“I made a mistake thirty years ago—”
Margaret cut him.
“Thirty years is not a mistake. Thirty years is a second life.”
She turned her face to the room as much as to him. The smile was gone.
“Do not sing. Blow those candles out yourself. I am done celebrating a man I never fully met.”
The candles stayed unlit.
The box stayed open.
The gold balloons kept tapping the ceiling as if the ceiling were still a party.
Margaret Keane had spent six weeks on the party.
She had ordered the cake from the place that did gold lettering. She had called Frank’s sister in Akron. She had bought the rose blouse because Frank once said she looked like a person who belonged at a table when she wore that color. She had written a toast on an index card and folded it into her sleeve. The toast said things about thirty-eight years of marriage and a son they were proud of and a house that had held.
She did not use the toast.
Patrick had found the box on a Tuesday.
He had gone into the garage for Christmas lights in September because Margaret wanted to test a strand. Behind the lights, behind a crate of tax files, was a cardboard box that did not belong to taxes. Inside: envelopes of pictures. Dayton written on the flaps in his father’s hand. A woman laughing on a porch. Two boys with cakes. Frank in a chair that was not the chair in this dining room. Dates. Years. Christmas after Christmas.
Patrick sat on the garage floor until his legs hurt.
He did not tell his mother that afternoon. He took one print—the clearest one, the one where the woman’s hands were on Frank’s shoulders and the boys stood close enough to be a unit—and he put the rest back. He went home to his apartment and drank a glass of water and called no one.
He put the print in a gift box because he needed his father to open it in the only room where the truth would have witnesses. He hated himself for the cake. He hated his father more for the garage.
Frank had a sister in Akron who knew nothing, or said she knew nothing. Frank had a workshop that smelled like sawdust. Frank had a way of leaving for “supplier runs” that lasted a weekend. Margaret had believed suppliers. Margaret had believed a lot of ordinary words.
Dayton was two hours down the highway. Two hours is not another country. Two hours is a second refrigerator.