“Just the one time in Pittsburgh.”
“That’s right. Then you know. She’s beautiful. Not hard at all to stand on the beach with her in her bikini during family vacations. Sorry, but true. Otherwise pleasantly, smartly suburban. Content, I think. This will rattle her, but I doubt it will tear her apart.”
“Yeah? Be best if it worked out that way. Wasn’t so lucky myself.”
“That right?” Tom looks up at the sky and spins in a circle again. “But you say a word against Jon in Joline’s earshot, that March wind you had wailing out here this afternoon? Be like a June breeze.”
“I gathered they were pretty tight.”
“You gathered? Sometimes I don’t know where one begins and the other ends.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding. You got sisters?”
“Two.”
“Close?”
“When we were children, sure.”
“This is a different story. She made it clear early and often who the principal man in her life was and would be. I got it. I can roll with it.”
Tom again looks up, and arches his back with his arms spread. He closes his eyes and smiles.
“What’s he like?” Marc asks. He is remembering Joline had said Marc had reminded her of her brother.
“Who, Jon? A little aloof, you know? Brooding. Not without a dark sense of humor. Good-looking, too, like every damn cousin twice removed in that family.”
A shadow passes over Tom’s face, and he opens his eyes. He straightens his back and looks at Marc with a thin smile.
“Thanks for walking me out here. It’s quite a place. A little center of the universe.”
“Thanks. I’ve always thought that myself.”
Tom stares back at the house where the windows are shining a deep yellow.
“Jesus, it looks like a Christmas card.”
He takes a single step toward it, and then turns back and looks at Marc.
“I don’t think I’m made for this,” he says.
“For what?”
“For fatherhood. You got no idea how it changes things.”
And then Tom walks back toward the house, trying to step lightly so his shoes won’t break through the crusted snow.
*
Marc’s unable to sleep. The nights he can’t aren’t unusual anymore, and have become more numerous since Kathleen has come to live with him, though he knows this one is not about the rhythms of growing older, but about Tom and Joline sleeping upstairs, the baby between them. And about Kathleen, who is walking the difficult balance of her sadness over her son and her joy over her granddaughter, two rooms that have opened inside her that she doesn’t yet know how to fill. And, if he’s honest with himself, it’s about Claire’s ghost, which he imagines with its face pressed to the house windows, outside in the cold, wanting in, wanting to hover over the infant girl and the sleeping mother and father.