Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (41 page)

Two pairs of kid-size boots listed over on the step below them.

He found no other evidence of his father’s second family. No tire swing, no play structure, no Big Wheels in the front yard.

Ben wondered if these kids paged through the Sears catalogs, dreaming about toys they were never going to get. If they had an endless list of chores to do but no money, nothing of their own. If their father frowned and muttered if they even dared to suggest the possibility of an allowance.

The old barn appeared as likely to collapse at any moment as it had when Ben last saw it. The new barn had a fresh coat of paint. Set at an angle beyond it was the familiar long, low shape of the chicken house, a gleam of sunlight reflecting off its tin roof.

A silhouette appeared behind the screen door. When it opened, Dean Hausman stood there.

Smaller than Ben remembered, like everything else.

Ben hadn’t been up here since he and Sandy were about to get married. The visit started out awkward and went downhill fast.

Ben hadn’t spoken to his father since. “Hi, Dad.”

“We’re having breakfast.”

There were no clues in the way he said it. It could have been an invitation to eat with them or a request that Ben depart, and he’d never be able to guess.

He’d expended so much energy once, picking apart his father’s sentences to find the meanings underneath. Trying to locate messages that might not have even been there.

“I can go,” he offered.

“Marnie says to invite you in.”

Hard to believe that Marnie was calling the shots, but Ben nodded his assent. The door closed behind his father with a creak and a slam that pushed Ben’s head under, a violent submersion into the past.

His mother, screaming, “You heartless bastard!” as she shoved the door open. The beige strap of her bra where her bright red blouse slipped off her shoulder
.

The slam of the screen door, the car door. Spinning wheels on the gravel driveway
.

Another slam that heralded the arrival of ice-blue eyes and a faded denim shirt. His father’s smell. “Come with me. I need to show you something.”

Some chore he’d done wrong. Some punishment to be borne
.

Ben held the door open, his gaze caught on his fingers gripping the unpainted metal handle.

The screen sagged. It would need to be replaced, but not this year. Not when it was about time to put the storm windows on.

In the kitchen, the three boys sat along one side of the table with cereal bowls in front of them. They wore white shirts, stiff shoes, and dark blue slacks. Sunday morning, he realized. They would be off to church soon to hear parables and color in pictures of Jesus.

One of them was Aiden, another Ashton. The little one was Atticus. Ben figured the names had to be Marnie’s doing.

He wondered which one would be in charge of carrying the storm windows from the basement. Which would wash the panes with Windex and soft rags from the top of the extension ladder and which would have the job of cleaning from the inside and pointing out the streaks.

None of them looked up to it. They were all so small, even the oldest. Ashton would be ten by now, surely.

Ben had done harder work at ten.

Marnie broke the spell with a greeting, and he let go of the door and greeted her back.

His father settled in his chair at the end of the table while she brushed crumbs off what had to be her own seat and filled the space with empty chatter. When she offered it, he took the chair next to the boys.

They had their father’s blue eyes and light hair, their mother’s fair skin and freckles. They slurped Rice Krispies in silence, kept their elbows off the table and their eyes on their
bowls when they weren’t sneaking glances at him from behind their bangs.

His brothers. Afraid of him. How surreal.

They didn’t know him. But what if they did? Would they still be afraid?

He shouldn’t have come back. Too many things were the same. The clock over the kitchen sink was a bright, painful splash of orange and yellow that hurt him to look at. He remembered his mother buying it on Madeline Island the time they’d taken the ferry over for the day. A smiling sunburst, its rays pointing toward the numbers.

“What brings you up here?” Marnie asked.

She’d been fresh and pretty when his father met her, but she wasn’t anymore.

“I was in Manitowoc,” he said. “Thought I’d drive up.”

She nodded as though that made sense.

Ben’s father ate bent over his plate with one arm curved around it. He’d always done that, as though someone might try to take it away if he didn’t defend it. His hair was thinner and entirely gray now, his body less impressive under his heavy cotton work shirt, but his mannerisms remained deeply familiar.

Ben knew how his father’s soap would smell, but he didn’t know what the old man was thinking. He’d never been able to get inside his head.

Atticus reached for the sugar and knocked over a glass of orange juice—an impertinent advance of vivid color across the white Formica tabletop. The boy’s eyes shot to his father’s face. “I’m sorry! It was an accident.”

“Clean it up,” Dean said.

Marnie wet a cloth under the tap, her movements slow because time had become stiff, starched with tension.

This was the same, then. His father wielded his expectations, his disappointments, like a mallet, and everyone around him cringed, waiting for the blow.

There was no love in this room. No affection. Just a cold man who’d found his first wife and kid so disappointing, he’d given up on them and started over again.

He didn’t seem any more pleased this time.

Atticus mopped at the orange juice, but he didn’t seem to know that he had to change to another part of the rag when the first part got saturated, so he spread the sticky dampness around. He knocked the cloth into a new part of the puddle, and juice spilled over the edge onto the floor.

“For Christ’s sake,” Dean said.

Ben stood and held his hand out for the rag, forcing a smile that he hoped would reassure. “It’s all right,” he said. “I want to help.”

Atticus gave it to him, but if anything he looked more frightened than before.

Ben ran the rag over the edge of the table to stop the spill and then maneuvered around Marnie to the sink, where he rinsed it, wrung it out. “It’s only orange juice,” he said as he finished mopping it up.

His father’s eyes lifted from his plate, and the hard gleam in them woke an old, buried terror in Ben.

Don’t make him mad
.

But his father had already stolen his childhood. He’d taken the farm away, kicked him out of his life. There was nothing left he could take.

“Don’t you start,” Dean warned.

All the kids had gone quiet around the table. Marnie wrung a dish towel, her eyes on her husband’s face.

Ben could feel his jaw thrust out, the tightness spreading up his neck from his shoulders and down to his fists. This was what he’d tried to tell May—how good it could feel to be angry. It was right that he should have some power in this place, at this table, where he’d never had it before.

What did I ever start?
he wondered.
What did I ever do to him?

The wide eyes of the three boys on the other side of the table answered both questions.

They’d done nothing. He’d done nothing.

It was their father who was the problem.

Ben’s fist relaxed.

There was no fight in this kitchen worth getting into. Any angry words he exchanged, any violence he brought here would only be visited on these three boys. They didn’t deserve it.

He resumed his seat and took a polite bite of the scrambled eggs Marnie had placed in front of him.

“You expecting me to give you something?” his father asked. “Hand you money? Beg forgiveness?”

“No. I’m … I just wanted to look around.”

His father dropped his balled-up napkin on top of his plate, signaling that his meal had come to an end. “Look all you want. I’ve got things to do.”

The kitchen door slammed behind him.

Through the screen, Ben watched him walk across the yard toward the barn, a stiff hitch in his step that hadn’t been there the last time Ben was home. More than ever, his father was a rigid son of a bitch. A demanding, difficult bully who’d developed high standards and spent most of his life measuring everyone he met against them and complaining when they fell short.

No wonder Ben hated himself.

Atticus sniffled and shifted in his seat. Marnie put her hand on the boy’s skinny shoulder. Her wide-set gray eyes met Ben’s.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I only wanted to see the farm.”

“Take a look around,” she said quietly. “We’ll be going to church before too long. But I think when we get back …”

“I’ll be sure to be gone by then.”

“Thank you.”

Ben finished his eggs and toast. He put his plate by the sink and went outside, clinging to the door handle until it came to rest soundlessly against the jamb.

He walked straight to the chicken house.

The building sat on a slope, the back side set into the rise of the land so that a relatively nimble boy could easily climb the bricks and onto the roof. The mortar felt crumbly beneath his fingers. Deteriorating, like the rest of the place.

His father would have made him patch the mortar.

He hauled himself up and breathed in the view. Coming off the lake, the air had a bite. He tightened his abs to lock down a cough that wanted to come.

This had been his place once—this vista out over the farm, the hives to his right at the margin of the patch of woods where they cleared brush, chopped firewood, and found a Christmas tree every December. The neat rows of the berry plants over the rise to the left, put to bed until spring. And far off in front of him, Lake Superior, its vastness answering a yearning inside him for something bigger than himself and this farm. Something so huge as to appear endless.

When he’d felt too much as a boy—when he’d needed it—he would come here and be
diminished, the riot of confusion in his head and the pounding in his blood reduced to a minor human storm in a world built on an inhuman scale.

The cold of the roof soaked through his jeans, and Ben wrapped his arms around his knees and rested his chin on his folded hands. He let the water absorb all his roiling, all his turmoil, and turn him flat and calm again. Small enough to disappear.

When he was ready, he looked at himself.

Thirty-two years old. A giant, compared to those boys. Trained as a chef, he’d become a beekeeper and a farmer, like his father.

Like his father, he spent too much time angry, and he unleashed it on the wrong people.

Ben couldn’t know what his father felt about that, but he knew that he hated it, and he wanted it to stop.

“I’m not him,” he said aloud.

He didn’t want to be him—not now, not twenty years from now. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life cynical and simmering with suppressed rage.

He didn’t want to hide inside his own head, either, pressing down on his feelings like those boys, with their cereal and their church shoes and their fear. He could almost
taste
their fear, that flood of salt-copper that came before bile, before pain.

He could see, from up here, that he’d never really been all right on this farm.

That he’d done what he was told and kept himself quiet and small, tamping his feelings tighter and tighter into the pocket he’d made for them.

That he’d left them there, sweating. Unstable. Primed to explode.

He was tired of exploding.

So obvious, but he’d never seen it. Maybe he’d had to feel his own blood beating inside those boys to understand it. To climb onto the chicken house and look at the lake in order to click all the pieces of himself back into place again.

He wasn’t some fucked-up golf swing. He was just a boy who’d left this farm utterly ill-equipped for life. A man who’d spent most of the years since trying to figure out how to survive.

And now … now he wanted more than to survive. He wanted to be okay. He wanted to be happy.

He wanted to be with May.

Ben took one last look at the lake and swung his legs over the side of the roof. A minute
later, he knocked on the screen door again, and Marnie let him in. He could hear the boys upstairs and water running in the bathroom. A toilet flushed.

“I’m sorry for any trouble I’ve made,” he said. “I was hoping … maybe you could send me an email now and then.” Footsteps thundered down the hall overhead. “Tell me what those guys are up to? I’d like to keep in touch, if you’re willing.”

“Why?”

Ben searched for the right words, but all he could think of to say was “They’re my brothers.”

She thought this over, then tilted her head in agreement. “Sure.” She pointed toward the low table beneath the phone that had always stood in that spot, though the phone had changed since Ben was last here. “Leave me your email?”

Ben bent down and printed it in block capitals. He flipped the page, tore off another sheet, and asked, “What’s yours?”

She gave it to him, and he pocketed the paper.

“Thanks for breakfast.”

“It was my pleasure.”

He made a face, and she smiled faintly. There hadn’t been much pleasure in it for anyone.

“Take care,” he told her.

“Drive safe.”

He let himself out, easing the screen door closed behind him. The morning was bright and clear. In the distance, the lake appeared unusually calm. His father emerged from the barn with a veil and gloves in his hands, heading toward the hives.

He didn’t look at Ben, and that was fine. Of all the people in the world who were disappointed in him, his father was the one whose opinion he cared about the least.

May was five hours away. If he drove fast and said the right words, he might get lucky enough to see her smile by nightfall.

Ben rang the bell on the front porch of May’s parents’ house, mentally crossing his fingers that the green sedan in the driveway belonged to her and not some random relative.

She hadn’t been at home when he checked. He didn’t have her new cell number. If she wasn’t here, he wouldn’t know where else to look for her, and—