Outside the windshield stretched long driveways and big front yards, simple one-story ranch homes dwarfed by mature oaks, their leaves still green and shiny. All this openness should have made it easier to breathe, but the air itself felt weighted, my lungs like bags of sand. My father had been discharged this morning. He and Andrew were waiting for us at the house, and I had no idea what to expect.
“That was my school,” I told Duke, pointing at Glenwood Elementary. The “Little Red Schoolhouse” had started as a one-teacher school in a dugout on the old Glenn farm. In 1915, it was disassembled and transported by wagon a quarter mile east, where it would remain. As a child, I’d had trouble understanding that buildings weren’t permanent, that they could be taken apart and stitched back together somewhere else. Sometimes I had nightmares of lying in a bed floating in vast empty space, nothing tethering it to a home, to the world.
“My mom taught third grade there. We used to decorate her classroom together at the start of each school year.” I was babbling. I didn’t care.
I’d loved sitting across from my mother at her desk, digging inside giant tin boxes of art supplies. One year we’d drawn and cut out characters from Charlotte’s Web, hours of painstaking work because we wanted to be precise with the parts of Charlotte’s legs, the way she named them for Wilbur: “the coxa, the trochanter, the femur, the patella, the tibia, the metatarsus, and the tarsus.” We spent three afternoons drawing insects for the web, gluing sequins and glitter onto doomed wings. I liked to let the glue dry on my fingers and peel it off in one eerie film.
“That sounds nice,” Duke said. Not quite chilly, but reserved. He softened. “I wish I’d gotten the chance to meet her.”
“Me too.” I hesitated, then reached across the console for his hand. After a moment, his fingers closed around mine. “Look, if he’s drinking—”
“It’s going to be okay,” he said. So firm and confident, such easy certainty of favorable outcomes.
As I turned into my old neighborhood, nostalgia was the flap of a great wing. Here was where I’d first felt the wobbling freedom of a bike without training wheels, my mother’s cheers floating like a kite behind me. Here was the Lowensteins’ house, my old friend Levi whom I’d once overheard telling another guy that screwing me would be like screwing a telephone pole. And here, before us, was my childhood home. The red brick that, on white winter days, stood out from sky and snow like a pulsing heart.
In the semicircular gravel drive, I clutched the key in the ignition. There was the pecan tree I’d climbed when I was eleven or twelve and had found the flask in my dad’s boot. I’d tucked it high in the branches, thinking if he couldn’t find it, he couldn’t drink, and if he couldn’t drink, he couldn’t hit. Later I’d heard him yelling at my mom. Cabinet doors slamming, my mom’s low, calm voice: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, John.” I’d trembled in my room. How could I be so stupid? Of course he’d blame her. But I was too scared to tell the truth.
I took a deep, queasy breath. Duke turned to me. He wanted to keep punishing me with aloofness, I could tell, but it was against his nature. “You okay?” he murmured.
I gave a shaky half laugh. “Peachy.”
Then Andrew stepped out of the house.
“Andrew!” I called, flinging open the door. “Look at you! You’re so tall!”
“Not really,” he said, as I pulled him in for a hug. His preteen body was a collection of bones growing too fast for clothes to keep up. His jeans were half an inch too short, revealing white Nike ankle socks. His shoulder blades were sharp under my palms, tensing like prehistoric wings. His feline face, all green eyes and cheekbones, looked so much like our mother’s it took my breath away. He was wearing his straight blond hair longish, so it fell in a swoop to his eyes. When he pulled away, he flicked his head back like a member of a boy band.
Behind Andrew, my father winced with each step toward us. A thick white neck brace cradled his chin. A red-black scab covered the bridge of his nose. Glistening black bruises extended from the inner corner of each eye to below the frames of his glasses. I’d never seen him look so fragile. I wanted to take my fingers to those bruises. To press him where it hurt. To ask how he liked it. But my legs also wobbled with the reality of his injuries, his mortality. Even without them, he had aged. His knees looked pointy through his jeans, and he was shorter than I remembered. But those baseball-mitt hands. I’d read once that human hair and nails continue to grow even after death. Would my father’s hands ever stop growing?
“Cassie,” he said. It was his Newly Sober Voice, gruff with shame. “It’s great to see you. And you must be Duke.”
Duke shook my father’s hand. “Pleasure to meet you, sir.”
Despite the circumstances, Duke seemed wired by a desire to impress my father. Before we’d left I’d walked into the bathroom to see him attempting to tame his curls with a slap of some dusty-lidded hair product. A tiny scab on his chin had dried where he’d shaved his usual stubble.
“Hi,” I said stiffly, before turning to Andrew. “You ready, buddy? Need help with your bags?”
Andrew looked at my father, who said to me, “You’ve had a long drive. Stay the night, at least. It’s Thanksgiving tomorrow!”
“We talked about this,” I said to Andrew. “We’ll have Thanksgiving back in Austin.”
“I bought groceries,” my father said. “We—”
I nearly dropped the car keys. “You drove? Was Andrew in the car?”
“I ordered stuff online,” Andrew said, toeing the gravel with his black Converse. “It all got delivered. The turkey’s already defrosting.”
My pulse throbbed at my temples. Too much coffee, too little water. My eyes ached.
“Please.” My father reached toward me, as if he might touch my shoulder, and then let his hand drop. “Just tonight. I’ve got Italian chicken pasta in the slow cooker,” he added hopefully.
I wanted to remind him of our last phone call, the way he’d hissed: Leaving at the first opportunity and then calling out of the blue with “you promised.” He’d sounded like he despised me. Now here he was, cooking my favorite meal. I’d never known which version of him was real.
“No, thanks,” I said, right as Duke leaned into me, murmuring, “We were going to spend the night somewhere anyway.”
I glared at him, furious that we couldn’t be united on this one thing, but Andrew was already walking back toward the house. I couldn’t read him. Did he want us to stay? Did he want to stay, despite everything?
My father clapped once, then winced, touching his ribs. “It’s settled. Let me help with your bags.”
“You’re hurt,” I snapped as I popped the trunk and yanked out my small duffel. “Hey, Andrew,” I called, “wait up!”
I pulled up short inside.
“Do you like it?” my father asked behind me.
At first, I couldn’t figure out how the configuration of my childhood home had changed so dramatically. Then I realized two walls had been knocked down, opening the dining room to the kitchen and the kitchen to the living room. The buttercream walls were repainted cappuccino-brown, the carpet replaced by white ceramic tile, shiny as veneers. The house felt masculine and country with the cherrywood TV armoire, the pine breakfast table with a star carved onto the back of each chair.
The brick fireplace mantel—the one from which my grandfather’s urn had fallen—had been painted white, and the urn itself was missing. Instead there stood half a dozen framed photos: my parents slicing into a wedding cake; my parents and me on some lost Christmas morning; Andrew and our father, thrusting their saugeye at the camera, the fish’s iridescent green scales catching the light. At this one, I felt an orphan’s sorrow.
“The couch,” I said suddenly, turning back to the living room. I avoided looking at his old leather chair, his preferred whiskey seat. “What happened to the couch?”
“What couch?” My father stared at the taupe microfiber set in its place. “Not that ratty old thing from when you were a kid?”
“Did you get rid of it?”