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 Mani
towoc,” 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.