“Dad!” Sean called.
Startled, Paul turned, and with the sway of his body, the ladder popped off the roof. He pitched his weight forward until it snapped tight again. His son stood near the base of the ladder with Iris, who held Sean’s hand and waved a newspaper. She wore her slippers and cotton nightdress. She said something he couldn’t make out.
“Can’t hear you!” he called. He could hardly hear her in the house, either. In her socks or foam slippers, she whispered around the wood floors. She was sixty now, an age he could no longer ignore, her silver hair still cropped short.
“Come down,” Iris said. “Esther’s here. You’ll want to see this.” She shook the paper, and even from that height he could see the loose skin drooping on the underside of her arm like a wet sock. He looked at the fascia board. She had lived long enough to turn sixty. Who: his mother, a widow for almost twenty years. He knew what she wanted to show him, the news he’d seen in the paper at the coffee shop early that morning. Who, what, where, when: Jess Winters, a girl gone missing at age seventeen from Sycamore almost two decades ago. Why, how: No one knew.
He said, “I saw it.”
“Are you okay up there? Be careful. That ladder looks off.”
“Mom, I’m fine.” He tried not to bristle at her tone, her constant clucking and worrying. “I’ll be down in a minute, okay? Let me finish this stretch.”
Iris didn’t answer. When he glanced down, she gazed at the orchard rows, shielding her eyes.
“Miss Esther brought doughnuts, Dad,” Sean said. “Doughnuts, doughnuts, doughnuts.” He dropped Iris’s hand and started to run in circles, his pajama top ballooning with air. The white bandage on his knee flapped loose.
Iris squinted up at Paul and swatted the paper against her open palm. “Come down, honey. And be careful.” She walked toward the house, seeming to float across the grass.
He sighed and started down, keeping his weight forward. He needed to reset the ladder anyway.
“Hey, Esther,” Paul said, leaning into her hug. She still smelled like the vanilla lotion she’d kept on her school desk—he always thought of her when Caryn used a store tester. Esther had been the first one there when his father died, bringing box after box of pastries and answering the door and phone and running errands. She didn’t look much different than she had then, a little heavier around the hips maybe, a little grayer in her frizzy curls. Her face, with those sharp blue eyes and round chin, reminded him of a cat. Or an elf. It always had shamed him when he would get aroused when she’d pace in front of the class in all her loud strangeness, her skirts swirling like a dust devil. Of course, he could get aroused by a stiff wind then. Hell, just the word stiff would do the trick. But she was the one who taught him how to write. “Stop bullshitting,” she’d write in the margins. “Say what you mean. Shut up and get on with it, darling. SNORE. Get to the point. Careful with commas; they can change everything.”
“Hey yourself, honey,” Esther said. “Goddamn it. I hate it for you. Hate it.”
He pulled away gently. “Thanks.”
“Fucking cancer.”
Iris said, “Esther,” and nodded at Sean, who sat at the counter with a doughnut on a plate in front of him. His eyes were round.
Esther said, “There’s a time and place for swearing, darling, and this is one of them. I’m sure your father knows.”
Paul said, “We left the cuss jar at home, didn’t we, buddy?”
Sean nodded and stuck his finger in the hole of his doughnut. “The f-word’s a quarter.”
Esther laughed. “Smart kid.” She pointed at the white pastry box on the counter, printed with yum in bright yellow block letters. “Have one. Save me from myself.”
Iris pointed at Sean’s doughnut. “Eat. Don’t play with it.”
“I am,” Sean said. He broke off a piece but didn’t put it in his mouth.
Esther touched Paul’s arm. “Tell me about the news racket. I keep track of your bylines. You keeping those crooks in the legislature on their toes?”
“Trying,” Paul said. “I’m on leave right now.”
“Of course you are.” She smacked her forehead and then tapped the paper folded at her elbow. “You saw the paper today?”
He nodded. “This morning when I went for coffee.”
Iris said, “I still can’t believe it. I can’t believe it’s her.”
“Who?” Sean said.
“Oh, a friend of your father’s from high school,” Iris said.
Paul shook his head, irritated by the description. “Not exactly a friend. Someone I knew.”
Iris frowned at him. “She was a friend. A good kid,” she said. “I don’t care about the rest of it.” She picked up a cloth from the sink and wiped the counter.
His hands curled into fists. “You don’t care about what they did to Dani? Or Rachel?”
“They didn’t do it to Dani and Rachel. It happened.”
“It didn’t just happen. It wasn’t an act of God, like a hurricane or something.”
“So what?” Iris said. “That’s not what we’re talking about. What is wrong with you? Think about her mother. Think about the bigger picture here.”
“Bones in a dry wash,” Esther said. “A goddamn ditch.”
Sean looked at Paul. “What bones, Daddy?”
Paul patted Sean’s back. “Nothing. It’s okay, buddy.” He knocked his sprained wrist against the counter and winced. He rubbed at the elastic bandage. “I forgave them a long time ago.”
Esther narrowed her eyes. “Forgave them? How noble of you.” She snorted. “What did you have to forgive? What business was it of yours? I love Dani and Rachel, too, but, honey, this isn’t the time for petty teenage grievances.”
He started at the vehemence in her tone. “They were like family to me. In a way.”
“They weren’t your family,” Iris said.
“I said ‘like’ family. But they might have been if—”
“You weren’t going to marry her,” Iris said. “You were too young.”
“Marry who?” Sean picked at the bandage at his elbow. “Mama?”
“No, buddy. It’s okay. Leave that alone.”
Iris scrubbed at a spot on the tile. “I did my best, you know. I did my best without him. I made the best family I could.”
Paul blinked. He saw her standing over the sink with the clippers, buzzing her head, the clouds of hair falling to the basin. She’d said, “Who needs it?” She’d never grown it out again, kept it cropped short.
“Mom, I know that. That’s not what I’m saying.”
Esther folded her arms on the counter and rested her chin on her forearms. “Adam was like your father.”
“No,” Paul said. He pictured Adam Newell, the man with his face contorted at the dinner table, the man in the moonlit orchard. That old angry heat expanded in his stomach, a sensation that had died down once he’d moved away but with which he always wrestled. Deep breaths, love, he could hear Caryn say. I don’t want your heart to blow.
“He wasn’t like my father. He was in no way like my father.”
“No, I mean he was like family, like a father figure,” Esther said. “That’s why you took it to heart.”