Chapter 38: The Man on My Porch
I drove home from dinner with the peonies on the passenger seat, belted in like a passenger.
I was angry at my father. It is a strange thing, being angry at the dead.
They never argue back, so you finish both sides yourself.
Helen says anger at the dead is just love with nowhere to sit. Helen got that from a mug, but mugs are right sometimes.
He had suspected Grant's character.
He had sat across from Grant at holidays knowing the Wexler family pattern, watching for echoes, and keeping his suspicion from me.
The safeguards he left were love.
I understood the arithmetic. He was dying. I was still the woman who arranged Grant's dinners and laughed at his partners' jokes.
My father looked at what he could not prove, then at me, and refused to turn family history into an accusation.
He feared forcing that choice would shatter me.
He was wrong about the shattering.
He was right to demand evidence. He left a standing investigation where an accusation would have been.
The next morning I drove to the cemetery. I had not been in a year.
I had avoided the cemetery for a year because the last visit followed me home for days.
The last time, I had stood there in funeral black with Grant's hand on my back.
He checked his phone twice during the eulogy. I excused it. I excused everything, back then.
His stone is plain. Victor Hale, and the dates, and nothing else.
He used to say a man who needs adjectives after death probably needed them before it too.
I stood there a long time.
You should have told me what you suspected, I said. No one stood close enough to hear.
The wind came off the hill. I waited anyway.
But I had brought him something better than anger.
I found the evidence myself, I said. Just like you said I would.
And I did not shatter. I did the opposite of shatter.
I told him about the trust. About the ruling.
About the receipts, and the review, and the video of the cardboard box.
I told him about Vera's loan, the old written caution of his that had loaded every weapon I was now firing.
You were not paranoid, I said. You were early. There is a difference.
I told him about Owen, and the peonies, and then I stood there feeling foolish, telling my dead father about a dinner.
When I finally spoke, it was the truest thing I had said in months.
You were prepared, I said. Now so am I.
But the rest of it, the life part, that one is mine.
I am not letting Grant live in it anymore. And I am not letting you run it from a stone.
I left one peony at the base of the stone. He would have called it a waste of a good flower.
I drove home lighter than I had felt in a year.
I stopped at the farm stand and bought tomatoes I did not need.
I let the radio play a song I used to skip. Small things. The life part.
The lightness lasted until my street.
Because there was a man sitting on my porch steps, and for one bad second my whole body went back to being afraid before my eyes caught up.
Grant.
He did not stand up. Grant Wexler, sitting, while a woman approached.
No suit. No Porsche. A man in a wrinkled shirt, looking at the ground like it owed him an explanation.
Beside him was a brown bag from the liquor store, unopened.
Somehow the unopened part was the worst detail of all.
He heard the car. He looked up.
And there was no anger in his face at all.
Anger I knew how to answer. I had a fifteen-year fluency in his anger.
This was a language I had never heard him speak.