They had married when Frank was thirty-two and Margaret thirty. Patrick came two years later. The marriage was not a cold one. They cooked. They danced at a cousin’s wedding. They bought this house when Patrick was eight and Margaret planted peonies that still came back. Frank ran a small HVAC company and was good with his hands and late with stories about jobs.
The late stories had room in them for Dayton.
Christine Vale lived in a duplex on the west side of Dayton with a maple in the strip of dirt by the sidewalk. Frank met her when Patrick was fourteen and Frank was forty, on a job that ran long. That is the version he will try to sell as a mistake. The box in the garage sold it as birthdays and Christmas and two sons: Matthew, now twenty-eight, and Josh, now twenty-five. The photograph Patrick chose was from a year when the boys were sixteen and thirteen and Christine’s hands were on Frank as if she had the right.
She had the right he gave her.
He paid a portion of a rent. He kept a drawer there. He was not on a lease. He told Christine his marriage had ended in all the ways that mattered and that paper was slow. He told Margaret he had a hotel near a commercial site. Both women were competent. Both women were reasonable. Reasonable is how a second life fits in a garage behind Christmas lights.
Patrick, at fourteen, had noticed his father gone more. He had not had a box then. He had a mother who made dinner and saved a plate. He ate the plate. He played baseball. He left for college and came home and the house looked the same. Sameness is a kind of camouflage.
When he was forty-four and sitting on the garage concrete he understood that his childhood had included a highway he was not on.
He almost burned the box.
He did not burn it because Margaret was in the kitchen humming.
Humming is a terrible thing to reward with fire. It is also a terrible thing to reward with a gift box at a seventieth. Patrick chose the gift box. He will live with that choice the way Frank lived with Dayton.
After Margaret spoke to the room, the room did what rooms do when a marriage splits open over cake: it tried to become coats and car keys.
Frank’s sister from Akron said, “Peggy. Come to the kitchen.”
Margaret did not go to the kitchen.
“Take the balloons if you want,” she said. “Leave the cake.”
Patrick did not move from his side of the table. Frank’s hands were on the open box as if he could close the picture back into cardboard and close the year with it.
“Pat,” Frank said.