sedate response to pretty much everything in his life besides Tom. But he seemed completely unfazed by the gravity of this situation. “What are we going to do for money?”

“I’ll get another job, obviously.”

“But you don’t seem bothered at all.”

“I’m bothered.” He was, and he wasn’t. The audacity of it bothered him. The fact that they might have been right about his waning contribution to the company bothered him. So, yes, he was shocked to the core by the firing—but the core was empty.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t understand you.”

How could she? He’d never shown her the full picture. He didn’t understand it himself.

A light snow was starting outside; beyond his shoulder, she saw snowflakes batting the dark windowpane over the sink. “Felix, can you please tell me, are you ever going to get better? I know what you went through must have been terrifying. But you never speak to me about what happened, so it’s hard to understand. Everywhere I look, men who were in the war have gotten on with their lives. Kit Baker’s husband came back from France with only one hand, and his café is always full. He’s talking about opening up a second location. With a hook for a hand—it’s remarkable.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“Nothing. I guess that’s my point.” The snowflakes were looping now, drawing circles on the glass.

Suddenly, Tom, in tiger pajamas, ran into the kitchen and circled the table. “Stop fighting! Stop fighting!” he said.

Felix took him by the shoulders and ruffled his head. He told him they weren’t fighting; they were just talking. Margaret told him to go back to bed.

When they were alone again, in something between a whisper and hiss, Felix said, “I’ll get another job, Margaret. I’ll bet some wives hug their husbands when they get fired.”

“I’ll bet some husbands want to be hugged.” She gave him a chance to respond to that. When he didn’t, she said, “I’d just like a husband who doesn’t act like his head lives somewhere else all the time. The other night, four-thirty in the morning, I found you in the den, staring at the wall and holding a cigarette that had burned itself out, ash all over the arm of the chair. I wish you could be present for me, is all. Present for yourself. And—yes, both upstairs and down.”

An unfair curveball. Somehow she felt the need to link such a deeply buried subject to his job status. He wondered why.

“I’m fine, Margaret,” was all he said.

“Then act like it.”

“All I do is act.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He looked to the side, said, “Nothing.”

“You need to see someone, Felix. You need to talk to someone. A doctor. Maybe a psychiatrist.”

“For getting fired?”

“For how you are. Even right now. You’ve been like this forever, and you don’t seem to want to get better.” She picked and picked at the spot on the table, tears coming to her eyes. “That’s what I don’t understand, Felix. You don’t want to get better.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” he said. His face was suddenly burning. “I’m going to bed.”

He got up, headed out of the room. When he turned around to speak again, he was startled to find her right behind him. “You think you’re so easy to live with?” he said. “You’re not happy with anything.”

“That’s not true!”

“Nothing’s ever enough.”

“That’s not true,” she said again—evenly this time, coldly, because she didn’t want it to be. “Could I be happier? Do I want to be happier? Yes. Lock me up, if that’s a crime.”

He groaned and turned away. She followed him upstairs.

Neither of them had any interest in continuing the conversation they’d been having in the kitchen, but the air remained thick. As they undressed in the near dark, Margaret asked softly, “Are you attracted to me?”

Not are you still, which was a different question. Not were you ever, which was the most frightening question of all. No, hers was clearly the most incisive and important question, as well as the simplest. Are you?

The answer was yes, because as much as he’d ever been attracted to any woman, he was attracted to her. And—there was just no predicting these things—his body was suddenly willing to prove it.

Chapter Fifteen

Right away, he started looking. There seemed to be plenty of opportunity out there, with all the companies that had moved into the area since the end of the war. But his only job interview experience was when he’d applied at Tuck & Sons nineteen years ago, helped along (shooed in?) by his father, and he was surprised to discover that he was no longer impressive in the business world. It didn’t seem to impress anyone that he’d stayed with the same company for so long. Why was that a mark against him? Didn’t it speak to loyalty?

Back home, changing out of his suit, he thought: I should have shaved this morning. And: a trip to the barber would make me more presentable.

But he didn’t care.

He went downstairs and walked past the living room, where Tom and the two littlest Talbot children from next door were sitting around the coffee table, playing Assembly Line, and into the kitchen, where Margaret had the radio on, an apple crumble in the works, and dance pattern sheets laid out across the floor. She glanced at his sweater, his khakis. Asked—in an over-spirited way he found a little irritating—how the interview he’d been to that morning had gone.

“The search continues,” he said. He drained the percolator into a cup and carried the cup and the newspaper to the living room, where he sat in one of the armchairs and combed over the job listings once more.

If you jumped down and over a column—if you stopped thinking of yourself as an executive—the field really opened up. Felix could become a house painter. A janitor. A security guard at one of the places that wouldn’t hire him in a suit. He could drive a delivery truck, work on a loading dock. He lifted his eyes from the paper, looked out the window, and said to the kids, “Who wants to go sledding up on Owen’s Ridge?”

—

The Van Benton Furniture Company had opened a production facility in Bonhomie in 1949, and in late January of 1953, Felix started working there. His salary was a little more than half what he’d last been making at Tuck & Sons (though there were opportunities for advancement, he was told). He went to work in frumpy shirts and jeans now, and put coveralls on over those when he got there. He wore steel-toed boots and usually had Band-Aids on his hands.

Margaret was both dismayed and confused. Why, she asked, would he want to throw away his education? He said he wasn’t throwing it away; he still had it. Why, then, would he want to do something so…laborious? Good for the body, he said—and added that he shouldn’t have to explain why the job appealed to him. But, she wanted to know, how were they going to get by on what he made? She brought in almost nothing from the dance lessons she was giving. Not even half the grocery bill. If he expected her to get a real job, they were going to have to talk about hiring a babysitter. It was a lot of change, all of a sudden, she said. He told her she didn’t need to get a job; he’d come up with a new budget, and they would make it work. They’d have to trim some corners, was all. He’d sell the Buick he now wished he hadn’t bought brand-new off the lot last year; he’d get something used and cheap instead. They wouldn’t make any big purchases for a while.

She loved that Buick. “It’s a lot of change,” she said again.

—

He spent the first half of each shift feeding steel wire into a machine that made cone-shaped coils, and the second half attaching those coils to crossbars and fastening them together with extension springs to make understructures for sofas and armchairs. The work, in some ways, was closer to his engineering minor than anything he’d done at Tuck & Sons. And it wasn’t as mindless as he’d thought it might be; far from it, you had to stay alert to avoid getting injured.

The company was based in Maumee and was small, with just three facilities—this one employing sixty people. There were nine other men at stations similar to Felix’s, and down at the other end of the workroom, ten men building wooden furniture frames. Between them: the fabrics department, where they pulled bark cloth and velvet off great rolls and cut it and ran it through the stitcher; and the polyurethane foam and stuffing department, where they cut pads and cleaned and combed cotton into layerable sheets. Felix’s nicked-up hands ached at the end of the day in ways they hadn’t since basic training, but he punched his time card secure in the knowledge that he’d put in a good eight hours, that overtime was possible, that he was responsible only for his spot, within his station, and that the next shift would pretty much be the same as the last.

At lunch, some of the workers dispersed, but the majority gathered in the enclosed porch that opened off the loading dock at the back of the building, where there were picnic tables and a bay door that let in fresh air. Most of the men had been in the Second World War. Two had done a stint in Korea, and one had fought in both wars and was recently retired from the service. Over sandwiches and thermoses of coffee, these men talked, sometimes, about what campaign they’d been in, what raid, what battle. They told stories that ranged from funny to dead serious. The heavier, more harrowing accounts, Felix noticed, were told calmly, almost without emotion. The facts were allowed to speak for themselves.

The person who kept the story wheel turning—the one who would prompt people to talk at whatever table he was sitting at, or at any of the six tables, since he tended to move around during lunch—was one of the wood workers, a guy named Bishop, who was around Felix’s age, wore a flattop and horn-rimmed glasses, and had an infectious smile. He’d spent the war as a plane mechanic on a carrier in the Pacific and had seen plenty—he’d been at Midway, Guadalcanal, Okinawa—but the stories he told about his years in the service were all on the light side. Training mishaps. Pranks.

It occurred to Felix that there were probably a lot of men who, like him, were asked about the war by people who hadn’t been in it—spouses, well-meaning friends—and just didn’t want to say. Because it was too hard to do justice to the memories, maybe. Because the emotions attached to them couldn’t be casually revisited. The porch, at lunchtime, was a safe discussion field. You didn’t have to explain anything you didn’t want to. You could stop midsentence and no one expected another word. It was interesting to listen in on, but it occurred to Felix that the baton was eventually going to come his way. He’d already acknowledged to the guys in metalworks that he’d served on a cargo ship, but he couldn’t see himself opening his mouth to expand on that, to speak about the Teague and not have it lead to—the Teague. He worried that whatever he tried to say would break his composure, which was something he’d rather avoid, if possible.

He moved his lunch venue—casually, inconspicuously, he hoped—to the little break room near the front entrance of the building.

—

On Saturdays, Margaret often taught a class or two at the studio, and Felix was in charge of Tom. She was always telling him how wild Tom was around her. But around Felix, Tom was quieter. He was like a pH strip, maybe, changed by whatever he was currently steeped in.

They went to the movies. They went to Owen’s Ridge after each heavy snow. Tom had taken an interest in models—cars and planes and boats—so they sometimes went to the hobby shop and found him something to build. One Saturday, Felix took him ice skating at the outdoor rink next to Hedleston’s Auto Lot.

As soon as he got on the ice, Tom found a couple of other kids from his class and off they went, smooth as little swans. Felix hadn’t been on skates since college. The blades added almost two inches to his height, making him seem to tower over everyone else, and he expected to be wobbly but wasn’t; he moved almost gracefully, in fact, the muscles in his legs remembering the moves it took to balance.

A dozen or so kids, a dozen or so grown-ups were going around and around. The rink manager came over the loudspeaker and interrupted the organ music to remind them that there was no shoving. A woman in a short red coat passed Felix on the inside, her brown hair lifting over her collar. She met his eyes and smiled. When she passed a minute later, she smiled again, and this time he smiled back. Was this flirting? If it was, he was flattered. It was like being mistaken for someone else, and going with it for a few minutes. He was skating close to the outside wall now, where spectators rested their elbows. He lost sight of the woman, then spotted the back of her coat as she stepped off the ice to greet someone waiting for her. A handsome fair-haired man with his arms out. They embraced.

Those were the easiest flirtations, Felix thought, and the safest. The ones with no chance of going anywhere.

Then his eye caught on a man in a leather jacket leaning over the wall up ahead, watching him approach. Augie. No doubt, Augie. But when Felix looked over his shoulder, it was someone else entirely, a complete stranger. He drew one foot across the path of the other as he rounded the turn—and went down.

—

When Bishop walked into the break room to get a soda out of the cooler, he seemed surprised to see Felix eating alone. “Enjoying the view?” he asked, smiling and nodding toward the window that looked out onto the parking lot.

He asked Felix the same question the following Friday.

A week after that—almost two months after Felix had started working at Van Benton—Bishop came in with his lunch box and said, “Mind?”

There were four square tables in the break room but he sat down at Felix’s, across from him. He cleaned the sawdust off his glasses with a bandanna. Tucked the bandanna into the hammer loop of his coveralls. They talked about work as they ate. What the best and worst parts of their stations were. Where they’d been before this. Bishop said he’d made fancy radiator covers before the war. He loved working with wood. He loved carving—all the finishing work. Not the building so much, he said, but the details. He asked if Felix had always been in metal.

Felix wagged his head a little, told him he’d been a suit at Tuck & Sons. “They got tired of me, so I came here.”

Bishop chuckled. He said, “A step up, no doubt,” and didn’t ask for any details. “You’re Navy, right? You were on a ship, in the war?”

“Cargo.”

He nodded, took a bite of his sandwich. “You don’t like to talk about it, do you?”

No, Felix thought, so why ask? But he could sense the understanding behind the question. He gave Bishop the bare-bones version of what he’d been through.

Bishop whistled softly. He said, “It’s always the quiet guys who have the jaw-dropping stories.”

“Yours sound like you were sailing around with the Marx Brothers.”

“They’re cherry-picked,” Bishop said.

He came back with his lunch box the following Friday, then made Fridays a regular thing. They talked about the World Series, walked through some of the games, Yogi Berra’s doubles, the Dodgers’ rotten luck. All the while, Felix kept in the back of his mind Bishop’s comment about cherry-picking which stories he told. It made him wonder if Bishop had maybe been through something on a scale of the sinking—if he was lugging something like that around and still managing to smile most of the time. “Can I ask you a question?” Felix said one Friday. “On the carrier—were you with a lot of guys who died?”

Bishop took an apple from his lunch box and rubbed it on his sleeve. “Too many. Pilots, mostly. But a lot of others too.”

“Do you ever see them?”

“See them?”

“Think you see them, I mean. Say, when you’re out somewhere. You think it’s them, and then—you remember. But for a second, you were sure.”

“Ah,” Bishop said. “That been happening to you?”

“Yes,” Felix said, amazed at how good it felt just saying it to another person. But his eyes had welled up in the process. He shook his head in frustration, used his napkin. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Bishop said. “It makes sense to me. Why do you think they didn’t want us to pack anything, going over? They knew we were going to be bringing a lot of shit home.”

—

The next week, they didn’t talk about the war at all. Bishop talked about his family. He’d grown up in Bonhomie, moved to Fremont after high school, gotten married after the war, but his marriage had only lasted three years, and when it ended he moved back home to take care of his parents. Both with polio. Both in and out of wheelchairs. They were a handful, he said. He’d built an outdoor ramp as long as the house because his mom didn’t want any switchbacks.

“That was very thoughtful of you,” Felix said.

“Tell the old man that. He wanted switchbacks.”

Bishop had a sister in New Mexico who only managed to come east twice a year. She didn’t really help out, he said, but they had an understanding that the house, the Ford, and whatever was left in the bank would go to him, down the line. He asked Felix if he had siblings, and about his parents.

“No siblings,” Felix said, “and the parents were still alive the last time I spoke to them.” He left it at that, which made Bishop laugh a little. Which made Felix laugh, a little.

—

The following Friday, Bishop said, “I was thinking about what you said a couple of weeks ago. About seeing people who—aren’t around anymore.” And right there over a steaming thermos cup of chicken noodle soup, he told Felix a story that was anything but light. Off Okinawa, they’d taken a couple of bombs on deck, then heavy fire, and they were all taking cover when a friend of Bishop’s took a big piece of shrapnel in his chest. A great guy named Ernie Walters from Sacramento, had a wife and a couple of kids he loved to talk about, but he was gone in two seconds. That kind of thing happened a lot, but Ernie hit him hard, Bishop said, because he’d had so many conversations with Bishop about his family. Anyway, the reason Bishop brought it up was because he thought he saw Ernie around, after he got back. He also couldn’t stop seeing the worst stuff that had happened, it played over and over in his head. When it got to be too much, he said, he checked himself into the VA hospital in Lima. “I mean, I was ready for the bug house,” he said. “They didn’t think I was quite there. But they kept me for a while, and doped me a little—but it was the talking that helped. With the psychiatrist, I mean. That changed it for me. Got me past it.”

Felix was stunned by his candor. He also thought the conversation was starting to sound prescriptive. Through the window, they watched one of the delivery trucks with its bright yellow logo roll across the parking lot and out into the street. He said, “My wife recently suggested I do as much. But I already did it—in a string of hospitals they made me jump through, all the way home from Manila.” (An exaggeration; it had been two hospitals.) “I can’t say it was useless, but I think I got all I’m going to get out of it.”

Bishop seesawed his head a little, thinking. “You could try hypnosis. A buddy of mine went, said it helps him turn off the movie in his head when he’s trying to fall asleep.” He lifted his thermos cup and blew steam off his soup. “They call it trying something new for a reason, you know?”

—

But Felix was afraid of hypnosis. It seemed to him like a surefire way to get you to talk about things you didn’t want to talk about, things you weren’t supposed to share with anyone. It turned out there was a hypnotist who advertised in the Gazette. He’d never noticed the ad before, though how could he have missed it, with its big eye looking out from the page. Build Confidence! it said. Break bad habits!

Bark like a dog, Felix thought. Spill your guts.

He was grief-ridden. To the point where it no longer felt like grief, it felt like being awake, and he was all but convinced that was how things would—and maybe should—remain for the rest of his life.

He noticed another, smaller ad. Scalloped around the edges. No eye looking out at him from this one.

—

He made the appointment for mid-March, on a Saturday when he thought Margaret had no classes. It snowed overnight—several inches added to what was still there from the last storm. At breakfast, Margaret told him that she and Ruth and Dot Fletcher were taking Brenda out for a birthday lunch, and she had a kiddie class afterward. The Hokey Pokey and the Bunny Hop were in her future. Tom was in his.

Felix looked up from the sports page. “You told me that?”

“I used to think you tuned me out,” Margaret said. “Now, I think you just don’t receive any signals. Yes, I told you that.”

—

Cal was shoveling the sidewalk in front of the next-door neighbors’ house when a light-blue Plymouth pulled up to the curb in front of number 17. He watched a tall man in a fedora get out, and a boy in a trapper hat with the earflaps down. The man noticed Cal looking over at them and gave a little wave. Cal waved back. Then the man and the boy walked up Cal’s driveway and onto the porch, and Becky opened the front door. There was something familiar about them to Cal, even from a distance.

Just before they went in, the boy took off his hat, and Cal felt the skin across his forehead tighten.

—

It was the first time someone had shown up with a child—but Becky wasn’t put off. She told Mr. Salt it was probably best if the boy didn’t join them for the actual session, though, and Felix said of course; Tom could just sit somewhere, he had a puzzle book with him and wouldn’t bother anything. He looked down at his son and said, “Don’t bother anything.”

Tom nodded and took the softcover book and pencil stub from his pocket.

Becky said he might want to play with Skip, in the backyard.

Tom put the book and pencil away and followed her through the kitchen and outside.

They were only two years apart, but Skip was almost twice as big as Tom. He was blond and red-cheeked, and he was busy making an igloo when Becky called him over. The whole front of him was caked with snow, including his forehead. She introduced him to Tom, asked him to let Tom play with him while she met with his father.

Skip sized Tom up, which for him meant looking down almost a foot. “He’s just a little kid!”

“And you’re a big one. We won’t be too long.”

—

In the parlor, at the hexagonal table, Felix provided Becky with the same bare-bones version of what had happened to the Teague that he’d given Bishop. She told him how sorry she was for what he’d gone through. She asked what sort of contact he was hoping to make.

“I don’t really know,” he said. “I’ve just been carrying around this—weight. I want them all to know how sorry I am. I guess that’s it.” He made a face. “I have no experience with this at all.”

“That’s okay,” Becky said. “I do. Can you tell me the name of at least one of the people you’d like to make contact with?”

“You need a name?” He’d been hoping to do this without getting into specifics. Figuring if she was real, Augie would know without having to be singled out.

“First and last,” she said. “Middle, if you have it. And the date of the sinking, so I have an idea of when they crossed into the spirit world.”

Felix started having second thoughts. Come to think of it, he didn’t even know if he believed in the spirit world. Was it a contradiction to be an agnostic and believe in spirits? Were spirits souls? “Is there any way you could just try to reach the group of them?”

“I can try,” she said. He gave her the date and time of the sinking. The approximate location, and the number of men who’d died. That was it. She rolled up the sleeves of her turquoise blouse, closed her eyes, and asked him to close his own. He did.

It was very odd to be in a stranger’s home with his eyes closed. She did her work silently for a while, and as he waited they both heard a nervous curl of indigestion emanating from his stomach.

“Someone’s in the water,” she said.

His neck bristled. He opened his eyes, as if there were something to see.

Hers were still closed, so he closed his again.

Moments (minutes?) later, she said, “Someone wants—something—from someone else. There’s a great deal of unrest here. Many of these spirits think they’re still in the water.”

Not a comforting thought, but he felt that she understood the magnitude of what he’d been through. The immeasurability of it. His neck wouldn’t unbristle. What would he do if Carazzo or Goretsky suddenly started speaking through her? Or Dale Baxter? Would she start growling, like Baxter had? Would she reach for him?

But no voice other than her own came out of her, and he felt both relieved and a little foolish, realizing that he had, indeed, brought to the session a considerable measure of doubt; if he’d truly believed she might bring Dale Baxter into the room, he might not have come.

She sat back and, rubbing one of her temples, concluded there were too many restless spirits connected to the Teague to be able to draw one of them forward without a name. She’d never experienced anything like it, she said, but she’d also never tried to reach such a large group before. She’d thought for a moment that she was on the verge of establishing a one-on-one connection; a man who thought he was still in the water was repeating a word she hadn’t been able to make out. A foreign word, perhaps. If Felix wanted to zero in on a specific person, she said, the results might be different—but it wasn’t likely to happen today.

Felix glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes had passed.

She pulled back the curtains.

“I guess it’s hard to predict the success rate of this kind of thing,” Felix said.

“It is. But when it happens, it’s—well, it’s not like anything else.”

“What is it like?”

Becky opened the pocket doors, blew out the votive. “As best I can understand it, there’s a kind of membrane between the living and the dead that’s very thin, but also very strong. Spirits who have something they want to convey tend to gravitate toward the membrane, or go to it when called, and linger there. Some of us on this side—for whatever reason—can sense the membrane and what’s behind it. And can push on it. And the spirits, if they choose to, can push back. The pushing is language. The silence is language. And sometimes there’s actual language I’m able to access. Words. Phrases. Whole sentences. So the success rate is hard to predict, yes, but there is success.”

Felix wondered.

They stepped into the foyer, and she asked him to wait while she went and got Tom. She came back without him. “I sent him around,” she said, smiling. “He’s covered in snow. You’re going to want to brush him off before he gets in the car.”

“Will do.”

She could sense Felix’s disappointment as she walked him out. There was nothing to be done about that. But out of her own curiosity, she was still trying to decipher the voice of the man in the water, the word he’d been saying. Like a once-forgotten tune, these things sometimes came back to her after the fact, with startling clarity.

Tom was coming around the side of the house when they walked down the porch steps. Cal was two houses away. He paused shoveling and watched as the man and the boy in the trapper hat reached their car.

In the next moment, the word Becky was reaching for came to her.

“Mr. Salt,” she called after him. “Felix!”

He turned around.

“What’s a kapok?”

—

He waited two weeks before calling again. This time, he scheduled a session for early evening on a weekday. Cal had just walked in from work and was hanging up his jacket and scarf when Becky told him Mr. Salt would be there any minute.

The slim hope Cal had been holding on to that Felix Salt’s presence at their house had been an anomaly—vanished. Trying to push down the rise in his voice, he said, “Why?”

“Another session.” Becky carried a pitcher of water past him into the parlor. “It shouldn’t take too long.”

“He wants to find more…spirits?”

“You know I don’t talk about that with anyone but the person I meet with,” Becky said. “Mr. Salt was on a ship that went down in the war. A lot of people he knew died.”

Cal tried to feign a quiet surprise.

—

Becky was pleased Felix had made a second appointment. Something in him, a woundedness in his amber eyes, pulled at her. She wanted to help him. But when they sat down at the hexagonal table, he still didn’t want to give her a name. She did her best with what she had to work with. Several minutes in, she asked him if there’d been someone particularly close to him in the water.

“Close, meaning…”

“Proximity.”

“Yes,” Felix said. “A lot of them. There were people all around me.”

She knew that, because the spirits were swimming in and out of him as he spoke. Quite a few were transmitting flashes of experience to her. None of them pleasant. She told Felix of a spirit who’d gotten a kapok from him but had still managed to drown. She told him of another who had a kapok and had hung on to the side of a raft but was injured and bled internally—to the end. The last thing this spirit saw—as a man—was a ship arriving, the name on the side of the ship’s bow. She couldn’t make it out.

But then she could. Rigdon.

Some of the men, she said, didn’t seem to know they were spirits. They were still fighting to stay alive. One was trying to find the Teague on the surface. Another was still inside the ship, wandering its sideways corridors. Two were in the engine room, arguing over a bottle of something.

Felix was almost too stunned to respond. He’d never told her the name of the rescue ship. He’d never told her about Bollen and Marcello, forever accusing each other of theft.

Mid-session, eyes closed, he said, “You’re not not telling me anything, are you?”

She paused. “There’s one spirit who seems to be caught in a—a loop of anger. Directed at you.”

Augie?

“He’s still grappling for something, still struggling in the water with you.”

“With me?” Not Augie, then. Dale Baxter, maybe. Felix felt a wave of dread ripple through him. He didn’t want to talk about Baxter, certainly didn’t want to be put in touch with him directly, if such a thing were possible.

Before long, though, the spirit got bored, or distracted, and moved on.

The ceiling creaked. Cal, moving around upstairs.

Felix said, “Maybe it’s not possible to find out what I want to know.”

“You haven’t told me what that is.”

“I—I lived. They didn’t. I guess I want them to know that I know I owe them something. That’s part of it.”

“What do you owe them?”

His life, somehow. Their lives—even though he wasn’t supposed to think that way. Their lives, Augie’s life. “Please just convey my gratitude.”

“I am,” she said. And, “They know.” There was something more, though, she could tell. “Do you want me to try to contact a specific person?”

That question again. He did, and didn’t. He shook his head.

Afterward, wanting fresh air, she walked with him down the driveway to where his car was parked along the curb. “What’s the other part, if I might ask?”

He didn’t understand.

“You told me part of it was that you wanted to thank them, but you didn’t say what the other part is.”

She could see sadness—or maybe worry—tugging at the corners of his eyes.

“Next time,” he said, “maybe.” The smile he offered her faded as quickly as it had come.

He made an appointment for a week later but called the day before it to cancel, saying something had come up and he’d call to reschedule. She had a feeling that wouldn’t happen anytime soon.

Chapter Sixteen

In the spring of 1953, Skip was out in the schoolyard at recess when he spotted the redheaded boy who’d come to the house the previous winter. The one who’d helped him build the igloo. All the grades were out for recess, just them and a bunch of blue rubber kickballs for an hour, no further instruction. Skip’s faction of nine-year-olds was a peel-off from the other fourth graders, who were mostly girls. Theo Bach, a crusty, rabbity kid whose black-framed glasses were always taped, sat with his back to a basketball post, trying to push a pencil into one of the balls. Denny Shep, who had a brother off fighting in Korea, told Theo he was doing it wrong; go for the airhole. Skip tried to dribble one of the balls with his foot, but despite his size and strength, he’d never had much interest in sports; he knocked the ball over to Ron Burgess, a loose cannon of a kid who trapped it and tried to kick it onto the roof of the school. It bounced off the rain gutter. Skip was watching him make his third attempt when a flash moved across his peripheral vision.

The redheaded boy was running around like someone had given him the hotfoot. The second graders were learning dodgeball, it seemed. But the redhead was the only target, and they weren’t in a line; they were just running around, picking up balls and throwing them at him. Maybe they didn’t know the rules. He was hit with balls but wasn’t out; he caught balls and threw them back, but the balls kept coming. The poor kid had a raw deal, Skip thought. His hair made him stand out too much, maybe. His size made him easy to pick on.

“Look at that little bastard,” Ron Burgess said, laughing. He took a pawpaw out of his back pocket, sank a firecracker into it, lit the fuse, and threw it high into the air over the recess field. It exploded and rained bits of fruit down on everyone, making half the kids hoot and whistle and the other half scream and scramble.

—

Then summer came, and because they hadn’t had any rain all spring it was extra hot. Brutal, his father said. It didn’t bother Skip any. Sweat was sweat, who cared? He mounted his bike in the mornings and set out for whomever he could find to play with. He had squadrons all over this side of town. He played with kids in the neighborhood that he went to school with but only played with in the summer, for some reason. He played with a couple of kids who lived in Tiller’s Flat and who went to the Black school one town over, like Vincent Deeds, who was Skip’s age and who lately wouldn’t shut up about Reader’s Digest miniature cars. Vincent’s little sister, Ellah, who didn’t really play with Vincent and Skip but hovered around sometimes, spying on them. Sam Riley, whose dad had died late in the war when Sam was little, and who lived with his mom, a block away from Vincent. Sam was eleven and didn’t want to clothespin playing cards to his bicycle spokes anymore. Every time they ran into each other, he asked Skip if his mustache was visible.

Theo and Ron lived on the other side of Brookdale, in Camden where the people his dad said he shouldn’t call poor lived. There were a couple of mean dads in there, and there was a girl on the back loop who Theo and Ron called Downtown Alice, who was older, maybe ten, wore her brother’s clothes, and made sex gestures with her hands that none of them understood. Sometimes she threw gravel at them.

Skip would ride with whoever wanted to go: out to the railyard to thump over the ties; into the woods across Cooper Road to track Nazis and Commies; to the new, giant laundromat to check the coin returns and lint traps for loose change. The only snag was that he couldn’t just mix and match his friends, willy-nilly. He couldn’t, for instance, have Ron and Vincent together, or Ron and Sam. Ron said terrible things about Tiller’s Flat and used the word for Black people even Skip’s Grandad didn’t use. And Sam and Vincent didn’t have anything good to say about the “dumb cracker hicks” who lived in Camden. Having squadrons, Skip had learned, meant having factions. Sometimes it was easier just to ride around by himself.

—

Now and then he saw the redheaded boy in town, on his bicycle. Hard to miss him if he wasn’t wearing a hat. Sometimes he was with another kid or two, sometimes he was alone. One afternoon, not far into the summer, Skip was out by himself, zigzagging over the cobblestones of Crenshaw Street and machine-gunning his voice, when he saw a group of boys at the corner, by the car wash. He rode closer. The tallest boy, with the flattop, was from his class. Three others were from the grade behind his, and in the middle of them all was the redheaded boy. His bike lay on the sidewalk a few feet away.

What Skip saw made no sense to his brain. That boy was the youngest and littlest of these kids. The flattop was facing him, flicking his finger against the boy’s forehead, while one of the other kids held his arms pinned back. The redheaded boy was twisting like an eel, trying to get away but to no avail.

Skip dismounted, walked up to the flattop, and used both hands to shove him to the ground. The flattop spit out a string of curse words and made to come at Skip, but Skip just shoved him down again, as if it were an afterthought.

After the lot of them had scattered, the redheaded boy brushed his hands over his arms the same way he’d dusted snow off his coat sleeves. He walked over to his bike and stood it, then gave Skip the same look he’d given him when Skip had hefted huge armfuls of snow for the walls of the igloo: a little wary, maybe impressed. “Thanks,” he said.

“When they’re bigger than you, like that?” Skip said. “Kick ’em in the nuts as hard as you can. Works every time.”

—

The next time they saw each other, they bicycled out to the railyard and around the cars on the service tracks. The time after that, they rode to Skip’s house and collected buckeyes from under the tree in his front yard, shelling all the ones that could be shelled. Pockets bulging, they rode out to the abandoned mill and left their bikes at the bottom of the smokestack and climbed the rusted spiral staircase to the circular platform at the top. From up there, they used Skip’s slingshot and shot the buckeyes at birds they knew they couldn’t hit. They shot at crop dusters, distant cars. They fired straight up into the air and stood with their hands at their sides and their eyes shut, waiting to be killed should the buckeye come down and pierce one of their skulls. When they’d emptied all their pockets and Skip thought they were out of nuts, Tom pointed to his socks, which were bulging with them. Skip thought that was one of the funniest things he’d ever seen. He called Tom Buckeye from that day on.

—

They rode all through Tom’s neighborhood, which Skip thought was fancy because the houses sat farther back from the street, and all through Camden and Tiller’s Flat. They found Vincent at the nearly dry culvert, trying to ride his bike through it with his head sideways, and after he’d shown them the new Reader’s Digest car he had in his pocket—a hearse, he said, though to Skip and Tom it just looked like a purple station wagon—the three of them rode up and down the alleys behind the new warehouses on Dover Street. Then up Jones Street and down Main and out to the cemetery. When they saw, from inside the cemetery, Everett on his tricycle heading into town, Skip and Vincent glanced at each other, then took off, motioning for Tom to follow. As fast as they could, they rode up Compton Road to Everett’s house, where they set about exploring all the junk in his yard.

The chickens watched them from one of the rusted Model Ts. The old black dog watched them from the lip of his doghouse. Everything was dirty and hot to the touch. In Everett’s barn, there was no room to walk, but the three of them climbed over things, slapping at spiderwebs as they went. Skip found a spittoon. Vincent found a moldy Bible in a trombone case. Under a canvas tarp so stiff that it held the shape of its sag when he lifted it, Tom found a skeleton that might have belonged to a cat. He and Vincent scrambled back from it, but Skip just shrugged and said it was no surprise because the old man was an ogre, and it was scientifically known that ogres ate cats.

Another time—just Skip and Tom (Vincent, who had a beloved tabby named Milton, wasn’t interested in going back after finding the skeleton)—they thought they saw Everett in town at a distance, but when they got to his house, he was sitting in an armchair in his front yard, in the shade of the giant oak tree. Dressed in overalls, an undershirt. The chair stuffed with some kind of hair that tufted out of holes in the fabric. A rifle lay across the arms. A bottle stood in the grass beside the chair.

“Why do you shitbirds keep coming here?” Everett asked them.

They liked that, shitbirds. They looked at each other and grinned. “What’s in the bottle?” Skip asked.

“If you don’t tell your father about it, you can have a taste.” Everett glanced at Tom. “Him too.”

“He’s too little,” Skip said. He walked up to his grandfather, accepted the bottle, and sipped from it. The top half of his face puckered. He leaned over and spit.

“Puts wood in your pecker,” Everett said.

He walked them around back, showed them a pachinko machine filled with dead spiders the tiny ball de-legged as it fell. He showed them the giant wheel-handle off a printing press. He showed them an old factory door hinged to a wooden frame set into the ground, and beneath the door, the fallout shelter he’d dug after the last war: just big enough for a cot and a shelf with a kerosene lamp, tins of water, tins of Spam. When the jackasses who ran the world decided to drop the big one, Everett said, this was where he’d be. They were welcome to join him.

They showed up at Roman and Ida’s sometimes, too, but not very often. Ida would make them what she called “a gourmet snack,” where she took two plates down from the cabinet and on each put one of most everything in the kitchen that could be considered snackable, such as a Hydrox cookie, a Vienna sausage, an olive, a pickle, a pineapple ring, and a saltine—that was high living to them. But besides that, all they wanted to do when they were there was play with the trains, and there were so many rules about them that all the fun was wrung out. They weren’t allowed to touch any of it. If Roman was there—not just home, but with them in the basement, supervising—Skip and his friends were allowed to hold the transformer box and work the switches for five supervised minutes each. That was it.

“When can we really play with it?” Skip asked one afternoon, with Tom, in the basement.

“When I’m dead,” Roman said.

The boys went upstairs and found Ida in the dining room, a fan blowing on her as she snapped Theodore Roosevelt’s glasses into a jigsawed picture of Mount Rushmore. Skip asked her when Grandad was going to die, and without looking up from her puzzle Ida said, “Oh, honey, that’s anyone’s guess.”

Then they were back outside, pulling their bikes up from the hot grass and mounting them like cowboys on horses, at some point peeling off in different directions, because it was close to dinnertime and they each had to get home. “Hey, watch out for the flattop!” Skip sometimes called over his shoulder, and Tom always called back, “Shut up!” because, while he appreciated Skip’s watching out for him, he wasn’t about to be teased for it.

—

They could go days without seeing each other and hardly notice. Tom had other kids he played with on his street, Talbots and Friedmans and Wallachs and Valencias. Skip had his various squadrons. But when they were together, something particular registered between them.

Every few days, making the rounds, Skip would get on his bike and ride through town to Tom’s neighborhood, ring the doorbell at Tom’s house, and Tom would usually answer. If his father came to the door, he’d say hello and ask how Skip’s mother was before hollering for Tom. The first time Tom’s mother answered the door, she said, “Yes?” and when Skip asked if Tom was there, she said, “Why?”

“To play,” he said.

She looked over his shoulder, at his bicycle lying on its side at the bottom of the porch steps. She asked how old he was.

“Nine,” he said, wondering if there was a cut-off age.

Margaret told him to wait there and closed the door. She went upstairs and found Tom on the floor in his room, on his hands and knees, positioning little plastic army men and little plastic animals as if to battle one another. “You have an older friend? Blond hair? On the tall side?”

Tom nodded.

“He’s here asking for you.” Feeling this was a moment when she should probably add something parental, she said, “Tell him only Goofus lays his bicycle down in the middle of people’s walkways. Gallant parks his bicycle to the side, and uses his kickstand.”

—

At the dinner table that year, when Skip told Cal and Becky about his day, Tom’s name began to pop up more often. Tom also started coming around the house more. He was playing in the yard with Skip sometimes when Cal got home from work. He was a frequent guest at the dining table. An amicable kid, if a little reserved. Still, Cal had to get used to having him around. He could only defer to what Margaret had told him in the garden shop, but he had to learn how to be in Tom’s presence and not feel terrible all over again for what he’d done, back during the war. He had to learn how to look at Tom and not wonder if Margaret had been wrong—or knew more than she was letting on.

It was both a help and a hindrance that the boy bore such a strong resemblance to his mother.

—

One evening in late July, at dusk, Margaret stood at the living room window, watching the boys climb the oak in the front yard—her son; the older, blond boy; and a wiry Black boy she’d never seen before—when she wondered aloud where all these kids were coming from. Felix, sitting forward on the sofa and turning a tiny screwdriver into the door hinge on Tom’s toy safe, surprised her by knowing their names. He sounded pleased with himself, in fact.

“But what are Vincent and Skip doing here?”

“Are you not okay with Vincent?”

“Of course I’m okay with Vincent. You know that. It’s the other one I’m wondering about. The one who looks like he should be playing with people his own size. Where did he come from?”

That boy, Felix said, was actually the son of a psychic he’d consulted a couple of times.

Actually as in, this might be a point of some interest. Margaret couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d said he’d consulted a hedgehog. “You did what?”

He acknowledged it sounded off-the-wall for him—but he also reminded her that she was the one who’d suggested he talk to someone.

“A psychiatrist,” she said. “Not a psychic. Why on Earth would you—what did you and this person ‘consult’ about?”

“The ship,” Felix said, and then added, “People who died on the ship.”

The people he hadn’t mentioned once since getting back from the war? Those people? She didn’t say that. She mentioned the budget they were supposed to be sticking to and asked what a psychic consultation cost. It cost nothing, he said.

“And she—saw ghosts?”

“No. It wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like?”

He paused his screwdriver work, glanced off to the side for a moment. “It’s hard to describe.”

She didn’t know how else to put it, so she asked, “Did it do you any good?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

The boys vanished into the tree, then reappeared higher up, in different places. She couldn’t tell if Felix was being blithe or circumspect, but he did seem a little different lately. A little more alert, maybe. A little more present. Whether or not that had anything to do with this psychic, she didn’t know, because he wasn’t telling her much. She asked where the psychic lived, and he said over in Brookdale. She asked who the psychic was, and it wasn’t until he said the name that she realized she’d been picturing a man—in a turban, with a goatee.

The biggest shock, though, was the name itself.

It dropped through Margaret like a stone, abrading her insides as it went. What Cal had told her about his wife, her “hobby,” it had all sounded so harmless, even silly at the time. Now she imagined Felix in Cal’s house. Tom in Cal’s house. Neither of which should ever have occurred, and here was Cal’s son—his other son—up in her tree. Felix told her Becky advertised and said, as if feeling the need to defend her services, that she couldn’t have been nicer or more welcoming.

Margaret closed an eye against it all, removing its depth. Oh, for a less complicated life. One where Felix hadn’t felt the need to go to a psychic or psychiatrist at all. One where she’d never gotten pregnant, never left Columbus. Above all, perhaps, at least in this moment, one where a giant hawk swooped down and—gently—carried all three of those boys away.

—

If there be a Hall of Records for dogs, and a ledger in which to report their joys and sorrows, let the entry devoted to Buster Keaton show that in August of 1953 he died with a happy, if worm-eaten, heart.

Everett wept. Then he went to look for his shovel.

The sun was low in the sky when he finished burying the dog. He took a packet of zinnia seeds and sprinkled them over the dirt mound. Took in a deep breath of warm evening air. Went inside and sat down at his typewriter.

Dear Presiden  Eisenhower.

Blas  your coral a oll  o hell for all  he pleasure i  brings your murderous hear . Wha  a fool I was  o  hink we had evolved beyond our incredible capaci y for des ruc ion, because you, sir, are  aking us back  o  he dark ages. May God, if such a being s ill exis s in wha  is lef  of  he Heavens, have mercy on all  he underlings and wre ched sons of bi ches who promo e and encourage  he dropping of bombs on innocen  people. As such individuals are following your orders, please know  ha  you have blood and worse on your hands. May you suffer migh ily in a cour  of law or by angry mob, for we all know you won  s op un il  hese hydrogen clouds are bigger  han  his bloodsoaked world.

Mos  Sincerely.

Lance Corporal Everett B. Jenkins.

U.S. Army Re ired.

In his armchair, he rolled a cigarette and lit it. He uncorked the bottle of Old Overholt he’d been saving for a special occasion and drank to Buster. He drank to the end of the Korean War and to all the lucky men who’d made it home, and to all the unlucky ones who hadn’t. He flipped through the Blade from a week ago and peered at it and drank to the Algerian protesters who’d been shot at by French police (recalling how the D.C. police had shot at him and the other Bonus Marchers back in ’32). He drank to Maude Adams, and to Miss Universe, whoever that was. He drank to Buster’s namesake, Buster Keaton. And he drank, again, to Buster.

And to Buster.

And to Buster.

—

All he remembered about his dream that night was that the world was on fire.

He woke up in pure darkness. Felt around, and after a few moments realized he was in his bomb shelter. He had no memory of going out there, had been in his chair, last he knew, reading.

When he cracked the door up from the earthen ceiling, the sun was sitting like a pearl resting on a giant palm of smoke.

The air smelled charred. The trucks and his tricycle and the cart were black. All that was left of the house was a dark shell. The wall that had run alongside the staircase was nothing more than a lace of ash that was somehow still standing to the height of the second floor. As he watched, it cracked, collapsed into the basement, and sent up a fresh cloud of ash.

—

Several people called the Jenkins house that morning to tell them there’d been a fire out on Compton Road, and word was that it was Everett’s place. Cal was heading out the door after the first call when Roman, who monitored the local fire activity on his police scanner, pulled into the driveway in his Cadillac.

Even before they turned onto Compton they saw the smoke—a faint column laid across the light-blue sky like a teased-out skein of yarn. An ambulance was parked on the gravel. The paramedics were leaning against the hood, talking. One of the fire trucks was still there, its lights off and its hose spooled, and a police squad car was parked at an angle in the yard. But there was no house. No garage behind it. And not much spared in the yard. Two firemen were walking around the house’s stone perimeter with shovels, leaning in, digging cautiously through the rubble that almost filled the basement. In case they found Everett, Cal realized. Or what was left of him. One of them waved at Roman, and Roman looked at Cal. “You okay?”

Cal nodded, and Roman made his way over to the fireman.

The ash was wet and still smoking. Cal walked up to what had been the bottom step of the front porch and pushed the tip of his cane against the frosted board; it broke like piecrust. A chill spread across his shoulders and up into his neck. Aw, Pop, he thought. What an awful, awful way to go.

The deputy came over to tell Cal what a mess this was, and that he was really sorry, then speculated it must have been all the stuff in the yard that conducted the fire to the garage, and the chickens probably got away, and the Fords must have had empty gas tanks or they would have blown sky-high.

Cal was about to tell him, Okay, enough, stop talking, when he raised his eyes from the remains of his childhood home he spotted a figure in the woods. Not very far in, sitting on a fallen tree, facing the smoldering ash and the fire truck and the squad car, staring but not appearing to see any of it. His eyes didn’t even register Cal’s approach.

“Pop!”

Everett flinched and looked at Cal, surprised to see him. “Oh, son,” he said, seeming mystified by his own concern, “I think I might have burned our house down.”

—

He wanted them to know the dog had died before the fire, the dog had gotten a proper burial, he hadn’t killed the dog. They assured him they understood.

Temporarily, they moved him into the guest room Cal had occupied for several months eight years ago. Other than the clothes he had on, Everett had nothing to bring to it. They dressed him in Cal’s clothes—the two of them were the same size—and bought him new toiletries. Cal brought him to the barber, and for the first time in his life Everett let someone else trim his beard. They took him to Lafferty’s and bought him shirts, pants, underwear, socks, tennis shoes, work boots, and a pair of loafers that had leather tassels he removed with a pocket knife as soon as they got home. Becky found him a bolo tie with silver aiguillettes and a turquoise slide, much like the one he used to own. He wore it most every day.

No other solution presented itself for what to do with him. They couldn’t afford a retirement home, they couldn’t afford to rent him his own place, and he wasn’t about to go into a veterans’ facility. They weren’t even sure his paperwork existed anywhere. It was Cal who walked through the options and concluded they were stuck with the old man. He was reluctant to tell Becky, but when he did, she said she’d expected as much, and it was okay, she understood.

In truth, she was filled with reservations. For one thing, she worried Everett might burn their house down—with them in it. She suggested a no-smoking rule for being inside. Everett, who hadn’t rolled a cigarette since the fire, was fine with that. She also got rid of all the liquor in the house, not that there was much, and hid the kitchen matches. For the first week or so, she watched him askance, quietly keeping tabs on him.

Her other big reservation was about the atmosphere in their home. Cal and his father hadn’t gotten along the whole time she and Cal had been married, and there was nothing to suggest that was going to improve. Cal tensed up around him. Everett grumbled and snapped. Several times during that first week, they barked at each other—about what condition to leave the newspaper in, how loud the television should be, what to throw away versus what to keep—in ways that made Becky wince and Skip widen his eyes.

When Cal was at work, it was a different story. Everett roamed the house in the quiet hours of the day like a man in a museum. He peered at the knickknacks, the army of mismatched ceramic owls, as if they were archeological treasures, examined the jackets of the record albums as if they were sacred texts. The grandfather clock, when it chimed, both alarmed and fascinated him. Becky came upon him opening kitchen cabinets and drawers and inspecting their contents—without touching anything.

“Can I help you find something?” she asked.

He shook his head. “You have nice things. So organized.”

That night, he and Cal had a disagreement about how to operate the recliner—though it was hard to tell what they couldn’t agree on, since there was only one handle and it did only one thing.

So it went for a while, until one early evening when Skip was out on his bicycle and Becky, upstairs, heard an explosion of voices from the living room. When she was halfway down, she saw them both on their feet, inches apart, red-faced, looking as if they wanted to land blows. She never found out what sparked the argument. She got them to sit down, at least, and argue like civil people.

Something about sitting down to fight—a new concept to both of them—made the fighting productive. Things came up from decades ago. Cal told his father how awful it had been to grow up with a drunk. Everett accused Cal of being a whiner and a Puritan. It all seemed to boil down to Cal’s having moved out of the now nonexistent house on Compton Road when he was eighteen. Cal had felt like Everett had deliberately crowded him out over the years—choosing stuff over him. Everett had felt misunderstood and abandoned. There was no resolution because there was nothing, really, to resolve (neither of them possessing a time machine), but they said what they never had before, and after that, tensions eased a little.

Over the coming weeks, Everett had a chance to observe Cal as a husband, and as a father. The simplest things could hold Everett rapt and cause him to reflect in ways he wasn’t used to. The complete absence of alcohol in his bloodstream contributed to this phenomenon. When Skip couldn’t get the knot out of his shoelace, he brought his shoe to Cal, who untied it. Everett asked Cal if he’d ever done that for him, growing up.

“Unknotted my shoes? I don’t know. You probably just found more shoes.”

Everett watched Becky and Cal take turns helping Skip make a birdhouse for shop class, and the next time he and Cal were alone, he said, “I suppose I never built anything with you. I’m sorry about that.”

“You did,” Cal said. “We built things. We built a soapbox racer together, remember? The steering wheel came off and I got a bloody nose.”

“That’s right,” Everett said, smiling.

“You don’t have to look for stuff to apologize for, Pop.”

But the more Everett witnessed this family—his family, he was coming to realize—the more he saw a disparity between them and him. Or between them and the person he’d recently been. His memory of his pre-fire behavior was spotty. On the couch one afternoon, watching Skip watch television, he said, “Did I ever call you a bad name?”

Skip thought about it. “Shitbird!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Didn’t bother me,” Skip said, his attention already back on the television. “I used to call you the Ogre.”

Another time, Everett observed Becky sitting at the table cutting coupons out of a circular and, turning to Cal, said within her earshot, “I should have been happier about you marrying her.” Cal flushed, but Becky heard the compliment.

She gently tried to reteach her father-in-law some of the table manners he’d stopped bothering with long ago. No need to use his sleeve when they had napkins (like Cal used to do). No need to eat beans out of a can when they had plenty of plates and bowls. At dinner one night he dropped his fork without realizing it (his ears didn’t register the sound it made when it hit the floor), and after glancing around for it, he began eating his meatloaf with his hands.

“What the heck are you doing?” Skip said.

Cal glared at him. Skip rolled his eyes and gave Cal the Cagney look. After pulling the boy by his arm into the kitchen and closing the swinging door behind them, Cal explained that it was rude to ask a houseguest “what the heck” they were doing.

“He’s not a houseguest. He’s my grandfather! Plus, he lives here now.”

“He’s an elder, above all, and you should show some respect.”

“Elder hillbilly.”

“You’re not too big to be put over my knee, mister.”

“I kind of am, though. I wouldn’t fit on your lap.”

“You can be sent to your room, then. Without dessert.”

Skip considered this. “What are we having for dessert?”

When they came back to the dining area, Everett was eating his meatloaf with a spoon.

—

To his own surprise as much as anyone’s, Everett didn’t feel devastated by his monumental loss. He didn’t miss booze, which surprised him, or tobacco, which astounded him. He didn’t miss most of his possessions. It was as if he’d been carrying on his back all the things he’d been collecting over the years, and with their combined weight suddenly gone, he was able to lift his head.

He did, however, miss his typewriter. When he mentioned this to Becky, she dug out of the hall closet the portable Smith Corona she’d written her term papers on in high school. Everett sat in front of it at the kitchen table, ran his fingertips across its smooth body, peered down at its letters, its symbols, its punctuation marks all level in their rows. He’d never seen such a beautiful typewriter. Did she have any paper he might use? She had only a box of lilac stationery left over from her days at the stationery store, and he was fine with that. He rolled one of the half-sheets onto the platen and immediately began pecking out a letter to the secretary of state.

He also missed his Zane Grey books. Those twenty novels with worn, butterscotch covers and foxed pages. He’d read each of them several times and had planned on rereading them for the rest of his life. When Becky found this out, she took him to the library, got him a card, and showed him how to use the card catalogue. To Everett’s astonishment, Zane Grey had published forty additional books during his lifetime that Everett hadn’t read, and another dozen or so after he died in 1939. Most of them were there, in handsome editions stamped with the author’s initials, the end pages patterned with horseshoes.

Because he was focused on just one author, Everett would always finish choosing his library books before Becky chose hers, but he was happy to sit down at one of the tables and read while he waited for her.

One day he met another man there: a fellow veteran from the First World War who’d grown up in Tiffin and had been in the Bonus Army, like Everett. He had but a wisp of white hair on top of his head, and his left hand wouldn’t open all the way—which he said had nothing to do with the war. His name was Lee, and he was reading Rogue River Feud. Everett was reading Shadow on the Trail. Lee said he knew a couple of other veterans in town who were also Zane Grey readers. The librarian shushed them. Everett leaned down and in a whisper suggested that he and this man and those other two men get together someplace where they could talk.

“About what?” Lee loud-whispered back.

“The books,” Everett said.

Within a week they’d arranged to get together, and within a month the four of them were meeting every other Thursday afternoon, in a booth at Fink’s. They agreed ahead of time on what book they would read—often a reread—and when there was only the one copy available, they worked out a system wherein each of them would get three days with it, then tape a nickel inside the book’s cover and leave it in their mailbox. Skip would then collect the nickel and carry the book on his bicycle over to the next house, where he would leave it in the mailbox and put the flag up. At the drugstore, the four men shared their reactions and thoughts.

“What is this?” Mary Lisnik asked, a few Thursdays in. “A church thing?”

“We’re discussing westerns,” Everett said.

She refilled their coffee cups and said to let her know when they felt like discussing food.

They ate nothing, drank coffee. They called themselves the Zane Grey Boys.

Chapter Seventeen

Throughout that summer and into the fall, as Felix settled further into life after Tuck & Sons—his suits were shoved far to one side in his closet—he considered going back to Becky Jenkins. At times, his hesitation felt decisive. He questioned not her abilities but his reasons for going, and what the risks might be. Was she helping him be done with the most painful thing that had ever happened to him, or was she drawing him back in? During storms at sea, if the need arose to transfer an officer from one ship to another, they did it with a system of ropes and pulleys strung between the two ships, the officer strapped into a chair that was pulled, inch by inch, through the air over the top of the waves. Sitting at Becky Jenkins’s table was a little like how Felix imagined it would be, in that chair. Did he really want to be pulled across? Was there anything to be gained in this that wouldn’t break his heart again?

Unless breaking his heart again was the point. The way his left arm needed to be rebroken so it could heal properly.

Leave it to fate, he decided. If he saw—or thought he saw—Augie again, he would go back to Becky Jenkins.

Fate delivered on Halloween. As he was walking in the twilight through their neighborhood, behind Tom and several other kids from their block, he saw in his peripheral vision a man across the street, on the opposite sidewalk, walking in the opposite direction, behind a little boy dressed as a pirate. The man wore a blue ballcap and had his hands tucked into his coat pockets. The profile, Felix thought as they passed, was Augie’s. The gait. When this man noticed Felix looking, he slowed and tilted his head a bit, his features all but obscured by the dusk. Tom and his friends were at somebody’s door up ahead. The little pirate boy was walking up a driveway. The man looked after the boy, checked for cars, and, to Felix’s surprise, came walking across the street. Felix stopped. A jolt of panic coursed through him, but wrapped around it was a thread of irrational hope—for why would this person be crossing the street with such determination if he wasn’t Augie?

The man seemed a little hesitant, once there. “Evening,” he said, bobbing his head nervously.

Felix had to agree, it was evening. But it wasn’t Augie. He nodded, said the word back as impartially as he could, and resumed walking.

—

In mid-November of 1953, on his lunch hour, he returned to Taft Street.

It had been more than seven months since Becky had seen him. He was dressed differently, she thought—though she couldn’t remember what he’d been wearing before; now, he had on a stiff canvas jacket, a blue work shirt tucked into dingy trousers, and work boots. He apologized for his appearance and she waved him off, said he looked fine. What didn’t look fine was his aura. She couldn’t always detect auras, but his was steely, flinty. Fractured. It hovered around him like particles waiting to fall. She said nothing about that.

They spoke for a minute about the boys, the friendship that had come out of that half-built igloo. Then they sat down. Felix seemed to want to pick up where they’d left off last time. He still didn’t have a name for her, but she had a feeling it was rolling around in his mouth.

She cast her invitation to the spirits who’d died on the Teague, and they waited with their eyes closed while she listened and focused.

Nothing. Nothing. Then something…peculiar. Something erratic. Not human.

“Did you have a dog?”

“When I was a boy,” Felix said. “We had a beagle.”

“But on the ship?”

“No. There were no dogs on the ship.”

“It’s strange. I can just barely sense a—an animal, maybe—a dog, I’m guessing—and it seems to have known you from that time. Or a cat? Something with a tail.” The spirit was playful, wouldn’t stay still. She asked it what it was. Asked it to come closer. Then she made a noise that sounded like a gasp. Felix opened one eye for just a moment and could tell from her expression that she hadn’t gasped at all; she’d stifled a laugh. “It’s a monkey. This is a first—I’ve actually never encountered an animal before.”

“I don’t understand,” Felix said. “I mean, I do, but I don’t. It…He…He wasn’t on the ship. Is he okay?”

“Well, he’s dead. He’s a spirit.”

“What happened to him?”

She asked, but cross-dimensional simian didn’t translate into anything she could decipher. “Why do you think he’s here?” she asked Felix.

“I don’t know.”

She took a breath. “Tell me about this monkey. Where you encountered him.”

He told her he’d gone on R & R once, and there’d been a monkey, and how he and some of the other guys had gotten a kick out of him. But they’d left him there and returned to the ship.

Becky concentrated. After almost a full minute, she said, “The monkey is with another spirit. That spirit was on the Teague.”

Felix swallowed. “Who is it?”

“I don’t find it usually works that way. In fact, this spirit is reminding me it doesn’t work that way. He—this is another first—he wants you to say his name.”

Felix felt panic rattling around in his chest. He was terrified that some sort of conversation was about to unfold between him and Augie—through Becky. Which was why he’d come to her in the first place, he knew, but, suddenly confronted with the opportunity, his mind went blank as to what he wanted to say. Whatever it was, he wasn’t sure he could say it in front of her. Through her. Maybe Augie wasn’t sure either.

He asked if they could stop.

They did, and when she glanced up at him she saw how flustered he looked—agitated, even. He apologized. She told him there was no need.

“I’m such an idiot. I should have—I thought I was ready. I need to be ready.”

“Why don’t you give yourself a little breather? Whatever you want to ask, or say, write it down, maybe. And then bring it with you next time, if it’s easier.” She looked down as she said this, to give him some space, wondering if he was about to disappear for another seven months.

But as he pulled his jacket on, he made an appointment for later that week. She watched his tall, lean frame walk down the driveway to his car, shoulders hunched against the cold, breath clouding in front of him. There goes a very handsome, very troubled man, she thought.

—

Do the dead visit us in our dreams? Or do we just conjure them up out of grief or some other need and insert them into our subconscious?

Becky wondered.

A month ago, Mrs. Dodson had been sitting at home in her armchair in front of the television, shelling peas, and had died. Mrs. Ray from next door found her. A heart attack, they thought, the peas were all over her living room floor. She’d been there for hours, and Becky had been right across the street the whole time, oblivious.

Just one more conversation with her would have been nice. But there’d been no contact as of yet.

On the night after she’d encountered Felix’s monkey, Becky dreamed she was standing at the kitchen counter making a sandwich, and when she turned around Mrs. Dodson was there: sitting at the enamel-topped table, wearing a bright yellow summer dress in the middle of winter and looking perfectly fine.

“I’m so glad to see you,” Becky said. “But why are you here?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Mrs. Dodson asked.

“I don’t know, except—you died.” Becky, vaguely aware even in her dream that this wasn’t how she usually encountered the dead, carried the plate with the sandwich over to the table and sat down across from her neighbor. “Would you like half?”

“No, thank you,” Mrs. Dodson said. “No more sandwiches for me.”

The house was quiet, the room bright with sunlight. “I don’t understand,” Becky said. But then said, “No, wait, I do. You died, and I’m dreaming. You’ve come to me in a dream, because if you came to me when I was awake, as a ghost I could actually see, I might think I was going crazy.”

“Very good,” Mrs. Dodson said.

“But why not just come to me during a session? Communicate that way?”

“Would you be so formal with an old friend?”

“I guess not.” Becky wouldn’t eat in front of Mrs. Dodson if Mrs. Dodson no longer ate. She put her hands in her lap. “So you’re here to tell me you’re okay?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Dodson said in a tone that implied this was only part of the reason. She looked around. She seemed to be seeing not the room but the air inside the room. She said, “There’s so much I never bothered to notice before,” and then she just sat for a while, noticing. “Listen,” she said, returning to Becky, “I never told you this, but I’ve always thought you place too many limitations on yourself.”

“Limitations?”

“You’re more than you think you are,” Mrs. Dodson said. “More than anyone thinks you are. Your true senses already know this.”

“What are my true senses?”

“If I told you, they wouldn’t be true. Just realize, you are more.”

More than—herself? She didn’t want to waste this opportunity, wanted to get it right before she woke up. “More than Becky Jenkins?” she said.

“Much more.”

“More than somebody’s daughter, or mother? Or wife?”

“Yes.”

“More than a human being in a body.”

“Don’t go off the rails, dear. But look what you did for me. You made it so that I could communicate with the two people I missed the most. You see yourself as a telephone operator connecting calls, but you bridge worlds, don’t you get it? What an incredible thing that is.”

“What about now?” she asked. “Are you in communication with them regularly? Your husband and son—the two Henrys?”

“Ha ha,” Mrs. Dodson said gently. “Junior, yes. Senior, we’re all caught up.”

“You know what?” Becky said, sitting back in her chair. “Maybe I’m dreaming you in order to say these things to myself. Can I ask you one more thing?”

The older woman’s eyes narrowed and she nodded.

“What was it like?”

It took Mrs. Dodson a moment to answer. “I won’t lie to you,” she said with a shrug that was mostly performed with her thin brow, “dying was unpleasant. But death? It’s wonderful.”

—

Felix came back in early December. Becky had been stringing cranberries in the living room and watching Search for Tomorrow, but she’d been expecting him. She left the television on so as not to disturb Everett, who’d fallen asleep in the recliner, and showed Felix into the parlor. She closed the doors behind them.

When she turned around, Felix was already sitting at the table. He hadn’t even taken his jacket off, one half of its canvas collar stood up and away from his neck. She prepared the room and sat down.

After a few moments, with a slight tremor in his voice, he said, “This situation is extremely personal.”

She assured him whatever it was would stay in the room.

He said, “It might shock you.”

She said she’d been shocked before and had survived.

He nodded. He unbuttoned the breast pocket of his jacket and took out a folded square of paper. He said he’d taken her advice, written down what he wanted to say. Then, at last, he gave her a name: Augustus D. Varick.

“What does the D stand for?”

He blinked. “I don’t know. He went by Augie.”

She closed her eyes and cast her invitation. As if they hadn’t gone anywhere since the last session, within seconds the two spirits were in the room with them. The playful one—the monkey—and the other. They looped through the ether, played. They merged into one, separated.

“It’s him,” she said. “He’s here.”

Felix sucked in a lungful of air and let it leak out of him. “I have to open my eyes,” he said.

“Of course.”

He unfolded the square of paper, took a deep breath, and read aloud:

I miss your voice, your face, every part of you.

I wish we’d found a way to be together, not just on the island.

I wish we’d met sooner.

I wish we’d had more time.

Just four short sentences. Yet from them Becky understood why he’d been so reluctant to give her a name. What else could it have been but a matter of the heart? She repeated each line in her head after he said it, and when he was finished, she kept repeating the lines, to make sure they got across. When she was beginning her fourth cycle, Augie Varick spoke to her.

“Oh,” she said, listening. And a few moments later, “Oh. Oh, Felix.”

She could hardly bear the weight of it, she was so happy and sad for them at the same time. And now she, too, opened her eyes. “He says it’s okay. It’s all okay.” Never before had she looked someone in the eye as she conveyed a message from the spirit world, it would have felt showy to her, but this message felt like it would bore through her senses if she didn’t let it out by every means possible. “He says he was hoping you would find him. He says he loves you, Felix. He wants you to know that. And he says this—that you have to keep swimming. You’re the one in the water, and you’re the one who has to swim.”

—

When he walked out of the house, the air smelled different. Peat-like. Fireplace smoke, maybe; the temperature had dropped and the cold needled his face and hands. He was shaken. He couldn’t help wondering if he would have been better off never answering that ad and going to Becky Jenkins in the first place. She’d given him, and so directly, what he’d been trying to push out of his head for the past nine years. Exactly what he’d been trying not to be. Because he’d asked her to. Because he’d written it across Augie’s chest with his finger. The things that we love tell us what we are.

Something—not just the smell or the temperature or the light—was different. He’d been told, then.

He no longer thought any of it was going away, no longer believed it possible.

And he saw that he could live with that.

He felt, maybe for the first time in his life, like he might fit into the world—as himself, among the living. With Margaret, and with Tom—he saw a path there, fraught as it was at times. He saw a path he could navigate. As himself.

He returned to work, climbed back into his coveralls, and drifted through the rest of the day building undercarriages. On the way home, he bought a Christmas tree from a young Canadian who tied it to the roof of the Plymouth without breaking a sweat. Felix tipped the guy, wished the young couple coming onto the lot a happy holiday, while the French horns of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” wagged out of the loudspeakers.

Chapter Eighteen

The two years between the boys’ ages kept them at bay from each other, at times. Around his other friends—especially at school—Skip could act like it was a drag to have a pipsqueak riding his coattails. But it was just that: an act. He never outright shunned Tom, never told him to get lost or belittled him. He inched away now and then, was all, but even when he did, that early impulse to protect Tom held, and he kept an eye out for him. It was more than just the differences in their ages and sizes, or the fact that Skip was twice as strong. It was something that emanated from his gut, and it never occurred to him to question it. If one of his other friends said anything mean about Tom Salt, Skip put a stop to it. If there was any sort of scuffle on the playground in Tom’s vicinity, Skip was usually on hand to make sure Tom held his own. And Tom, through Skip, was learning to hold his own. Bullies bullied less when they knew you’d strike back.

Outside of school, one-on-one, their ages dropped away. They were goofballs, they cracked each other up. Tom did impressions of the teachers they’d both had, and the principal, and Jack Benny. He did a bit where he was his own ventriloquist dummy, and it was so stupid Skip couldn’t stop laughing. When Tom spent the night the first time, Becky had to get up after midnight, rap on Skip’s bedroom door, and ask them to keep it down. Everett snored away in the next room, undisturbed.

“Maybe having Tom stay over isn’t such a good idea,” Cal said when Becky slid back into bed beside him.

“They’re fine,” she said, scrunching her pillow. “Would you rather have Ron?”

No. Ron Burgess—the only other friend Skip had invited to stay the night—was loud, crass, slammed doors, and ate like a woodchipper. They were very happy not to have Ron back. But having Tom under their roof overnight, from time to time, and having him there in the morning, continued to give response to an echo Cal had been trying not to hear for the past seven years. And while he saw no resemblance, he couldn’t shake the possibility—not completely. He couldn’t not notice the boy’s mannerisms—the way Tom moved his hands, held his head—and see traces of himself that weren’t supposed to be there. Was this the birthright of his actions, he wondered—living with the uncertainty of uncertainty?

—

Tom stayed over on the night of Skip’s tenth birthday, in March of 1954, and after Skip raked in an Ampro reel-to-reel tape recorder he’d been wanting since Christmas (from Becky and Cal), an archery set (from Ida and Roman), and a boomerang wrapped in the exact shape of a boomerang (from Tom), the boys proceeded to eat slice after slice of a chocolate cake Becky had made, and bowl after bowl of peppermint ice cream to go along with it. Cal threaded the reel for them, and with the tape recorder parked in the middle of the table, Skip went around with the microphone. He recorded Everett saying, “Get that thing away from me,” and Roman saying, “I like Ike.” He recorded Ida singing a whole verse of “A Little Bird Told Me.” While she sang, Everett leaned over to Cal and said, “Give me a dollar.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t know I was supposed to have a present.”

“Don’t worry about it, Pop.”

“Just give me a goddamn dollar.”

Cal got out his wallet and gave Everett a dollar. Ida finished singing, and as the rest of them clapped, Everett slid the dollar across the table to Skip and wished him a happy birthday.

Skip consumed the most cake and ice cream of all, the day being his, so when Becky and Cal were awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of someone being sick, they both expected it to be Skip. But when Cal looked into the bathroom, it was Tom he found. Crouched in front of the toilet with that affronted look on his face that kids get when they throw up.

“All out?” Cal asked, and Tom nodded uncertainly, then leaned over the bowl as another surge came.

Cal got a washcloth, wet it, wrung it out. He handed it to Tom and sat on the edge of the tub. When the next wave came, he reached over and gently laid his hand on the boy’s back.

—

Tom had declined a ride from the Jenkinses and had pedaled home through the cold, thinking he was feeling better. But moments after walking in, he said he didn’t want any breakfast because his stomach still hurt, and he went upstairs and crawled onto his bed with his scarf and tennis shoes still on.

Sick child, Margaret thought. Tom was a fairly self-sufficient boy. When he’d been sick in the past, he didn’t need much, wasn’t a complainer. He was like a machine, and when something went wrong with him she generally just waited and the problem resolved itself.

He looked miserable, though. She sat on the edge of his bed and untied his shoes, took them off. She put her hand on his forehead, his cheek. It was just too much cake and ice cream, he said, diagnosing himself for her, and she thought, Why did you spend the night over there in the first place? She’d been uncomfortable with his growing friendship with Skip and had been very unhappy with the idea of his being an overnight guest in Cal’s house. But Felix had gone and approved it when she wasn’t around. Three times now. Because she knew that, sooner or later, Tom was bound to ask if Skip could stay over, Margaret had proactively told her son she didn’t want him having any friends stay the night. She didn’t feel she needed to give a reason.

Just then, something Lydia had said—when Margaret was little and had a stomachache—came back to her. “Lie on your right side,” she told Tom. “Your stomach empties on that side. If anything’s still in there, it’ll get out faster.”

Tom rolled onto his right side, away from her.

What else? She suggested he take his scarf off. He tugged it from around his neck, held it up, and she took it from him and folded it. She patted his back gently, unaware that this was the same spot Cal had touched just hours before, the warmth of her hand, after the fact, overlapping his.

—

She’d done her best to love him as he was, she really had, but her son kept changing on her. He’d gone from being the mistake she’d had to carry around, to the mystery she’d had to keep alive, to the beautiful little boy with Cal lurking inside him, waiting to jump out. His hair and eye color meant the fuse on that bomb was long and probably slow burning, but it sparked nonetheless.

She envied Tom, at times. Not just his youth and the open life ahead of him, but also his ignorance of the situation he was at the very center of.

She envied Felix for that same ignorance, and she envied—and resented—the contentedness that sometimes radiated off him lately. Or, if not contentedness, undisturbedness. He seemed, in general, more alert, responsive, not as drawn away by whatever was going on in his head. That was it, she thought: he seemed to have broken free of the undertow that had had ahold of him since he’d gotten back from the war. How had he finally managed that? Was it the job change? The appeal of building furniture instead of overseeing men melting aluminum? Or was it something that had happened with the psychic—Cal’s wife? Margaret still didn’t understand what had drawn Felix to Becky Jenkins—but what did she understand about him, really?

And what was she supposed to do while Tom’s fuse burned and Felix got his second wind in life? How many times could she teach other couples to dance, and see the enjoyment on their faces as they moved about the floor, figuring things out?

—

Winter held on until late May, culminating in an ice storm that made her cancel classes and, homebound, start her spring cleaning. When the ice melted, she took all their coats, jackets, and scarves to the dry cleaners on Second Street. She added the tan canvas jacket Felix wore to and from and sometimes at work all winter; its elbows and cuffs were darkened with grime. She also brought in her three cocktail dresses—not that she had much use for them, but an annual dry cleaning gave her the opportunity to admire them, and to point out to Mr. Spencer at Ever-Bright Cleaners that they were quite special and to please be careful with them.

When she picked everything up a week later, there was a little crumpled fold of paper safety-pinned to the bill. She asked Mr. Spencer what it was.

“Found in the jacket,” Mr. Spencer said, without looking up from the buttons he was pushing on the cash register. “Breast pocket.”

In the car, she carefully unpinned and unfolded the paper. It didn’t look very old. A poem, she thought at first. But it was in Felix’s handwriting, and when had he ever written poetry? A list maybe. She read it over and over.

Who did he want to be on an island with?

Whose voice and face and “every part” did he miss?

Someone he’d gone to bed with, that much was clear. Someone he no longer saw but wished he did. Her thoughts leapfrogged to his past, before her. His fiancée, maybe. Or someone since then? There’d been islands mentioned in his letters throughout the war—none of them by name (some with that information inked out by the censors). Every port in the Pacific was on an island, it seemed.

I wish we’d met sooner.

I wish we’d had more time.

She pulled out of the Ever-Bright parking lot, then sat at a red light, the dry cleaning on the seat beside her, wondering if WAVES and WACs had been stationed overseas; her understanding was that they’d all been stateside. A local woman, maybe. An islander. Or…

Someone else entirely, she thought, and a hot wave flooded her lower back and rose into her shoulders.

The driver behind her tapped his horn, startling her.

She drove home. Felix wasn’t there; she recalled that it was league night. Tom’s bicycle was gone from the back porch. She put the dry cleaning away upstairs and drew a bath. She tried not to see her body in the mirror anymore, tried to assess neither the parts nor the entirety of it, because doing so only made her think of how her body didn’t matter anymore. In three years, she’d be forty. She’d aged out of childhood at Open Arms, waiting for someone to adopt her. She’d wandered into middle age in Bonhomie, waiting to be happy. And now?

She sank up to her chin.

Of all people, her mother came to mind. Having never given much thought to who her father was, she now wondered if her mother, by putting her in a basket and walking away, had been deliberately sidestepping a difficult life with someone (besides her). Was that possible? And would that make it a wise thing to have done? Maybe, as Lydia had speculated, her mother had left her because of money, not enough of it to feed and take care of a baby. Or she’d had a lover who wasn’t Margaret’s father. Or she’d found out Margaret’s father was writing love notes to someone else. Maybe, knowing she was going to be alone, and a terrible mother, she’d decided to sidestep all that—and sidestep Margaret. What were you running from? Margaret wanted to ask her. What were you hoping to avoid? And what did you find, instead of me? Instead of us?

Lydia had been the closest thing she’d had to a mother, and yet Margaret had let their correspondence wither down almost to nothing. The last postcard she sent to Doyle had been over a year ago, and whatever she’d written on it was empty, a lie. She regretted, now more than ever, not keeping up, not getting to know Lydia better as an adult, and never being honest with her about the state of things in her marriage, her life—part of the reason she’d pulled away was that she’d gotten sick of maintaining the false front. Lydia, she thought, was the one person in her life to whom she could spill everything who wouldn’t think she was awful or crazy for what she’d done, or for the way she’d felt. Lydia’s mind always landed on the practical, on figuring out what you need to do. And hadn’t Lydia actually loved her for herself—even if Margaret had only been a child?

She stayed in the tub till the water began to cool.

All these years later, the number was still in her address book, under “O. A.” Her heart raced at the thought of dialing it. She thought of waiting, thinking a little about what she wanted to say—but if she did, she knew she’d lose her nerve and never call. She dialed.

A girl answered.

“Hello, my name is Margaret Salt. Is Lydia Verts there?”

“Salt?”

“Yes, Salt. My last name was Anderson when I lived there. May I please speak to Lydia Verts? Is she available?”

There was a pause and a crackle on the line. “She died,” the girl said.

Another pause. Then, “Six months ago.”

“What? I—I don’t understand.” Margaret’s hand went to the page of the address book, as if trying to keep it from flying away. “How—I mean how did she…?”

“They didn’t tell me that,” the girl said. Her voice seemed to reach Margaret from inside an echo. It was a young voice but not terribly young—perhaps one of the more senior girls, now assuming an important duty. “They just told me to answer the phone if it rang.”

—

When Felix got home sometime later, he called out a hello and got no response. He put his bowling bag in the bottom of the hall closet and found Margaret upstairs by the bedroom window, curled in the green felt rocking chair they used to rock Tom in when he was a baby. He could tell she’d been crying, asked her what had happened. Her aunt died, she said, and he knelt down beside the rocker and hugged her and told her how sorry he was. He asked if she wanted to go, and it took her a moment to realize that he meant to Doyle.

No, she said, she didn’t want to, especially at this point, because Lydia had died a while ago. But, Felix, she wanted to say, who did you write that note to? Enough, though. The news from Open Arms had taken the last of the day’s energy out of her.

“Was she married? Did she have any kids?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know if she was married?”

She said—snapped, maybe—that they hadn’t spoken in a while, and that it didn’t matter now, anyway. She was going to bed.

Felix stood, looked at his watch. As if one thing were connected to the other, he said, “Well, then, where’s Tom? It’s almost ten.”

“I’m not sure. His bicycle’s not here, so I guess he’s out somewhere. It’s Saturday.”

—

She slept so deeply that her body felt leaden when she opened her eyes early the next morning. She looked at the swirls in the ceiling plaster and thought: Lydia’s dead. She looked at Felix, asleep on his side of the bed, and saw with her mind’s eye the note still in her purse that he’d written to someone who wasn’t her.

The house was quiet, the light barely coming in yet, it was so early in the day. She walked down the hall, tying the sash of her robe. Tom’s room was dark, his door standing partly open; she looked in and made out his shape on the bed, asleep. She didn’t notice, from that angle, the sleeping bag stretched out on the floor.

Downstairs, she walked into the kitchen and shrieked. Skip Jenkins was standing in front of the open refrigerator, holding the milk bottle. Barefoot, in his boxer shorts, his blond hair sticking up around his head. He flinched at the sound she made and nearly dropped the bottle.

It felt like too much to ask of her, this unexpected presence of Cal’s son. As if he were standing atop a mountain made up of every difficult situation she’d ever gotten herself into, his hulking presence adding another five feet she was going to have to climb. Unable to suppress the anger and irritation that rode right alongside the surprise in her voice, she asked him what he thought he was doing, and as he tried to answer, she walked over and snatched the milk bottle out of his hand. She told him he was wanted at his own home and that he should leave. But he’d been invited, he said, not quite matching her volume and sounding a bit frightened. He’d been invited. Mr. Salt had gotten the sleeping bag out for him, he added. He’d slept in Tom’s room, on the floor. He’d been invited.

That was a mistake, Margaret said. Please, you need to leave. Now.

Tom, awakened by their voices, was coming groggily down the stairs as Skip pushed past him, on his way up to get his clothes. By the time Felix emerged tying the sash of his robe, Skip was walking out onto the front porch with his sneakers in his hand, Tom was crying and yelling at her, and Margaret was holding the door open, wishing she’d never gotten out of bed, filled with a peculiar tightness in her chest that was something between regret and anguish.

—

Tom was furious with her. Felix wasn’t too happy either, she gathered, from the way he steered clear of her for the rest of the morning. At some point, she heard him make a call from the phone in his den, and she confirmed by listening outside the door that he’d dialed the Jenkinses, though she couldn’t tell which Jenkins he was talking to. It had been a misunderstanding, Felix was saying. Skip had caught Margaret off guard, was all. “I’ll speak with her.”

As if she were a child. His easily upsettable wife.

For the balance of the day she waited, braced. But, like Tom, Felix cold-shouldered her. She gave it back to them for a while, keeping herself apart. But she wanted to be alone in a different way. Late in the afternoon, she announced—to no one in particular, since no one wanted to hear—that she was going out.

The sky was a putty-colored haze over Main Street, where geraniums and marigolds were in full bloom in their planters. She parked the Packard and walked absently up and down the sidewalks, glancing into the shop windows, admiring the hats in the new hat store, and she felt so sad about Lydia that she could have burst into tears with every step she took.

But Lydia would have hated that. Go eat something, for goodness’ sake, she would have said. Go do something fun.

Margaret picked her way around a Cobb salad at Zuzu’s. As a paltry ode to the quarters Lydia used to slip her on Saturdays, she walked up to the Bijou window and bought a ticket for something called Rhapsody. It had already started and was boring as toast, but she cried steadily right to the end, when Elizabeth Taylor and John Ericson fell into each other’s arms and the words The End filled the giant screen over their heads. When she emerged from the theater, the sun was down and the sky, still hazy, was deep purple and starless.

—

Tom was on the sofa when she got home, reading a Hardy Boys book. Ed Sullivan was on the television.

“Hello, Tom,” she said.

He glanced up at her but said nothing, returned his eyes to his book.

She walked into the kitchen, where Felix was hanging a dish towel across the stove handle. “You disappeared,” he said.

She set her purse on the counter. “I don’t think Tom’s speaking to me.”

“Probably not. Would you join me on the back porch, please?”

She couldn’t imagine anything sounding more daunting. She followed him out. He left the porch light off, and they sat in the iron patio chairs on either side of the little table, in the glow of the living room lamp that seeped through the wooden blinds inside. The window was shut.

Felix lit a cigarette.

“You’re like a chimney with those things,” she said.

He nodded. “We should keep our voices down. I don’t want Tom to hear.”

Also daunting, but probably for the best. She didn’t need them ganging up on her.

Crickets trilled in the darkness beyond the screen, looking for mates. Nearby, a car door closed, an engine turned over. Felix drew from his cigarette and asked her what had happened that morning. She’d been startled, she said. In her own home—when she’d expressly told Tom that no one was allowed to spend the night. Felix asked why the rule, and since when. The ruckus, she said. She’d been sleeping poorly lately and didn’t want a bunch of kids running around the house at night.

“So you threw Skip out.”

“He wasn’t supposed to be here!”

“You sent him home crying. A ten-year-old kid.”

It was a point he wanted to pick at, apparently—unless he was just waiting for her to admit that she’d behaved atrociously. She conceded that she might have overreacted, but beyond that, she didn’t know what he wanted her to say. “How about you apologize to Tom?” he suggested, his voice heavy with smoke and exasperation.

But she couldn’t see lifting her foot, after putting it down so emphatically. She shook her head.

“Tom isn’t going to want to have any friends over here, if he thinks this can happen,” Felix said.

“Then he’d be the one overreacting.”

“He’ll resent it,” Felix said. “He’ll resent you.”

“I can’t help what goes on in his head.”

“But do you care, Margaret? Tell me, does it matter to you, what he thinks of you?”

Who’s asking? she wanted to ask. The new-and-improved Felix? The missing-a-past-love Felix? “What a question,” she said, drawing her arms across her stomach. “Of course I care.”

“You might show it a little more often.”

A moth the size of a guitar pick landed on the screen with a soft thump, and clung there. Margaret sat back against the cool iron of the chair without having realized she’d been sitting forward. Felix tapped his cigarette over the ashtray on the table.

Years later, she would think how fitting it was that the suggestion of showing affection to a child had started their unraveling. But it wasn’t just that, of course. It was the folded square of paper tucked into her purse. It was the day she found out she was pregnant. It was the moment she realized she was lonely at the thought of Felix’s coming home. So many things had started their unraveling.

She bristled at his words and asked him when he had gotten to be such an expert on parenting. That led to some defensive back-and-forth about what their roles were, and their respective contributions to the raising of their son, and what they each brought to the household, and before they knew it they were enumerating their frustrations and each other’s faults—all in hushed voices, as the sound of the crickets faded into the night around them.

Money came up. Then, sex. Margaret asked if he ever intended on even trying to make love to her again, since it had been five months since they’d last attempted anything. Instead of reaching for one of his usual answers—it wasn’t her, it was him; he was working on it; it wasn’t permanent—he said, “It’s a difficult situation, I know.”

“Difficult? I’ve wondered for fifteen years why you would marry someone you weren’t attracted to.”

“We’ve been through this, Margaret.”

“We haven’t. We’ve talked around it. You never told me why.”

He put out his cigarette and stared out at the dark recesses of the yard. The faint outline of the toolshed. He said, “I thought I could become attracted to you.”

An admittance, at last. But not nearly as bittersweetly satisfying as she’d imagined it might be. She said, “Who did you become attracted to?”

In the long silence that followed, she went into the house and came back out with her purse.

—

He didn’t want to talk about the paper the dry cleaner had discovered. His hands shook a little and he wouldn’t take it from her when she held it out to him, so she dropped it onto the table. After several moments of his silence, she asked him to please, please explain it to her, so that she could understand at least one thing about him.

He dragged a hand, with its long elegant fingers, over his mouth.

“It’s something I’ve hidden,” he said. “For my whole life. Even from myself, at times.”

That declaration couldn’t be unsaid and unheard any more than she could unsee the note and slip it back into his jacket pocket.

He told her about the boy his father had caught him with when he was fifteen, about his “fumbling around” in college. He told her about the mold he’d wanted to fit into, about the offer-slash-ultimatum his father had put to him, and the ruse of his first engagement. He alluded to a few experiences he’d had in the years before they met, and said nothing had happened since—until it did. He wanted her to know he’d loved her when he proposed, and he loved her still, and that he’d believed marrying her would turn things around for him, sexually. When it didn’t, he thought it would take time. That was always the plan.

All the times she’d wondered what she was doing wrong, why she couldn’t meet his particular carnal needs. Also, she hadn’t known she was someone’s plan. What she remembered was his telling her things were about to click into place and get better every time something good came along. The promotion. The house. The holiday bonus. Always some good thing that was like a marker he had to get past in order to turn a corner—but he never reached the corner.

She was, somehow, both numb and pinpricked, all over. “Felix,” she said, “I’m sorry, but…you still have not explained the note.”

—

His voice dropped. He realized he would have to tell her now about Augie. He didn’t want to, spoke almost in a whisper, not saying much but the bare bones of it he felt would suffice and he hoped would make sense to her. Still, she couldn’t suppress the ferocity of her tone—was it hurt? envy? he wasn’t sure—when she asked, “Were the two of you in love?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“You can tell me, Felix. You might as well, at this point.”

They hadn’t used the word love, he said. But he’d felt it, and at the time he’d suspected Augie did too. But he really hadn’t known. Time was short, on the ship, he lost his nerve—and then it was too late. After the sinking, and the hospitals, he’d just wanted to get home to her, and see if he could still be the person he was before the war. Or the person he’d been trying to be. And then Tom came into their lives, and he felt so happy, Tom’s birth seemed to bode well, he said, like a good omen, no more than that, and all he could think to do was stay the course, be a husband and a father and hope that all of it—everything connected to his past that wasn’t who he wanted to be, right now—would slide off of him, fall away.

She nearly reached for one of his cigarettes, thinking it might help her get through this. “Go on,” she said.

Waiting to feel different had been like slow dying, he said. For years. It wasn’t until he spoke to somebody, and sorted some things out, that he was able to make any sort of peace with himself. He stopped wishing a whole part of him would die—that helped. He figured out that being who he was…didn’t preclude being who he was, if that made sense to her. (It did, and didn’t.) He said he was sorry she’d found out the way she had. He never wanted to hurt her.

So this was the person in the poem that was not a poem—he’d loved this Augie, she thought, and Augie had died. She’d known grief was a part of what he was going through, so many people he’d sailed with had died on the Teague. But she hadn’t known he’d been grieving a specific person. A lover. Right there was the undertow, the lower-than-low moods. The epicenter of the storm inside him. And yet, now that she understood, he seemed further away from her than ever. His eyes would not meet hers, he was staring straight ahead at the screen, the darkness beyond it.

In the silence that accumulated, she had a realization. Added two plus two. She asked if it was the fortune teller, Skip’s mother, who’d helped him “sort some things out,” as he’d put it.

“She’s not a fortune teller, she is a spiritualist,” he said. “But, yes.”

Could she possibly care how Becky Jenkins labeled herself? “She helped you…feel okay? Laid it all out for you? Like a psychiatrist?”

He shook his head. “It’s more than that. Becky found Augie for me,” he said.

“Found his ghost, you mean. She found the ghost of the man you fell in love with, and told you he loved you back?”

How strange it was for him to hear her say those words aloud. Stranger, still, to hear himself clarify the matter: “Augie told me. Through Becky.”

The chatter of crickets and all other night noises had faded. A train whistle nudged against the dark. She didn’t know quite what to think of Becky’s “helping” him in this way, whether real or not. The idea of Becky’s being involved in their lives at all felt wrong to her—but also fitting, somehow. Margaret felt stupid. Deceived. “How could you do this to me?” she said finally.

He took a breath. “I thought it would be different. I thought I could be—fixed.”

“But you’re telling me I was the thing you thought would fix you, and it didn’t work. So you just carried on, trying other things? I was step one in your experiment? This is my life, Felix. This is all I have.” She huffed out the breath she’d been holding. “I never stood a chance.”

“That’s not true. It’s just not the case. We’ve stayed together. We’re still here, still us.”

“We’ve never been us,” she said. “There is no us. We were both pretending.”

“Margaret—”

Her voice broke, but she kept talking through the pieces: “You proposed to me because you thought I would fix you? I said yes because I was looking out for myself. We hardly knew each other. We hardly know each other now. This enormous part of you I knew nothing about—because you kept it from me. I understand—but I blinded myself to it. Just like you did, to me. All this stepping around and lying, as if there’s something precious here that needs to be preserved.”

“Isn’t there, still?”

“We’re a sham, Felix. We’re actually more alike than I thought—we both came at this so blindly.”

“We don’t have to be blind now. We have a child, and a home together. I’m still me. We’re still us.”

She felt the past and what it held for her drawing inward, imploding upon itself. “I had an affair while you were overseas.”

He went quiet for several moments. Then: “I wondered, actually, if you had.”

“You did? Why?”

“Because you’re a woman…and not just a beautiful one. I wasn’t providing, along those lines. Not before I left, and not when I got back.”

His sensibility. His discretion. “Aren’t you even going to ask me who it was?”

He ticked his damp eyes over to her. Because they’d been outside for so long, they could see each other clearly in the dim light. “I don’t need to know,” he said.

“You do. And you need to know the timing, I’m afraid. It lasted a while, then happened again the night before you got back. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“That’s enough.” His voice was terse and he raised a hand, open-palmed, in the space between them, not as if threatening to strike her but as though to fend off a blow. “Please, please, not another word,” he said, because this, even as he’d opened the door to his life, he hadn’t seen coming. This had never occurred to him. “Please stop.”

Therein, she thought, lies the unbearable solitude of a lie: you’re alone when you tell it, alone when you live it, alone when you try to dismantle it. The crickets, suddenly, started all together, as if after an intermission at a concert. Their noise sounded like a snare drum. “What do we do now?” she asked.

He crushed another cigarette, stood, and said, “We’ll figure it out.” Then walked into the house.

—

An hour later, she went upstairs—to the guest room, where she lay down on the bed in which she’d made love with Cal all those years ago, and waited for a sleep that never came.

How ridiculously naïve you are, she said to herself, thinking year after year that things would improve. Believing he would get past whatever he wasn’t talking about. And that he would and could give you happiness, when the whole time he’d been grieving and suffering from a broken heart, lamenting a love he would never be able to know.

Because it would have been love, right?

It would have been love.

—

Yesterday’s haze had burned out of the sky. She waited for Cal at noon in the little triangle wedge of park beside the courthouse, on the bench where she told him she’d be, between the two weeping willows, unable to tell if the pain in her stomach was nerves or hunger; she hadn’t eaten since yesterday afternoon. Cal was walking with a cane now. She’d seen him with it from a distance a few times. The lines around his mouth had deepened some, maybe; his blond hair was receding into a peak, but otherwise he hardly seemed to have aged in the past nine years. He sat down beside her.

They’d gotten their awkward greetings out of the way over the phone, when she’d called him at the store, so the first thing he said after sitting down was “Is this about Skip?”

No. It was about them. It was about Tom. It was about her. How could she explain that she’d had no choice but to see him? He was part of this, after all. He was going to remain part of this. She took a breath and let it out slowly. Said she knew what she was about to say might sound crazy. Then she asked him if what had happened between the two of them had been real.

Clearly, the question stumped Cal. Real as in…did it happen? He seemed ready to fudge on that, if he could get away with it. Real, she said, as in what they’d felt for each other. What they’d shared. Still stumped, suspecting a trap, maybe, he said, “We enjoyed ourselves, didn’t we? That felt real.”

“But was it all just a distraction for you? Could it have been anyone? Or did you desire me?”

“Not anyone,” Cal said, glancing around, leaning back on the bench as if to tuck himself out of sight. Though he turned his head so that his blue eyes met hers and held for a moment, his voice was potholed with reluctance. “In that—situation—under those—circumstances, I desired you, yes.”

Romance had never been the point, she reminded herself. Clearly, he could only assign to her the kind of desire that produced sex, then memories of sex that could be locked away in a vault. Well. She was done being the vault.

He turned to face her on the bench, his cane held upright between his knees. “What’s this about, Margaret? Has something happened?”

“Felix and I are separating. We’ll divorce, I suppose.”

His mouth went slack for a moment. He asked her why. She wasn’t going into that, she said. It was over because it had to be, and she wouldn’t discuss the particulars with him or anyone else. Cal sat with the impact of that for a moment, looking out across the little fences cordoning off the grass. “Why are you telling me?”

“You know why. We have a child together.”

He actually looked stunned by that. He either hadn’t known—how could he not have known?—or couldn’t believe he was finally hearing it from her. She didn’t have time to watch him process what she’d been living with for a decade. If she weren’t around, she said, did he think it would be better for everyone if their spouses knew the truth?

He asked her what she meant by not being around.

She waved that off, rephrased her question: didn’t he think, for Tom’s sake, that Becky and Felix should know?

It was as if all the blood had suddenly drained to his feet. “Did you tell him?”

“Please answer my question, Cal.”

“Do I—No. Why would that be a good idea?”

“I guess I’m asking if, in your heart, it bothers you that they don’t know. Do you think Becky has a right to?”

He’d never thought of it in terms of who had a right to know; he’d thought of their affair only as something no one should ever know about, because it never should have happened. He felt a surprising flicker of doubt about what she—this person he’d been so passionate with, so intimate with, so many years ago—was telling him. But he had to doubt her, didn’t he? Just as his brain had eventually brought a measure of doubt to what she’d told him in the garden shop. Suddenly, this felt like a defining moment, and none of the definitions he could think of were acceptable. “No,” he said. And added, “Please don’t do this to me.”

A slight breeze picked up, waving the strands of the willows on either side of them.

“Why is it something I’m doing to you?” she asked. “And why has dealing with this been all on me? I’m not asking you what I should do, Cal. I’m asking what your thoughts are. And I guess I have them now.”

“What are you going to do?”

She didn’t answer but thanked him for seeing her. She picked her purse up from the bench and stood.

“Wait,” he said, and stood, too, but she asked him to please not walk with her or follow her. When she was near the entrance of the park, almost to the brick sidewalk of Main Street, she heard him call out, “Where are you going to go?”

It was the last thing he ever said to her.

—

Early afternoon. Felix was at work, Tom was at school. The house was empty and cool and quiet. It smelled of Murphy Oil Soap. Cigarettes. The light-blue carpet in the living room still bore the treads from the most recent vacuuming she’d given it.

She moved quickly. Brought two suitcases up from the basement and filled them with some of her clothes. Took half the checks out of the checkbook, half the emergency cash out of the Band-Aid tin they kept behind Felix’s socks. Rolled up her toiletries in a towel. Took her jewelry. Took photos of her husband and son, in a hinged frame that closed. She put the suitcases into the trunk of the car, plus a grocery bag of shoes, then tossed her coats into the back seat and slid the Dolice in on top of them.

At the secretary’s desk, she took out a sheet of paper and a pen and wrote:

Dear Felix,

I’ve gone away. Not because of what you told me, but because we’ll never be what we need and want in each other, and if there’d ever been a possibility for that, there surely isn’t one now. I promise you: I’ll never tell Tom or anyone else what you shared with me. It’s no one’s business but yours. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of. The heart knows where it wants to go.

I need to tell you, though, that I’ve done something terrible I’ve we’ve been living with for a long time. The affair I had was with Cal Jenkins. I ended it as soon as I got the telegram about the sinking, but we were together once more—the night before you got home. I slept with him less than twenty-four hours before sleeping with you.

I didn’t want to see it, but I do, because it’s there. I wasn’t saying what I said to be cruel last night. Cal is Tom’s father, Felix. I’m very sorry about that.

What I want you to know most, though, is that you’re Tom’s father, because you are. You’re the father he’s grown up with, the only one he’s ever known. Please don’t love him any less, or let anything I’ve done come between the two of you.

I’ve tried to feel what I’m supposed to feel, but I always seem to fall short, or get it wrong. I’ve had so much resentment for you, at times. I’ve even resented Tom. I’ve lived a lot of years out of sorts about a problem, but I think the problem is me.

I’ve spoken to Cal about this, and told him it’s my feeling that Becky should know. If you know, she should know. But if and when you tell Tom—that is up to you.

I’m sorry we were never the people we wanted to be, with each other. I’m sorry there had to be so much deception to make it work for as long as it did. Thank you for proposing to marry me. That was the greatest moment of my life, and even if it doesn’t seem that way right now, I want you to know it.

Love,

Margaret

She pressed a tissue against her eyes over and over as she wrote. She sealed the envelope, carried it upstairs, and left it on Felix’s nightstand, on top of the copy of The Caine Mutiny she’d given him at Christmas. Then, having gone back and forth on whether or not she should, and whether or not she had time, she returned to the desk and wrote to Becky Jenkins. A briefer letter, sticking to the facts, offering no details or evidence—let Cal provide those—and asking Becky to please, if she could manage, continue to show Tom the kindness Margaret assumed she always had. Regretfully, she wrote before signing her name, and the word looked out of place, somehow, meant for an RSVP. She had to keep moving, though. She folded the letter, addressed and stamped the envelope.

In the garage, she threw her purse into the car, brought the door up, flooding the space with light, then noticed the Dolice had already slid off the coats and into the footwell. Some of the coats had slid down there too. They’d all be on the floor the first time she braked if she didn’t move them. Quickly, she opened the back passenger door, grabbed the coats, moved them to the trunk, then secured the painting. Her eyes watered steadily and her heart raced as she tried to think if there was anything she was forgetting. Keep moving, her mind said. Go.

But she’d taken too long. She was closing the passenger door when Tom rolled up the driveway on his bicycle. His dark red hair scattered over his forehead. His yellow-and-white-striped T-shirt half-tucked into his jeans. His schoolbooks strapped to the bookrack over his back tire. She saw his eyes move from her to the open trunk. The suitcases and coats, the open bag of shoes. She saw confusion bend his brow.

She wanted to pull a curtain down between him and this sight—and leave it down forever. But she couldn’t, now. She couldn’t do anything but bring the trunk lid down.

He flinched when it closed, his hands still gripping his handlebars.

She had the urge to walk over to him, hug him, tell him something that would help make sense out of what she was doing. But what sense was there to be made? What sense had she been able to conjure out of what her own mother had done to her? She would explain it to him when she could bear to. She would explain it to him when she understood it herself. She had to go. She walked around to the driver’s side and got into the car. Dragged her hand across her eyes as she turned over the engine.

She was careful, backing past him. But she couldn’t look at him again. Not into his eyes. She kept him in her periphery, and in no time, he was gone from even there.

—

Out on Route 23, the sky was a vast dome of periwinkle. The sun beat down through the windshield and warmed her hands on the steering wheel, and the air coming in from the open windows cooled her eyes. I’m sorry, she thought as she neared the edge of town. Bonhomie began to fall away, until it was just the outlying industrial plants and warehouses, and then one last gas station, and a gun store. To houses sitting way off by themselves, and barns, and an old rusted-out hearse up on cinderblocks with a For Sale sign on its windshield. I’m sorry, Tom, she thought, passing barns and far-off combines. I have to go, Felix. As if she were still there, talking to one of them. I have to go, Tom. I’m sorry. Had her mother talked to her after leaving? Had she almost changed her mind and gone back? Margaret had thought, if this ever happened to her, she would finally understand what her mother had experienced, actually doing it, beyond the emotional pain, and the guilt, and the sadness—because surely there was more to it than that. Surely there was at least a glimmer of a notion of having done the right thing.

She kept her eyes out for that as she drove.

She kept her hands at ten and two, the way Felix had taught her—except to roll down the window. The air out here smelled like husk.

Part III

Chapter Nineteen

“Let me know when you’re ready,” Becky called across the graves. “No rush.”

On her knees, she worked her way around the base of Mrs. Dodson’s headstone with a pair of hand gardening shears, cutting away weeks’ worth of grass. The stone had been paid for by Mrs. Dodson’s brother, a banker who lived in Maine and didn’t get to Bonhomie very often—or ever—to tend to the grave. Becky didn’t blame him; he had no other reason to make the trip. She managed to get out once every couple of months to do the tending.

She never attempted to communicate with Mrs. Dodson or any other spirit while she was at the cemetery. Mrs. Dodson, in a dream, had told her not to bother. Spirits didn’t linger in graveyards, she’d said. Why would they? There was nothing to do, nothing to observe. And it was true: Becky never felt the presence of any spirits when she was here. The place was like an abandoned motel. She understood why people talked to the graves of their loved ones, of course—it was the same reason they came to her parlor—but she lamented all those one-sided cemetery conversations.

Everett had decided to come with her and was down the row, near the vine-covered fence that ran along the cemetery’s north wall. He sat on a bench across from the graves of his wife, daughter, and eldest son. Head lowered, hat resting on his lap. Becky couldn’t tell if he’d heard her. She couldn’t tell if he was speaking softly to the graves or just reposing. Or napping. Then something shrieked in the sky and Everett tilted his head back and looked straight up, his beard sparkling in the pearly sun. “Northern harrier,” he said, then resumed his slouch.

She gathered the cut grass in handfuls and tossed it aside. She dropped the shears, picked up her whisk broom, and brushed the black train grit off the tops of the stones and out of the letters and numbers carved into their faces. Family plots were practical, she supposed. The ones she found unsettling were the double stones for spouses when one of them was still alive—the wife, usually, her birth date followed by a dash and then nothing, like an unfinished sentence. The Wakefields had one of those, adjacent to the Dodsons; Mrs. Wakefield’s sentence was still a fragment. What was it like to visit your husband’s grave and each time see your own waiting for you, and that unfinished sentence? Would you feel like you were holding things up?

She wondered, too, how many of these married couples, all-in or half-dead, had been faithful, and how many of them had lovers buried nearby. Some of the graves dated back to the previous century. Had this one here slept with that one over there, while the spouse was clueless? Were the duped spouses suddenly in the know once they got to the other side?

That might be preferable to finding out while you were still alive, she thought. It was October of 1955, one year and two months since she and Cal had separated.

She finished with the Dodsons, but Everett was still on his bench, so she moved with her shears and whisk broom over to the Picketts on the other side of the Amberlys. There were no living Picketts left to tend to the graves; they were often shabby and in need of cleaning. She entered their corral and got to work.

Activity had brought her back to herself. For a while after Margaret Salt’s letter, everything became vaguely unfamiliar to Becky, slightly out of balance, in a way that made her wonder, at times, if she were sleepwalking. Taft Street, where she’d lived for eleven years, and most every other street in Bonhomie, where she’d lived her entire life, felt unfamiliar. The house felt unfamiliar. The creak of the stairs. The feel of the bedroom carpet under her feet. All of it rang a bell, but the bell was somewhere else.

As the months passed, her awareness righted itself, and the only thing unfamiliar to her was Cal.

She’d been over and over what had happened—so often, it had carved a groove in her brain. She understood the what, but the why had never crystallized for her. She and Cal hadn’t been an overtly romantic couple. They hadn’t doted on each other, hadn’t given each other pet names or gone overboard on Valentine’s Day. Maybe they should have, but she’d always assumed they were that way because it was how they wanted to be. Their sex life had been staid, sure, but fine with her. In fact, that would have been her temperature reading on their whole marriage: fine. They’d been through some rough spots, had bitten some bullets (well, she’d bitten some bullets). As half of a couple in their midthirties, she’d been content to think of them as being done weathering storms. But Cal, it turned out, had made a storm bigger than both of them. Cal had made his own weather system.

He’d broken down sobbing when she’d shown him Margaret’s letter. He couldn’t explain himself, couldn’t defend himself. He kept emphasizing that it had been nine years ago, as if each year that had passed since the affair warranted a dollop of forgiveness, when, in fact, all that time made everything worse. The arguments, an awful string of them they managed to have with at least some walls between them and Skip and Everett, expanded in scope to be not just about what had happened, but about them. Scrambling, he told her it wasn’t easy to live with “the angel of service,” making her think he’d been carrying that term around in his back pocket, at the ready. She returned to the idea that he was insecure—to the point that it had ruined his judgment. He was so bothered—to this day, she said—that he couldn’t go off to war and prove something, that he’d let it define who he was. He wasn’t his leg! Did he know that he limped more when he pouted? His insecurity and self-pity were holding him back. From what? he’d asked, and she told him flat out: from being a better person.

—

The day after the letter had arrived, the day after that initial, awful conversation with Cal, she’d called Felix Salt to say they needed to talk.

He asked her over.

It was early evening. He’d changed out of his work clothes, was wearing a light-blue oxford shirt that looked carefully tucked into his khakis. The part in his hair was exact, but he needed a shave and looked tired. Tom was out, he said. They sat down in his living room.

When Becky asked how Tom was doing, Felix said as well as could be expected. Hurt, confused, angry, and not very interested in being consoled—at least for the time being. Felix acknowledged that he himself had been blindsided both by Margaret’s revelation and her departure, and suddenly they were tracing events backward, each wanting the other to know they’d been oblivious to what had gone on, back when they’d had their sessions together. Each apologizing to the other for not knowing what had been hidden from them.

Margaret, Felix said, had probably gone to Columbus. It’d been a week since she’d left, at that point, and he still hadn’t heard from her. He didn’t know if she was coming home. Was he worried about her? Becky asked, and he said, yes, of course, but also no; if there was one thing Margaret was good at, it was prioritizing herself. He asked Becky how things were between her and Cal, and she shook her head: not good.

But this concern for the adults was nothing more than moving furniture around to keep making space for the little elephant in the room. What were they going to do about Tom? She asked this outright, trying to read his face, his movements; she was in the wingback, he was across from her on the sofa, hunched forward, elbows resting on his knees and his hands dangling. The letter, Becky said, had been short and to the point and didn’t seem to leave room for doubt. She had it with her—sticking out of her purse—but Felix didn’t want to see it. Time might make things more…apparent, she said, but for now, how did he wish to—

“I thought I saw myself in him,” he said, cutting her off. “Two weeks ago, I would have sworn to it. Now, I don’t know. It’s like I can’t trust my eyes, they see what they want to see. What about you—do you have any doubts?”

As much as anything, this question saddened her—for either he was in denial, or he didn’t know. She hadn’t been around Tom since the letter arrived, and yet, ever since, the boy’s face had been superimposed over Cal’s in her mind. Like Felix, she saw similarities one minute, none the next. But it didn’t matter. She knew as a mother that Margaret knew: as a mother. She didn’t want to say that to Felix, though, and could tell from his expression that she didn’t have to. By not answering his question, she’d answered it.

“Christ,” he said.

No matter how long it took to sink in, there was still a decision to be made on how to proceed. “I think it’s up to you,” she said, “what happens next.”

Felix closed his hands over his face for a moment. “Tom is eight years old. His mother just walked out on him. I want to table this whole thing until he’s older, that’s what I want. Enough major upset for a while, you know? I’ll tell him when he’s thirty. Or sixty. Just kidding—thirty. If he wakes up one day looking like your husband in the meantime, we’ll have to talk.”

“So, don’t tell them?”

“Them?”

“The boys. That they’re half brothers.”

How could he not have thought of that? Thank you again, Margaret. “Could we agree not to, for now? I don’t want Tom to suddenly think he doesn’t have me either. It would be my—his whole world.”

“I understand,” Becky said. “I do. You’re his father. Cal and I will, of course, stick to whatever you decide about what to tell him, and when. Both of them.”

“Thank you.”

There was no smooth way to end such an unusual conversation, but as he walked her out to her car, they felt the reverberations of their shared history—the one that had nothing to do with this current set of circumstances—and it made saying goodbye almost comforting.

—

Feeling sorry for yourself in a cemetery was a peculiar kind of callous. If all the bones and hair and nails and dust of each of the departed could come together into their respective bodies again, and their spirits return, most of them would probably trade places with you and your troubles for a little more time topside. Here was Lemuel Pickett, born in 1922, died in 1944 defending his country in France. He’d probably welcome your troubles for a few more years. Here was Baby Pickett, so much a baby that it hadn’t even been named, so short a life that the only thing on the headstone was Baby Pickett, Died 1917. Surely Baby Pickett would want your life with your troubles—unless, like Mrs. Dodson, Baby Pickett found death to be wonderful.

Everett was on his feet when she next looked over. His hat was back on his head, his hands were in his pockets. He took one last look at his family’s graves, then turned and started walking toward her. She gathered her garden shears and whisk broom and stood.

Everett knew there was big trouble at home but had been respectful enough not to inquire. Cal didn’t want him to know and had asked Becky not to tell him. To Ida and Roman, she’d said only that she and Cal were having problems and were separating. She’d made them promise they wouldn’t ask Cal what was going on, that they would respect her privacy—and his. She was also trying to be practical; if she and Cal somehow happened to survive this, she didn’t want her parents hating him.

She didn’t hate him.

She just wanted him out of her sight.

There were no empty bedrooms left, with Everett living there. For the first week or so, Cal had slept on the pullout couch in the basement. Then one morning, he was back upstairs, where he still showered and shaved and dressed for work, when she walked into their bedroom and said, “I think I need you farther away.”

His mind ticked through the options. In all seriousness, he said, “The attic?”

Then he understood.

He’d started looking for a place that afternoon. He was living now in a two-room apartment smaller than the place they’d shared when they were first married. He still had some of his clothes at the house (because his apartment only had one small closet). One of the blocks he’d stood on to level himself while he was barefoot and stationary was still under the foot of the bed. The ceramic owls he’d given her over the years were still on the curio shelf. He was everywhere she looked; she could trip over his shadow. But he was out of her sight.

Except when he came around, trying to be useful.

“I used to know him,” Everett said on their way back to the car, pointing a curled finger at one of the headstones. “He worked at the tannery out by the water tower. Played the violin.”

Becky looped her arm through his. “Was he good?”

“Better than me.”

“You play the violin?”

“Nope,” Everett said.

—

The apartment was over a bakery on Jones Street. The wallpaper was the color of a penny and patterned with figs, and the back windows looked down on an alley used for deliveries and garbage removal. For that first year—the worst of his life, so far—Cal functioned almost normally when he was out and about. He shopped for himself, got his laundry done, kept himself presentable, performed reasonably well at work. (Roman had catechizing eyes but stuck to his promise.) The instant he was back in the apartment, his energy left and he sank into despair.

Secrets, regrets, and apologies. These made up the stuff of his life. But there was nothing to be done with them, apparently, and no filing them away. Margaret had been overwhelmed by all the secrets and had spilled the beans—only to have those beans sprout and grow more secrets. Skip wasn’t to know what had happened between them. Becky’s parents and Cal’s father weren’t to know. Tom wasn’t to know the truth of his lineage, for now—or perhaps ever. And if Becky had made any ultimate decision about Cal in her heart, that was another secret. He couldn’t undo what he’d done, and without being able to do that, he had no idea how he would ever convince her to take him back. He’d apologized to her a hundred times, until she’d told him to stop, said she’d heard him, and reminded him that those two words, I’m sorry, were very easy to say and literally changed nothing.

—

That was a bleak prognosis for his predicament. Changed nothing? It provided him with a glimpse of understanding into why Margaret had just packed up and left. It also reverberated in his sole encounter with Felix to date, three months after it all went down.

He was sitting by himself at a table in the new Ferguson’s cafeteria, midday, the place nearly full, when he looked up and saw Felix enter the dining room. Cal had dreaded encountering him, had dodged him on the street a couple of times, the same way he used to dodge Margaret. For a while, at work, each time the bell jangled over the door, he worried that it was Felix come to confront him. Watching that very person cross the terrazzo floor now, Cal detected no sign of the enraged figure who’d taken up residence in his imagination. He saw a tall man with enviable, level shoulders doff his cap and smooth his hand over a full head of dark hair. Felix said something to the hostess, who smiled at him and followed him with her eyes as he made his way over to the far end of the L-shaped counter. There, he took off his jacket and sat. Ordered from the menu board. Lit a cigarette. Glanced around the dining room—and managed to lock eyes with Cal for just a moment. His coffee arrived, and he looked away.

The encounter seemed inevitable to Cal, and he was tired of dreading it. Also, a crowded cafeteria might be just the place to dissuade an altercation.

He left his water glass, gathered his plate of meatloaf and his cane, and crossed the dining room to the empty stool beside Felix’s.

“Mind?”

Felix shrugged.

Cal put his plate down and sat. They both faced forward, the long leg of the counter and the sea of tables stretched out before them. Cal knew he was expected to speak, and he knew what he wanted to say, but his nerve wavered, now that they were inches apart.

A roll and a butter pat were set down next to Felix’s place mat. He picked up the roll, tore it in half.

Cal poked some meatloaf into his mouth.

“I think I’m supposed to hit you,” Felix said, without looking over at him.

Cal swallowed, cleared his throat. “Here?”

“Outside, I guess. In the parking lot.” He spread the butter until it neatly filled the area within the circumference of the crust. Then he set the bread down on its plate. “But, actually, I don’t want to hit you.”

Cal exhaled. He counted to five, then ten, and said, “For what it’s worth, I never meant for any of it to happen.”

Something—a blender—whirred loudly for a few moments, then stopped.

“Well,” Felix said. “You meant for some of it to happen.”

“Right. What I mean is, I feel terrible about it.”

“I would imagine so. Maybe you can explain something for me.”

“Sure. I’ll try.”

“Margaret said you two were involved before she got the telegram about the ship, and you stopped when she got it?”

“Yes.”

“But then you got together once more, after she found out I was coming home?”

“Yes,” Cal said, glad, at least, to be able to provide clarification. “We were—involved—but once she’d heard what happened to you at sea, it stopped. She was too distraught. Didn’t see or talk to me at all. But then—it happened once more. Just before you got back.”

“So you slept together while she thought I was alive, and stopped while she thought I was dead?”

It sounded especially bad, put that way. “If it’s any consolation,” Cal said, “I’ve messed things up for myself pretty badly.”

Felix shook his head—just barely, almost a shudder. “It’s not.”

There was a clatter in the kitchen, something hit the floor, and Cal spoke more loudly than was necessary. “What I really want to tell you is—I’m sorry. Becky said that doesn’t change anything, and she’s right, but I wanted you to know.”

The shudder again. But in the same level, matter-of-fact voice, Felix said, “What kind of person would you be if you weren’t sorry?”

Good question, Cal thought.

Felix touched his napkin to his mouth and, without having eaten anything, stood.

“Don’t,” Cal said. “I’ll move—” But Felix waved him off with the slightest motion of his hand. He turned slightly to face Cal as he pulled on his jacket, and Cal could see how striking he was. How smoothly he was stepping into middle age. Felix said nothing else, took out his wallet and put several dollars on the counter. As he watched Felix walk out, the thrum of the dining room returned to Cal’s ears like a distant rumble.

—

From what he read in the paper each morning (while eating bear claws and crullers from the bakery), and from what he watched on the Philco he’d borrowed from the store, the rest of the world was still churning, still grinding and throwing sparks. A polio vaccine had finally been approved. A place called Disneyland had opened in California (two of Cal’s customers were taking their families all the way across the country just to ride the rides). Tensions around integration in the South were rising, now that the Supreme Court had said segregation was illegal in schools. Bigotry seemed to be a right some people thought they earned by paying taxes, and they weren’t about to have that right taken away. A teenaged Black boy named Emmett Till had been brutally murdered in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman, and his mother had asked that pictures of his body be shown in the newspapers. Everyone saw his face, his body, what was done to him. Everyone read about how his killers, a month later, pleaded not guilty and were acquitted by an all-white jury after just an hour of deliberation. There it was in the news: horrific, inexplicable—and then carried away by other news. Eisenhower had had a heart attack. The Russians had developed and tested a hydrogen bomb. And that November, in 1955, an outbreak of civil war in Vietnam, the very country where the U.S. had been pouring money and depositing troops for the last decade. The Viet Minh had its hand in the north, the U.S. had its hand in the south, and when the fuse was lit, everyone just happened to already be there, ready to go.

Cal fell asleep in front of the television some nights and was awakened by the National Anthem. In the morning, treacly smells from the bakery filled his bedroom. The baker seemed to think him needy, gave him an entire unclaimed birthday cake that said Happy Birthday, Bob on it. Cal kept it in the freezer. When Skip came over on Saturdays to spend the night, they thawed and ate pieces of it with whipped cream, never forgetting to wish Bob a happy birthday.

—

Having made sure it wouldn’t be a source of contention, he called the house most nights after dinner to check in with Skip. If Becky answered, he asked how she was, and how his dad was, and got in a few questions about the condition of the house, just to see if there was anything that needed his hand.

She didn’t mind when he came over to trim the hedges while Skip mowed the lawn. She didn’t mind when he came over to clean out the drainage ditch that ran behind the back fence. She wouldn’t let him climb a ladder to clean out the rain gutters, because she was worried he’d fall.

—

The kids, though. With all this rending, were the kids okay? Parents around the world—the happy and the miserable and all the ones in between—were asking, every day and night, Are the kids okay? Are they making the right decisions? Will their lives be better than ours?

And the question that all the other questions eventually came home to: Do they love us?

Skip knew a couple of different kids with parents who’d separated. They both said the same thing: it wasn’t so bad; you got two birthday parties, two Christmases. But one of those kids had had to move to Kentucky with his mom right in the middle of the school year, which had made Skip conclude that having your parents separate might be crummy in a way that double presents couldn’t make up for. Now that he was one of those kids, he saw how right he’d been. It stank that his dad lived in a different part of town (in what was actually a pretty cool apartment), and it stank that his mom had to invite his dad to dinner, that his dad couldn’t just show up whenever he wanted. They hadn’t told Skip much of anything, just that there was a problem and they needed time apart, but neither one of them seemed to have any idea how to fix the problem or how much time they needed. They weren’t even trying, from what Skip could tell. It never occurred to him to take sides, because he never stopped thinking of them as one entity, but he wanted to yell at them, like round-headed, red-faced Coach Schneider at school, Work it out, people!

Tom’s situation seemed worse, because his mother had up and left town—but he wasn’t taking sides either. He was, for a while at least, equally mad at both his parents. He was mad at his dad for not having any idea when his mom might be coming back, mad at his dad for saying his mom would call (because Felix had assumed Margaret would), and mad at his mom for not calling. He was mad at his mom for leaving and at his dad for staying. He was mad at himself for whatever he might have done to make this happen. He’d even been mad at Skip, at first, because he thought that that crazy blowup, after Skip had spent the night, had been the last straw of something, for whatever reason.

But Felix had assured him his mom’s leaving wasn’t because of anything he—or Skip—had done. “She’s just decided she wants to live somewhere else for a while.” That was the explanation Felix came up with, and he added things he wanted to be true that he thought Tom needed to hear. “She said she loves you and is going to miss you while she’s gone. She’ll call once she gets where she’s going.” Which, of course, prompted the question, “Where’s that?”

Felix took a guess.

Sure enough, the card that came for Tom a month later was postmarked Columbus, as was the Christmas card four months after that, and the birthday card the following April, always the same message following the greeting: Be good, and know I love you—Mom. Never a return address.

Tom carried each card up to his room when it arrived, to read it alone. Later, Felix would see it standing open on his dresser. There for a few weeks, then gone.

“We’re in the same boat, Buckeye,” Skip said, spotting one of the cards before it went away. Trying to make him feel better, Tom knew, but he smarted a little because he could feel Skip trying to protect him, even in this—when, in fact, their boats were very different. After a while, the only similarity was the coincidence of the timing of it all, and coincidence doesn’t impress kids much. When things happened matters far less than how things are, and for Tom, things weren’t good.

He was a tightly wound spring of a kid. Ten years old, short and wiry (evidence of Cal that Felix tried not to see), with a dense head of bright red hair that could be tamed with water and a comb but otherwise hung over his forehead and, half the time, his eyes. He was broody. He looked people in the eye less and less. If he mumbled and you asked him to repeat himself, he yelled whatever he’d just said. He slammed doors and drawers when he didn’t get his way. He started using all the curse words he’d heard at school. Felix felt like he was constantly on him about something. Over the course of that first school year after Margaret left, his grades slipped from A-minuses and B’s to B-minuses, and sometimes to C’s. His conduct marks went from S to U (Unsatisfactory). In the “remarks” section of his report card, the teacher wrote, Talks in class. Doesn’t Listen. Has trouble taking instructions. When he was signing on the parent line, Felix asked Tom if he could explain why Mr. Holt had written those remarks.

“Because he’s a bastard,” was Tom’s answer.

As Felix saw it, the boy had a lot of anger toward his mother, and she wasn’t here to receive it, so he was doling it out to whomever was around. How could Felix not punish him? He docked his allowance for this, put him on restriction for that. Raised his voice, sent him to his room. Was curt with him—just like Margaret had been.

But Tom wasn’t always tightly wound, and he wasn’t always contentious. At night, he usually settled down and did his homework after dinner, and they watched television together, side by side on the sofa. He leaned his shoulder against Felix’s sometimes, his feet on the coffee table, a half-eaten bowl of popcorn beside him on the cushion.

They were only down one person, but the house was cavernous with just the two of them. Tom’s bedroom, at the other end of the hall from Felix’s, felt far away at night. It would occur to Felix that anything could happen to Tom. He could come down with some illness in the middle of the night. He could be kidnapped. Worries that had never been there before. Sometimes, because he knew it would help him get back to sleep, he got up and looked into Tom’s room, to make sure he was safe and sleeping soundly. And there he was: sleeping like a stone, Margaret’s red hair tousled around his head, Margaret’s long eyelashes weighting his eyes closed. Anger, Felix knew, was exhausting.

A couple of times, though, Felix was in bed, having not fallen asleep yet, when a stirring made him lift his head from the pillow—only to find Tom silhouetted in the doorway, the nightlight in the hall glowing around him, checking to see if Felix was there.

—

“Que Sera, Sera” was all over the radio in early 1956, and when it came on, Becky tried to assume its attitude. But when “Heartbreak Hotel” came on, she felt the rawest, loneliest parts of her oozing out of her pores. She had, in fact, been heartbroken by what had happened between her and Cal. She had, in fact, been so lonely she could die—but she didn’t stay that way for long. She had her practice, which she found gratifying when she wasn’t being asked to help people locate family heirlooms or safety deposit box keys. Cal was around, if she needed him. And she had Skip, who, even at twelve, needed her every day of his life. She loved that. It got her out of bed in the morning, kept her blood flowing.

She was more lenient with him since the separation. As long as he stuck to his curfew and kept his grades up, she let him stay out with his friends in the evening and have them over as much as he wanted. That included Vincent and Sam, sometimes, and Theo Bach from over in Camden. Tom, too, though not as often lately. Tom seemed quieter now, withdrawn. She felt terrible for him. He hadn’t asked for any of this and probably didn’t understand what had happened any more than Skip did. That the boys didn’t know their two situations were connected seemed so strange to her, though she understood the necessity (and convenience) of it. She worried about how it would play out down the road, but there was nothing she could do about that now. Tom didn’t come around for weeks, sometimes. It was easier, not having him there—but she also had to stop herself from calling the Salt house now and then to check on him—to check on both of them.

Then there was her roommate. The one she’d once worried might burn the house down.

She found Everett’s reading glasses all over the house and brought them to him. He learned how to work the Electrolux. She filled his hot water bottle when the old bullet wound in his shoulder acted up. He helped her in the kitchen peeling potatoes, which he was surprisingly good at despite his arthritis, and shucking corn, which he pretended to be better at than he was. At his recommendation, she read Twin Sombreros, and they discussed the actions taken by the book’s unlucky hero, Brazos Keene. At her suggestion, he read Death on the Nile. He hadn’t seen the ending coming, he said. She asked if he’d enjoyed it. “Not especially,” he said. “But that Poy-Rot is in the right business.”

—

She was in the parlor late one morning, on the heels of another appointment, when Everett appeared around one of the pocket doors.

“Do you have a moment?” he asked. Wearing the bolo tie she’d bought for him, the tassel-less loafers. His white beard looked combed.

She beckoned him in.

He came just a few steps and stopped. Held his hands over his stomach. “You’ve done so much for me. I’m extremely grateful. And I was wondering if you could—if it were possible…”

“Anything,” she said.

“My ears aren’t as bad as Cal says. The heat vent in my room connects to the one in here, and the voices carry. I know what goes on. I was, to be frank, actually wondering if you might be able to help me reach some people.”

She did her best to hide the surprise in her face. She said yes, of course, and invited him to sit down at the hexagonal table. Even though they were the only people home, she closed the pocket doors. Readied the room and sat down across from him.

He took a moment. “You know I had a wife once,” he said. “Dora. Right after I got called up, in Cleveland, I had four days before my train, and that’s when we met. We couldn’t see any reason not to get married. I liked the idea of it, because if I was going to die, I wanted to be married. But I didn’t die. I came back, and we had three children. I couldn’t shake the war, though, and was a wretched husband, a wretched father. They put up with me. And then we had to bury Robert. And Grace. And then I had to bury Dora—Cal and me both had to do that, in ’29.”

He’d never said nearly so much to her about his past. And then he went on: he was seventy-six and probably going to die before too long, so he thought it made sense to find out ahead of time if his family wanted to see him or not. He didn’t want to look forward to a reunion if there wasn’t going to be one.

The flame of the votive she’d lit danced in his pupils. She saw with startling immediacy the awful fight she’d had with Cal years ago, when he so adamantly didn’t want to be put in touch with his family—and here his father was asking her to do that very thing. She blinked away a tear that was blurring her vision. “I’ll try,” she said. She asked Everett to close his eyes, and she closed hers. She waited a moment, then mentally said her introductions to the spirit world, and, having asked him for them, the full names and approximate death dates of all the departed (he was able to narrow the dates down to the month) and invited them to come forward.

Nothing.

She cast the invitation again. The void could feel like a canyon some days, and it was like that today. She cast again. And again.

“I’m not getting anything.”

“Not from Robert? Or Grace?”

“No,” she said, frustrated, fervent in her desire to help him. Was there another option here? “I’m sorry,” she said. “Nothing from Robert, or Grace.” She heard a rattle in him. She peeked. His eyes were still closed, his hands now flat on the table. His fingers, twig-like and shiny, were crossed. She couldn’t bear it. “But Dora—”

“You found her?”

“…I’m sensing her.”

Still peeking, she saw him rock slightly back and forth, as if trying to nudge himself into her words.

“Dora says—” She could do this, couldn’t she? She could adjust the truth for him. “She says of course she’s looking forward to seeing you. She says they all are. Her, and Grace, and Robert.”

“Truly?”

Becky’s mouth was dry. “Truly,” she said. Then added, “She says she hopes it’s not anytime soon, though.”

Everett took in a breath, let it out slowly. “That sounds like her. I’ll be goddamned—that sounds just like her sense of humor. Please tell her I’m sorry for being so awful.” She said she would. His eyes stayed closed for another few moments, his will holding him there. Then the hold seemed to release, and he looked at her and smiled.

He thanked her as he stood, and thanked her again as she pulled open one of the pocket doors.

“One other thing,” he said before leaving the room. He stopped and looked at her, his eyes—Cal’s eyes—blue-gray, damp, and serious. “I’ve tried not to say anything because it didn’t seem like my place. But now I think I’m wrong. I think I’ve got a place.”

“Okay. And—you do.”

“You and Cal make it so you don’t have to do what I just did. So you don’t have to find out this way.”

It was the kindest, most understated yet understanding piece of advice she could imagine. But she didn’t see how to implement it. She told him she didn’t know if it was possible.

“You’re both still alive,” Everett said. “It’s possible.”

—

She went to blow out the votive but found the wick already smoldering. Relieved the session was over, mortified by her lie, she crossed the room to Ida’s old divan and sat, then lay back as flat as the divan would allow.

“That was beautiful, what you did for him,” Mrs. Dodson said from the chair Everett had just been sitting in. She’d taken to doing this now and then, when they were alone: forgoing the venue of a dream, showing up in the parlor at will. She was the only spirit who did such a thing with her, and Becky had given up wondering if it was her own imagination, or if Mrs. Dodson just felt the need to breach the membrane more intimately.

“It wasn’t beautiful,” Becky said. “Not at all.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You know why. I couldn’t find them. But I couldn’t bear telling him that.”

“You couldn’t bear it,” Mrs. Dodson said. “Interesting. I actually think he would have been fine if you told him you got no reply. He would have understood.”

“So I shouldn’t have done it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“It’s the first time I’ve ever lied to someone at my table.”

“Think of it as a one-time occurrence, then. You did that man a world of good.”

“Until he finds out they aren’t waiting for him.”

“Who says they aren’t? You? Just because you couldn’t find them?” Mrs. Dodson waited a moment, then laughed softly and slipped back into the ether.

—

In May of 1956, almost two years into their separation, Cal asked Becky if he could take her out to dinner for her thirty-fifth birthday. She surprised him by saying yes.

He picked her up just as a rain was ending, they drove through streets shining with puddles to the new Mexican place on the west side of town, and as soon as they were done eating he said that he had something to ask her, but that he wanted her to listen all the way to the end of what he had to say before she answered. She nodded, sinking back a little in the booth. He went over again how—to this day—he was mortified by what he’d done. To her. To their family. To Felix’s family. But to her most of all, because she was the one he’d betrayed. He wanted more than anything to convince her that he’d changed, but he didn’t know how to do that. He was coming to the realization: the person who was stupid enough to do what he’d done wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to fix it. He knew she didn’t want to hear him apologize anymore. All he wanted in the whole world was to make things right. So he was asking her to tell him, please, if she thought there was even the slightest chance for them—and if there was, could she let him know what he could do to help it along? Give him a hint or something?

Apparently, this was her birthday present: his needs. Still, she missed him. She was tired of trying to figure out why she should forgive him, tired of weighing that against her pride. She thought of what his father had just told her. She said, “I’ve been trying to figure out how I can trust you, if I don’t trust your judgment.”

He glanced at the restaurant’s dropped ceiling for an instant. Shook his head in frustration. His voice went down in volume and up in pitch. “How can you say that?”

“Because I don’t trust your judgment.”

“One thing,” he said. “I mean, it’s a big thing, but one thing.”

“It’s a thousand things, Cal. A thousand bad, selfish decisions. And a child. And all the thinking you did to figure out how to live with yourself for those nine years. I trust your remorse. I really do. But you’re only remorseful because I found out about it. You’re only remorseful because you got caught.”

It wasn’t true, he’d been remorseful before that, but he wasn’t going to argue with her. She’d somehow both dodged his question about their chances, and answered it. He drove her home, wished her happy birthday, and said with his eyes what he knew she didn’t want to hear again.

—

He planned a camping trip with Skip in June. Two nights on the Sandusky River, north of Fremont. Skip asked if he could bring Theo, and Cal said sure. When Theo couldn’t go because his aunt and uncle were going to be in town, Skip asked if he could bring Tom. Cal called the house and sailed the idea past Becky. They both concluded the same thing: what would be the reason for saying no? As long as it was okay with Felix. Thankfully, she made that phone call on Cal’s behalf and reported back: Felix couldn’t come up with a reason for saying no, either.

Then, the night before the trip, Roman called Cal’s apartment, having caught wind of the trip from Becky, and asked him what the ETD was.

“The what?”

“When do we leave? I’m inviting myself.”

So it was the four of them, three generations, then, who piled into the Bel Air with all the gear and drove an hour to the campground.

—

Roman gave instructions and identified plant life and sipped cognac out of a coffee mug. When he wasn’t talking, they heard songbirds twittering, wild turkeys cackling in the distance, the sway of the basswoods overhead—but he was usually talking. Tom stood around for a while with one arm behind him, holding his elbow. He’d never been camping before, didn’t know how to do it. Skip showed him. They went swimming in the river and dug for arrowheads and pottery shards along the levy. Tom screamed his head off when he discovered a leech on his thumb; Skip pulled it off, tossed it back into the river, and ruffled his hair. In just their bathing suits and sneakers, they went on walks through the woods. Cal trailed along behind them, careful of his balance. Each time they circled back to the camp, Roman was there, in a folding chair he’d brought, sipping from his mug and smoking a cigarillo, his shirt open to expose his pink, medicine ball stomach. He was sixty-eight and still had all his teeth. “This is living,” he said.

By the first evening, Cal had banished from the camp all talk of politics, current events, the store, and lecturing of any kind for the duration of the weekend. “Banished!” he said, waving his cane in the air, making the boys laugh. Roman wasn’t amused.

On the afternoon of the last day of the trip, they went kayaking. The boys paddled ahead until Cal could just make out the orange of their life vests and the red of their kayaks, could just hear their voices skimming across the water. For a few minutes, Roman paddled along beside Cal, uncharacteristically silent.

Then he said, “Maritime law.”

“What about it?”

Land rules didn’t apply, Roman explained. He could talk about whatever he wanted. Apparently that included his promise to Becky that he wouldn’t ask about what was happening with them, because he asked Cal when the hell he was going to get all this straightened out. Cal paddled harder, but Roman kept up. “What’s the plan, Stan?” he asked. “You bucking for a divorce?”

Cal told him no, he wasn’t, but—and he forced a smile—it was none of Roman’s business, was it?

It kind of was, Roman said. He didn’t want to point fingers, but everyone knew Cal was the one who’d stepped in it. It was time to clean off his boots. This had gone on too long.

Cal carved his paddle through the water, watching the trees along the shoreline fall away on either side. He said he didn’t think Becky liked him anymore, as a person.

“Boy, can you be a dope,” Roman said. “The whole thing wouldn’t still upset her if she didn’t like you. And you want to know a secret? I like you. You’ve grown on me. And you’re good for Becky—or you were, until you stepped in it.”

“I don’t know what else to do,” Cal said. “There’s nothing I can say that I haven’t already said to her, or tried to—and meant with all my heart. She doesn’t want to hear it.”

“What the hell did you step in? Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. Let me tell you from experience, you’re doing the right thing.”

“How?”

“Or, you were doing the right thing, up till a couple of months ago. She said you’ve stopped coming around as much, stopped calling.”

“She hardly ever calls me.”

“And I hardly ever call Veronica Lake. Who cares?” He pulled his paddle up, laid it across his kayak. “The point is, with a situation like this, neither one of you can see a way out because you don’t want out. All this time, you been sticking around. She’s been letting you come over. Why? Because neither one of you wants out. Sooner or later, something’s going to happen to knock that sense into your heads, and you need to be around for it. Not only that, you need to have been around. You see what I’m saying?”

Cal stopped paddling too. They were carried by the current, beneath a clear-blue, midday sky. “Yeah,” he said.

“Good. And—son?” Roman’s silver hair was almost translucent in the bright light, the veins on his temples like a pair of tiny claws reaching for his eyes. “Don’t fuck this up.”

Which was the first and only time Cal’s father-in-law ever called him “son.”

—

Three months later, Roman was dead.

It was a Thursday afternoon. Cal had the day off and was out running errands when he saw the Back in an Hour sign on the door of the hardware store. The sign they only put out at lunchtime. He glanced at his watch. It was half past three.

He parked along the curb. Let himself in with his key. “Roman?” he called as he looked down each aisle, and “Roman?” as he descended into the basement.

He found him lying on the cement floor between two of the shelves. A stroke, they determined later. He was on his side, stretched out, one arm bent beneath him and the other stretched out across the floor. Cold, and firm to the touch. Lividity had settled his blood so that the lower part of his arms, hands, fingers, that side of his neck, whatever was closest to the floor was dark purple, while everything above it was pale gray. His eyes were clenched shut, and for that Cal was grateful.

After pacing the floor for a few moments, he took a clean painter’s tarp down from one of the shelves and gently covered Roman. Then he called the operator and was put through to a deputy he’d gone to high school with. The deputy got all the necessary balls rolling.

Only after the paramedics had arrived and were carrying Roman out did Cal call Ida and Becky. Before leaving for the hospital, he threw the painter’s cloth away and mopped the floor where Roman had been.

In the morgue, Ida asked if Roman had been napping on his cot, as he often did during his lunch break, and Cal shook his head. He said Roman had been on the floor, but he’d looked peaceful, almost as if he’d chosen that spot to lie down.

—

The viewing was large. The wake at Ida’s, after the burial, was small. Twenty or so people. Boxes of cigarillos open here and there, the good stuff out at the bar, Perry Como on the stereo.

Skip was obliged to stay but not to interact. Free of his suit jacket and tie, he wandered around the first floor for a while, sampling all the food. He put a couple of cigarillos in his pocket, then went upstairs and looked at his grandad’s clothes still hanging in the closet, his watch and his lighter in a dish on the dresser. He got on the phone by Ida’s side of the bed and called Tom’s house. Tom answered.

“I’m holding my dead grandfather’s toothbrush, Buckeye. The one who went camping with us. Creepy, huh?” He asked if Tom wanted to come over.

Twenty minutes later, Tom rolled up the driveway on his bicycle. Skip let him in through the kitchen. They loaded up on snacks and slipped down to the basement without being noticed. There, in the glow of the hanging overhead bulb, they beheld the miniature village with its three trains and its papier-mâché mountain. All of it Skip’s now. In the light, dust hung like stars over the streets and buildings. The ceiling creaked with footsteps. Tom was taking his cues from Skip, and Skip, who’d thought about this moment many times over the years, was overcome with a new reverence for the trains and the village. The two boys stepped in opposite directions around the table, taking it in. When they met on the other side, Tom handed Skip one of Roman’s conductor’s hats he’d picked up from the bench, and Skip set it absently on his head. He brought out the cigarillos, handed one to Tom. They sank down onto the bench chairs at one end of the table and put the cigars in their mouths, but neither of them reached for the transformer box.

—

The day had been long and somber. Cal, having chauffeured everyone to the cemetery that morning, and then to Ida’s, said he would drive Everett and Skip home at dusk. He did a double-take when he saw Tom coming up from the basement. Rather than ask what he was doing there, he offered to give him a ride, but Tom said no thanks and pedaled off on his bicycle. Cal took his father and Skip to the house on Taft Street, then drove back to Ida’s to help clean up.

When they were finished, there was some conversation about whether or not Becky would stay the night on London Hill, but Ida brushed that off, said she was fine. She wanted to be alone, in fact.

Becky had been moved by Cal’s behavior over the past few days. She’d never asked him what, specifically, he’d encountered when he’d found her father. She didn’t want to know, knew only that it had to have been harrowing, and that he’d dealt with the worst of it himself. Since then, he’d been with her every waking hour, had stood beside her in the receiving line at the viewing, had helped out as much as he could. When they pulled into the driveway on Taft Street, she reached over and put her hand on his shoulder, gave it a squeeze. She thanked him for everything he’d done, said she was glad he’d been a part of it; she knew Roman wasn’t his favorite person.

“He could be likable,” Cal said.

“That should be his epitaph.” She leaned over, kissed him on the cheek, and got out of the car.

—

Roman had been streamlining his businesses for a while, in preparation for full retirement. He’d sold the luncheonette in Tiffin two years ago, and the lamp store in Fostoria the year before. In his will, he’d arranged for a sizable nest egg to go to Becky, had earmarked some money for a college fund for Skip, and, while leaving the business to his daughter, he’d expressed in his will that he wished for his son-in-law to remain its manager. Everything else, he left to Ida.

By September, Ida was making plans.

She mentioned this to Becky while they shopped at the farmer’s market, downtown.

“What kind of plans?” Becky asked.

Ida touched the asparagus. She touched the bell peppers. “Maybe I’ll see the USA in a Chevrolet. Or finally go to New York to become a lounge singer.”

“At your age?”

“I beg your pardon? I’m sixty-four years young, thank you very much.”

“So you’re going to stand in audition lines? Sing in front of strangers?”

“Look how they react, just because you want to do something out of the ordinary. Rings a bell with someone else’s situation, doesn’t it?”

“Just tell me you’re not going to New York.”

“Of course I’m not going to New York.” Ida picked up a strawberry and blew on it. “I’m going to Florida.”

“When?”

“As soon as I sell the house.”

“You’re selling the house?”

“And moving to Fort Lauderdale. Your father was dragging his heels, didn’t want to ‘get completely out of the game,’ as he called it. We were supposed to be down there three years ago.” She caught the attention of the farmer, Mr. Blosier, whose stall it was, winked at him as she bit the strawberry off the stem. She added one of his pints to her basket. “You’re not sad, are you? About the house?”

“I guess not. I’ll miss you, though.”

“You too, pumpkin. You’ll have to come visit. You and Skip. Who knows, maybe Cal too.”

Becky cut her a look.

“How about some cider?” Ida said. She bought them each a cup from the apple vendor. They sat for a minute on the bench circling the War of 1812 memorial fountain, their baskets between their feet.

“Oh, that’s nice,” Ida said of the cider. “So what’s the status of things with you and Cal, anyway? I know I’m not supposed to ask, and I’m not asking anything specific. Just a general update.”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s what I thought you’d say. The reason I bring it up is because I don’t want you to think your father and I didn’t have our problems. We hit a couple of low spots. I almost left him once.”

“When?” Becky asked, astounded. “What happened?”

“No specifics. Let’s just say, he wasn’t…original. What I want to tell you is, once it was all out in the open, I had to make a choice about whether or not I stayed, even while I didn’t know if I could forgive him. I decided to stay, obviously. And it wasn’t just one decision. I had to make that decision brand-new, almost every day, for a long time.”

“The decision to forgive him?”

“The decision to stay, even though I couldn’t forgive him. And sooner or later that turned into forgiveness—or something like it.”

“Cal had an affair, Mom.” The only part of the story she would give.

“I know.”

“You don’t. How could you know?”

“You don’t have the market cornered on intuition in this family.” Ida peered down into her cup as she swirled the grainy cider around. “I think you’re on the fence with him now, and you’ll fall one way or another, eventually. Just make sure you fall the right way. You don’t want to end up going through all this and regretting what you decided to do.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Me? I used to call him so many names. To his face, sometimes. I even called him an asshole once.” Becky’s mouth fell open. Ida grinned. “I did! Right in the middle of an argument we were having about who knows what. And the look on his face! Not just because of the insult, but because he hated to hear a woman swear. I danced around the room saying, asshole, asshole.” She smiled at the memory. “Yes, I’m glad I stayed. The whole reason you build a bridge together is so the water can run under it, right? And not wash the two of you away? Sometimes one of you makes it flood, and then the water recedes. Your father could infuriate me, but I loved him, and he was always going to be the one I gave it a go with. So, no, I don’t regret it. I’m glad I stayed.”

Even in such a moment of closeness, neither woman wanted to tell the other the extent of her husband’s crimes. No mention from Becky of the illegitimate child. No mention from Ida of the lipstick on Roman’s neck, or the blond hairs she found on his shirts whenever he came back from checking on the luncheonette in Tiffin. They kept these things to themselves not because of a misplaced sense of shame or guilt by association, but out of concern for the other’s opinion of the man in question, going forward. Even when one of those men was dead.

The house would sell in January of 1957 for slightly below the asking price. The miniature village would be disassembled carefully and relocated to the basement of the house on Taft Street, along with some of the furniture Becky wanted but wasn’t sure what to do with. By March, Ida would be living just north of Fort Lauderdale, in Pompano Beach, in a third-floor apartment overlooking the Atlantic. She would make friends, and go on dates with fellow retirees, then come home and tell Roman about them, his ashes in an urn on the mantel of the artificial fireplace. She would remind him now and then of some awful thing he’d done, but when she remembered something funny, from the early days, she’d share that with him too. He never got a word in.

—

Forgiveness wasn’t so great if you were the forgiver, Becky discovered. Forgiveness was supposed to be the high road, but it was low and bumpy—and long.

Still, she was tired of their having lost each other. It seemed so tragic and stupid. She thought of what her mother had told her. She thought of how her father’s death had come out of the blue, the way death so often did, and of Everett’s awareness of his own mortality, and of how Everett and Cal had spent a lot less time together since Cal had moved out. She reminded herself that Cal was the same person she’d wanted to talk to at Fink’s soda counter, nearly fifteen years ago. He was the person who’d pricked his thumb and howled and laughed—over and over—as he learned how to change Skip’s diapers. And he was still Skip’s dad.

She knew he was sorry. That was never in question. But to this day, she didn’t know why it had happened. What was becoming clearer, however—and had probably always been clear to her mother—was that she was looking for understanding where there was none to be found. She was looking for understanding in an act of wanton selfishness. Forgiveness, the way her mother had described it, wasn’t something that shot up out of the soil; it had to creep in over time, like a vine.

One night, Cal came for dinner and lingered in the living room after Everett and Skip had gone to bed. He always sat in the armchair on these visits, while Becky sat in the recliner, the empty couch between them like a neutral zone. They made guesses at What’s My Line? and talked about the possibility of expanding the store’s square footage by renting the place next door to it, which had been empty for six months. At one point, Becky made tea, and when she brought the cups in, she relocated herself to the couch and indicated with a nod that Cal join her. He didn’t kiss her until he was absolutely certain she wanted him to, and for a while they made out on the couch like teenagers. Early the next morning, they gave thought to his skedaddling before Skip and Everett woke up and discovered that he’d stayed the night. The kid and the old man could handle it, they decided.

He stayed.

Chapter Twenty

And what of Margaret Salt? Who’d vanished from Bonhomie—some said into thin air, meaning something immediate had happened that no doubt involved a scandal. She’d left her husband for someone else and hadn’t taken the child. Her husband had thrown her out and wouldn’t let her take the child (was that even legal?). She had a dark side. A mental breakdown. She was getting shock treatment in Cincinnati.

Have the police questioned the husband?

Was she a missing person?

But all of that was within the first couple of weeks, and it turned out there was nothing in any of the stories to sink your teeth into. The neighbor across the street had seen Margaret that afternoon, putting things into the trunk of her car, then had seen her drive off with her child standing right there. Her friends at the dance studio caught wind and were back and forth on the phone for an hour or so, until finally Ruth Mitchell called Felix, and nothing about what he said sounded at all suspicious, just horrible: Margaret had decided she’d be happier living in Columbus, alone, and that’s where she’d gone.

They felt sorry for the boy, but maybe good riddance to her? The handsome husband could always remarry. The handsome husband had every unmarried woman on the block—and some of the married ones—knocking on his door, dropping off baked goods, meatloaves, lasagna, coming back to reclaim their Tupperware and see how he was doing. He held his cards close to his chest, that one. Scarred, no doubt, and not just by the war he’d fought in.

Over time, the collective memory of Margaret Salt molted most of its details, and what emerged was a portrait of a heartless, clothes-loving snob who’d always made sure everyone knew she was from Columbus, and who’d given up her family to return to her Big City ways.

—

She lived on the third floor of a three-story nineteenth-century apartment building with eighteen units, a streetcar ride away from downtown. Her block was wide and busy with traffic, but her windows looked down onto a side street lined with dogwoods and brick sidewalks.

There was a very old woman who lived across from her and who walked the landing for exercise. Her hair was short, like dandelion fluff, and she spidered a hand against the wall as she walked, her white housecoat hiding her feet, so that she seemed to be floating and pulling herself along with her fingertips. She had many aches and ailments and in a soft, weak voice asked Margaret to open all her pill bottles the pharmacy delivered each month, then kept them out on her dining table, caps resting loosely. She frustrated the landlord by using her oven for heat when she was cold.

On the second floor lived a thick little man with hair that sometimes sat askew on his head. His face was pale and sagged so much that parts of it seemed to be resting on other parts. His hands were swollen and the color of an eggplant. When Margaret passed him on the stairs, he smelled of rum and sometimes sauerkraut. One morning, six months after moving in, she was heading to work as he was coming into the building, wearing a pea coat and a black ushanka hat. At the foot of the stairs, he turned decisively and spoke to her for the first time. “How are you holding up?” he asked.

Was he mistaking her for someone else? Did she look like someone who’d been through an ordeal? “Fine,” she said. “How are you?”

“Well, I’ll tell you.” He laid one of his swollen hands on the newel post. “A person can get whiplash just walking through life. They love your allegro but loathe your troppo. They invite you to lunch, then shit in your soup. Know what I mean?”

Better to lie or suffer the explanation? “Yes,” Margaret said.

She never saw him again. A month later, she came home in the evening and found the door to his apartment standing open and the landlord inside, mopping the empty rooms. Margaret asked if the man who’d lived there had moved away. “Died in his sleep,” the landlord said. “A nephew found him, thank God. Let me know if you see a parakeet, will you?”

—

The apartment had come furnished. The smell of cigarettes that lingered in all the cushions was the same as the one she’d hated in the furnished place she and Felix had first shared; now it reminded her of him. She didn’t mind; coming home to it was almost comforting. The trim and doors were exposed wood. The kitchen was large enough for a small table. The bedroom was quiet, save for the pipes. The parquet floor crackled underfoot.

She’d landed on her feet only with Felix’s help, and for that she was grateful. He’d honored the dozen or so checks she’d taken with her—once they’d agreed on the amounts she would fill them in for, and when she would cash them. The jewelry she sold at a pawn shop. The tan Packard—her third in a series of them, a Patrician purchased while Felix was still at the foundry—she traded in for a dinged-up Ford Victoria that sounded asthmatic and was the color of a Hershey Bar inside and out.

The landlord was a blond, twitchy Dan Duryea type whose face was always clenched for bad news. His wife smacked his shoulder if the three of them were ever on the landing together (though she was always polite to Margaret). Since he was hardly permitted to look at her, much less flirt with her, Margaret was able to get him to do things, like install a chain and an extra lock on the front door and have dowels cut to keep the windows from being opened on the outside. She found a kilim at a porch sale and put it down in the living room. Bought some paintings of street scenes from street painters and put them up over the sofa. Above the fireplace, on her own, she hung the Dolice. When the landlord was dropping off the dowels, she showed him the painting and asked him if it looked like dawn or dusk. The question seemed to needle him a little—maybe because he hadn’t factored it into his day. He bared his teeth slightly as he squinted at the Dolice, then said with what seemed to be apprehension, “Well, you can’t tell, because it’s blurry.” She thanked him for the dowels.

She saw something new in her face, in that apartment. Along with the emergence of crow’s feet and the faint lines surfacing on her chin, and the gray she dyed away on a regular basis, there was a density, an opaqueness in her eyes. As if they were done receiving and projecting. It was the same look Lydia had each time she had to let go of one of the girls. The look she’d had for the last month Margaret lived at Open Arms, when they were preparing for her departure: a preemptive, numbing No to whatever the world wanted to show her next.

Had Lydia’s been a lonely death, like her downstairs neighbor’s? Had there ever been a death that wasn’t? She wondered if the nephew had held some kind of funeral. She wondered morbid things, like was he buried with his toupee? She would have gone to the service. Would have said, if asked, that he was quiet, respectful. She hadn’t even known his last name, though. The next time she looked at his mailbox, the name had been removed. Part of what had appealed to her about Columbus, when she was eighteen, was its vastness—all there was to see and do, and the chance to be a part of it. What appealed now was its vast anonymity, its ability to cloak people in its density, so that you could live your life without answering too many questions or encountering too many expectations. Right up to your last moments, if you wanted, so that the most lasting impression you left on your neighbors was that they’d known nothing about you.

—

How could she explain herself to Tom? She couldn’t tell him any of the reasons she’d left, couldn’t tell him about Felix, or her affair, or Cal. Plus, the more time that passed without calling or writing, the harder it was, because she knew she’d also have to explain that. So she put it off, and put it off—until it seemed impossible.

She kept his photo, along with Felix’s, in its hinged frame, closed, in her nightstand drawer. She took it out from time to time and opened it, like a book.

Even if she wrote instead of calling, she was terrified of what Tom would write back.

She was terrified he would ask her, over the phone or in a letter, when—or if—she was coming home.

She was terrified of every single question she could think of that Tom might ask.

—

Throughout that first year, she was in touch with Felix when necessary, until they were finally able to square away a divorce. A reason had to be given, and the options they gave you were ugly. She was prepared to go with Adultery (noticing that Mutual Adultery wasn’t an option), but after Felix couldn’t convince her to talk to Tom, after he understood that she wasn’t going to do any more than send the boy a card on the holidays, he wanted to choose Abandonment. It turned a little knife in her—but when it was finally done, she couldn’t see what difference it made. Neither of them wanted anything else from the other anymore. All the wanting was over.

—

From the start, she worked small store retail jobs. Every time she got hit on by a boss, she quit. It was always possible to find something else, but the searching and sidewalk pounding in heels was a pain. Each place she worked had unspoken rules, and those were the things that could trip a person up because no one spoke of them until you broke one. Telling people about upcoming sales on items they were about to buy. Accepting returns of things she shouldn’t have, like pajamas and custom-feathered hats. Accepting returns of things from Black customers. Almost half the stores she worked in had a Whites Only policy (unspoken, she guessed, because the policy had been illegal in Ohio since the 1880s). She only asked once how such a thing was enforced. (“We make it quietly known.”) She didn’t argue her opinion that people were people, and money was money—because she was a person, and she needed money. Most often, for her, it was dress the part, learn the ropes, hand on ass, out the door. In between, she usually managed to work efficiently, so that she was able to garner some references. By the fall of 1960, after six and a half years in Columbus, she’d worked in ten different stores.

She had friends she’d picked up along the way—from her jobs, from the dance club she’d joined and the dance halls she went to—people she ran into and exchanged hellos with on the street, on the streetcars. She had people she could depend on if she was sick and needed something, like soup. People who could call her for the same. She had dates, and sometimes second and third dates, but usually no more. The men were either too old, too young, too aggressive, not aggressive enough, or—what do you know—married. She never let it matter much because she never let them matter much. To all of them, she was a middle-aged woman, divorced, no kids. A person who didn’t see the value in looking back.

The morning after the Kennedy–Nixon debate, she walked into a smart-looking, pistachio-colored shoe store called Delmonico’s just off High Street to inquire about a job, and by the time she’d crossed the floor, the owner had hired her.

His name was Lars Delmonico. He was in his midforties, had a full head of chestnut hair he coiffed into a pompadour, wore three-piece suits, and had the kind of good posture that made his shoulders turn with his head. He had an Italian father and a Scandinavian mother, he said; they’d opened the store in the thirties and left it to him when they retired and moved back to Naples. He had a fiancée named Daisy who worked as a court stenographer. Bits of him trickled to the surface as they spent time together in the store.

Men asked Lars for something in their size and then, while he was in the back, sauntered over to the other side to say hello or compliment Margaret’s outfit or ask her how her day was going—little advances she shut down with a single word: Hello. Thanks. Fine! She waited for Lars to follow suit with his own advances: the maneuvering they did in the narrow stockroom, looking for sizes, allowed ample opportunity. But he never did. Margaret was relieved. She just wanted things to flow. She just wanted to sell shoes. Aldens in duo-leather. Naturalizers known for their lasting comfort. Enna Jetticks—for energy.

—

She kept her overhead low and her life deliberately simple. She had a workable salary, when you added in commissions. She’d learned since moving back to Columbus that she was good at selling things. Her looks didn’t hurt, she knew, but she was also good at ferrying the customer smoothly through the buying process. No one noticed the opacity in her eyes, the wall of her countenance.

What pierced it was the sight of a woman—any woman—with a child. She couldn’t bear it, wanted to run from it, but of course it was everywhere. Mothers with children were on every corner, every streetcar. Mothers with infants, with their little boys. Once, on the streetcar, it was a redheaded mother with her redheaded toddler, holding the boy up on the seat and smiling at Margaret, touching the boy’s hair and pointing at her own, then at Margaret’s, as if Margaret were an animal in the zoo who happened to share their hair color. Unaware that the very sight of them was putting a squeeze on her heart. She got off a stop early just to get away from them.

What pierced it, also, was the sight of a teenage boy. No matter the color of his hair.

For all her wondering how her mother had brought herself to leave her child in a basket—a question she now believed she would never be able to stop asking herself—she wondered how her mother had managed the rest of it. The getting-by part. The moving on with your life, having abandoned your child part. The part where you figured out how to live with yourself. The rest of it, in other words.

—

In downtimes, Lars stood at the front window and smoked while she straightened shoes and walked around with a feather duster. Lars was an Elvis Presley fan and talked a lot about Elvis. He asked what she listened to. At home, she played the same records over and over. Count Basie. Art Tatum. He asked how long she was married, and she said, “Let’s not.” She asked about his fiancée, and he showed her a wallet photo. Daisy was in Cleveland at the moment taking care of her ailing mother, he said. He asked if Margaret was dating anyone, and she said no. Would she like to meet a friend of his? A nice fellow named Bill, marrying type, wants to settle down.

No, thanks.

“Something,” he said one day, carrying from the storeroom a stack of shoeboxes up to his chin. “One detail from pre-Delmonico’s Margaret. I’ve bored you to tears with myself.”

“I used to teach dance,” she said, taking the top half of the stack from him.

“What kind? To whom?”

“The Hokey Pokey. To old people. For their circulation. That’s all you get.”

Almost a running joke between them, how mum she was about her past. She kept thinking one day she was going to feel something crack in her—an opening in the exterior—and she would come pouring out of it despite herself. But it didn’t happen.

On a frigid day with almost no sidewalk traffic, he brought the portable television out of the back and set it among the shoes and they watched Kennedy get sworn in. As if the event had sparked his thinking, he sat back in his chair and looked at her anew. “Why aren’t you at Lazarus?”

“Because I want to buy everything when I go in there, and I’m on a budget.”

“I mean, why aren’t you working there? Instead of here?”

“Do you want me to go?”

“Never. I love you, kid”—she’d been there a year, his only employee—“but I also want you to wear diamonds in your navel, and Lazarus pays better. They’d snap you up in a heartbeat, I’ll bet.”

She’d only been there once since her return to the city. The department store was as grand to her as ever—it even had an annex now. But it felt out of reach. Like something from her old old life that she couldn’t fit into this one. It hadn’t ever occurred to her to work there.

“Isn’t it kind of funny, what we do?” she said. “Or what I do—you own the place. I make money selling all these beautiful shoes that I can’t afford to buy. I make money selling to other people what I can’t have.”

“Capitalism only works if people are out there selling what they don’t own.”

One day a few months later he came to work with a black eye. He didn’t want to talk about it.

Then in the spring of 1963, just after the weather turned warm, he came in with half his face bruised and swollen. His mood was terrible. Through clenched teeth, he told her he’d been in a traffic accident. He sat down in the back with an ice pack and a bottle of aspirin. She asked if anyone else was hurt, if the police had been involved. He said he didn’t want to talk about it. When she asked if he wanted her to call Daisy for him, he all but hissed, “No! I certainly don’t want you to call Daisy!”

And Margaret thought, There is no Daisy.

But six weeks later, he had a wedding date set. And a week after he announced it, Daisy herself walked into the store, just as beautiful as she’d been in the photo. She peeled Margaret with her eyes. She and Lars got married, moved in together. By October, Daisy was pregnant. So what did Margaret know? All that she understood about the world could fit into a thimble.

The following month, Lars brought out the television again, this time setting it among the shoes. The two of them watched Kennedy’s funeral together. They cried on and off the whole day. As they were closing up, Lars said he had something difficult to tell her. It was Daisy’s strong desire, he said, that he hire someone else. To replace Margaret, he meant. He couldn’t be any sorrier, he said.

Margaret asked whom Daisy wanted him to hire.

“Her words? Someone old and ugly.”

—

The heat pipes ticked and knocked and hissed. The hissing strung one thought to the next as she lay awake. She supposed she’d never know why her mother hadn’t wanted her, never know how her mother had managed to carry on, after walking away from her child. Margaret would certainly never hear her apologize. Even if she went the whole rest of her life wanting those things. Was Tom in the same boat?

What to do, in the witching hours. What to do.

Try to get amnesia every night of her life. Wake up feeling like someone without a past, without memories, let the days fill her up, leaving no room for anything from before. That was always the goal, and she always fell short of it.

But there was always tomorrow.

Chapter Twenty-One

Was it dawn, or was it dusk? Just as things were starting to look shiny (for some), the clouds moved, changing the light. Or were they the ones changing, while dawn and dusk played a slow game of paddleball with the sun?

They hardly knew where to let their eyes land when they read the newspaper.

They’d been told the atomic bomb had changed warfare forever, and the need for foot soldiers in the future had been greatly reduced. They’d also been advised to create fallout shelters in their homes where they could hide for weeks, in case of a nuclear attack.

They’d been told that Washington, D.C., Hollywood, and the entire U.S. military had been infiltrated by Communists, Communist sympathizers, and homosexuals. They’d been told that Communists were sprinkled throughout the United States like paprika. Now they were told the Communists were up to no good in Vietnam, a country wracked by civil war. But the U.S. military was there, keeping an eye on things, and would do whatever it took to make sure Communism didn’t domino its way here, where everything was nice, fair, and democratic. Stay tuned, they were told.

Meanwhile, all through 1956 they’d read in the paper, heard on the radio, and seen on the television reports about the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, until the Supreme Court finally said it was unconstitutional to prevent Black people from riding buses in that state. In September of 1957, they’d learned that it had taken both the 101st Airborne Division and the National Guard to fend off a white mob, just so nine Black children could walk into a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. The South was simmering with racism, it seemed to everyone who wasn’t in the South—though to Becky it seemed that the whole country was simmering; the South was just more obvious about it, and had signage.

In February of 1960, when Cal read of the four men who refused to leave the Woolworth counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and all of the other sit-ins that followed, he remembered how Roman had spoken and even moved differently whenever a Black customer walked into the store (which wasn’t very often). How curt he’d become, how guarded. Cal had always found it embarrassing, but hadn’t he stiffened, too, at times? Didn’t he still? A little?

If you believed in God but didn’t go to church, and only prayed on an as-needed basis, you lived with your fingers crossed that your life was stacking up to make some sort of sense, and that it was preparing you for what was to come. But that meant you were depending on a map you were drawing as you went along. When he read, heard, and watched the news, he wondered how many people were out there doing the same thing he was—scratching their heads as they tried to figure out how to prioritize their worries and confront their prejudices; drawing their own maps with their fingers crossed.

Becky, he thought, was a person whose life was stacking into something that made complete sense. Right before his eyes, she’d transitioned into middle age with grace, poise, and a desire not to waste any more of her efforts on other people’s foolishness. She’d gotten very good at weeding out potentially frivolous clients. By instinct, she’d told him. He hadn’t asked her to explain that, knowing the particulars might lead them into the kind of prickly conversation they didn’t have anymore. She had no complaints about her practice, and he was glad. She complained about her gray hair, but he suspected she secretly liked it; she looked at it in the mirror enough. She complained about the few pounds she’d put on and blamed her weakness for ice cream. And chocolate. She had a sweet tooth. He had a salty one. There was, often, a plate of chocolates and pretzels on a plate between them while they read or watched or listened to the news.

She was, he told her, more radiant than ever; her body was exactly the way it should be. The lines coming into her face were only in service to the lines that were already there—which he’d honestly meant as a compliment, but it didn’t sound like one once it was out of his mouth, so much so that she smiled.

Everett’s arthritic hand would sometimes reach over and tap a headline Cal was looking at. “That one’s bullshit,” he’d say.

“Can I read it first, please?”

“Just trying to save you the time.” Everett was something of an authority on time, having clocked, by 1962, eighty-two years of it—far more than anyone, including him, would have predicted he’d get. He’d lost a few molars, further pitting his cheeks, and he fell asleep whenever the urge struck him—sometimes right in the middle of a meal. But he’d looked like an old man since Cal was a teenager, and—to Cal, anyway—he didn’t look that much older now.

Cal, on the other hand, had a high widow’s peak in his yellow hair, and little pastries under his eyes that turned ashen when he was tired. He winced sometimes when he stood, and he looked with envy at the men who walked with canes they hardly seemed to need, like they were accessories, while his bore more weight with each passing year and became crucial to his balance. Then he would hear Becky saying, You’re not your leg! and other people’s canes would stop bothering him. He would allow himself to be the guy who took over his father-in-law’s hardware store and doubled its size and its business in less than five years. The guy who got the Chamber of Commerce Heart of Downtown Award. Twice.

—

They sometimes caught themselves watching Tom’s face like it was an egg about to hatch. The almost perfectly replicated pattern of hair growth on the back of his and Cal’s heads was hardly discernible—the sort of thing that would only draw the attention of a mother, or a lover. They saw other similarities, but those usually didn’t stick around for long. It seemed to the three grown-ups still in the picture that, on the whole, Cal wasn’t going to end up commandeering Tom’s looks after all, which was a relief, though Cal privately felt an ache in the back of his chest. Not because he wanted to lay claim to Tom, but because part of him, deep down, wanted Tom to know. Even if the two of them never spoke of it or even acknowledged it to each other, he secretly longed for the information to be shared, though he would never be the one to share it.

What was discernible to the naked eye, but only after they were sure Tom was finished growing, was that, while Margaret was responsible for his hair, his eyes, and most of his face, Tom’s frame was Cal’s (only evener in leg and straighter in spine).

What was not so easily discernible:

His nose was a composite—hers at the bridge, Cal’s at the end.

His ears were Cal’s, but there was nothing remarkable about Cal’s ears.

His pinkies, like Cal’s, could be bent backward at the top knuckle, but even Tom hadn’t noticed that about himself.

His mouth was Margaret’s, right down to the full, carved lips, but the way he held it was Cal’s.

Add to that the fact that familiarity tends to breed blindness. By the time Tom turned sixteen, in the spring of 1962, the grown-ups were starting to think they just might be out of the woods, free and clear.

—

And Tom? What did he see when he looked in the mirror? A carrot-topped pipsqueak, he’d been called by bullies, and he saw that for a while. He’d seen clownhead when he looked in the mirror for all of third grade. He’d seen the person his mother would sometimes move from room to room to get away from. Get away, get away! she’d said sometimes, almost as if to herself. He’d thought it was a game, until he knew it wasn’t.

For a long while, he’d seen the person his mother had looked in the eye and said nothing to as she left. In the absence of any kind of explanation from her for why she had gone, he’d formed his own: she couldn’t stand him, couldn’t stand his father—so much so that she hadn’t even been able to leave like other parents did. She hadn’t taken him aside to try to tell him it had nothing to do with him. She hadn’t moved across town so that he could be with her on weekends. She hadn’t called or written (except those goddamn cards), and she hadn’t sent a single present. He told kids at school that his mother had died. He even told them how. Her plane went down. A tunnel she was driving through collapsed. She was in a bank in Cincinnati and got caught in a robbery, shot right through the head. Please, Felix said (because one of Tom’s teachers had called him), don’t go around telling people your mother died, because it isn’t true. Tom had been twelve at the time, and still hurting, though he would never admit it. He told Felix it might as well be true, and Felix said, no, no, no, and sat him down, squaring himself in front of the boy. The truth matters, he said. The truth was that his mother was alive and not here by choice.

Tom said, “Nobody gave me a choice.”

Four years later, he still saw that guy in the mirror sometimes. The asshole who said that. He saw the way those words had hit his father in the stomach. He’d apologized and taken it back, but he’d felt bad for weeks.

On good days, that stuff wasn’t there. He just saw a face that was too narrow. A chin that was too pointy. Hair that didn’t want to stay combed. Pimples. All of it balanced on a pencil neck. He hated his hair color, his freckles. Where were all the cool, famous redheaded men, by the way? There weren’t any. Not a single one.

—

“I’m the parent who stayed,” Felix said, “so I’m the one who has to contend with it. All the rage, all the testing. All the resentment. All the questions—”

“All the love.”

“Yeah, we keep that in a little jar in the kitchen. I’m the one who has to make every threat and dole out every punishment. I’m tired of being the jerk.”

Bishop, himself not a father, said somewhat chipperly that he had no advice to offer. But he listened whenever Felix wanted to complain—usually over a beer at Pin King or the pub a few blocks from the furniture factory, near the wood detailing place Bishop had moved on to the year before Felix started climbing the ladder at Van Benton. “I don’t know how two people raise a kid,” Bishop said, “much less one.”

“He doesn’t ask about his mom much anymore—hardly ever—but he’s got a lot of bad feelings for her. He doesn’t know what to do with them, hurls them at me sometimes, I guess. And you know what really stinks?”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t want him to hate her. I don’t want him telling people stories about her, and I don’t want him carrying around all these bad feelings. But I also can’t bring myself to tell him anything good about her. Because I did that, right after she left, tried to cover for her, and she never called him. Because she left him, for chrissake.”

Bishop told him to go easy on himself. He said he didn’t know any parents who didn’t complain. His ex-wife had three kids with her husband, and she’d sounded at her wits’ end on the phone the last time they talked.

“You two speak?”

“Sure. A few times a year, at least, just to catch up. We get along better now than when we were married.” He gave a shrug and a little smile, as if to say, You never know.

Had the look ever passed between them? They’d both wondered, privately. If it had, their regular proximity to each other through work, back when they worked together, had caused it to fade. Or their becoming friends had caused it to fade. Or the look hadn’t been there at all (the easiest and safest conclusion). They were buddies. Felix was glad for that, and for the ear, and the occasional reassurance. Glad, and a little surprised at the flicker of disappointment he felt sometimes, looking into Bishop’s eyes.

—

Skip graduated in June of 1962, more than a year after the president had advised them all to ask what they could do for their country. As far as Skip could tell—squinting in the sun, combing Vitalis through his hair—that meant either get a job or go to college. He’d taken a required class during senior year called the Exploratory Wheel, where they read and watched slideshows and talked about different career options. The field of medicine. The field of education. Finance. Delivery services. They cast a wide net of possibilities, and kids cracked up when one of the slides showed a custodian cleaning offices. Skip hadn’t seen what was so funny about that. He also hadn’t really been grabbed by any career option they’d covered. He’d been sort of grabbed by a couple of options. Being a lawyer who got to cross-examine people. Being an architect who got to stand on a street somewhere with his hands on his hips, looking up at a building he’d designed. But everything that even sort of grabbed him took a lot of work just to become that, years before you even got to start doing whatever it was you wanted to do.

Mostly, or for now, anyway, he wanted a car. Which meant having some sort of job while he saved up for it and figured out what came next.

As long as he had a plan, Becky and Cal weren’t too concerned. Until he kept replacing one plan with the next. He’d applied to Ohio State and Bowling Green and had gotten into both, but when Cal and Becky visited the campuses with him, he’d showed little interest, couldn’t picture himself at either school. He was working at the Esso station by then and had gotten a taste of how money could accrue. He worked all fall and into the winter, banked most of his pay by living at home, and in March of 1963 he bought a moss-colored ’54 Dodge Coronet he called the Snot Rocket. Cal said it looked like a very good car to get him back and forth from the vocational college out on Route 23.

Instead, he worked on the loading dock at LeRoy Produce for a while. He got a place of his own—a little apartment he rented on Early Street that Becky couldn’t stand, because it smelled like his dirty laundry and mice. She shoved his clothes into grocery bags when she went over, brought them home, washed and folded them. Cal worried that he had no discipline or focus; college was supposed to have provided those. “Give him time,” Becky said. Still, Cal sailed the suggestion—more than once—that Skip might come work in the hardware store. “No offense, Dad,” Skip finally said, “but retail’s boring.” Then he went and took a job at a lightbulb plant out near the highway, where he moved pallets of lightbulbs around a warehouse with a forklift all day.

—

Like Skip’s before him, Tom’s graduation from Bonhomie High School, in June of 1964, was held on the football field, on a Saturday morning, with the families filling the span of bleachers as if they were there to watch a game. Felix was in the front row with his Minolta.

Cal wanted to attend the ceremony, but he felt like asking Becky to join him would be insensitive, given everything. And strange. The two of them sitting there, clapping for his secret son. He ended up waiting for Becky to leave the house that morning to run errands, then driving over to the high school, where he parked and stood off to the side of the bleachers, watching from the chain-link fence. Becky, it turned out, was already there—a little farther down along the fence. He walked over and stood beside her, and they watched together.

Skip, meanwhile, was sitting in the Snot Rocket with Theo Bach out in front of school, listening to the names over the loudspeaker. Almost seventy of them before they got to the S’s. When they finally called Thomas Aquinas Salt, Skip looked at Theo and they both mouthed Aquinas? then whooped and hollered as Skip laid into the horn, rousing a spat of starlings from a nearby elm.

—

He and Tom had drifted apart some, of course. How could it not happen? The two-year age difference had felt like a canyon when Skip was fourteen and Tom was still twelve. Skip had gravitated more toward Ron and Theo, Vincent and Sam, kids his age and older, and for whatever reason, having Tom around had become a drag. He never said as much, still called him “Buckeye,” but he pulled away. Also, around that time, he started shedding things he deemed “kid stuff,” like the tape recorder, and the do-it-yourself radio kit he’d gotten for Christmas but never opened.

Tom had accepted these items like consolation prizes for the hours he and Skip no longer logged together. In his room at home, he’d cleared his plane and car model projects off the card table, its vinyl top crosshatched with X-Acto knife slices, and plopped down the radio kit. He’d laid all the parts out, built it, then took it apart. Then he’d built it a second time to see if it would still work. He’d used the tools from the radio kit to dismantle the Ampro reel-to-reel. He’d labeled all the parts, and managed—eventually—to put the tape recorder back together again. Over time, he did this with other things in the house, some of which he couldn’t put back together (Felix never knew why the radio in his study stopped picking up stations). He tested the reassembled tape recorder by recording short interview shows where he did all the voices, then erased the results. When it came time to declare an intended major for college, he would’ve gone with broadcasting or sound engineering, had such things been listed, and went instead with the closest he could come: engineering. He was then surprised when his father, the furniture-maker turned furniture boss, told him engineering had been his major in college, before he’d switched it to his minor.

“You majored in furniture?” Tom asked, smirking a little.

Business—a nice umbrella major Tom might want to consider, Felix said. He wasn’t at all ready for this young man with Margaret’s eyes (and, occasionally, her temperament) not to be living under his roof, he was devastated by the idea, in fact, but he knew it was inevitable. All too soon, Tom, having waited tables at Wickersham’s all summer, bought a used yellow Chevy Corvair, and in no time Felix was following it up I-75 to Toledo to get Tom settled into his dorm room at Toledo University.

—

Bishop brought steaks and a six-pack of Schmidt over on the following weekend, to help lift Felix’s spirits. Turning T-bones on the grill in Felix’s backyard, he told Felix he was doing all the right things, reminded him he could go see Tom whenever he wanted. “Think of all the energy you won’t have to spend being aggravated with him,” Bishop said with a smile—and hoping to elicit the same from Felix’s long face. “Think of the cap that’ll be on the milk bottle when you open the fridge. Think of the privacy.” For Bishop was still taking care of his mother and father at home. But he was also thinking of another kind of privacy. And getting ahead of himself, perhaps.

Although perhaps not.

—

In October of 1964, Everett sat down at Becky’s Smith Corona, in his bedroom on Taft Street, and typed:

Dear President Johnson.

Under tragic circumstance did you enter office, so I do not write to you lightly. We all still mourn for the fallen Mr. Kennedy. Other than his decision to remove air cover for the men he sent to Cuba and his obsession with the moon, I liked him. But you, sir, are one more shitbird politician. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution is a lie that has nothing to do with containing Communists or the safety of this country. Furthermore, I do not believe it ever happened but was made up by your generals itching to play with their toys, and you have set them loose at a cost I fear will be tremendous when it comes to human life. YOU ARE NOT THE CANDIDATE OF PEACE.

Thank you for the most recent Civil Rights Act. I wonder, though, why people on your side wait until people on our side are bleeding before you act. Why werent civil rights handed out to everyone from the beginning? You say change takes time. It is taking no time at all to increase our presence in Vietnam. Why werent you in Birmingham last year when the police sicked dogs and sprayed fire hoses on a thousand young men and women? I was one of the Bonus Marchers in Washington in 1932, we were shot at by the police. Two of us got killed. A friend of mine was shot in the leg. Hoover sent in the Army, he sent in MacArthur, he brought tanks. Which is to say, now looks a lot like then.

Basic fairness should not take this long. This country is at war with itself while you meddle in Vietnam. Are you blind and deaf to your surroundings? Perhaps clean your glasses? And your ears?

Most sincerely.

Lance Corporal Everett B. Jenkins.

US Army Retired.

He took the letter from the platen, signed it, and set it on the snap-up leaf of the typing table Cal and Becky had given him for his last birthday. Then he lay down on his bed for a nap, and died some twenty minutes later.

Becky found him, thus sparing Cal—and inadvertently returning the favor he’d done her years ago. The sight that greeted her was far less gruesome than what he’d found. In fact, as if out of consideration, Everett—eyes closed, mouth just slightly ajar—was in the exact position of someone in a coffin. He’d become almost easygoing over the past ten years, almost comfortable in the world. He’d allowed her and Cal to sand some of his edges. She hadn’t read any of his other letters to Washington but knew how he viewed the world, and when she read this one, she saw that they hadn’t smoothed him down completely. She was glad for that.

Cal considered keeping the letter. Then he slipped it into an envelope, addressed it to Lyndon Johnson at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, put a stamp on it, and dropped it into the mail.

At the cemetery, the two Zane Grey Boys who were still alive—both of them, it turns out, a decade younger than Everett—stood to one side of the casket and, when the Presbyterian minister was done saying a few words, said they’d like to sing something if that was okay. The minister looked at Becky, who looked at Cal, and Cal said, “Of course,” half-expecting them to break into “Danny Boy.” Instead, in their leathery voices, they sang two verses of “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.”

Cal’s inheritance was internal. His father’s death took most of the steam out of any ill feeling he still possessed. He was surprised at how much he missed the old man. Strangely, he felt him—not his presence in the room, but in him. More and more often, lately, Cal understood—and felt—flashes of Everett’s anger toward the government. He heard Everett’s grumble in his own. He caught himself moving his closed lips around his teeth while he mulled over a thought, as if he were trying to separate a bit of fish from a bone.

—

The Jenkinses had never much wondered why the U.S. had gotten into the Second World War. Pearl Harbor had galvanized that decision. They’d both been a little foggier on why the U.S. had to fight so hard and for so long in Korea. That had been another country halfway around the world with a line drawn across it, Communists on one side, Americans on the other. Truman hadn’t even wanted to call it a war, but by the time it was over, the draft for that “police action” had called up one and a half million men. Thirty-six thousand of them had died. There was a memorial plaque in the cemetery dedicated to the four from Bonhomie.

Whether or not the alleged North Vietnamese attack that led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was real—it wasn’t—they could see that the war was escalating. The press could see that it was getting worse and talked about it nonstop. In the year following the Resolution, the number of U.S. troops stationed in Vietnam quadrupled. The number of draftees more than doubled—to two hundred and thirty thousand. By the middle of 1966, thirty-three thousand young men a month were getting called up from around the country to go fight in a war nobody seemed to understand the scope or direction of. People shrugged when you asked them what was going on. People shook their heads.

Tom was in his third year at TU, so Felix wasn’t too concerned yet, but the draft was on Cal and Becky’s mind more and more. It occurred to Becky at one point that the war in Korea had been able to remain somewhat vague to them because they hadn’t had a child hanging in the balance. Regardless, this war felt different. Even while it was growing, there were no posters encouraging support for it, no parades.

Skip, meanwhile, was twenty-two and, as Cal liked to put it, slow to take root. Skip called it being cautious. Becky called it having foresight—which was a smart thing to have, she’d say, cutting her eyes at Cal if she thought he was leaning too hard. Cal told her, one evening on their after-dinner walk, that he just wanted the kid to find a job he kept for more than six months. Skip was nixing his chances of liking anything, with that kind of impatience. He was too distracted, not serious enough. Becky said, “I think you think you’re not doing your job if you’re not riding him about something,” and Cal was drawing a breath to counter that when he realized she was right. Give him time, she said. He was working, at least. She’d finally gotten him to do his own laundry.

—

If only college had appealed. Even Skip thought of reconsidering it for a while. But in the spring of 1965, he’d driven out to TU to visit Tom for a weekend—ole Buckeye, who was so serious now, with his saddlebag and his sideburns and his schedule of classes. When Tom lit a cigarette, Skip had to tackle him, knuckle the part out of his hair. Tom walked him to the campus radio station, in a little pale brick building under a tower antenna next to the student union, and showed him where he earned credits doing sound and equipment checks and keeping programming logs. They let him do the weather on Sundays, if he felt like coming in, he said. He’d once accidentally said “sner flowies” instead of “snow flurries” on-air and no one had noticed—probably because his five listeners weren’t paying attention.

Tom did everything he could that weekend to talk Skip into enrolling at TU in the fall. To major in what? Skip wanted to know, and Tom said he could decide that later. “You’ll like it, I swear. We can room together. Even I get dates here.” He’d lost his virginity, that was his big news. He couldn’t stop smiling about it. He said he’d help Skip with all the enrollment forms. Write his essay for him. Why not give it a try? Skip didn’t think so. Spending the weekend on campus had only confirmed his suspicion that college really was just high school with beds and ashtrays. But he said, “Maybe.”

The drive back to Bonhomie was a dull hour through an evening sky silhouetted with mills and refineries. The town looked like a real place, with all its lights fanning out from the tiny tip of the courthouse, and that fucking tulip in the distance, and the sign that said Welcome to Bonhomie when you were still out in what used to be the sticks. He didn’t not like it here. He wasn’t one of those guys like Denny Shep, who wanted to get the hell out of town as soon as he graduated, go someplace else (his uncle’s blueberry farm in Vermont). Skip wasn’t restless like that. He just didn’t want to have to make any big decisions yet. And when he did, he wanted them to be his decisions. He punched buttons on the dashboard radio. Not Bobby Vinton. Herman’s Hermits. The Four Tops. He pulled up beside a pay phone in the warehouse district, dialed Patty Renneker’s number. Long shot, he knew. Holding the receiver between his cheek and his shoulder so he could keep his hands warm. Outside chance of a hello—at her place?

“Better than outside, Skip,” Patty said.

—

He knows there’s no way to know what’s coming. Consider that Denny Shep dies a month later in a head-on collision in Vermont, VW bug versus logging truck. Consider Sam Riley, who a few years back drove with two friends down to a march in Birmingham and got beaten up so badly, they had to move him into his aunt’s house in Huntsville so she could take care of him.

Not everyone gets the same view, the same ride. When Skip talks to Ron and Theo about the war, the three of them vacillate between wishing it would end and wondering what it’s like over there. Theo gets quiet when they talk about how they could get called up any day. Ron says he’s ready to kill some Commies.

When Skip talks to Vincent about the draft, Vincent says the government’s coming for him, one way or another. “They’ll vacuum up all the brothers, for sure.” Since what happened to Sam, Vincent hardly ever raises his brow, seldom smiles. He doesn’t even look at Skip the same way—unless Skip’s imagining that.

So—follow him—Skip goes from high school to the gas station, to the produce plant, to the lightbulb plant, to the import store, to laying linoleum, to glazing windows. For the last half of 1966, he can’t get the smell of linseed oil out of his nose. In terms of his love life, he goes from dating nobody to dating Jill Peaks, to dating nobody again, to dating Babette Morrison, then Jill Peaks again, then Patty Renneker. He likes Patty, likes this two-nights-a-week thing they have going, thinks, this is how people don’t make mistakes, they ease into things—until Patty starts crying one night right in the middle of kissing him and says she’s in love with a guy named Todd in Findlay.

The beat goes on. In January of 1967, Ron Burgess gets his induction letter, goes on a fishing trip two days later, and is never heard from again (as far as Skip knows). Sam Riley dies of a lung infection in a hospital bed in Huntsville. In February, Vincent Deeds is called up. He shakes his head, holding his letter. “Those motherfuckers,” he says. “One way or another.” He and Skip and Theo ride up to Owen’s Ridge in the Snot Rocket. Drink Old Dutch. Share a joint. Vincent doesn’t like the Beatles, and it’s a bad time to not like the Beatles because they’re on half the stations.

“Me and Theo’ll probably be over there with you soon,” Skip says.

“I hope not,” Theo says from the back seat.

“They might not snag you guys,” Vincent says. “If they do, look me up. We’ll make some trouble.” He frowns at the radio. “What the hell are ‘marmalade skies’?” He changes the station, finds Aaron Neville. “There you go. Tell it like it fucking is.”

Two weeks later, he’s off to basic.

—

“Landscaping?” Cal says. “Since when?”

“A couple of weeks,” Skip says. “Just feeling it out.”

“You’re going to feel your way out of job options, if you keep trying and quitting things,” Cal says, and with his eyes he adds: Come work for me.

Skip can read the look. But it wouldn’t be his decision, if he went to work for his dad; it would be Cal’s. And he’d be under Cal’s thumb all day, which sounded to him like the opposite of adulthood. I love you, Dad, he wants to say, I just don’t want to peddle hardware—or be your employee.

—

One night in March, he and Theo are sitting at the bar of the tiki lounge on Odom Street and Theo’s telling him how cool it is to sell lawnmowers high, when a man in a Hawaiian shirt sits down beside Skip. He’s around fifty. Casual demeanor, smoky voice, and the face of one of those slightly grizzled teachers who look tough but don’t really want to fail you. He strikes up a conversation with Skip and Theo about the whiskey he’s ordered—Bloxham’s, he says. The finest whiskey Ohio has to offer, he says. He introduces himself as Bill Sharp and buys them each a shot of Bloxham’s so they can enjoy it, too, then buys them each another beer. They aren’t used to people buying them drinks. They get a kick out of it, cut their eyes at each other, try not to grin. Hell yes. As the three of them drink, Bill Sharp looks up at the television mounted in the corner. Footage of a war protest in D.C. Footage of an open-doored helicopter taking off somewhere in Vietnam. “Awful state things are in,” he says, almost sounding amused. “Can either of you explain this goddamn war to me?” They can’t, so he starts explaining it to them. He doesn’t seem surprised when Theo gets up a few minutes later, says good night, and walks out. He looks after him, opens his hands around his glass, oh well, and talks to Skip for the next hour.

What Bill Sharp says makes as much sense as anything Skip’s heard about the war. In fact, it’s the only time anyone’s bothered to explain it to him. Bill Sharp goes right from the war to talking about the beauty of having a job you believe in. He talks about guys making two-year commitments to the military and getting to write their own tickets. Cushy assignments. Early retirement. These are the best-kept secrets of the war, he says. He likes Skip, he says. Good build—play football? Naw, Skip says, and doesn’t add, Sports are stupid. If Skip were to consider the Marines, Bill Sharp says he has no doubt they’d make a strong, happy, and well-situated man out of him. A respected man—for the rest of his life. And then Bill Sharp is kind enough to walk Skip all the way over to Union Street, where the recruitment office is open late these days.

—

They’d spent two years worrying about the draft. Becky had sat down with two different mothers from Bonhomie whose sons had died in la Drang. She’d sat down with a father who had a son missing in action since mid-1966. She’d told Cal that if Skip got called up, she’d do her best to convince him to go to Canada. If he didn’t want to go, she’d chloroform him and drive him there herself. She’d read enough mysteries and crime novels to pull it off. Cal said he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

It hadn’t occurred to either of them that, beneath the veneer of youthful restlessness and eye-rolling, Skip’s thinking could be out of line with theirs. It hadn’t occurred to them the extent to which his mind was malleable, that he would look at all his options for the future, weigh them equally, and come to his own conclusion. It hadn’t occurred to them that he would enlist.

Still in shock at his decision, they had to prepare for his departure.

Ida called Skip from Pompano Beach before he left for basic and tried not to cry but did. “I used to call you my little doughboy,” she said, “but I never meant for you to take it to heart. Will you please, please be careful?” He said he would. “And smart,” she said. “Not brave. Smart.”

It was excruciating for them to watch him leave for a total of fourteen weeks of training—first basic on Parris Island in Port Royal, South Carolina, then infantry at Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina—knowing that, even while he wasn’t immediately stepping into harm’s way, he was starting the process. He’d already started the process, but they knew that the next time they saw him, he was going to belong to it.

The days between hearing his news and seeing him off raced cruelly by. Then he hugged them, climbed the steps of a Greyhound bus, and was gone—bound for the Carolinas.

While he was away, Cal wondered to himself if it was time, finally, to tell both boys the truth. But when he brought it up with Becky, she became even more upset than she already was. “You don’t get to just step in and decide that,” she said.

“I’m not deciding anything. I’m just thinking, and I’m talking to you.”

“Well, stop thinking!”

It was the implication she didn’t like. The why behind the suggestion. The more she turned it over in her head, though, the more she thought Cal might be right. Still, wasn’t the choice really Felix’s to make?

—

She called him at the end of the first week Skip was away and asked if the two of them could meet for coffee. A new place equidistant from their houses, with an incongruous western theme. Resin-filled wagon wheels for tables, lariats nailed to the walls. They’d neither avoided nor sought each other out over the years, but whenever they crossed paths, even for a minute of chat on the sidewalk or in the grocery store, the unique connection between them took on a glow. Now, with her nerves on edge, a wave of goosebumps crossed her forearms when he walked into the coffee shop, midmorning. He was fifty-six and at the top of that slide that delivers handsome, up-till-then boyish men swiftly and without apology into their sixties. Unlike her now salt-and-peppering hair, his had come in discriminately: silver patches at his temples, sprigs of it in his eyebrows. After they’d settled across from each other in the booth she’d chosen, she told him what Skip had done.

Felix made to speak but went quiet.

He seemed to be wondering what was the right thing to say, so she circumvented that and asked him what he, as a veteran, felt about the war. Both as a veteran and an American, he said, he thought it was a god-awful mess the country had no business being in. Still, he tried to eke out some assurance for her: Skip had a good head on his shoulders, always had, it would serve him well. Plus, he added, he’d seen how enlisted men got a better shake than guys who waited till they got drafted to go in.

But Becky wasn’t interested in being consoled. She recounted what Cal had talked to her about, explaining why she’d gotten so upset at the suggestion, but, after some rethinking, had realized Cal had a point. That’s why she was here, she said, and why she’d called; she wanted to know if Felix thought it might be time to tell the boys.

Felix sat back against the tan seat of the booth. He’d already been wondering the same thing, given where Tom was in his own life—and now there was this. He was moved by Becky’s entire demeanor—so unlike the confident version of her he was familiar with, here she was agitated, conflicted, her hands trembling a little on the table between them. He understood the additional gravity the question held for her. It meant she was imagining all the possible outcomes for Skip, was having the worst thoughts imaginable, maybe she was even wondering if telling the boys might ward off any harm—though he doubted she went in for superstition like that. She was just trying to do the right thing. He told her he understood, then clarified that he couldn’t know exactly what she was going through, but some of the same thoughts had occurred to him lately. Still, he was of two minds on the matter. He apologized, shook his head, said only that he wasn’t ready. Said he was still worried about the damage it might do.

To whom, Becky wondered. She knew, though—and she understood, even while she was surprised at how disappointed she felt.

They left it at that. Shortly thereafter, they hugged on the cold sidewalk and parted ways, moving in opposite directions but, they each suspected, toward the same eventual place.

—

In the middle of August, after eight weeks of basic, Skip came back to Bonhomie for seven days. His blond curls had been razed to a stubble, his arms and shoulders were bulked up, his chest stretched the front of his T-shirts. Carrying around all that muscle seemed to make him grin a lot. He also wore something neither Cal nor Becky recognized, at first, because they weren’t used to seeing it on him. Conviction.

Tom drove down from Toledo to see him. Twenty-one now, Tom’s dark red hair was halfway to his shoulders. His face was stripped of baby fat no one had ever thought about; he was angular, striking. It was as if he’d had to go off to college (away from their watchful eyes) to fully come into his own body. Cal, that evening, was aware more than ever that, for better or worse, these two young men were his sons. Together under one roof, and soon not to be.

Theo Bach joined them for dinner. As rabbity as ever, glasses still crooked on his face (but no longer taped), Theo told them all about his nightshift job at the linoleum plant on the other side of the interstate. Twice he said he couldn’t believe Skip was about to be gone. Twice he asked Skip if he was scared.

Tom wondered the same thing, because Skip dodged the question both times. Finally he said, “How stupid would I be if I wasn’t scared? Of course I’m scared. But I feel ready, you know?”

They didn’t. Ready for what, exactly?

Becky, who’d made Skip’s favorite, shepherd’s pie, lost what little appetite she had listening to them talk. Skip put away two servings of it and cleaned his plate with his bread while telling them grueling stories about basic training. The horizontal net of barbed wire stretched taut a foot and a half over mud they’d had to crawl through. The five-foot-high wall they’d had to climb unassisted, with fifty-four pounds of gear on them and a rifle. Skip had gotten reprimanded for trying to help a guy over the wall, he said. His eyes lit up as he filled them in on what seemed to have been the hardest and most interesting two weeks of his life.

Theo shook his head, looking both amazed and horrified. “It sounds like hell.” He glanced at Becky. “Sorry, Mrs. J.”

Skip grinned and told Theo not to worry; the Army would give him one of those elastic straps so he didn’t lose his glasses when he went over the wall. Then he looked across the table at Tom and asked what the big man on campus had been up to—leave out the sex and the drugs, please, old people are present.

Tom told them he’d helped organize TU’s first “Human Be-In”—which, when he described it, sounded kind of like sex and drugs on a lawn somewhere. Theo was interested—and grateful that they’d moved on to a new topic. He asked Tom if people showed up naked.

Tom rolled his eyes. Then, nudging his food around, he mentioned the anti-war rallies he’d attended, the march he’d participated in, the radio program.

Both Cal and Becky looked from one young man to the other, ready if not for an argument, then at least some sort of terse exchange. But Skip already knew what Tom was up to. They’d kept in touch—to the extent that, the day after Skip enlisted, he’d dialed Tom’s number and said, “You’ll never guess what I did last night, Buckeye.”

He’d been right; Tom hadn’t been able to guess. He’d been too dumbfounded, at first. To his thinking, his activism was a direct extension of Skip, because Skip had taught him not to give in to bullies, which usually meant being crafty about how you fought them. So it was confounding for him to see his old friend and protector eager to go off and fight in a war in a foreign country. But it didn’t put them at odds with each other.

Theo had a nightshift to get to. He said good night to everyone shortly after dinner and gave Skip an awkward handshake on his way out. “I guess keep your head down,” he said.

When he was gone, Skip and Tom opened fresh beers and toasted Vincent Deeds, now off fighting halfway around the world, where Skip was soon to be. Then they carried their beers down to the basement. A few minutes later, Becky and Cal heard laughter rising up through the floorboards.

Before they turned in for the night, Cal motioned her over and cracked open the door at the top of the basement stairs. They caught a whiff of cigarette smoke and what might have been pot. They heard the voices of men in conversation, and the wheezing, mechanical whir of the miniature trains. Becky put her arm around Cal’s waist and drew his hip against hers. She was so scared, and sorry she couldn’t keep them down there forever, safe, playing with the trains. When they laughed, at least, they still sounded like boys.

—

After years of resenting those people who came to her only seeking to find out whether someone was dead or alive—as if she were a detective, or a missing persons department—Becky found herself strongly tempted to call out to her son, so that she might encounter silence and thus have some indication that he was still alive. As time between letters from him became longer, it was all she could do not to cast a net into the spirit world by the hour, and rein it in, just to make sure it didn’t contain her son.

She couldn’t tell Cal that. She didn’t need to. He was as eaten up with worry as she was. They read the paper with trepidation, watched the news with knots in their stomachs. They tried not to speculate on where Skip might be at any given time, or how he might be doing, because there was no point to it. His letters, they realized, were like light from a star, momentarily comforting but independent of a source that might no longer be there.

They had worry, and that was all. Worry was the reason they got up in the morning. The fuel of their lives. They lived in deference to it, honoring that imaginary pact made by parents everywhere: if we keep worrying, they’ll be okay.

Jan. 10, 1968

Hey Buckeye,

How’s it going? Happy New Year, by the way. They’re moving us around a lot but I’m still getting mail through this address, so use it if you write. I got nine letters from you so far, thanks for those. Sorry I haven’t written more. It’s not much like you’d imagine here, and nothing like the movies. Do they show it much on the news? I’ve only seen one news crew here and they were standing around the base waiting for Tony Curtis or some other hotshot actor to show up, I’m not kidding. Also I’m getting a Silver Star because of this thing that happened. I took two pepper fragments in my left arm and three in my left leg. (Don’t tell my folks if you happen to see them.) They pulled the frags out and gave them to me, I’ll give you one when I see you.

What happened was a month ago a guy’s medevac got ambushed and crashed right after takeoff, and we were nearby and pulled him and another guy out and got them under a lean-to. I didn’t even know I’d been hit. I just had this guy’s head in my lap and he was bleeding and looking at me. He asked if I was a doctor and I said no, but he asked again like he knew he really needed one, so I said yes. He asked if he was going to make it, and I said yes. And he’s just looking at me, so I said, Do you have a dog? And he said yeah a beagle, and I said what’s the beagle’s name, because I’m thinking he might stay alive if he keeps talking, and he said Napoleon. Also Napo, he said. Also Leon. Then he died.

I don’t mean this as a brag, Tom—that was nothing. That could have been any day of the week. The only reason I’m getting the Star is because I took a little hit. You asked me in your last letter to tell what’s happening over here, but I don’t want you to have this stuff in your head. The food’s rotten, by the way. We’re all starting to look like scarecrows. We don’t get much sleep. Everyone I know is messed up one way or another, some of them fucked up forever. None of us know why we’re here or what’s going on.

Remember how my Grandad and my Pop-Pop were vets who’d been to war and fought and all that? And your dad? Why didn’t they ever talk about it? Why didn’t they tell us how awful it was? I don’t have a single memory of any of them talking about how bad it was—or what it was even like. I keep wondering why they wouldn’t want us to know. Don’t repeat that, I don’t want to make anybody feel bad, but it’s something I’ve been wondering.

I hate it here, Tom. It’s the worst place on Earth. But don’t worry about me. Tell my folks I’m fine and being careful and all that. Don’t come over here, whatever you do. See you in about three months.

Skip

Light from a star. The letter took almost three weeks to reach Tom’s mailbox in the student union at TU, but by then he’d heard from Cal and Becky, who’d heard from the secretary of war, by way of a grim-faced pair of lieutenants. Skip had died in the Battle of Huế, when the transport vehicle he and five others were riding in tripped a landmine. He was being honored with a Purple Heart.

Chapter Twenty-Two

One frigid afternoon a month later, a woman stopped Becky coming out of the library, introduced herself as Jenny Shneider’s mother—apparently Jenny and Skip had been in the same class—and put her arms around Becky, as if they were friends. She said she was so sorry about Skip. She cried against Becky’s coat for a moment, said she’d been wondering how Becky was getting on. Was there anything she needed?

My son, Becky thought.

Around that same time, Jean Carhart—who’d been to her parlor once, years ago—tapped her arm in line at the post office, expressed her condolences, and in a hushed voice asked Becky if she could check on her son William, because it had been almost two months since she’d gotten a letter from him. Becky held up a finger as if to say, Hold that thought. She bought her stamps and got out of there.

After that, for a long time, she stopped leaving the house if she could help it.

She stopped holding sessions too. For now. Maybe forever. She canceled her long-running advertisement with its scalloped edges. Some of her regulars no doubt had heard what happened and were staying away. If people called for her, she said she’d retired and hung up. The idea of strangers coming into her house wanting something, even a glass of water, was overwhelming. Beyond that, the idea of doing what she did—for anyone—with Skip gone was unthinkable. She couldn’t contact others, or even attempt to, with him out there. It had taken her a week just to get up her nerve to close the parlor doors and sit down—alone, for the first time—to try to reach him, but she couldn’t stop crying enough to concentrate. Cal hadn’t asked what she was doing in there, and wouldn’t, she knew. They were giving each other space, when space from each other was the last thing they needed. They didn’t know any better.

She now found it shocking how much the living asked of spirits. The presumption of it. And to think, she’d contributed to it for years. She felt protective of the dead in a way she never had before. She felt closer to them than ever.

—

She and Cal cried differently. Cal tried to hold it in—fifty times a day, he tried—which, it turned out, was physically painful. His entire body shook when he broke down, and he held off wiping his eyes because his eyelids were raw. Becky’s face, by comparison, hardly moved when she cried. She thought of her face as a wooden mask that leaked water. She went about her day blotting tears. She learned she could do most anything while crying—eat, wash dishes, stare at the television, brush her teeth. Even read.

They both noticed that it hurt to blink. They both stopped noticing when the other was crying. Crying was like breathing. They asked themselves—but not each other—the worst questions, like how had the world benefited from their son’s death? What speck of good had that contributed? How could they just go on with their day-to-day lives when their child had been robbed of his? How could they exist, while he didn’t?

How did anyone do this?

—

Felix found out about Skip from Tom, who was sobbing over the phone so much that he could hardly get the words out, at first. Felix suggested he come home, see the Jenkinses; it might do them all some good. But Tom wanted to wait. He was in his last semester before graduating and had a full course load on his plate. Going home right now would upset him too much, wreck his studies. He was barely keeping it together as it was, he said. Maybe after midterms.

When they hung up, Felix called the Jenkins house. There was no answer. He called the next day, same thing. On the third day, he drove over to their house and knocked on the front door. He was knocking a second time, harder, when Becky answered. In a worn sweatshirt with the high school mascot, the badger, on the front. Skip’s. She collapsed against him. He was still in his coat and hat, holding her, when Cal came down the stairs.

The only time the two men had ever spoken face-to-face was at the lunch counter at Ferguson’s, thirteen years ago. Felix was surprised that he still felt that interaction as solidly as the floor he was standing on. But Cal looked pummeled, they both did. The shades were drawn, the air in the house gone stale. The downstairs phone, Felix saw, was off the hook.

He spent several hours with them. Listening, talking. The three of them said nothing at all for stretches. Cal wandered in and out of the living room, went upstairs for a while. Becky stayed in the recliner the whole time. Nothing from the past came up. Why would it? There was only one topic that mattered, and they couldn’t talk about that. A predicament all too familiar to Felix. He knew grief carved out a warren that could start to look more comfortable than the aboveground world. The Jenkinses were one foot in the warren.

He checked their cabinets and their refrigerator to see if they had enough food—discreetly, while looking for sugar for his coffee. Later that day, he called Bishop and caught him up on what was going on. Bishop, whose mother had died from polio several years ago but whose father was still alive and developing late symptoms, had just put the old man to bed for the night. He listened as Felix caught him up, then listened as Felix said he was tempted to go buy the Jenkinses some groceries but didn’t want to be presumptuous. Bishop asked him what the presumption would be—that they need to eat?

So Felix brought them groceries. And he brought more a few days later, and a few days after that. Bags of them he carried in through the back door; they’d shown him where the key lived, under the rock. He brought food that was easy to fix, food that was already made, containers of takeout he slipped into their refrigerator. Once he had access to the key, he sometimes came and went without seeing them, not wanting to disturb them if they were both upstairs.

He invited them out to a restaurant or two, but they declined, so he brought over a pizza and turned on their television—claiming his was on the fritz. The Beverly Hillbillies. Green Acres. The lightest fare he could find.

It made a difference to them, opening the fridge and finding eggs where there’d been none, hearing a voice that wasn’t theirs in the house, seeing him come through the back door now and then. They wouldn’t have expired on Taft Street without him, but in the slipstream of Skip’s death, the Jenkinses had forgotten they were still alive, and Felix helped remind them, in increments.

—

There’d been no funeral. There was nothing to bury. But Cal took some money out of the college fund Roman had left for Skip and bought the plot next to Everett’s, and a brass marker with a marble base, and two months after Skip died on a section of highway in South Vietnam, Cal and Becky stood in front of a section of grass in Ohio and tried to say goodbye to him. The ritual did not help.

Tom put off coming home till after his graduation in May. His major had departed from engineering in his second year, and had bounced around a little, and finally landed in the vague field of communications, which to him meant radio. Sound engineering, programming, being both behind and in front of the microphone, he was interested in all of it enough to want to find out more, and his plan was to spend the summer in Bonhomie while he delved into a job search in Hancock and the surrounding counties. He also knew he had to see the Jenkinses, and he wanted to, but the thought of doing so made him anxious. It was all so fucking sad.

When he was home and finally went over to their house, they threw their arms around him as if they hadn’t seen him in years, when they’d just seen him at Christmas. They wanted to show him the grave. Not actually a grave, they said, just a marker. He drove them to the cemetery and followed them down a row of headstones and markers, some bearing little American flags. There Skip was—or wasn’t. What were you supposed to say? Nice marker? Tom asked them if they wanted to get some ice cream, and though neither of them did, they were so caught off guard that they shrugged and said yes.

It occurred to him that he’d never been alone with them before. Not that he could hold it against them, but they were incredibly hard to talk to. He said things, they nodded. He asked trivial questions to get them talking, they answered in as few words as possible. No one mentioned the renewed threat of the draft, now that he was out of school. No one wanted to jinx things. At the ice cream parlor, as Tom ate his rocky road cone, Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins sat on a concrete bench and shared a sundae without even seeming to know it had flavor.

He wanted to see them happy again but couldn’t think of a single comforting thing he could say that wouldn’t sound weird. They didn’t need to hear from him what great parents they’d been, and how much Skip had loved them. They didn’t need to hear how flattened he was, and how angry. How could he tell them, anyway, without falling apart? Skip’s death had killed all the years he was supposed to have and all the things he was going to do—and one of those things was being Tom’s friend. His death had killed their friendship, their shared time and stories together as kids—now only Tom’s. It had killed their chance to be middle-aged, and old together, and make fun of each other for dropping their teeth and stuff. It had killed all that—for a war that made no fucking sense. He’d been so uncomfortable, standing at that empty grave with them. Not enough left to send back. Blown to bits. He couldn’t stand next to them with those thoughts in his head. He went back to the cemetery alone, whenever he came home. Sometimes just to stand in front of the marker for a couple of minutes, then walk back to his car. Sometimes he sat down at the foot of what would have been Skip, and picked at the grass, and an hour went by.

—

Becky couldn’t get over how utterly unprepared she was for grief. Given how many people she’d helped over the years with this very thing. And why hadn’t she heard from Skip by now? He was no longer in this world; she felt that and knew it, unequivocally. But three, four months in, nothing. She told herself what she’d told so many: that, unlike the living, the dead only seemed to speak when they had something to convey. Maybe he had nothing to tell them, and never would. She just wanted to feel his presence one more time.

It didn’t matter, because he wasn’t findable. Wondering why she couldn’t reach him had become one more layer of grief.

Cal, meanwhile, went from worrying that Becky was going to tell him she’d heard from Skip, to wondering if she’d heard from Skip and wasn’t telling him. He hadn’t found the courage to ask. Instead, he broadsided her with questions she couldn’t answer. Had he hounded Skip too much? Had he gotten on Skip’s case one too many times about finding a focus? “I don’t know!” she would cry. And because he would seem to hear that as a yes, “No! You didn’t hound him too much.”

One night, five months in, they sat down to watch Ironside, and Cal started to cry during the opening credits. He apologized and, as if the news were still fresh, said he couldn’t stop thinking that Skip wouldn’t have enlisted like that, without saying anything, if he’d felt like he had a father he could talk to. Becky told him that wasn’t true and that Skip could have talked to both of them about his intentions, if he’d really wanted to. “You have to stop doing this to yourself,” she said.

Cal took in a breath, let it out slowly. Just then, the courage to ask her was there. “Have you heard from him?”

She knew he was asking without believing such a thing was possible, but, still—he’d asked. She couldn’t begrudge him the question now. Just hearing it from his lips, in his voice, made her ache to help him. But no, she said, she hadn’t heard from Skip.

Not yet.

—

When they thought back on how they got through 1968, it would seem to them a miracle—but not the kind they’d ever want to celebrate. The year was a minefield in and of itself. The press couldn’t stop talking about the disastrous Tet Offensive that had left PFC Calvin M. Jenkins, Jr., and an estimated ten thousand other American soldiers dead. Cal couldn’t help thinking about Tom in a new, heightened way. College deferments might stop, if the war kept spiraling out of control. Tom could get drafted. It was both an endless and a useless worry, and one that could not be expressed aloud in their house, Cal assumed—until Becky, her eyes hedged in shadow, expressed the same apprehension. Tom was different things to them, maybe, but he was still Tom.

In February, Senator Robert Kennedy, who looked so comfortable out in public just five years after his brother’s murder, officially broke with Johnson and declared the war unwinnable. Three weeks later, he announced he was running for president, setting him up for a fight against the sitting president.

Johnson looked tired, Becky thought. Like someone had vacuumed out his soul. And he was tired; all that approving he’d done—and for what? The Tet Offensive had offended his swagger; nothing looked winnable now. Two weeks after Kennedy’s announcement, Johnson told the country he wouldn’t seek reelection.

Four days later, Dr. Martin Luther King, in Memphis for a march in support of the striking sanitation workers, was shot to death on the balcony of his hotel room.

Two months after that, Kennedy was shot to death at a campaign rally in California.

None of that year’s newsworthy events happened in Bonhomie, but the atmosphere there changed—as it was changing everywhere. The air felt heavy with the reality that anything could happen, and lately that meant anything bad. The flags at the courthouse and post office and public schools seemed to be at half-staff more often than not.

For Becky and Cal, every shock, every minor gasp, every horrible news item in that first year of their grief felt viscously attached to the loss of their son. Whatever it was, it went straight to that part of their minds where Skip’s death crouched, and when it got there, it turned on the lights. At times, they felt as if the world were scraping at the windows. At times, they pushed off together in an imaginary dinghy, and the news of the world was like flames along a shoreline they watched from a distance, drifting.

—

Though the Jenkinses were looking at their television at the end of August, they missed Tom when he appeared—for just an instant—at the bottom left-hand corner of their screen.

He’d spent most of the summer in Bonhomie looking for a job, but he’d also remained in touch with his friends at the radio station at TU and with several anti-war groups he’d become involved with. He’d hopped into his Corvair and driven back to Toledo for another march, driven out to Ann Arbor for a rally. To get to the Democratic National Convention, he drove himself to Toledo, then carpooled with a van full of Quakers to Chicago, where they joined thousands of others outside the International Amphitheatre to protest the nomination of Hubert Humphrey, a candidate who was very fond of the war in Vietnam. As Humphrey took the stage inside, a small group of counterprotesters descended upon Tom’s pocket of things, and suddenly, instead of being surrounded by people chanting and waving signs on sticks, he was in the middle of a brawl. His tactic, in such situations, was to use his size to his advantage and slip through—what he thought of as his turn-sideways-and-disappear move. This time, though, someone grabbed him from behind, and the fat neck in front of him punched him in the side of the head. Not the most impressive punch, but okay, ow. Punch number two was knuckling up, so Tom brought one of his feet back and kicked the fat neck in the balls so hard, the guy lifted off the ground a couple of inches. He folded, fell. Whoever was holding Tom let go—fearing for his balls, maybe—and Tom darted. Right around then, Mayor Daley gave the police free rein to forcefully subdue the demonstrators. One of the Quakers Tom had carpooled with, running alongside him, grabbed his arm and yanked him out of the path of a tear gas canister.

And so, for just a moment, on televisions tuned to CBS all over America, Tom Salt appeared: a flash of red hair half-whitened by camera lights, then gone.

—

He’d had three girlfriends in college. The first one was a young woman named Amy. Light on romance, heavy on sex, and they burned out over the course of one semester like a box of sparklers. His second girlfriend was a young woman named Pam, and they found a fun balance between sex and quasi-romance, but he made the mistake of telling her his mother had taken off when he was eight, disappearing from his life. Pam was majoring in psychiatric studies, and from that moment on, she “observed” Tom through the lens of motherlessness; she drew connections between his behavior and his childhood—down to the way he opened his mail—until he couldn’t take it anymore and pulled back without explaining why. His third girlfriend was a young woman from Lima who called herself Cloud. They met during his senior year, and he enjoyed their dates—but midway through spring semester, she also became involved with a guy who called himself Harmony, and Tom wished them both the best.

In the fall of 1968, he took a job in Toledo as overnight assistant sound engineer at WKML. He moved in with a young married couple who were both grade school teachers and liked to drop acid on the weekends and draw each other’s shadows on the walls of the apartment with felt-tip pens. Tom worked all night at the radio station, in headphones, and slept during the day with the sounds of the city and pictures of the war knocking around in his head. Wondering, like so many other young men, what he would do if he found a draft notice in the mail.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The war escalated all throughout 1969. Public support for it plummeted, then plummeted some more. Sweaty, soggy-eyed Nixon had run for president saying he had a secret plan to end the war, but no one had seen it. And yet, look at us, walking around on the moon! It made Tom’s brow knit, all the hullabaloo about that moon launch. Everybody hanging on pins and needles to find out if three guys were okay.

In November, a reporter broke the story of the My Lai massacre, which had happened back in March of ’68. Two platoons of U.S. soldiers had walked into a cluster of villages in the Quảng Ngãi province one morning, expecting to encounter Vietcong. Instead, they encountered families cooking breakfast, husbands and wives and elderly and children. None of them armed or even very worried, at first. Then one of the soldiers opened fire, another tossed a villager into a well and dropped in a grenade, and the rest of the soldiers joined in: shooting, lobbing grenades, rounding up and executing person after person for sport. Mothers and babies, grandparents. They marched groups of villagers into ditches and shot them en masse. They raped young women in front of their families, then shot them all. Over the course of two hours, the two American platoons tortured and murdered anywhere from three hundred and fifty to five hundred unarmed South Vietnamese civilians. That story on everyone’s breakfast table (the photos, by chance, taken by a young war photographer from Cleveland) cut through any lasting, reasonable perception that the war was under control.

In the days following the report, Tom drove himself, the acid-dropping grade school teachers, and a friend of theirs—a dark-haired young woman named Kathy Pascal, from Dayton, who had just started in production at the radio station where he worked, and whose cousin, like Skip, had died in the Tet Offensive—to Washington, D.C., to join half a million other people for a moratorium march and rally outside the White House. They carried signs with the names of fallen U.S. soldiers written on them, or the names of villages in South Vietnam that had been destroyed. Tom carried a sign with Skip’s name and rank, and a copy of his senior portrait taped above it. Inside the White House, Nixon watched college football on television. This detail would become part of history only because he himself would brag about it later: how completely unbothered he’d been by the people marching outside.

Then, in December of 1969, the biggest draft lottery in the country’s history was held live on national television. Felix asked Tom if he would come home from Toledo for it so they could be together when it happened, in case the news wasn’t good. Felix also wondered if it was time, finally, to tell Tom the truth about his birth father. Once Skip had died, Felix had been filled with remorse for not having told Tom—and for having kept the information from Skip, as well. But how could he have disclosed it then, in the wake of such a tragedy? When is the best time, exactly, to correct a lie told for fifteen years, and to reveal a truth that’s been buried for twenty-three?

Tom came home. Like old times, they made what Felix used to think of as one of their bachelor meals—grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup—and while they ate at the kitchen table, they talked about work, the recent snowfall, the second moon shot, but not the specific reason Tom was there. There was nothing, really, to say about that. They cleaned up and sat down in front of the television.

The lottery was like some grim game show where nobody wanted the prize. Every date on the calendar was assigned a corresponding number. Those numbers were put into capsules, placed in a big jar, and drawn out one by one. The first 195 numbers drawn indicated 195 dates, and if you were eligible and one of those dates was your birthday, you were called up. Felix watched sitting forward, elbows on his knees and hands clasped together, supporting his chin. Tom sat back and low on the sofa, his arms tucked around himself.

By chance, his number was in the three hundreds. The relief they both felt was ardent, but subdued.

“Do you think she’s watching?” Tom asked a little later.

Felix tried to remember the name of Tom’s last girlfriend, the one he’d been serious about. Then he realized who Tom meant.

He lit a cigarette. They almost never spoke of Margaret anymore. She came to mind at random times—sometimes Felix even dreamed about her. And her absence was quietly felt at every one of Tom’s milestones. Graduations. College acceptance letters. But for fifteen years, the birthday cards and Christmas cards had been coming to the house on Roswell Lane—the only address she had for him—and at Tom’s request, Felix had been throwing them out without mentioning them. Why doesn’t she come visit me, if she lives just across the state? was one of the questions that used to bubble up out of Tom on a semi-regular basis, then with less frequency, then never. “I don’t know,” Felix said now. “What made you think of her?”

Tom shrugged, his eyes still on the television. “All the moms.” Meaning, all the moms who were watching, worried about their sons. All the moms who were still on active duty, stateside. “You think she ever wonders if I’m over there? You think she wonders if I’m dead?”

For all we know, she’s dead, Felix wanted to say. The war wasn’t over, the draft wasn’t over, but Tom’s high number put a tentative ease in his heart that he hadn’t felt in a long time. Moments before the lottery, the thought had flashed through his mind: if we clear this, I’ll tell him. On the other side of that ultimatum, he was still wondering when, exactly, would be the best time.

The only thing he knew for certain was that there would be no getting it right.

—

Truer words.

Felix couldn’t bring himself to do it on that early December visit, when Tom was only there for the night and had received such good news. And he couldn’t bring himself to do it when Tom came back three weeks later, because it was Christmas.

There were, of course, other considerations that factored into his putting it off. Now that he’d let it go so long that Tom had become an adult, he’d decided that disclosure, whenever it happened, would have to be full, not partial. No matter how difficult. He couldn’t with a clear conscience excise from the report his own actions—his own contribution to the marriage that had fallen apart in such a spectacular way. A half-truth wasn’t a truth. It also wasn’t fair to Margaret, or Tom. Or him, for that matter.

As it happened, the opportunity to tell Tom in person didn’t present itself again until late April, when he planned a trip home the week after his twenty-fourth birthday.

In advance of that, with his resolve as strong as it was going to get, Felix dropped by Becky and Cal’s one evening after work and—in their kitchen, over a glass of lemonade—told them what he intended to do. They were understandably taken aback, Cal more so than Becky. For all the thinking Cal had devoted to the matter over the years, he was nervous about how Tom would react. He felt bad for Felix, and he almost spoke out against the idea—then remembered that he’d never had a say in the matter to begin with.

Taken aback or not, the Jenkinses supported Felix’s decision. They talked things over with him for almost an hour, and they offered to be there when he told Tom, if that was what he wanted. Felix thought about that for a moment and said no. Not at first, anyway. He had to do this alone, just him and Tom.

—

For all their trepidation, for all their certainty that telling Tom would cause an upheaval worthy of an emotional backlash—they were right; it did.

Felix pushed it till the last full day Tom was in town, then suggested the two of them take a walk around the quarter-mile stretch of Lake Meyer. Something they hadn’t done since Tom was a kid. It was a Thursday, early afternoon. The air was crisp, the sky mottled with mackerel clouds. A handful of people batted around in the water near the picnic area. Felix and Tom walked the narrow path around the horseshoe bend and ended up—at Felix’s suggestion—sitting on a large rock that sloped down into the water. A popular drying spot for turtles, but the turtles were nowhere to be seen. As Tom leaned back on his elbows and crossed his sandaled feet, he knew something was up. An announcement of some kind. His father seemed jittery, talkative, like he’d had too much coffee. He was great at skimming stones but was throwing one splunker after another.

“There actually was something”—splunk—“that I wanted to talk to you about.” Then Felix embarked on a preamble that had a lot of fits and starts, and wove in more than a few apologies before Tom even knew what the topic was.

Out with it, Tom wanted to say. Let’s get the show on the road.

And because he knew it was now or never, Felix spoke his opening lines.

—

Tom had never been in a serious car accident but knew two friends who had—two separate accidents—and they both said the same thing: most of the moments right before and during the collision were all but erased, their memory of the event fragmented, their sense of time muffled, their hearing wonky when they tried to re-piece it later, so that the whole thing kind of whaa-whaa-whaa’d. That’s sort of how it went for Tom. The afternoon was like one long collision. As he was tossed around in slow motion from one point of impact to another, pieces of him breaking off and floating around him, his father whaa-whaa-whaa’d, and then they moved on to the secondary crash site, driving in the most awkward silence of his life across town to Taft Street, where Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins whaa-whaa-whaa’d. Tom heard every word, but his brain, afterward, let go of remembering what it was like to sit there and listen to all of what they were telling him, on a rock, on a couch. Now that we’ve just cracked your identity apart, let’s dive in. Whaa-whaa-whaa.

He practically had tire tracks across his stomach when they were done. Nearly had to brush broken glass out of his hair. But in memory, listening to it all became one big, horrible thud.

—

Back the crash footage up a little. He’s surprised by the gay thing—but it’s not a bad surprise or even a lasting one. It’s 1970, after all. It’s only shocking because of how he’s always seen his father; change the lens and it starts to make sense, in a way. It’s not like a second wife or even a girlfriend had ever come into the picture. He’s fine with his father’s being gay—or somewhat gay, or bisexual, his father doesn’t use any of these terms, leans, instead, on words like preference and proclivity—however you word it, once the shock wears off, Tom is fine with it, and it might even be a fascinating thing to discuss, in and of itself.

But it turns out that’s just the first sharp turn in the road.

In the room with the grandfather clock he knew so well as a kid, he pieces together what happened when. He appreciates the shock they had to deal with, in advance of the shock he’s having to deal with. But that’s a hell of a lot of recovery time, on their part. A hell of a lot of lead time too. All three of them in on it. Four, if you count his mother. And he counts his mother.

Speaking of her:

What they’re saying is, this is sort of all her fault.

What they’re also saying is, this can’t all be blamed on her.

They tell him, too, that they don’t want him to resent Mr. Jenkins. Tom wants to tell them to stop talking, let him figure out the resentment later. He wants to go over to the mantel and look in the mirror, and at Mr. Jenkins, back and forth about a hundred times.

Mr. Jenkins, who’s telling him his father is still his father. In front of his father, whom they’ve all just told him isn’t his father. There’s one for the wha-wha pedal.

Mrs. Jenkins is blowing her nose into a tissue and saying something about how close he and Skip always were as kids—like he needs to be reminded of that. Maybe she’s worried he’s about to tell them all to go to hell. Maybe he is.

But now that someone has bothered to mention Skip, Tom wants to go back to the part where they all found out about this, when he was eight years old and Skip was ten. He says the word none of them have said yet.

“So, I had a brother.”

“Half,” Cal clarifies, then looks down and touches a finger to his lips.

“Half a brother,” Tom says.

There’s his father, perched on their armchair, wearing a light-blue sport shirt with wide lapels and looking pent-up, like he’s witnessing a medical procedure. He was far more talkative on the rock. All these sodden words are stacking up; he looks miserable. They all look miserable.

Their answer to Tom’s question, why did they wait so long?—put to his father on the rock, put to all three of them in the Jenkinses’ living room—is that they did the best they could, and that they did what they did for him, and for Skip. But it isn’t true. They lied about everything to make their own lives easier. With his body language, but also with what he tries to say, he lets them know that. Lets them know he thinks what they’ve done is an abuse of power. And hearing it hurts them, he can tell. He changes the question: why are they telling him now?

His father exhales. “Your number was high. It just felt like we were through something. Or had turned a corner. The lottery. I was sorry for so long that we hadn’t told you—hadn’t told both of you.”

Whaa-whaa-whaa.

Perhaps craziest of all: it seems important to them that he not think anything has changed.

—

He doesn’t stick around long. Not in that cyclone of unwelcome information. He doesn’t know how to measure it, how to weigh it, how to think about it. Does he storm out? Say things he wished he hadn’t? Slam their front door? He’s not a slammer. But he does leave, when they start pumping him for reassurance that he knows how bad they all feel; fuck that. On his way out, he tells them this is bullshit. But he doesn’t mean it isn’t true, because he knows it is. He knew it on the rock. He knew it from the way Felix—his father—was telling him. That’s another thing: by the time he gets out of the Jenkinses’ house, he’s heard all three of them say that Felix is still his father. As if they’re worried he might abandon the guy who’s been his dad his whole life and throw his arms around Mr. Jenkins. As if his sense of loyalty is that nudgeable. No. He has a brain; he understands. Felix Salt is his father. Cal Jenkins is his birth father. His mother washed her hands of all of them—conveniently—and the rest of the grown-ups decided to make life a little smoother for themselves by picking up her torch and carrying it all the way through the second half of his and Skip’s childhoods. Lying through their teeth every single day of their lives.

—

He walks back to Roswell Lane. It takes twenty minutes—on streets he used to sail down on his bicycle. Riding, at times, with no hands on the handlebars; he’d loved that. At the house, he gets into the Corvair and, because it suddenly feels like the only place to go, he drives out to the cemetery.

It doesn’t help. He sits down at the foot of that little plot of land where Skip isn’t buried and says, “You’re not going to believe this.” But he doesn’t say anything else because no words will come, and there’s no one to say them to.

From there, he goes to the Tiger’s Foot on Carson Street and sits at the bar with a beer he doesn’t want, turning it with his fingers and setting his thoughts on fire, one after another, in his head. It feels like a conspiracy. It is a conspiracy! Who are all these people who’ve made these enormous decisions for him, without giving him a say? Who are they, to have decided it was better to lie to him than face their own fuckups? It makes him wonder what else they’ve lied to him about. He decides to head back to Toledo tonight, not tomorrow. He can’t face the grieving Jenkinses again. Their grief actually pisses him off now. He knows it’s not fair, but he can’t look at Mr. Jenkins and have him looking back, seeing a son. He also can’t talk about this with his father anymore. He understands. People get laid, babies get made, everybody lies to their kids. Isn’t that the story of the world?

And now, they—his father and the Jenkinses—can’t live with themselves until they hear from him that he’s okay with all this. Even though they’ve been living with themselves pretty easily for a long time, as far as he can tell.

From across the room, he hears the snap of a cap gun and looks over to see a guy he thinks he recognizes playing the Rifle Range game in the corner next to the bathrooms. Black, a little older than him. A lot more hair than he used to have, it almost doubles the size of his head. Tom remembers riding with him and Skip out to Skip’s grandfather’s house on Compton Road, finding the cat skeleton. Vincent Deeds. The bartender, who’s also the owner of the place, is an older white man named Mr. Chuppy. Mr. Chuppy, Tom notices, has walked down to the end of the bar and is standing with a lit cigarette drooping from one side of his mouth, his arms folded, staring at Vincent. Just staring.

If you had to get stared at your whole life, not just in a town like this but everywhere you went, Tom wondered, would you start to get used to it? Probably not.

He picks up his beer, carries it over to the Rifle Range game, and reintroduces himself.

Vincent, it turns out, has been back for almost a year from his tour in Vietnam. He’s just finished his shift at Lankford Auto, down the street. When Tom asks what it was like—over there—Vincent won’t say anything more than, “Subhuman, man. Don’t ask.” The Game Over light comes on, and he drapes his arm over the mounted rifle, angling it upward. Looks at Tom and says he didn’t find out about Skip until he got back.

Tom thinks to tell him what the day has revealed. But no. Vincent has been through what he’s been through and is still going through it; he doesn’t need to be dragged into Tom’s woes. Something—everything—tells Tom his own woes can’t touch what Vincent and way too many other guys have experienced.

“Remember Theo Bach?” Vincent says.

Now that Tom is talking to him, other names from Skip’s coterie—squadrons, Skip called them—begin to surface in his mind. Theo Bach is that rabbity kid with the taped glasses who lived in Camden. He came to dinner at the Jenkinses’ the night before Skip shipped out. “What about him?”

Vincent shakes his head again. “Over and back. You didn’t see him? His grave’s on the same row as Skip’s.”

—

He tells his father he’ll call in a few days. He declines the offer to talk some more about everything they’ve already talked about. He hugs him, and tells him he loves him, makes a point of calling him “Dad.” But as for that thing his father and the Jenkinses seem to need so badly from him, that all’s-well thumbs-up they suddenly can’t live without? Tom takes that with him. Into the trunk of the Corvair it goes, next to his suitcase. They can jump into Lake Meyer, waiting for that.

Nothing is quite as maddening as being angry at people who lovingly understand your anger.

Unless it’s feeling guilty about the very justifiable anger you have toward those people. Because one of them raised you, for God’s sake. Because two of them just lost their kid.

And what of his mother, co-wielder of this sledgehammer that’s smashed his understanding of who he is? She hasn’t had to deal with any of this. Had she foreseen that they might keep the secret all these years? She hadn’t cared, obviously, but would she be dismayed to find out they had? Mortified? Both, he hopes. It jabs at him all over again that he’s never known what was going through her head that day. No matter what was happening with his father—or with anyone else’s father—what was she thinking as she rolled past him in her car that afternoon, and straight out of town? He has, suddenly, a rekindled desire to know, now that almost every other piece of this puzzle is on the table. Because she took a few of his pieces with her and probably doesn’t even know it, which is sad.

That’s the thing. He’s mad in about ten different directions. But he’s also sad, because there isn’t anyone left in his family—even his unexpectedly extended one—who hasn’t lied to him. He could have flipped a coin at that moment to decide which he wanted more: to make his mother listen to what he’s been through, or demand that she explain herself to him, once and for all. Maybe he just wants to collect all the versions of himself that are out there, lock them away, and lose the key.

It’s the first of May. The once scale-like clouds have come together across the sky, and a light rain falls through the dusk, speckling the windshield. He turns on the wipers.

He hasn’t flipped a coin and doesn’t feel like he’s decided anything when he turns the car around, then heads south. And east.

—

Less than two hours to get there. Just over a hundred miles. At the tail end of dusk, he picks up a radio station out of Columbus playing the entire Days of Future Passed album, which means the DJ’s probably not even at the sound desk; he’s taking a nap or went to get a slice of pizza, Tom’s seen DJs do it more than a few times. When “Nights in White Satin” comes on, he turns the volume up and rides its lush, orchestral waves into a city of lights that looks, to him, far bigger than Toledo.

At a Sohio station, he tanks up, buys a map. Walks to the phone booth at the corner of the lot and turns to the S’s. Easy as pie, there she is, in between Salstrom and Saltaris: Salt, Margaret. He writes the address on his hand with the Bic he always keeps in his pocket, gets back into his car, consults the map.

By the time he gets to her street and is slowly rolling past her apartment building for the third time, it’s fully dark. He peers at every person on the sidewalk, but it’s too hard to see. He parks around the corner. Pisses into an empty Ingleton’s bottle in his car. Combs his hair in the rearview mirror, then gets out and makes his way around the corner. He can’t tell if her building is fancy or not; he doesn’t see a guy in a uniform opening the door or anything like that, but there are columns on either side of the front steps. He sees his last name on the buzzer. He has to work up to it. He has to walk around a little, get his blood moving. He hasn’t smoked cigarettes since college, but he buys a pack of Viceroys at a newsstand and walks around smoking one after another, like his father. He’s ready for every woman he passes to be her, but none of them are. He walks by her building again. “Bridge over Troubled Water,” the song that won’t go away, is coming out of one of the curtained front windows. Is that his mother, sitting at home on a Thursday night listening to Simon & Garfunkel? He realizes how hungry he is, thinks it best that he eat first. He finds a grocer a block away and buys a sandwich and eats it on one of the benches on the median in front of her building. Partially lit by a streetlamp. He has no idea if she’s on the front or back of the building, no idea if she can look out and see him, or what she might do if she does.

When it gets a little chilly, he walks back to his car. Sits behind the wheel and locks the doors. Takes off his brown corduroy jacket and turns it around like a blanket and tucks it under his chin.

A garbage truck wakes him. The sun is up. For just a second, he’s disoriented—then snaps back into where he is, why he’s here. He empties into the bottle again, stretches, and, wishing he had somewhere to wash his hands, walks back to the place where he got the sandwich and gets another sandwich. He carries it and a cup of coffee to the bench where he sat the night before. The sky is clear, at least; last night’s clouds have moved on.

The door to her building opens, and opens again. Not her. Sometime later, it opens and she comes down the steps to the sidewalk.

He wasn’t sure he would recognize her—what if she’s gone brunette? Or gray, even? But her hair is almost the same red as his, cut shoulder-length and styled in a That Girl bob. She’s wearing a long light-blue coat with a matching belt. A yellow scarf. Bright red heels. In her early fifties now, he guesses. She doesn’t look up or over, doesn’t see him. She starts down the sidewalk, and he stands and walks on the median in the same direction. When traffic breaks, he crosses and walks behind her, stays back at least half a block. He feels like a private eye, or a creep. His heart vibrates against the back of his ribs.

She waits with several other people at a bus stop. He busies himself with a cigarette. On one of her heels, he notices, sticking up above the bright red of her shoe, is a Band-Aid. The bus arrives, she boards, and he sees through the windows that she walks almost all the way to the back before sitting on the opposite side. He fishes change out of his pocket, steps on, and sits as close to the front as he can, near the window.

From the window of a bus, Columbus looks a lot like Toledo. More people, maybe. They hop off in a hurry, climb on looking, to him, mildly inconvenienced. When the bus catches a light and they pick up speed, it all goes sideways past his windows and the details are smeared away, but his focus is inside the bus. He doesn’t want to turn around, doesn’t want her to see him this way, so he faces forward and waits. When she walks past him, he stalls for as long as he can, then exits the bus. He spots her from behind, up ahead on the sidewalk. Follows her.

This must be downtown. The streets are wider, the buildings taller, the fronts all businesses. He maneuvers among the foot traffic along High Street, watching the back of her head. He wonders how often she does this: wakes up, puts on nice clothes, ventures out to stroll the downtown district of her wonderful city. Is she meeting a friend? Clothes shopping? She passes store after store. Looks into a window now and then but doesn’t stop. At the corner she steps under a wide silver overhang and is snatched from his view by a revolving door. He has to back up a little on the sidewalk to see what she’s entered. The name Lazarus stands out from the corner of the building in vertically stacked letters.

A department store, it turns out, and the place is huge. People and mannequins scattered throughout, and as he walks in, he thinks he sees her stepping into an elevator. Then he thinks he sees her at the top of the escalator, so he takes that, but at the top there’s no redheaded woman in sight, so he rides the escalator back down. Voices and piped-in music thread through the air, more voices come over a loudspeaker announcing a sale. He could wander the floors of this store for hours and never find her. He imagines himself doing that, then imagines finding his way back to her neighborhood, instead, and waiting for her to come home. He also imagines getting into his car and driving back to Toledo.

But there she is.

In the jewelry department. Talking to a man in a suit who seems to be trying to sell her something. But when Tom gets closer, he sees that it’s the opposite—the man is standing in front of the glass counter, and his mother is standing behind it. He keeps himself blocked by various mannequins and display racks as he gets even closer, until he’s less than twenty feet away and is mostly on the other side of a wide round column. He can’t hear what his mother is saying, but the man’s voice carries, and now it’s clearer what’s going on. He’s not shouting, just loud, and he’s telling her not to be late again. She says something, eyes lowered, and he walks away.

As Tom moves around to the other side of the column, a voice comes over the loudspeaker saying there’s a sale on soccer equipment in the sports department. He pivots until she’s in view again, now occupied with a customer. An older woman, peering into the case.

His mother is still beautiful, he sees. But not young beautiful, as he remembers her. Even from this distance, he can see she has some lines on her forehead—two short ones, not quite parallel, above the middle of her brow. Her eyes are lively, but the skin that holds them in place looks like it might be tired of doing so. He watches a series of expressions flash steadily on her face, like slides projected from a slide carousel: pleasant, inquisitive, intrigued, amused. When the older woman walks away without buying anything, and she thinks no one’s looking, Tom sees a different slide: disconsolate. The carousel lingers on that one. She looks at her watch, which she wears backward, on the inside of her wrist. She picks at something on the glass countertop with her thumb. Straightens her arms and rests the heels of both hands on the glass with her fingers elevated to keep from making prints, looks out at the department and the departments beyond. Just when he thinks she’s spotted him—not that he expects her to recognize him—she sticks her lower lip out and blows air up over her face, then turns to check her hair in the mirror. Someone else approaches. The carousel clicks.

He sees that she’s not okay. He can’t say she’s unhappy, but she’s not okay. With her life. With some part of it. She needs too many faces, relies too often on the flat one. When a customer approaches, she transforms. He can distinguish her voice now from the other sounds, and that’s familiar too. She chuckles at something. Mm-hmms at something. Indicates with a discreet motion of her index finger, her nails wet-looking, some other department, and the man thanks her and walks away. Tom remembers the Band-Aid on her heel. The reprimand. Her brisk walk: she was late for work.

Opening its own track through the din of department store sounds, a part of his brain—or heart—tells him there’s nothing to be gotten from her. He runs through all the possible things he can imagine her saying to him, and suddenly he doesn’t want to hear any of them. Doesn’t need to hear any of them. And doesn’t need to tell her anything, either. Why tell her about Skip, and the rest of it? To watch her face? To be consoled? Apologized to? He’s just come from the Land of Apologies. You know who apologizes? People who need to, for their own sake. People who are trying to do themselves a favor.

He turns, follows the linoleum path back to the exit, and pushes out into the bright, busy morning.

—

He’ll drive back to Toledo feeling mean and sad and self-righteous and angry. Mostly angry. Despite his moment of clarity about how so many people, like Vincent (for God’s sake, like Skip and Theo), had it far worse than he did, he’ll spend days thinking of himself as an extremely fucked-over individual. Then he’ll hear the news, on the afternoon of May 4, of four college students, at a rally just like the ones he helps organize and participates in, getting gunned down by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, 130 miles away from the bed he’s sulking in. The world will always bring you back into perspective, if you only bother to let it.

Still, he will go back to Bonhomie less and less over the next couple of years, and he’ll call home less often, and he’ll share less of his life with Felix and none of it with the Jenkinses. This will spark the occasional heated conversation with his father, which will help nothing. Ultimately, it will be Tom who stops returning calls. In this way, he’ll deny himself to the people who denied him the truth and a half brother for so many years. The anger and resentment he feels toward all of them won’t go away anytime soon—not only because he feels entitled to it, but because he cares for and tends to it like he would any other part of himself.

By 1975, he’ll be twenty-nine, working as a programmer at WGTE-FM, and he won’t have spoken to Felix for more than a year.

Chapter Twenty-Four

In April of 1975, the war that killed Skip—and, when all the counting was done and the civilian death toll included, close to two and a half million other people—finally came to an end, twenty-one years after it started. The North Vietnamese, having intended to take Saigon from the beginning, took Saigon, and the country. By that time, the Watergate scandal had come and gone; Nixon had resigned, been pardoned, and was in California writing his memoirs. A jet trail of pain and grief hung in the sky over families still trying to understand why they’d had to sacrifice their sons, and yet—or therefore—America began gearing up for its bicentennial. Here and there, in gift shops and clothing boutiques and grocery stores, anything that could be manufactured in red, white, and blue began to appear—from snack cakes to coolers to steering-wheel covers to golf bags. Also, another rocket was being sent into space, this one to meet up with the Russians, and because Snoopy signed on to promote it, everyone forgot about the Red Scare. They bought rings that told them what mood they were in. They bought CB radios on which they had no one to talk to. They bought pet rocks. They put down shag carpeting and raked it each morning to lift the pile. They heard on the radio, over and over again, the promise that love would keep them together, and the song Elton John did about freedom—that wonderful fringe benefit of American life that had been doled out unevenly since the dawn of the Republic.

—

Here’s the story Felix Salt wished he could have told about the second half of his life:

He rebounded from Margaret’s sudden departure in 1954. He made all the right decisions with his son. Having come from a place of constant struggle, having risen above it with help he couldn’t have foreseen and still didn’t completely understand, he found a peace within himself he hadn’t known was there. He befriended a fellow veteran. They experimented carefully with cohabitation, found it to their mutual liking, made a home, and grew old together.

The story he could tell, by the end, was different.

One day, he thought: Tom and I aren’t close anymore. It made his heart sink because it sounded—and felt—irreversible, even while he refused to see it that way. Before their contact tapered off to its current nothingness, when they still spoke over the phone, it was as if Tom had sound-engineered any trace of affection out of his voice. The lie had done them in, Felix knew. Not the sex. Tom didn’t care who slept around; he cared about the lie, what it cost him. His sense of himself, for one thing. His control over his sense of himself. After being abandoned by his mother and getting no good explanation for why, after doing whatever he’d had to do, inside, to get through that, get over it (did a person ever get over such a thing?)—he’d lost Skip twice, in a way. And Felix had still gotten it all wrong. Margaret’s legacy had been the impossible predicament of when to tell Tom. That, and a son who no longer felt like he could trust anyone in his family.

—

Summer. The cabin at the edge of the woods was like a little haunted house when they arrived late at night—all cobwebs and shadows, a bat or bird flapping across the tops of their heads when Bishop got the door open. But in the morning, the cabin was bright and rustic and charming, filled with sunlight that projected the imperfections of the beveled windows onto the floor like floaters. They were sixty-five miles northwest of Bonhomie, on the border of the Goll Woods State Nature Preserve, a hundred yards from the Tiffin River. The cabin belonged to a co-worker of Bishop’s, someone named Wally Babik.

Felix rose from the iron-frame bed, found his shorts, and got his first clear look at the interior. Planked walls and slanted ceiling. A small wooden table set for two with tin plates, tin cups, flatware. A rusted umbrella stand by the door, holding fishing poles. He walked out onto the porch. The sun was still low but had burned off last night’s chill, and when the leaves stirred overhead, he felt a breeze licking his skin and for just a moment was back on Espiritu Santo, emerging from the Quonset hut behind Augie, the two of them bound for Champagne Beach. To the beach, Salt! Get the lead out! Barefoot, he stepped off the cabin porch and over to the edge of the clearing to pee. Augie had gotten a kick out of dropping their ranks and titles on the island, when it was just them. He’d gotten a kick out of being able to tease Felix. You call that a backstroke? Three decades later, Felix was approaching his sixty-fourth birthday, and Augie’s voice was still clear as a bell.

He walked back to the porch, to the small bench between the ladder-back rockers where he’d left his cigarettes. What if they’d both survived? Would they have tried to cross paths, stateside? Even stayed together? He liked to think so—even while knowing both his situation and the world wouldn’t have allowed for it.

He and Bishop weren’t “together” like that, but they’d been friends for over twenty years, and more than that—discreetly—for the past decade. They’d never looked at each other for very long in public. They’d never let Bishop’s car sit in Felix’s driveway or in front of his house overnight. What they had wasn’t a romance and maybe wasn’t even as much of one as they could have gotten away with, but it worked for them. They were, Felix thought, like a plant that could only get as big as its pot, no shaping or pruning allowed. Still, a healthy plant.

Fishing wasn’t the point of this little getaway, Bishop had said when Felix told him he didn’t really like to fish, but here Bishop came up the path from the river, a pole in one hand and a bucket in the other. Grinning. He’d caught lunch, he said. An ugly, whiskered catfish. Felix grimaced at the thing but pulled his shoes on to collect wood for the fire pit.

After lunch, a walk in the woods, a swim in the river, a turn on the creaky bed, and another swim, the two of them sat on the little porch, in the rockers, and watched as the sun sank behind the tree line and the sky went from deep blue to purple. Blackbirds zipped back and forth in front of the cabin and were gradually replaced by bats.

Felix pointed to the Dog Star, just visible. He thanked Bishop for suggesting the weekend, said the cabin was terrific.

“I think so too,” Bishop said, rocking slowly. “I told Wally he’s a fool to give it up.”

“He’s selling it?”

“Sold it,” Bishop said, smiling. “About two minutes ago, best I can figure. Feel like making this a regular thing?”

This meaning more trips to the cabin. This meaning more days like the one they were having, which was probably the best they’d ever shared, because it was the most time they’d spent together alone. This being, maybe, as close as they would come to suggesting that, whatever they were, they might want a bigger pot.

“I’d like that,” Felix said.

—

The body, however, makes its own plans.

Three months after that trip, Felix started noticing his breathing had become more labored. He discovered that it was hard—and then physically impossible—for him to take a full breath, or hold a breath in for more than a few seconds. His morning cough, which had evolved into his first half of the day cough, was now just his cough. He slowed down. He started feeling weaker. Noticed a slight wheeze in his voice that he couldn’t control.

The doctor at the VA hospital in Mansfield asked him how long he’d been a smoker. “Just since the war,” Felix said. He did the math in his head. Thirty-three years of smoking, on average, thirty cigarettes a day meant three hundred and sixty-one thousand cigarettes had passed through his lungs, give or take a few hundred. He couldn’t imagine anything stupider. The doctor arranged for tests, and the X-rays told them everything they needed to know.

Though it was far too late to make a difference, he quit. He’d never even tried before, and it wasn’t nearly as hard as he thought it would be. Dum-Dums did the trick. He kept them on him at all times. Kept them in the car, in his robe pocket, in a bowl on his nightstand. When he wanted a cigarette, he had a lollipop. And it turned out he didn’t want thirty lollipops a day. He wanted four or five lollipops. Then two or three. Then he never wanted to see a lollipop again and didn’t smoke anymore. He was thankful for that, at least, because, for what it was worth—and to him it was worth something—he wanted to die an ex-smoker. If only I’d wanted to live that way, he thought.

—

Bishop, glassy-eyed, his face graver than Felix had ever seen it (he’d actually never seen it grave at all), asked him if he wanted to talk about it. Felix said he wasn’t in pain. But the other thing, Bishop said. The rest of it. Meaning, Felix supposed, what this meant for them. Trying to be funny, Felix said that was a dead-end topic. He said he wanted to get past the sadness, if such a thing were possible. He wanted to stay in the happy part while there was still time—and still a happy part.

That proved challenging. He put off reaching out to Tom, knowing he wouldn’t get him but would have to leave a message with his answering service—and even then, anything short of life-or-death wasn’t going to get a reply. He wasn’t ready to leave a life-or-death message.

Bishop urged him to call.

Bishop offered to call for him.

Bishop got the number out of Felix’s address book and threatened to call if Felix didn’t.

So they bickered about that, which was the last thing either of them wanted to do, but eventually it got Felix to dial Tom’s number and leave a message.

A week later, he called again and left another message. Please call home ASAP.

A week after that, he said to the young woman at the service, “Something serious is going on, and I need you to call me.” In a moment that felt surreal, the young woman said the words back to him, “just to confirm.”

When another week went by, Felix began to think that if it took a message as simple and blunt as I’m dying to even get a response out of Tom, then maybe it was better to just let him stay out there, where he wanted to be.

“Don’t let this go a year,” Bishop cautioned.

Felix coughed, and thought wryly, I probably won’t.

Bishop had enough on his plate, between his job and his father. Felix didn’t want him having to tend to a second person. He didn’t want to be anyone’s task, much less a burden. He’d asked the doctor what the prognosis would be for someone who only had advanced emphysema, and the doctor had said three to four years, so that’s what Felix had told Bishop. Emphysema: three to four. But the black dots Felix hadn’t mentioned changed everything, according to the doctor. The combination of those and the damaged and swollen air sacs in Felix’s lungs was going to make things progress very quickly. They’d gone on to discuss treatment, but other than oxygen and pain management, Felix didn’t see the point, and the doctor hadn’t countered that. One year was the prognosis.

“Could it be shorter?” Felix said, just so he knew.

“Hard to say,” the doctor said, moving his pen around the X-ray. “Could be longer too. But when you see more than one black dot, the horse is out of the barn.”

There were many, many black dots.

—

In April of 1976, Felix ran into Cal Jenkins on Sutton Street, near the hardware store, and even though he was bundled up against the chill, he could tell from Cal’s face that his appearance was alarming. He’d lost thirty-five pounds.

Whereas Cal, Felix thought, was the picture of health. Fifty-five now, with less hair but wearing it swept back in a Leslie Howard sort of way, his blue eyes full of life. Felix thought, I could lift a barn with a body like that. Cane and all.

Their brief conversation on the sidewalk led to coffee, and coffee led to the Jenkinses stopping by the house on Roswell Lane to see if Felix needed anything. Which led to the Jenkinses coming around.

—

It was as if the three of them had built a machine long ago and covered it up; now, when they pulled the tarp off, it was well-oiled, shiny, and ready to go. Cal and Becky did a little, at first. Then, they did a little more, and separately, to divvy it up and to give Felix twice the company.

They had conversations with him about telling Tom that were similar to ones Felix had had with Bishop. But they were still deferring to Felix on all matters concerning Tom. Felix alarmed them by showing not just reluctance to reach out to his son but also a resentment toward him. His brow collapsed at the mention of Tom’s name. He complained about Tom’s stubbornness, said that came from Margaret, then shook his head and said, never mind, because it could just as easily have come from him.

—

They didn’t know how to say, If you wait much longer, you might be too weak to talk to him. They didn’t know how to say, If there’s a chance that he’ll come home—and they were sure there was—the longer you wait, the worse it will be for him. They didn’t know how to say, Let us go get him. You could die next week.

It was mid-June. Several people from the furniture company came and spent an hour or so. Neighbors came with food. His old secretary from Tuck & Sons, the ancient security guard, a pair of men in their seventies—one Black, one white—who’d worked down in the dross house at the plant and told Felix he was the only suit they’d ever liked in that place. Felix appreciated everyone’s visit, but it started to feel like a depressing talk show. This Was Your Life.

Then he fell when he was alone and hit his head on a doorjamb, giving himself bruises on both knees and one elbow, and a contusion with the radius of a golf ball on his forehead. He let go of the memory of that fall, and it never came back. He began to get out of breath when he was sitting still.

Becky and Cal were still dropping by individually, and around Bishop’s schedule, but the two of them sat down together with Felix to try to talk him into letting them reach out to Tom more aggressively. Even in his weakened state, Felix resisted the idea.

They were convinced things could turn dire at any time and decided to take matters into their own hands. One afternoon while Felix napped on the sofa, they looked around for his address book. They had no luck finding it, but when Bishop arrived and learned what they were seeking, he went right upstairs and got it out of Felix’s nightstand drawer.

—

One call to confirm that it was still the dead-end answering service that picked up the only number they had for Tom, and they knew there was only one other option. Cal wanted to go alone. Both of them might seem confrontational, he said. Like a gang-up. Becky agreed, and while part of her wanted to be the one, a bigger part was glad Cal was picking up the reins.

He drove an hour to Toledo, then spent almost that long finding Tom’s apartment. Just south of the UT campus (which until recently had been the TU campus), he parked in front of a gray stucco apartment building on Douglas Road. He buzzed, was let in, and made his way up five flights of stairs—only to find out Tom didn’t live there anymore. Tom used to rent one of the bedrooms, said the woman looking over the chain. Was he in some kind of trouble? No, Cal said, he just needed to find him; did she happen to have his new address? She went and got it while Cal waited for her in the hall, and she returned with a slip of paper; before passing it to him, she said, “Wait—who are you, anyway?”

“I’m his uncle,” Cal said.

—

He didn’t pretend to be an uncle with the dark-haired, blue-eyed young woman who answered the buzzer of an apartment on Dorr Street, less than a mile from the other address, because something about the way she confirmed that Tom lived there told Cal they were a couple. To her, he introduced himself as Cal Jenkins, a friend of the family. She seemed at least to have heard of him, and she asked him in, saying Tom had just stepped out but shouldn’t be long. Her name was Kathy. As she got Cal a glass of water in the kitchen, she followed his eyes to the photos on the refrigerator. “That was last year in Nova Scotia,” she said, pointing to one of them. Her and Tom on a beach, wet-haired, forehead to forehead, smiling into each other’s faces.

In the living room stood a bookcase full of worn paperbacks, many of them stacked sideways. On the wall over the couch hung a framed poster of Che Guevara, a Peter Max print. On the coffee table sat a dog-eared copy of The Brothers Karamazov lying open and face down next to a little tower consisting of All the President’s Men, Watership Down, Steal This Book, Jaws. They sat across from each other on the couch, and just as Cal was wondering if it was okay to tell her why he was there, Kathy said, “Wait, are you Skip’s father?”

He nodded, and she said Tom had told her all about him, and about Skip too. Cal must have looked surprised by that, because she offered, “His half brother, Skip—who died, right?” She told him that her cousin Riley had died in the Tet Offensive, too, and looking down at the striped throw pillow she’d moved onto her lap, she said she was very sorry for Cal’s loss.

He was very sorry for hers, he said. He was also inwardly happy, if happy was the word for it, that she knew about him, about Skip and all that had happened, because it meant Tom spoke of it, that he was able to speak of it, had maybe even worked through some of his anger. It meant he was with someone he trusted. Why, then, was he so goddamn hard to reach?

Cal asked if they had a phone, and Kathy said yes and pointed to it: the color of an avocado, sitting right there on the end table. The number Cal could see written on the middle of the dial was not the number he’d gotten from Felix’s address book. He told Kathy he didn’t need to use the phone; he just wondered if they ever used it. He went on to explain that Tom’s father, in Bonhomie, had been trying to call him—for a while, now—and Tom never seemed to get any of the messages that were left. Kathy dipped her head a little. Tom had his own line, she said. It didn’t come into the apartment, just went straight to an answering service. A service he never checked? Kathy seemed to know the answer to that but didn’t want to say.

Then the front door opened, and Tom walked in.

His hair was just as long as the last time Cal had seen it but a little less unkempt. His jeans and his vest were the smooth denim of a leisure suit, and under the vest, he wore a T-shirt with a cartoon tongue sticking out of a pair of cartoon lips. He clutched the rolled top of a paper bag in one hand. The look on his face when he saw Cal sitting on his couch revealed that he’d gotten all of Felix’s messages and knew why Cal was there.

“Hi, Tom,” Cal said.

“Hi,” Tom said.

“Hi,” Kathy said, smiling at Tom and making a slight what choice did I have? gesture with her hands.

For a moment, Tom and Cal just took each other in, as if sizing up opponents. With no change in his expression, Tom lifted the bag. “Lo mein?”

—

None of the messages had been specific. His father had used the word serious, but he hadn’t said anything was life-threatening. Tom had built up the distance between them for a reason; the word serious in a few phone messages wasn’t going to just erase it. His father was selling the house, maybe. Or something had happened to his mother (would that warrant a call)? Tom was going to call him back eventually, he was just putting it off, and when he started feeling guilty about that, he thought of all the years his father had put off telling him the truth. Which didn’t ease his guilt any but made him understand why he was being a jerk.

Still, he didn’t need terrible news about his father and a lecture on his behavior from Cal in one shot. In his own living room. In front of his girlfriend.

People grow up to get away from that shit.

But how the hell did something move or progress or whatever it was doing so fast? Diagnosed in late September? At death’s door in mid-June? Not death’s door, Cal said. That was part of the point of coming to get him now, before things got that far.

Because things would get that far.

Apparently, Cal didn’t trust Tom to do what he was told, because he followed him the whole way back to Bonhomie, his headlights like a pair of accusing eyes in Tom’s rearview mirror, and he didn’t peel off when they got into town; he followed Tom all the way to the house on Roswell Lane. He walked him to the front door.

“Okay, g’night,” Tom said gruffly, with a little salute.

“Why don’t I come in with you?”

“I’m fine.”

“But why don’t I come in with you.”

Something about the way he said it. The person they found in the kitchen, heating water for tea at the stove, looked like someone who was being retracted from himself. Eyes wide, startled, clearly happy to see them both. Cal stuck around. He called Becky, told her he was going to stay over.

Tom couldn’t stop crying.

—

So, yes: water, water everywhere. Water under the bridge. So much goddamn water.

He went back and forth from Toledo a couple of times to shift some project responsibilities at the station and arrange for a leave of absence. He explained everything to Kathy, thanked her when she offered to come with him, told her he was fine and would call and keep her posted. Then he threw his arms around her and didn’t leave for another two hours.

When Felix saw Tom walk through the door with two suitcases and learned that he had no set date to go back, he thought, Oh. I really am dying.

—

Mainly, they talked. Around that, through it, sometimes over it, Tom tended to his father—found things he would eat, helped him dress, administered his morphine drops, his Dilauded pills—Felix allowed himself to be tended to, as much as he didn’t like being so needy.

There were good days and bad days. Then—fairly quickly, it seemed to everyone, but especially to Tom—only good half-days. Sometimes just a good hour or two.

It wasn’t long before they got around to the past.

For as much as he didn’t want to, Tom began to see his father’s reasoning for doing what he’d done. Or, at the very least, he saw that his father was convinced any other course of action would have been bad for the two of them. He’d known that at the time, it seemed to him now—at eight years old, he’d known—but somehow he’d lost sight of it pretty quickly.

“I was selfish,” Felix said a week or so after Tom had settled in. His voice had gotten higher in pitch. He was in his robe and pajamas, sitting in the electric-powered recliner Bishop had gotten him. (Bishop had also brought down the bed from the guest room and set it up in Felix’s den, so that Felix didn’t have stairs to contend with. Bishop, who Tom had known peripherally for half his life, took a little getting used to as more than just his father’s friend. But Tom was glad for him, for both of them. Sad too, for what they faced.) “I worried what you were going to think about it all. It’s really hard to protect your kid from a situation you don’t know how to handle. One that’s half your fault.”

“It wasn’t half your fault,” Tom said, peeling an orange on the couch.

“Your mother and I survived on a lot of presumption about each other.”

“Makes sense.” Tom held up an orange wedge. “Want one?”

Felix didn’t acknowledge the offer. He focused on taking a few breaths, then changed tack slightly. “I couldn’t stand the idea of somehow losing you. I couldn’t lose you. So I got selfish and didn’t tell you. Then I waited too long.”

“You didn’t lose me.”

“Sure I did,” Felix said, squinting at him. “All that silence?”

Tom shook his head. “I think I lost you for a while.”

—

He told Felix about going to see his mother. About wanting to talk to her—right after he found out about everything—but then just holding back and watching her from a distance.

“You didn’t speak to her?”

“No.”

Felix lost what air he had, hearing that. He drew in a breath of lament. “Why not?”

Tom had gained a crease on either side of his mouth in adulthood—like parentheses, Felix thought, more pronounced now than ever. They deepened as he thought about how to answer. “It sounds stupid, maybe, but once I saw her, I didn’t want to make her have to talk to me. I knew she didn’t want to.”

“She might have.”

“No, Dad.”

Disagreeing, or flat-out refusing to accept even the possibility. Felix let the heaviness of that settle. After a time, he said, “How did she look?”

“Tired,” Tom said. “Beautiful.”

—

When he ran errands now, in this town where he’d been born and raised, he felt of an entirely different species—like one of those Star Trek episodes where they zapped down to a whole new society of beings and walked around, hoping to blend in. Not because he’d become a “city dweller,” or even because he hadn’t lived here for so long, but because none of these people had a dying father, like he did. Or, none of them had his dying father. It made no sense, but he didn’t even want to look anybody in the eye here. Not the pharmacist, not the cashiers, not the bag boys at the grocery store. Nobody who wasn’t an immediate part of what he was going through.

He’d been in town two weeks when June rolled into July, and while he’d been seeing a lot of red, white, and blue crap all over town, there was an explosion of it now. The benches and planters were painted red, white, and blue. The curbs were painted red, white, and blue. The mailboxes were striped with it. A banner stretched across Main Street, near the courthouse, read Bonhomie is the Spirit of ’76! Which made no sense. He couldn’t even drive on Main Street one afternoon because there was a barricade across Cooper Road, just west of the roundabout—and even the barricade was draped with red, white, and blue bunting. People were gathered just beyond it and lined along both sides of the street. Before taking the detour, Tom, detecting music behind music, shut off the Bellamy Brothers and lowered his window to hear, in the near distance, a marching band. The sound swelled, and around the gray brick corner of Linneger Brothers Bargain Store they came, turning onto Main, followed by a pickup truck pulling a giant red, white, and blue birthday cake made of tissue and chicken wire. Behind that, a dozen baton-twirling teenaged girls and, visible through their spinning arms, Shriners zigzagging in their stupid little cars. The fucking Fourth of July, Tom realized. The fucking bicentennial, to boot. Happy fucking birthday, America. That meant all the stores were going to be closed and he might as well go back to the house.

He was filled with frustration at what was happening. He was angry at his father for doing this to himself, though he would never say that—to his father, anyway. He was scared. He had Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins and Bishop there, so he wasn’t alone, but, still, he was scared.

Sometimes, faintly, he thought, Where the fuck is my mom?

—

They watched television together. All five of them, sometimes, sitting around the living room. They watched Columbo and Kojak and McCloud. They watched fourteen-year-old Nadia Comăneci win three gold medals in gymnastics.

Tom and Felix were looking at pictures of Mars in the newspaper one morning when Felix said, “You might want to give her a call.”

They were deep into it now. There’d been some dark days. Tom said, “To tell her what—that you’re dying?”

“Well, when you put it that way.” Felix half-cringed. “But, yeah.”

“You think I want to talk to her now?”

“I don’t know. Do you? Would you rather tell her afterward?”

Too much. Tom waved his hand.

“Write to her.”

“Do you want to see her?”

“Don’t flip your lid—is that the expression? If she walked through the door, I’d be okay with it.”

“What would you say?”

“I’d say hi. But I’m talking about you doing it—if you want to. Don’t worry about everybody else. They’ll understand. If you want to, I mean, you should. It’s up to you.”

“Sounds like you want me to. Like you think I ought to.”

“Thomas Aquinas Salt. If I knew what was best for you—” But Felix never finished that thought. He started coughing, and coughing was like running up a mountain. When he was finished, his thoughts had moved on. Tom almost brought him back to what he was saying. Later, he would wish he had. It was just the needling sort of half-sentence that could stick with a person for the rest of his life.

He used to be convinced he had this figured out, convinced that his father didn’t understand anything about him. Now he saw that his father had looked at him the same way, with the same conviction. Of course he had. But Tom had been stubborn about it. He’d had to put them behind him, in tow, and wait until they finally fell away, like those stages of the Saturn V separating and tumbling behind what was left of that rocket that just had to get to the moon.

His father, in one of their often-interrupted conversations (because he had to cough, or catch his breath, or rest), had told him about Augie (and about how Augie had, in a circuitous way, been responsible for Tom’s middle name). Tom couldn’t imagine a struggle like what Felix had gone through, losing Augie and almost dying at the same time. Hiding who he was—for decades. Even while there was, to this minute, some ugly little nook tucked away inside him where his anger still kicked at the walls because of what they’d hidden from him and Skip, he couldn’t imagine having to be them, with the problems they faced. Who knows? He might have done the same, in their place—except for leaving a little kid; he couldn’t see himself ever doing that.

“I know your mom loved you,” his father said in another of their conversations, when they weren’t even talking about her; he was telling Tom about coming home from the war, the long train ride with his ribs still bandaged and his arm in a sling.

“You’re just saying that. How do you know that?”

“I saw her with you. I saw something in her eyes when she looked at you that I never saw before—or since. We didn’t really know what we were doing, she and I, but we were excited. I was excited, anyway. About having a child. About having you.” He smiled a little beneath the hose that lay across his upper lip. “I still am.”

—

At the beginning of August, Felix had a dream that Becky told him she’d had a dream wherein the two of them were lovers. Not a sexy dream, but one where they walked, holding hands and smiling at each other. He didn’t know for sure that he’d been dreaming, though.

—

There were different combinations of people at different times. Sometimes Tom, with Bishop coming in and out. Sometimes Bishop and Becky. Sometimes Cal and Tom together, or just Cal, sitting in the armchair diagonal from the foot of the bed, reading. Felix asked what it was. Michener, Cal said. Centennial. He looked about fifty years in.

It wasn’t strange anymore. To be in a room, just the two of them. They’d never said much about what had happened; they’d covered it, though, it was covered up, and for the best. But as Felix’s convoy of thoughts began to line up in a horizontal column laid out across the water, he thought of things he’d never asked. Like, How did you and Margaret meet? Did she tell you she was married? Did she talk about me at all?

There was a rhythm to the movement of a ship that was like leaning into a breath. The up and down of it, the surge and yaw. The ship’s breathing was the sea’s breathing. The sea’s breathing was Augie’s, was Felix’s.

There were things he didn’t have the breath to articulate.

There were things he decided to leave unasked.

—

Bishop carried him out to the backyard one afternoon in the third week of August, and they had a kind of picnic on a folding table Cal had set up in the shade of the oak tree. They settled Felix into one of the Adirondack chairs, a few feet back from the table. Tom grilled. Becky brought out a portable 8-track and played some nostalgia tape full of big band music from the forties. Les Brown. Harry Roy. It took them all back—except for Tom, who groaned and wagged his head.

The day was pristine. They all forgot to be sad for a little while, Felix could see that in their faces, and he was grateful. He thought that he could sit and watch them, and listen to the music, for a very long time.

Say, forever.

What is it about time that confounds us? We spend it. We save it. We while it away. We waste it. We kill it. We complain about not having enough of it, or about having too much of it on our hands. We regret what we’ve done with it. We give it away. We want it back. We say “time and again” when something is bothering us and “it’s time” when something is supposed to end. Felix saw it so clearly: all we should ever want of time is more of it. Life was so simple when it was reduced to the barest of necessities: more time; more air; more Duke Ellington.

At the far end of the folding table, Tom pushed his chair back and stood, holding his paper plate with a half-eaten hamburger on it, his bottle of beer. Don’t leave, Felix thought. Please don’t leave.

But Tom isn’t leaving. He’s walking toward Felix. He’s sitting down on the grass next to Felix’s chair. Look just off to the side, and down. There he is, see? No one is leaving, just yet.

—

It was the first time she’d ever seen her son’s adult handwriting. The letter was brief, informed her that Felix was dying, said if she wanted to come, she should come soon, and if she didn’t, that was fine too. Mainly, the letter concluded, I wanted you to know.

Mainly.

She’d never thought she would hear from him, never thought he’d be the one to reach out. She’d worried about him all throughout this terrible long war that was finally over, had maintained a subscription to The Hancock Gazette so that she could keep an eye on the names that were weekly listed there of any local boys who had died. There weren’t many, which had made Calvin M. Jenkins, Jr. leap out at her—she had forgotten, but of course Skip had been eligible for the draft too. She’d felt wrenched for Cal and Becky. She’d almost sent them a card—had even considered sending an anonymous one to try to express her condolences. She was certain they wouldn’t have wanted to hear from her, but she couldn’t imagine anything more tragic than losing a child to a war on the other side of the world, and receiving that information—however it was delivered to them.

Now the news of Felix’s condition seemed just as sad to her. The past felt suddenly, terribly close.

She’d put both of them away, was one of the hard things about this. Put them away just as they were the last time she’d seen them. Tom had grown up and would have changed considerably, but Felix…she’d shellacked him in her memory. It was difficult to imagine him dying—or even aging. He’d be sixty-five now; she was fifty-eight. A soft fifty-eight, maybe, or so she sometimes thought—a little smoke and a couple of mirrors. She’d had three marriage proposals in the last five years, and each one took her right back to Felix. She saw the road and the handsome man driving, and she saw herself in the passenger’s seat, unhappy, and grabbing the steering wheel—over and over. Unhappy, because she somehow never felt that she was where she was supposed to be, living the life she thought she would live, loved in the way she thought she should be loved. And she didn’t know how to love back, had been lousy at loving, a bad partner in a less-than-ideal marriage having to face her own shortcomings, day in and day out. Lousy at not fully reckoning with her own son as a person—not just as one of her main shortcomings.

For two days, she went back and forth about what to do. It seemed impossible that she would go. It seemed impossible that she wouldn’t. The letter said nothing about Felix’s opinion on the matter. It said mainly, as if to imply there might be another reason Tom had written. Or it said mainly, as if to withdraw the invitation a little, even while it was being extended.

For that’s what it was: an invitation. From Tom, to her.

—

Just as she’d put her husband and son away, she’d pictured Bonhomie as frozen in time too: smaller than it had been, even—a diorama of the place where she’d lived; she would have to shrink down like Alice to fit into it. But on that hot August morning, she hardly recognized the town she drove into. She spotted the Tuck & Sons tulip, but it was no longer on the edge of town. Farther in, she began to recognize buildings and intersections, and she had the ridiculous fear that someone she’d known twenty-two years ago was going to spot her, call out to her. No one did.

Except for the cars, Roswell Lane was just as she remembered it, right down to the sprinklers. She pulled up slowly in front of her old house and stopped along the curb. Gave herself a minute to take it in. The white shingles. The deep front porch. She took a breath, standing in its shade, remembering how basement-cool it felt, and how she’d had a hard time with the plants out here, at first. She rang the bell.

No answer. How strange to think that she didn’t have a key to get in. She rang again, then walked off the porch and looked in through the garage windows. A woman appeared on the porch next door. Not Mrs. Talbot, someone different, holding a watering can. “Felix?” the woman said. Margaret said yes, and the woman made a sad face and told her they’d already left for the cemetery. “It was a few hours ago, though. You might have just missed it.”

—

She had. Which meant she’d missed him. She found his grave easily—it was the one with the canopy still up and the winch still installed, and it hadn’t yet been filled. An excavator was parked nearby. Just the people tending to the equipment were left. She couldn’t see what would be gained by getting out and looking down into that hole. A glimpse of the top of his casket, the lid of the vault. No, she couldn’t look there. But she sat for a while in her car, near him, at least.

Goodbye, Felix, she thought. Goodbye again. I’m sorry.

She didn’t know if she should return to Roswell Lane and wait for Tom—or if he was even going back there tonight. She didn’t know if he would still want to see her, now that Felix was gone, or in fact if he’d genuinely wanted to see her at all. But she was here and might never be again. He’d written to her, maybe, so that she would come be here with him.

There was only one place left she could think to go.

—

Cal’s was the only yard on the street with a buckeye tree, now grown wide and taller than the house; she spotted its height and its bright green leaves from the corner. There were cars parked along the curb. The three windows of the front room were up and the drapes were wide open, and as she rolled past, she saw figures inside, dressed in dark clothes, milling about.

The Jenkinses were hosting Felix’s wake.

She parked up the street, walked partway back. As she approached the tall hedge that stood between the Jenkinses’ driveway and the driveway next door, she hesitated, pretending to look for something in her purse while she glanced up at the house.

People she didn’t recognize. People she did. A woman she assumed was Becky, having seen her from a distance a number of times years ago. A man with thinning gray hair sitting in a chair by one of the windows, talking to a dark-haired young woman. As people shifted about, Margaret caught a glimpse of a man who might be Cal, dressed in a jacket and tie, holding a plate of food. He appeared to have his ear turned, listening closely to someone just out of view. His expression lifted into a smile. It was Cal.

As soon as she saw his face brighten, she knew she shouldn’t have come. Or she should have come sooner, when it could have been just her and Tom and Felix. Tom’s letter had taken three days to reach her; she’d waited two days to decide. It didn’t matter now, she just knew that she hadn’t come to stand in a room with all of them, be a spectacle—certainly not an hour after they buried Felix.

Her eyes moved to the window on the right, and the person standing there, in profile, was her son. In a light-blue shirt and dark trousers, his suit coat off, his tie tugged down a little from his neck. He was receiving a kiss on the cheek, Margaret saw, from the dark-haired young woman. When she stepped away, he lingered in the window, his hands in his pockets, looking at the house across the street, or at the afternoon sky, or at nothing at all; she couldn’t tell.

And then he was looking at her.

Instinctively, she took half a step back on the sidewalk. But wasn’t hiding from him against everything she’d come here for, or almost everything? She’d come to see Felix one more time and to pay her respects to the good that they’d shared together. And she’d come to see her son. She’d wondered, since receiving his letter, if the truth, or some of the truth, had reached him by now. If he knew about Cal and had even formed some sort of bond with him, so that, with Felix gone—

But if ever there was something it wasn’t her place to inquire about, it was that. Not today, especially—even if today it mattered most.

Would she leave without seeing him, then, without speaking to him, because she still couldn’t face up to what she’d done?

When she stepped forward and looked back up, he wasn’t in the window. Her heart wobbled as she wondered where he’d gone. She couldn’t just stand out here, waiting. She turned to walk back up the street, and she was almost to her car when she heard his voice.

“Mom?”

He’d cut across the Jenkinses’ lawn and was walking toward her on the sidewalk. She reminded herself to breathe.

He stopped within a few feet of her, his brow a bit moist in the summer heat, his chest rising and falling beneath his shirt. She’d spent so much time peering into his face when he was a baby, and then a boy, looking for evidence of Cal, that she’d never once appreciated seeing herself in him. There she was—but handsome. Stunning, really. From what she could tell, at the end of the growing season, Tom was Cal’s size but dipped in her features—like a wick dipped in paraffin. Thirty years old.

“You got my letter,” he said.

“Yes. Thank you for that.”

He nodded, told her she was too late and looked pained as he said it. They weren’t to hug each other, she concluded. Because his letter had said so little, she asked him what the illness had been, and she wasn’t surprised when he told her—but lamented that carton of Lucky Strikes she’d mailed to Felix back in 1943. She lamented all the ones he’d smoked on his own, too, and that she’d never gotten on him to quit. “I wasn’t sure if I should come,” she said. “I shouldn’t have hesitated.”

“I might have written sooner.”

She couldn’t tell if there was regret in that, or if he was telling her he’d had options. The intensity of his eyes—the same jade as hers—both held her and made her want to look away. As if, with them, he was trying to etch her portrait. “I’m so sorry, Tom,” she said.

His brow lowered. “About Felix?”

Not Dad. Felix. So he knew, then. He was letting her know that he knew.

“Yes. But more than that,” she said, and without knowing she would say it until it left her mouth, “I am sorry about everything.”

Five words that were, for her, a watershed. And the closest she could come to explaining—how could she tell him what she was still coming to understand herself? Growing up, she’d so badly wanted her mother to come back and explain. To say why she’d done what she’d done, and also how she’d managed to live with it. That explanation, Margaret had thought, might set her free of wondering and change the way she saw herself. As a child, she’d wanted it so that she could feel better about who she was; as an adult, she’d wanted it so that she could feel better about what she’d done. But time had either killed the want or made her wiser. I knew it would be better for you if I went away. I didn’t understand how to do what I had to do, as a mother. I didn’t understand how to love you. Would it have changed anything if her mother had appeared at some point—or appeared tomorrow—and said these things to her? No. Would it change anything if she said them to Tom?

No.

She’d gotten no explanation, but the truth couldn’t be more bluntly obvious: her mother didn’t want to be a mother, and so had stopped being one. Margaret had removed herself from Tom’s life because she was dissatisfied with her own, and because she’d screwed everything up in such a way that she couldn’t bear to be around when it all came crashing down. What she wanted from her mother was remorse. What she wanted—she didn’t fully understand this until she was looking into her son’s eyes, her own eyes—was for her mother to tell her she was sorry. Deeply, truly sorry.

But Tom looked confused by her words. He drew his head back an inch. “Everything?” he said.

“I know there’s nothing I can say to explain why I did what I did. And I can’t blame you for whatever you might think of me. But, yes, I am sorry, Tom. For everything.”

No, no, no. He’d wanted to see his father and his mother in the same room together, to know that, by the time his father died, his parents would have had one more conversation, he didn’t even have to be there for it, didn’t care what it was about, he just had a picture of them spending a few calm minutes together, on the other side of all the trouble, and he wanted that picture to be real so that he could carry it around in his mental wallet for the rest of his life. He’d wanted her to be there, to see him seeing his father out. And he wanted to give her the opportunity to explain why she’d walked out on him. Why she hadn’t even said goodbye. No matter what the explanation was, he would have welcomed it from her.

But not this. He never would have written to her if he’d thought she might show up and try to hand him a blanket apology for things that’d had such a profound and painful impact on his life. He didn’t want to hear her apologize without telling him why.

“You didn’t say goodbye,” he said, instead of asking anything. “You said completely nothing, ever. And you didn’t call.”

“It’s unthinkable, what I did—but it’s way in the past now, this is already such a hard day, and—”

“You’re too late,” he said for the second time.

She knew what he meant—but then realized he meant more than that, and he was full of sorrow at having to point out an unfortunate, obvious fact.

“Tom, no. I need to tell you something, I want to say something to you now. I am sorry—it’s something about me. But maybe it’s—the thing is, Tom, I did to you what my mother did to me. I was abandoned as a baby. At an orphanage. I was an infant, and I was raised there, outside of Columbus, and…” The words had never left her mouth before. She sometimes thought he, of all people, was the last who should ever know. Felix hadn’t known, nor had Cal. And as she said it now, desperate to hold on to him after being away for more than twenty years, she wondered how it helped her case that she’d suffered the same fate. He might even hear what she said as a paltry excuse—that she’d learned this behavior and couldn’t be held responsible for her actions.

It didn’t matter. He didn’t seem to believe her. Or hear her. His eyes were glassy, and his head was shaking no, almost imperceptibly. From somewhere down the street—life going on, brutal as ever—a lawn mower fired up. He took half a step backward and said, “I should get back inside.”

She hadn’t even shaken his hand. She would have given anything just to touch him. Anything—

He rushed forward, suddenly, and met her, throwing his arms around her, planting his face against her chest for just a moment and saying into the collar of her blouse what might have been I forgive you or even I love you; she would probably never know.

He dashed back into the house.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The Jenkinses ventured out over the years. They went to Niagara Falls, Lookout Mountain, Mammoth Cave. They drove to Florida to see Ida, and stopped at Stone Mountain and St. Augustine. They flew nowhere until Ida was dying and there was a need to get down there fast, and neither of them cared for it or especially wanted to do it again. For Becky’s upcoming sixtieth birthday, in May of 1981, all she really wanted, she said, was to return to the spot of their postponed honeymoon, thirty-eight years ago: Huron. That modest hotel with the picture window overlooking Lake Erie, near the lighthouse.

The hotel was now a gated community with security guards, but Cal found another hotel farther out and was able to reserve them a room with a view of the water for two nights. The day before her birthday, driving up I-75 in the Oldsmobile with the power steering that made Cal nervous, they remembered how, the last time they’d taken this exact trip, just the two of them, they’d had to save up their rationed gasoline for a week. Which led Cal to remember that Roman and Ida had given them five gallons of gas as a honeymoon present. Then Becky covered her eyes as she recalled her father’s proposal to the town council that they question everyone who wanted to move to Bonhomie—from anywhere—so that Bonhomie got only what he’d called “the cream of the crop.” Pretty bad, Cal said, but had her dad ever fired a .22 at a census taker, like Everett once had?

They marveled at how they hadn’t emerged more scathed by the parents—or in Cal’s case, parent—who’d raised them.

They were sad that Skip would never be able to say the same thing about himself and them one day.

They were sad that Skip would never have children.

The Jenkinses had naturally assumed they’d be grandparents by now, and, over time, they had reset their hopes on Tom and Kathy, who drove in from Toledo every fourth Sunday to have a family dinner on Taft Street. But this younger generation wasn’t shy about rejecting what they perceived as broken systems. The world was already crowded with children and unstable. The kids, Cal and Becky were taken aback to discover, weren’t interested in making more kids. In fact, as Tom had told them on a recent visit, young couples choosing not to procreate was one of the proposed topics of the new radio program he’d just gotten greenlighted at WKML, an interview series to be called The Salt Mine, about the unsung heroes and underdogs of Hancock County. Kathy would produce. They also planned to do a segment on Toledo’s Vietnam War veterans and their experiences after returning home, since, more and more lately, stories were surfacing about vets being poorly received and struggling to reacclimate and get back on their feet. “And a segment on librarians,” Kathy said, “maybe the least sung heroes of all.”

The Jenkinses congratulated them on the show and said they’d be sure to listen. “But the segment about the couples who don’t want children,” Becky said, “what will the story be, there?”

Tom glanced across the table at Kathy. “Well, it turns out some of them do want children,” he said.

“They want them and don’t want them?” Cal asked, trying to follow.

“They don’t want to bring more kids into the world. So they find kids who happen to need parents,” Tom said.

“You’re doing a segment on adoption,” Becky said.

“Yeah. But, specifically, on young, lower income couples who’ve adamantly decided not to bring more kids into the world. Like us.”

It took a moment for Cal and Becky to realize what else was being conveyed. A grandchild was in the offing, after all.

But when? The kids were mum on that.

In the Olds, merging onto Route 6 just past Portage, Cal told Becky he hoped Tom and Kathy didn’t wait too long, because he wanted to be able to watch his grandchild grow up. Becky pointed out that they could adopt a teenager if they wanted to. “Fine with me,” Cal said. “I’ll make him mow the lawn.”

“She might tell you to mow it yourself,” Becky said.

They laughed at that, for it was more or less what Skip, at ten, had said to Cal, the first time Cal had told him mowing was to become part of his chores—a funny but sad-tinged memory that was suddenly sailing up the highway with both of them, clouding the inside of the car. Perhaps, they mused, this was why they didn’t travel more: they brought it all with them whenever they left the house.

—

She’d never resumed her sessions after Skip died. The spirits—even Mrs. Dodson—seemed to have accepted her retirement. Becky wondered sometimes if they’d always known what she’d have to live through to understand: that all that contact over the years had been in service to the people who came to her in need, and to the spirits of people who had died—but it had also been vital training for her, so that she could learn to accept death and understand what grieving really was, so that, when the unimaginable happened, she would be able to survive losing her son—and should he want to reach out to her, she would be able to hear him.

—

It had finally happened on a Saturday afternoon, six months after Skip died. She’d been in the laundry room, folding clothes still hot from the dryer, when she heard his voice.

Mom!

Not in her head, like Mr. Shefflin’s voice, or any of the other spirits’ voices, but outside it, in the room with her. Clear as day.

Mom!

“Skip?”

Hey, Mom!

He sounded the way he had when he was little. When he used to tug at her sleeve, wanting something. Her heart quickened.

Let go already, would you?

Before she had a chance to reply, she felt him laugh and move through her like a wriggling fish. She gasped.

Over and over, she’d learned that what the dead most often conveyed was love and forgiveness. She could only conclude that these were the two most important things in the world—so important that people carried them into the afterlife for the sole purpose of being able to hand them back to the living. And then the living prayed to have them bestowed upon the dead. Throughout all the joy and bickering and betrayal and abandonment, all the wars around the world and in America, all the human hardship, messages of love and forgiveness were being sent back and forth, across the divide between the living and the dead. Those messages meant everything; they counterbalanced the world.

She yearned for a life wherein a woman could have an unusual talent and not be thought of as a nuisance (and for as outlandish as it had seemed at the time, she was sorry she hadn’t encouraged her mother to go to New York City when she’d had the chance). But even more than that, she yearned for a life wherein all these messages of love and forgiveness were received, and heard, and put to use. She’d been able to carry on with Cal because she’d trusted that something was going to come along in place of the forgiveness she’d fallen short of, and what had come along was what had been right in front of her the whole time: she knew with absolute certainty that she would be sending that message across the divide to him in one direction or another—so, as Everett had suggested, why not send it while they were both alive?

She’d climbed the stairs that afternoon with Skip’s voice still in her ears. Cal had been doing yard work all morning and was just stepping out of the shower, wrapping a towel around his waist. He’d taken one look at her standing in the bathroom doorway and had known, somehow. “You heard from him,” he said. A moment later, his arms were around her and her hands were pressed against his curved, wet spine. She didn’t even have to tell him, and he believed her. At the eleventh hour, when it mattered most.

—

Almost as soon as they were in the hotel room, they got undressed and climbed into bed, kicking the bedspread onto the floor as they rolled around.

After a nap, he took her to lunch at a grand seafood restaurant that had an outdoor dining area overlooking the water and a small marina. The tables all had flowers. The stiff white tablecloths were secured against the breeze with thin metal clamps. A cat, ash-gray and lop-eared, threaded around the feet of the diners, vying for food. Cal ordered the trout. Becky ordered big, for her: perch, a salad, hush puppies, and lemon pie. She ate almost all of it too (though a bite of fish went to the cat). After their plates were cleared, Cal reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and brought out an envelope: letter-size, creased, and a bit worn around the edges, R. H. written on the front in both the sender and receiver spots. He dropped it onto the table between them.

“Oh, my gosh,” she said, “it worked!”

“What do you mean?”

“I’d forgotten about it! Just like I’d wanted to.”

“You don’t remember writing it?”

“Of course I do, but not what’s in it. That was more than fifty years ago.”

There were other presents wrapped and waiting for her back at the room, he said (he’d gotten her a cobalt blue beret, and a signed first edition of Cards on the Table he’d bought over the phone from a rare book dealer in Detroit). “This doesn’t really count as a present, per se.”

“It does, though,” Becky said. She picked up the envelope, met his eyes for a moment, and ran her thumb gently along the flap, easily breaking the seal of the old glue. She took out the wide-rule piece of notebook paper that she’d long ago so carefully folded.

The air was warm, promising summer. There were dark thin clouds out over the lake, but far off; a breeze stirred the corners of the page as she read. He watched her face: her brow an overhang, like her father’s; her mouth pulled to one side. Her eyes skated back and forth over the page, and when she got to the bottom, she smiled just a little. She read the letter again, then refolded it and tucked it back into the envelope.

“Well?”

“Well,” she said.

“Any surprises?”

She set the envelope down and slid it toward him. “Read it, if you want.”

“Isn’t it private? I assumed it was private. I never looked—obviously.”

“I never said you couldn’t read it.”

“You did.”

“Actually, I said, don’t let me read it until I’m sixty—not knowing that was going to be five minutes after I handed it to you. I also remember saying I’d hold on to your letter for you, if you ever wrote one to yourself.”

“You know I didn’t. Weirdly, I regret that.”

“You still can.”

“And tell myself what? Remember to take your blood thinner?”

“Write to your younger self, then. If this all happens again, you might appreciate the mail.”

It was the same kind of off-kilter remark she would make when they were first dating that would cause him to scratch his head and wonder if she was pulling his leg, and, when it dawned on him that she wasn’t, wonder how long he’d be able to bear her company. It had taken losing her, and feeling dead, and having her gradually take him back for him to realize what now seemed like the most obvious thing in the world: he could bear her forever, because he loved her. She’d taken him back because she loved him. He might have had no idea what to make of her, or she of him, but they’d both had the idea to make something, and thirty-nine years later, even in the face of all they’d lost, they were still making it.

—

After confirming he could indeed read the letter if he wanted to, she anchored it under the salt shaker and didn’t touch it again. Apparently, he was to continue being the bearer of it, whether he read it or not. When they stood to go, he slipped it back into his pocket.

They drove the short distance to Sandusky, then across the bay to Cedar Point, where they wandered through eddies of sweating, overstimulated children and exhausted-looking parents. Cal negotiated his forearm crutch around all those feet, got knocked into a couple of times, but was ready for it. Once again, Becky wanted to ride a roller coaster, and this time Cal said he would sit it out. She contemplated the Blue Streak, which looked like a giant stack of razor wire, and the Iron Dragon, which she worried would give her whiplash. She settled on the Gemini—a ferocious-looking fortress of wooden lattice with two sets of cars running through it. Cal found a bench nearby to sit on while Becky stood in line. She waved to him from the platform, climbed into one of the cars beside a little girl with a ponytail. The two of them spoke for a moment, grinning with excitement. Then a bell sounded, and they were off.

If only she was right, and there was a chance of all this happening again.

The wisdom that comes with age was needling, he found, because it brought the clarity of hindsight without the means to change anything. He’d spent so much of his early adulthood thinking he’d been truncated in life, because of his leg. Because he hadn’t been able to say he’d served in a war, that great marker of identity. But war had marked his father in a manner that had left him forever damaged, and it had wiped Skip’s mark away completely. They were the truncated ones—them and countless others who’d gone before and were doubtless to follow, since the world that purported to want peace seemed always to be at war. All Cal had had to do was pick up the pieces of his own mistakes. In fact, that, as he saw it now, was his life’s work: trying to make right what he’d gotten wrong. Maybe that was what Sean Robison had been talking about in the fourth grade; maybe Cal’s special thing was his determination, after taking a wrecking ball to his life, to put it back together. Wasn’t it a fair measure of a person, what they did with their mistakes? How they managed to stumble into some of the right steps, after taking all the wrong ones?

He wasn’t sure. He was too easy on himself, certainly. Too lax. He could forget what he and Becky talked about last week, but he heard Sean speaking to him as if it had happened that morning. He also heard Becky’s grassy voice as she spoke to him in Fink’s for the first time. He saw his father’s face when he first held Skip, and remembered his own surprise. Saw Tom and Skip figure-eighting their bicycles in the street out in front of the house and nearly colliding. Felt the stubbly back of Skip’s neck when he hugged him for what turned out to be the last time. This is why old people seem distant and distracted, he thought. We aren’t living in the past; the past is living in us. And it’s talking. We get old to be able to recalibrate everything we thought was going to be important. We get old just to hear it. It says, the days, the days, the days.

High overhead, the Gemini went roaring by on its tracks. Becky and the little girl airborne, screaming with delight, maybe, while Cal, down on the ground, took the envelope from his pocket and fished out the letter. It was undated, and her eight-year-old handwriting was blocky and uniform.

Dear 60 Year Olde Me,

How’s the weather? Just kidding. How do you like being old as dirt? Also just kidding. I hope you still have a sense of humor!

Really though this is a serious letter. Are you famous? Do you still hate beets? Did you marry Sticky Wilson?

I hope you’ve swum the English Channel and climbed Mount Everest (because you’re too old to do it now). I hope you have a library with a thousand books. I hope you are happy and have a wonderful husband and a wonderful house and lots and lots of wonderful children!

I’ll be going now, but I also want to be sure to say I hope you have straight teeth and super shiny hair.

Most Sincerely,

Long ago, she’d called the letter a vision of her future self. Cal had always imagined it would be some sort of prediction—one that would lay out actual circumstances, dates, maybe a diagram of what she would achieve and experience along the way. Of course, it wasn’t any of those things. She’d told him before—more than once—that she couldn’t predict the future. This “vision” was an eight-year-old’s. It was nothing more than an expression of hope.

She came through the little swinging gate smiling, her cheeks ruddy and her hair blown back.

He bought her a funnel cake, the coils of hot, greasy dough dusted heavily with powdered sugar. She blew on it and carried it, in its folded shell of paper plate, onto the double Ferris wheel with him, where she somehow remembered that the car they’d sat in last time had been orange. This car was green, and as they sat eating warm, greasy dough, it pulled them backward and around and up, higher and higher, until they paused there to let someone on or off, down below. She leaned over and kissed powdered sugar onto his cheek.

The view, which seemed made for them because of the day, and because they’d stopped at the Ferris wheel’s highest point, was panoramic, breathtaking. Almost too much; Cal had a mild fear of heights and felt like the two of them could vanish into thin air, up there, and no one would even notice. Plus, the car was rocking a little. Becky, he realized, was moving forward and back, rocking it deliberately. Don’t, he wanted to tell her, but the look she gave him—impish, challenging—said, Do. So he moved his body forward and back, rocking the car with her, and before long, as if by their doing, the wheel began to turn.

Acknowledgments

I’m immensely grateful to my partner, Fred Blair, for his love, strength, and resilience. Our life together has been contorted, at times, for the sake of my writing, and he’s remained an unwavering pillar of encouragement. After more than twenty-five years, he’s still the reader I’m most curious about and the person I most want to see when I walk into a room.

Thank you to Michael Carroll for venturing into adulthood with me, for sharing the same vision and drive, and for building with me a friendship that’s turned out to be lifelong and defining.

Thank you to Nicole Aragi, my agent, for believing in this novel’s potential from the earliest pages, and for knowing exactly what to do, once I finally stopped fiddling. Her ardor, acumen, and true-grit buoyancy are a wonder to behold, and I’m honored to be one of her authors.

Thank you to Robin Desser, my editor, who went above and beyond for this book. She heard the tone I was reaching for and helped me reach it. She saw the path I wanted to follow and kept steering me back to it—through multiple drafts. It’s phenomenal and inspiring to know that your editor cares about the story as much as you do, and to watch that care deepen as the work progresses. Robin’s wisdom is matched only by her generosity of spirit, and there isn’t a scene in Buckeye that wasn’t improved by her edits. I’m a better writer for having worked with her and am deeply grateful for the experience.

Thank you to Andy Ward, whose faith in this book—and in me, over the years—has been a beacon. Thank you to Clio Seraphim for her narrative insights, her laser-sharp eye, and for so deftly shepherding the edited manuscript through the entire production process.

Thank you to Erin Richards, Greg Mollica, Ted Allen, Leila Tejani, and the entire amazing team of people at Penguin Random House who handled this novel with such care and precision. Thank you to Anna Kochman for an arrestingly beautiful cover. Thank you to Kelsey Day at Aragi, Inc., for her vital assistance in areas that confound me.

Thank you to the MacDowell Foundation for generously providing me with time and a quiet place to work on this book.

Thank you to Maribeth Batcha, Hannah Tinti, and Lena Valencia for their tremendous understanding and support throughout the revising of this novel. They are the salt of the Earth, and I’m proud to share the deck of the good ship One Story with them.

Thank you to the following people for their time and knowledge: Dan Antoszyk, my brother James Bles, Donnie Conner, Brad Felver, Cindy Felver, Maybelle Keyser-Butson, Judy Lewis, David McConnell, Keith McDermott, Karen DeLuca Stephens, the late Robert Lee Thomas, and Chai Xeuwen. Thank you to Sophia Efthimiatou for years of love and bolstering. Thank you to Edmund White for his friendship and guidance and for giving me the courage to keep going.

Thank you to Karen Ramspacher and Craig Ferguson for so thoughtfully putting themselves in the right place at the right time. Thank you to Steve Quester, Mike Bloxham, Denver Butson, and Rhonda Keyser for bringing so much passion and joy into the lives of those around them.

Thank you to the VanDevenders (to whom this book is dedicated) for so many things, but mainly for opening their hearts to me many years ago and for letting me stay there.

Thank you to my mother, Beverly Neel; my sister, Betty Bles-Webber; and the rest of my incredible family. Thank you to Jon-Michael Roy for the love he brought to us and for the legacy of love he left behind.

Finally, a heartfelt wave of gratitude sent across the void to Susan Kamil, who first took a chance on me and my writing and who became such a dear and formative presence in my life. Thank you, Susan. Your voice still echoes, and your presence is still felt. I hope Mrs. Dodson was right.

About the Author

Patrick Ryan is the author of the story collection The Dream Life of Astronauts (named one of the Best Books of the Year by the St. Louis Times-Dispatch, LitHub, Refinery 29, and Electric Literature, and longlisted for The Story Prize) and the linked story collection Send Me. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, the anthology Tales of Two Cities, and elsewhere. The former associate editor of Granta, he is the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine One Story. He lives in New York City.

patrickryanbooks.com

Instagram: @patrickryannyc

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