the house felt even more abandoned. I walked from room to room, touching boxes and the doors of empty closets. The violent shock of my earlier visit devolved into forlorn sorrow. I tried to imagine the clear spaciousness of when I’d lived there alone before Addie. But I couldn’t see past the deserted rooms.
The top shelf of the bureau I’d shared with Adam still bulged with old single gloves, the odd scarf, and a few stray photographs that I kept separate from the photo albums and the shoe box of family snapshots. A wide, white envelope held the photo of the burned Japanese woman that Frank had left years before. With it was the photo of me and Addie that Momma had been looking at when she told me about my father. I recalled A.’s face in those few short days after I found her when she was not yet Addie. The mixture of horror and empathy that had bloomed across her face as she held the picture of the Japanese woman that day was one of the things that led me to trust her so. That quality was still there in Adam; I still trusted him deeply, intuitively. He had changed so much, yet remained the same. But I knew no more about him after almost twenty years. I had no idea what changes twenty more years would bring, but I sensed in him something new since we’d moved to Florida. Good, but slightly different, as if his voice held new frequencies just over the edge of my ability to hear.
I put the two photographs back in the envelope and packed them.
The next day warmed unseasonably. I would have preferred to do all of the moving alone, but knew I couldn’t manage the furniture on my own and so had asked Joe to help. I hadn’t told anyone else about my trip back to the farm. I didn’t want to take any chances, even though Joe assured me there had been no more phone calls or visits from the sheriff.
It wasn’t that difficult to withhold information, even about where, exactly, we were living, and Joe didn’t press. Without Momma, our family had no center. Except for the day we cleaned Momma’s closets, I’d hardly seen Bertie or Rita. As Joe and I sweated, cramming headboard, tables, and chairs into the back of the truck, he told me about Rita’s move to Hickory, where her new boyfriend lived. She worked at a store there and rented a little apartment.
Like Daddy, Joe had somehow become middle-aged while still in his thirties. Since Momma’s death, he’d even taken up pipe-smoking and now smelled of the same sweet tobacco Daddy smoked. When we’d finished with the furniture and hitched the horse trailer to the truck, Joe hugged me, a rare thing for him. “Come back when you can.” His voice thickened. Of all of them, I felt he was the most likely to forgive Adam, the most likely to find a way to treat him like an ordinary man.
“Thank you, Joe. I will,” I whispered as he released me. I felt I should say more, but I didn’t trust myself. As I watched his car pull away and his hand sweep out the window in a final wave, I knew that I—we—would not be coming back.
As night fell, I leaned against the porch, surveying the pastures and star-filled sky above the stables. A stone of sorrow grew in my stomach. The cooling night air smelled of spring.
Only one task remained. For years, Adam and I had measured the height of our daughters each year in the dining-room doorway. Dozens of horizontal pencil marks, dates, and initials marked the door frame. The lowest mark was Jennie and Lil in early 1959, when they were toddlers. The highest was marked “Dad.” I was about three inches below him.
The nails that held the board to the door frame, hammered home long before I had been born, groaned as I pried them loose with a crowbar. I worked up one side and then down the other. By fractions of an inch, the nails released. Finally, the board clattered to the floor, its dual row of nails jutting up. By the back-porch light, I banged all the nails out except a center stubborn one, then wedged the board into the tight press of the furniture strapped into the truck bed.
After I made a final sweep of each room, I stood in the hall and sang, as steady as