“Would you take me there?
I haven’t been inside yet.
I don’t want to go alone the first time.”
A silence.
Not an uncomfortable one.
“Tomorrow morning?” he said.
“Tomorrow morning,” I said.
After I hung up I sat at the table for a long time.
The letter in front of me.
The keys on the counter.
The photograph of Thomas at seventeen or eighteen, standing in front of a house he had just bought, smiling at a camera with his whole face.
*She’ll come.*
He had written that fifty-three years ago.
Daniel was already parked on Maple Street when I arrived.
The house was white with dark green shutters.
A covered porch across the front.
Two oak trees in the yard, enormous now, the kind of trees that take fifty years to grow that wide.
A stone path from the gate to the front steps, slightly uneven in the way old paths get when the ground beneath them shifts over decades.
It was exactly the kind of house I would have chosen.
Daniel stood at the gate with his hands in his coat pockets.
He watched me get out of the car and look at it.
“He had someone come every spring,” Daniel said.
“Paint touch-ups, gutters, the garden.
I used to help sometimes when I was a teenager.
