“It can take a while,” the man said after Ed had gone back in. “Sometimes you’d swear he’d wandered off into the woods to hunt the bird.”
The man and woman began eating their burgers. It struck her that the woman had yet to say a word. Claire looked directly at her and asked, “Do you live here in town?”
The man turned, and pointed toward the houses that lay along two stretches of road above the highway. “The blue one there. We walk up most afternoons to have lunch here with Ed.”
Finally, the woman spoke. “Michigan? That’s a long way to drive all on your own.”
“It is,” she said. “But I really didn’t have much choice.”
“Visiting family?” the woman asked.
“You could say that, I guess.”
The woman was wearing a hat with a large white brim. Claire began to feel her own scalp prickle with the heat.
“Could you say otherwise?” the man asked.
“My father’s ill,” she said. “Congestive heart failure. He’s in the hospital. So I’m going back to see him.”
The man looked down at his sandwich, and his face darkened, as if this revelation was something he didn’t want to witness. The woman said, “I’m so sorry.”
Inexplicably, Claire felt compelled to add, “The woman who called and told me he was in the hospital—I didn’t even recognize her name. I haven’t seen him in years. I haven’t even spoken to him, and I don’t even know if he knows he has a granddaughter.”
The man looked up at her again, started chewing with some speed, swallowed with difficulty, then said, “Why the hell not?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I said, why the hell not? How can it happen that a man has a granddaughter and doesn’t even know it?”
“Charlie, that’s not our business,” the woman said.
“The man has a granddaughter, Maeve. Child of his only child. And she never even told him.”
Claire watched him go back to his burger and take an oversized bite.
“How do you know that?” she asked. “How do you know I’m his only child?”
He waved his hand at her; through his teeth as he chewed, he said, “It’s written all over your face. All over your face. I’ve seen a thing or two in my time. What a shame.”
At that point Ed banged through the screen door with her sandwich in a paper bag, and walked it over to her and took her money. “Threw in a pickle and chips no charge,” he said with an apologetic smile. “Never mind him,” and he jerked his head toward the man at the table. He’d clearly overheard the conversation. “Figures he’s the local savant. Retired from the railroad, and he sits here every afternoon and guesses about the people come through. Last week he guessed someone was a circus clown. Turned out he’d done a stint as a rodeo clown, and the guy was amazed. Charlie here said he could tell by the way he walked.”
She thanked him and then climbed back into her truck, and when she came around the woman raised her hand and said, “Have a safe trip to Michigan,” but the man wouldn’t look up and just shook his head.
*
Back out on the highway, the wind streaming through—the air-conditioning barely worked, and in the high sun she was better off with the windows down—she thought about it. She had never planned on not speaking with her father. With her mother, either. After she’d nearly been killed, they had taken good care of her, one or the other of them in the hospital until she was released, and then through the long months that her back and shoulder healed. Sometimes when her mother was at work, or was out with her new boyfriend, her father, who had flown home the day he’d heard of the attack, would come by and spend time with her; they’d play Scrabble, or watch daytime TV, or sometimes she would put on music and they would listen together. But he would never ask where she’d been when she’d been stabbed, why she was there, and what it meant that she’d never heard from the man she said she’d loved after the night she was hurt.
One afternoon, when she was strong enough and angry enough at her confinement, and neither of them was at home, she’d packed a suitcase and left a note thanking them for everything. She’d told them she’d be in touch. And then she never was.