Two
I got into the car and drove back to my father’s house.
After Mom had died, I’d still thought of it for the longest time as my parents’ place, even though Dad was living there without her. It took a year or so for me to move past that. With Dad dead less than a week, I knew it was going to take a while before I could think of it as anything but his place.
But it wasn’t. Not anymore. It was mine.
And my brother’s.
I’d never lived here. There was a guest room where I always slept when I came to visit, but there were no mementoes from my childhood here. No dresser drawer with stashes of Playboy and Penthouse, no model cars on the shelves, no posters on the walls. My parents had bought this place when I was twenty-one. I’d already moved out of our house on Stonywood Drive, in the heart of Promise Falls. My parents had hoped one of their sons would make something of himself, but put that dream on hold when I bailed on my university career in Albany and gotten a job at a Beekman Street art gallery in Saratoga Springs.
My parents were never farmers, but when they’d spotted this place, it fit the bill. First, it was out in the country, several hundred yards from the closest neighbor. They’d have their privacy. Some isolation. It reduced the likelihood of another incident.
Second, it was still a relatively short drive to work for Dad. But instead of driving into Promise Falls, through the downtown, and out the other side, he’d take the bypass they finished back in the late 1970s. Dad liked working for P&L. He didn’t want to look for something closer to home.
Third, the house was charming, with its dormer windows and wraparound porch. Mom had loved to sit out there, three seasons out of the year. The place came with a barn, which Dad didn’t have much need for, other than to store tools and park the lawn tractor. But they both loved the look of the structure, even if it wasn’t storing hay every fall.
There was a lot of property, but my parents maintained only about two acres of it. Behind the house, the yard stretched out flat for about sixty feet, then sloped down and out of sight to a creek that wound its way to the river that flowed into the center of town and cascaded over Promise Falls.
I’d only been down to the creek once since I’d come home. A task awaited me there, when I finally felt up to it.
Some of the flat and treeless land, beyond where Dad maintained it, was rented to neighboring farm interests. For years, that had provided my parents with a secondary—if nominal—income. The closest woods were across the highway. When you turned in off the main road and started up the drive, the house and barn sat on the horizon like a couple of boxes on a flatcar. Mom always said she liked a long driveway because when she saw someone turn in—which was not, she’d have been the first to admit, often—it gave her plenty of time to steel herself.
“People don’t usually come to your door with good news,” she’d said on more than one occasion. It had certainly been her experience, most notably when she was a young girl, and officials of the U.S. government had come to inform her mother that her father would not be coming home from Korea.
I nosed the car close to the steps that led up to the porch, parking my four-wheel-drive Audi Q5 next to Dad’s ten-year-old Chrysler minivan. He didn’t think much of my German wheels. He questioned supporting the economies of nations we once fought. “I suppose,” he’d said a few months ago, “when they start importing cars from North Vietnam, you’ll buy one of those.” Since he was so concerned, I offered to return for him his beloved Sony TV with a screen big enough that he could actually see the puck when watching the Stanley Cup playoffs.
“It being a Japanese set and all,” I’d said.
“Touch that thing and I’ll knock your block off,” he’d said.
I took the porch steps two at a time, unlocked the front door—I hadn’t needed to take a house key from Dad’s ring; I’d always had one—and went into the kitchen. The clock on the wall said it was nearly four thirty. Time to start thinking about something for dinner.
I hunted around in the fridge t