who nodded thanks, and poured herself another red wine from the cask. Frank must have told Lee. It would come out about the night drives, the fines, everything. Eve took her plate to the sink, lit a cigarette and stood by the open back door, blowing smoke out into the night air. The fact that Lee wouldn’t meet Dot’s eye wasn’t necessarily unusual but she wished, just wished, someone would speak. Get it over with.
‘So those people who came this morning,’ she found herself beginning.
‘I had a letter today,’ Lee cut across her. ‘From an old schoolfriend. She’s got a fine life now, done very well for herself. Nice neighbourhood, three beautiful children, architect husband on the town council and she’s on the school board, though she doesn’t have to work.’
Frank snorted.
‘And you know what just happened? Just last year, when she’s forty-five years old? He shows up. The baby she had at seventeen and adopted out and never told anyone about. Her husband doesn’t even know. The baby’s father, whoever he is, doesn’t know. And the boy, in his late twenties now, comes back.’
As Lee was talking, Dorothy saw it, only the hallway was their hallway, the street outside their own. A few days before Christmas she walked down the hall and saw the wobbly shape of a strange man through the bubbled-glass front door. She slung the bolt on. Opened the door. Through the safety of the gap, she asked if he was lost. She could see now he was no threat, a slight man, narrow shoulders, wearing a coat that didn’t look enough for the weather. ‘ “Are you lost, honey?” and he said to her, “You don’t know me. But I think I am your son.” ’
‘She had a baby when she was seventeen?’ Ruth asked.
‘Seventeen.’
Dot felt it like an electric jolt, that lost baby transformed into a young man wearing a suit especially for the visit, a man who had brushed his hair and shaved and cleaned his teeth that morning knowing what he was about to do.
A friend of Frank’s tooted from the street, his car idling. Their father pushed his chair back and took his plate to the sink and stepped into the hallway and stumbled over the box that waited for the antique dealer’s assessment. It contained a fox-fur shrug, three crystal decanters, a couple of picture frames with the family photos removed, a blue vase made of Danish glass, Georgian candelabras, several round and rectangular silver trays, an incomplete set of silver cutlery with mother-of-pearl handles, a tangled rhinestone necklace, the thick lacquered folder that housed an ancestor’s coin collection and the Kodak Instamatic camera, the device on which Frank had recorded their childhoods, its black nose sticking out between the twisty stalks of the candlesticks as though it was coming up for air.
3. Yeah, Everything
Frank was waiting at the bottom of the escalator with his thinning hair, and Eve hugged the familiar leanness of his body underneath the woollen jumper, the angled plates of his shoulders. ‘I thought Dorothy was coming?’ he said.
‘She said to send her love. She’s got a classroom placement.’
‘Yes, yes. She must be very busy.’
‘She said to say sorry. She sends her love.’
‘You’ve got thin, Evie.’
‘Have I?’
They waited for her suitcase at the conveyor belt together. The other travellers were middle-aged suits. Sales reps maybe, or farmers. Evelyn lurched towards the wrong suitcase twice before hers passed, the same bright blue as the others, the colour that reminded her of the hospice where she often delivered flowers.
‘Your mother ties a ribbon around the handle.’
‘I should do that.’
The airport was tiny, and a station wagon was just outside. Not his; the car belonged to the person whose house he was minding. The dog panted in the boot, a handsome dog, black and tan and watching intently as they approached. Her father opened the boot and pushed a hand towards the dog, holding it back when it rose as though to get out.
‘Hey. Boy,’ Evelyn said, unable to remember this latest dog’s name though her father might have mentioned it in one of his recent late-night calls. It circled itself and sniffed at the suitcase, growling slightly. She buckled herself into the passenger seat and Frank drove them away from the signs directing traffic towards the city. The car smelled doggy. Evelyn pulled the inhaler from her bag, unwound the Walkman cord from around it, shook fluff out of the mouthpiece and blew into the top to dislodge