Chapter 7

Ren went to his parents' house Friday night, and I didn't go with him, and later I understood that was the whole problem.

The Ottaway house is up on the ridge road, three stories, brick, with a porch wide enough to hold a wedding. Dale Ottaway is Harlan's younger brother. He ran the depot for twenty years and retired with a pension and a garden. Corinne raised three boys and had Ren in the middle of them like a book set. Everybody in Kessler Bend says those boys turned out decent.

Ren took Eli to his ex-wife's mother's house first. He told me that after. He said he sat in the driveway for ten minutes with his hands on the wheel.

He told me what happened in the kitchen. He told me twice, because the first time I didn't hear it right.

Corinne was making coffee. Dale was in the chair by the window with the paper, and the TV was on with the sound off. Ren put the Ziploc down on the island. He said, "I need to hear it from you."

Corinne looked at the bag and kept looking at it. She said, "Where did you find that," which was the same as saying yes.

"Twenty twenty. Your husband's desk."

Dale didn't look up from the paper.

"I want to hear about the fence line," Ren said. "The kerosene tank. The one on the north side that ran under the boundary and leaked into the ditch, which everybody in the depot knew about, which was in the maintenance log, which my brother worked on for two months in ninety-three."

Corinne poured coffee she wasn't going to drink.

Dale said, "It was addressed."

"Addressed? Dad. A house burned."

"We addressed it," Dale said. He folded the paper, neat, in half, then in quarters. "It was addressed."

Corinne set the mug down and said, "It ran under the fence."

Dale said her name once. Just once, low, like a man calling a dog off.

"It ran under the fence and it ran downhill into the ditch and your father knew it and the company knew it. There was a maintenance log entry in January of ninety-four." Her voice was calm and terrible. "And then a house on the other side of that fence burned and they brought you to me six months later in a blue snowsuit and told me your name was Ren and no one was ever going to come for you. And I took you." She finally looked at him. "Yes. I knew what I was doing. And I loved you every day of the twenty-nine years after, and I'm not going to stand here and pretend that part isn't true."

Ren said he stood in that kitchen and couldn't feel his hands.

Then Corinne said the other thing. She said, "And if you go out there and pull this house down around our ears, there's a boy who's eight years old and a wife and a mortgage and my husband's heart, and your name in the paper. Think about what you get." She said it like she was helping. He said that's what made him walk.

He came to the shop at nine. I was on the concrete apron with a flashlight, sorting through a bin of flooded sockets, trying to save two hundred dollars worth of tools.

He walked up and I knew before he said anything. Something in a man's walk goes flat when he's lost a house he grew up in.

"You told her," he said.

"I told Faye what? I didn't tell anybody anything."

"You had to be the one to make it happen. You couldn't stand it, could you. You couldn't leave it alone for one month." He wasn't yelling. That was worse. "I had a mother. I had a father who taught me to run a boat and drove Eli to the hospital when he broke his collarbone. Now I've got a woman who confirms it in a kitchen and a father who folds a newspaper and says 'it was addressed.'"

"What do you want me to say?"

"Nothing." He picked up a socket and put it down. "I'm done. I'm out. I got what I came for. I met my sister."

"You don't get to be done."

He turned around.

"You don't get to be done," I said, "because he's three years old in a crib and somebody turned away from him and let it happen, and I was six and screaming in a gutter outside, and we're both alive and standing on my dead shop apron, and the men who did it are going to have a relief meeting on September fifth where they hand us all a check and everybody claps." I had a wrench in my hand. I put it down because I was going to break it against the wall. "You can hate me. I don't care. You don't get to go home."

He stood there in the rain for a long count.

"Sunday," he said finally. "I'll meet you Sunday."

"Sunday's the meeting."

"Then I'll see you at the meeting," he said, and walked off down Front Street, and I went back to my sockets like a fool.