IT WAS PSYCH 101. When faced with an unpleasant truth they weren’t equipped to handle, most people ran away. Kate found herself running home to Blunt River, New Hampshire. She had a powerful urge to visit her father, since he was the only person who understood her losses as deeply as she did.
Downtown Blunt River was a bustling commercial district full of restaurants, cafés and boutiques, with lots of pedestrians milling about—mostly college students and office workers. The streets unfolded in a grid pattern, neat as a Monopoly board. Many of the historic shoe factories had been repurposed into high-end condos and office parks, but despite the modernized sheen, nothing of significance had changed over the past couple of decades. The Stoned Café was as popular as ever. The retro movie theater was showing a Fellini retrospective. The Thyme-to-Eat Diner was open for business, a decadent high-fat eatery where the waitresses called you “dollface.”
Kate turned off the main drag and drove past the mom-and-pop stores where she and her friends used to hang out after school: the vintage clothing boutique, the indie record store, the cozy feminist bookshop where she and her BFF Heather drank organic coffee, thinking it made them look sophisticated and grown-up.
She left downtown behind and took a meandering three-mile route back to her old neighborhood. She spotted the yellow-brick funeral home where they’d picked up Julia’s ashes, and a dull ache settled in her stomach. On the drive home, Savannah had insisted on holding the cardboard box in her lap. She kept shaking it to confirm that it contained their mother’s ashes, with maybe a few bits of bone. See, Kate? Do you hear that? Shake-shake-shake. And Kate had been mortified but fascinated, which explained her half-hearted attempts to stop her sister. Their father hadn’t said a word. Savannah kept shaking the box, trying to provoke a reaction out of him. It didn’t work. Anything—even a bark of anger—would’ve been preferable to that stony silence.
She drove past snowy fields and dense woods, sycamores and hemlocks swaying in the wind, skeins of snow blowing off their branches like the Dance of the Seven Veils. Almost home. Her stomach sparked with every passing landmark.
Her apprehension ticked up a notch as she rode the three hills up and down. Her father’s house was a renovated gem of salvaged lumber painted deep forest green with stone-gray trim, a combination of colors that pulled the harmony out of the wood and created the illusion of coziness and warmth. The house could’ve been torn from the pages of Country Living magazine, but it was all smoke and mirrors. Her father lived here alone. His family had fled.
She pulled into the slushy driveway and parked behind his Ford Ranger. She took a sharp breath and got out. The cold winter air smelled crisp and delicious. Emerald rows of evergreens defined the white hillsides.
Bram Wolfe came to the door with a plastered-on smile, which surprised her. She never knew what kind of mood he’d be in. Today, he seemed happy to see her. Maybe this time would be different? After her last visit, she’d been depressed for days. Her relationship with James had been pretty new back then; she could remember complaining to him, “I keep expecting my relationship with my father to improve, but it never does.”
“Doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results, is the very definition of insanity,” James had joked. He hadn’t meant her to take it seriously, but she hadn’t been back in three years.
Her father wore a woolly sweater, tweed slacks and polished loafers. He had a perspiring face and a prominent aristocratic nose. His shoulder-length hair had gone completely white, and he tucked it behind his rather large ears. He was tall, and like most tall men, he had a tendency to slouch. Kate had never been able to find herself in him—she took after Julia, thank God. Both she and Savannah shared their mother’s heart-shaped face, her slender frame, her ballerina-like grace and excitable laugh.
“Hey, Dad,” she said with a wave. “How are you?”
“Fine. You?”
“Good.”
“How was the drive?”
“Can’t complain.”
His self-consciousness was contagious. He crossed his arms, and then uncrossed them, while she wobbled the last few yards across the snow and tripped up the porch steps, where she planned on greeting him with a hug. But he beat her to it, gripping her by the elbow and reeling her in, pulling her towards him and giving her a chaste peck on the cheek— except they both moved their heads at the same time and accidentally locked lips.
“Oh sheesh,” she muttered. “Let’s pretend that never happened.” She laughed and wiped her mouth. Oh God, I’m home. His lips were papery dry. “James wanted to come,” she lied, “but there was a crisis at the hospital.”
“Oh. Well, I hope everything’s okay.”
She shrugged. “The locked unit is a cornucopia of alter-nate realities.”
He either missed the irony or ignored it. “I don’t see a ring yet.”
She’d taken off her birthday ring, hoping to avoid this very question. “Nope,” she said with a shrug. “I’d tell you if I was getting married, Dad.”
He nodded slowly. “I see.”
What did he see? What did he understand about her? What had he ever understood about her?
“Maybe next time you can bring James,” Bram said.
“Oh. Absolutely. He wants to meet you.”
“I’d like to meet him, as well.”
Her stomach tensed—well, was that it? Had they already run out of things to say?
“Come inside,” he said.
The front hallway was clean and tidy. Her father’s winter coat hung from the iron coat rack, and his well-insulated boots were tucked underneath the pine bench like battle-hardened soldiers awaiting orders. The woven Navaho basket held today’s mail. The ceramic Chinese bowl cradled his car keys and spare change.
Kate stomped the snow off her boots, shrugged out of her coat and placed everything next to her father’s. Then she followed him into the living room, where the gauzy curtains hung like ghosts, catching the silvery winter light. The house was large and airy, with lots of dark colonial furniture and ever-growing piles of books and magazines.
“You’re looking well, Kate.”
“You too, Dad.”
Okay. How many more bland pleasantries were they going to exchange? She had to break through this wall of avoidance if it killed her. “Well, Dad, I figured it’s been a couple of years since we last saw each other.”
“Three.”
“Right. Three years. That’s a long time.”
“Glass of wine?” he offered politely.
“Sure.” She collapsed in the wingback chair, her favorite piece in the room. Savannah had preferred to snuggle up on the velvet sofa next to the French doors, where she’d do her homework by the dying light of day.
“Be right back.” He disappeared into the kitchen, and she could hear him uncork a bottle of wine and fetch the longstemmed glasses from the china cabinet. “How was your trip?” he asked her—again—through the open doorway.
“Uneventful,” she responded.
“That’s good.”
Next they’d be talking about the weather.
The house was so quiet. No music, no pets. Just her dad and his beloved solitude. She got up and studied the family portrait above the mantelpiece. There was ten-year-old Kate before her mother had killed herself. What a happy-go-lucky kid. No suicide cuts. No evidence of self-harm. In the painting, her parents were smiling, and Kate’s arm was draped protectively around Savannah’s shoulders. It made her want to scream, “Take better care of her! She’s fragile!”
“Lunch is served,” Bram announced.
Kate joined him in the dining room, where the table was set with the good china. Lunch was cold salmon and artichoke salad. “Wow. I wasn’t expecting this,” she said, pleased he’d made an effort. Usually they shared leftovers from the fridge. “Thanks, Dad.”
“Well, today is a special occasion.” He handed her a glass of wine.
“Special?”
“As you say, we haven’t seen each other in quite some time. Cheers.”