“I mean before we disappeared to Rio Vista.”
Tomas rubbed his hands together, a sound like swishing sandpaper. “They were a miserable couple, I’ll tell you that. But that’s nothing new. And they were all Raj, all the time, which isn’t the worst thing. You saw that firsthand, of course.”
“I remember them fighting a lot.”
“You remember correctly,” he said, and his sight panned from the floor to Lydia and back, “but it was more like Mr. Patel fighting and Mrs. Patel shrinking. She was lovely and friendly, and he was an asshole and a pig, and I think that pretty much says it all. I vaguely recall some fight about her wearing jeans, or maybe her jeans were too tight. The word Jordache comes to mind. She should’ve left him, anyway, but I’m guessing that wasn’t an option for her.”
“Because of their families?”
“Maybe that,” he said, “or maybe just their dynamic. The only thing Mr. Patel controlled as much as his wife was his perfect little boy. He was so overbearing he’d never have let her out of the marriage.”
“So you never heard of them having any other kids?”
Her father’s head visibly jerked.
“Kids?” he said. “Besides Raj? Definitely not. She wouldn’t put another kid through that, I don’t think. No, that would be a deal-breaker. Why are you asking me all this?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and she could feel herself curling around Raj’s secret, as if to protect him.
“I’m just glad we got out of there in one piece,” he said.
Lydia sighed. She’d come here to find a path into Raj’s past, but that path had dropped into oblivion. She felt light-headed and tired to the bone.
“I should go home,” she said, lifting herself from the floor.
“It’s too late to drive to Denver,” he said, and began to ramble about snow tires and highway salt and plowing trucks in the manner of someone whose conversational skills had been so neglected that all that remained was a feral kind of monologue. She had the impression that he was glad to veer away from all this talk of the past.
He pointed at the mattress on the floor in the corner. “You can sleep right there next to the woodstove. It’s the warmest spot I’ve got at the moment.”
“That’ll be great.”
“I’d offer you your bedroom but it’s been taken over by reference books.”
“This is fine.”
“I’ll run up and get an extra blanket. Plus there’s a few greeting cards you never got.”
“Greeting cards?”
“One’s from your eighteenth birthday. One’s from Valentine’s. I think I stopped writing them after that. Should still be ten bucks in the birthday card.”
“Should I come with you?”
He paused as he was walking out the shop door. “Sure. I suppose. Only if you want.” Then he ducked into the night.
Because of her father’s hesitation, Lydia walked slowly up the pitted path he’d tracked in the snow, keeping a distance between them. A partial moon had emerged over the mountains and its faint light made the snow glow, exposing fat pines and gnarled clumps of brush. The night was freezing but it felt good to move.
No lights were on, inside or out, so his A-frame appeared crystalline in the moonlight. Alongside the cabin’s small porch were stacks of cardboard boxes half-covered with a tarp, presumably packed with books awaiting shelves.
“Just be a minute,” her dad said when he opened the front door. “Wait out here. Don’t need you getting hurt.”
She didn’t quite understand what he’d meant until a light inside came on and she could see, through the open front door and the two windows that flanked it, that the cabin had been . . . remodeled. It looked for a moment as if he’d enclosed part of the entryway, and maybe even added a narrow hallway down the center of the main room. Then she realized that she wasn’t seeing walls or halls, but aisles.
Let’s just say it got a little tight in there, he’d said earlier, and now she understood. The main room was cross-sectioned by bookshelves that ran the length of the cabin, high enough to meet the ceiling and just narrow enough for a person to walk between. When she ducked her head to look down one of the aisles, she saw that the walls of the hallway and kitchen beyond were also covered in books, just as his workshop had been. She could only imagine what the bedrooms and bathroom looked like.
In her absence, he’d turned the cabin into a library where nothing was ever read, nothing ever checked out. More graveyard than library, he’d said.
The floorboards creaked and groaned under the weight of all those titles as he marched around somewhere inside.
When he appeared again in the doorway he wouldn’t look at her, and she could tell he was embarrassed by their home’s transformation. She realized she might very well have been the first person to ever see it like this. He handed out a folded wool blanket and a wad of brown paper towel.
“You know what that is, don’t you?” he said, gesturing to the wadded paper. “Your mom’s ring.”
“I don’t want it.”
“I should never have given it to Dottie. I was keeping it for you.”
“I really don’t want it.”
“You can give it away or pawn it. Just please take it. Please.”
She tucked it into her satchel. He crammed his hands in his pockets and looked at the glowing sky. A thought occurred to her.
“Is it possible,” she said, standing next to him in the cold, “that Dottie actually loved you? Because I was thinking she kept the ring, didn’t she? She was wearing it when she died. So maybe she put it on because—”
“Romantic,” he said, “I know. Except she only kept it because it was worth something. Another flashy ring for her flashy fingers. Had nothing to do with love, Lydia, believe me.” He may have winked at her in the dark. “Not that I’m bitter.”
Before leading her back toward the workshop, he stepped into the cabin to shut off the lights. Through the icy window she took one last look at the tight warren of shelves he’d created, at the mass of books that had pushed him out of his home, and finally understood what he’d been doing all these years: trying to return to a time in his life that was forever out of reach.
Not unlike Joey, she thought.
In the morning, Lydia awakened on the concrete next to the woodstove, covered by a blanket and snarled inside a sleeping bag. A soft blue light brightened the workshop windows; a crisp Mount Princeton loomed against the panes. Last night her father had set up the space and fluffed her dirty pillow as carefully as a parent at a slumber party. When she finally drifted off he’d been fiddling around at the workbench, tinkering under a dim single light. She didn’t know where he’d slept, if he’d slept.
“Wakey-wakey,” he said. He was perched on his stool in the middle of the room, hooded against the chill.
Lydia blinked into her palms and stretched the arches of her feet. Her father was holding something in his hand, and she realized it was the birthday party photo she’d packed in her satchel on the way out of Denver.
“Is that . . . ?” she said.
“I took the liberty. I wasn’t snooping.”