I stared at her. “Who told you?”
“Marlene. She’s been stewing for two weeks. He’s been in a state.” Ada folded her hands in her lap. “I didn’t raise him to do that, Karen. I want you to know. Whatever he’s told you, I didn’t.”
“I know.”
“He’s frightened of you. Did you know that?”
I hadn’t.
“He thinks you’ll take the place away. That you’ll sell it and leave him with nothing. He’s never owned an acre in his life, and he’s fifty-six.” She shook her head slowly. “Tom should have given him a share. I told him so. But Tom said Dwayne would only sell it.”
“Tom was probably right.”
“Probably. But it left a splinter.”
She looked at me, and her eyes were Tom’s eyes, pale gray and steady. “I don’t ask you to forgive him. I only ask that you don’t slam the door.”
I thought about the letter, folded in my coat.
Give him a way back.
“I won’t slam it,” I said.
I went to see Dwayne on a Sunday afternoon in October, when the first cold front had come through and the cottonwoods were turning yellow along the creek. He lived in a neat gray house with a three-car garage and a flag on the porch. A boat sat in the driveway, covered in a blue tarp.
Marlene answered the door. She was a small, tired woman with gray-blonde hair and a worn gray cardigan. When she saw me, her face did something complicated.
“Karen,” she whispered. “He’s in the den.”
“Is he home?”
“He hasn’t left the house in a
week.”
She led me through the kitchen. Dwayne sat in a leather recliner in front of a television that wasn’t on, a heavy, sandy-haired man in a flannel shirt, with Tom’s long jaw and none of Tom’s ease. He saw me in the doorway and went gray under the tan.
“I’m not here to fight,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
“I brought something.” I held up the envelope. “Can I sit?”
He gestured to the couch. I sat, and set the envelope on the coffee table between us.
