Charles felt for the key in his pocket, opened the side door, walked up the stairs, and stood in the doorway of his father’s office. He felt along the wall and turned on the light switch. On the left wall was a line of bookcases that held financial reference books, autobiographies, a bunch of glass plaques he’d been awarded when handling a company’s IPO. There was a silver-framed photograph of his mother in a bridal gown next to the plaques. She looked younger than Charles was now, her hair much longer and her body a bit thinner.
Behind the bookshelves was an old bar cart, the kind that he imagined had once been regularly wheeled around office buildings in late afternoons. Cocktail hour. A crystal decanter sat on top, filled with amber-colored liquid. There was one lowball glass beside it, scrubbed clean. In the middle of the room was a big glass-topped desk. There was a Dell laptop closed in the center of the desk. His mother probably hadn’t opened it once since he’d been here last. She’d kept this room absolutely untouched, as if it were a museum or a crime scene.
And that was the worst of it—she’d honored his memory. She probably figured he’d had a short-lived tryst with a woman, someone around her age. It would have been easier to swallow that, easier to accept that his father had reached out for someone for purely sexual reasons. As hard as Charles tried, he couldn’t stop thinking about his father going into a store and choosing something for Bronwyn, asking the clerk to wrap it carefully. And then presenting it to her—when? Did they meet privately, away from the rest of the family?
No, his mother couldn’t know any of that. Charles hadn’t known, either. But according to Bronwyn, Scott did. Why hadn’t he told anyone about it? Telling seemed like just the kind of thing Scott would do. Did he feel some kind of power, keeping what he’d seen to himself?
Charles wanted to ask his father the same questions he’d asked Bronwyn: Did he really hate Charles that much? Had he sought out Bronwyn as some sort of punishment, because Charles wasn’t the son he wanted? Because Charles didn’t buy that his dad and Bronwyn truly had anything in common; their relationship couldn’t have been out of emotional necessity. It was because of some cruel psychological desire of his father’s to hurt the rest of his family. Right?
Charles stood up, scraping his fingernails up and down his arms. Just outside the window, birds flitted in and out of the birdhouse on the post. He walked over to the window and hefted it up. Cold air swirled in. All the birds scattered except for a cardinal who was greedily eating the last scraps of seed from one of the small windows.
The pressure in his stomach broke free. Charles whirled around, picked up a glass paperweight from his father’s desk, and hurled it at the birdhouse. He hit the metal post on which it stood. The cardinal fluttered away quickly, the house tipped, the paperweight made a slushy thud in the bush below.
The clanging noise resonated through the air for a few hollow seconds. The birdhouse was now tilted about fifteen degrees, seed slowly pouring out of the openings angled toward the ground. Birds rushed to the newly spilled seed on the grass, fighting for scraps. If Charles reached out, he couldn’t touch the house anymore. It was suspended out in the yard, unreachable by human hands. After a moment, a bird hovered by the house and finally settled on the top, poking its beak into one of the partitions.
After that, Charles’s rage felt wrung out. He tried to picture his father coming into his office right now. His dad had needed a friend so badly that he reached out to Bronwyn. A teenage girl. Wasn’t his father supposed to be the strong, unwieldy, impeccably correct man? That was always how he’d portrayed himself.
If his father walked in right now, Charles might not be so afraid of him anymore.
He shut his eyes and saw Bronwyn standing in the gulley, her stomach round and swollen, her face full of pain. He had dated her for three years, and he hadn’t known she was unhappy. He’d envied how interested her parents were in her. She’d made no mention of them being overbearing and impersonal, but she’d turned to his father, maybe at random, definitely in desperation. She never told Charles, never told his friends, just ran away from all of them, too afraid to face what she assumed they knew. Charles wondered if maybe there was more to the story than what Bronwyn had told him. She’d kissed his dad, she said, and not the other way around. Maybe she had even fallen in love with him, a mixed, confused love that was both sexual and childlike. She was so worried about people thinking they were having an affair because maybe in her mind, they were.
All this time, Charles thought Bronwyn had abandoned him because she thought she was better than he was, and that she’d embarked on the Back to the Land adventure because she was a purer, needless, higher-evolved being. But really, she was running away. She was no better than he was.
Charles turned off the overhead light in the office and shut the door. He was halfway down the stairs when he paused, hearing a shuffle and a creak. Someone was in the kitchen.
“Oh,” Scott said when Charles walked into the room. He was standing at the open fridge, peeking at something wrapped in foil on one of the shelves.