The Son Who Returned to Expose Their Shame novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Cane

Annie throws her water in my face, my mother orders me to apologize and I won't; at Gran's house I learn the drive needs ten days and the gala is in nine, and at midnight Bryce is on the porch.

Annie stopped in the dining room doorway.

She had the same red-brown hair, pinned up off her neck.

The same straight back. Dancers never lose that.

She had a black cane with a silver top in her right hand.

She saw me and every bit of color left her face.

Bryce was at her side in two steps, a hand on her waist.

"It's okay," he said. "I'm right here."

Annie didn't look at him.

She looked at me.

"You came back," she said, "to look at it?"

"No."

"Then what are you doing at this table?"

"I used to eat here."

My mother stood and went to her.

She took Annie's free hand in both of hers.

"Sweetheart, I'm so sorry. We had no idea he'd come here today."

"I had an idea," I said. "I said I was coming."

My mother turned around.

"Roark. You will apologize to her. Right now. In front of this family."

"I'll apologize when I've done something."

My father put down the carving knife.

"Get out of my house."

"In a minute."

I looked at Annie.

The last time I saw her she was laughing on the dock with her shoes in her hand.

"My keys were in my jacket," I said. "The jacket was on a chair in the kitchen. I was asleep on the end of the dock. I'd had two beers."

"You were drunk," Bryce said.

"Two beers."

"Dad found your car in the garage with the headlight smashed in," Bryce said, gentle, for her. "Your sister saw you take the keys. We all said so. Under oath."

Callie made a sound caught in her throat.

Annie's knuckles went white on the cane.

"Five years," she said to me. "You never came to the hospital. You never wrote. Not a word."

"I wrote."

"Don't."

She picked a glass of water up off the table and threw it in my face.

It was cold. Ice and all.

I stood there and let it run down my collar.

Nobody at the table moved.

Bryce looked like Christmas had come early.

Annie put the glass down very carefully.

Then she turned and went back out into the hall.

Tap. Step. Tap.

Bryce hurried after her, calling her name, and stopped in the doorway long enough to look back at me and wink.

I wiped my face with my mother's linen napkin and set it down on the ham.

"Saturday," I said.

I walked out.

Gran was still at the curb with the engine running.

She looked at my wet shirt.

"So that went well."

"About how I thought."

"Did you eat?"

"No."

"Good. I made biscuits."

Gran's house in Mount Pleasant had a porch on three sides and paint coming off in long white curls.

The screen door hung by one hinge.

"Don't touch it," she said. "It's got a system."

My old room upstairs was exactly how I left it the summer I was twenty-four.

A ceiling fan. A twin bed. My college pennant.

On the dresser was a shoebox full of envelopes with the prison's return address.

Every letter I ever wrote Gran from inside, sixty months of them.

"You kept them," I said.

"I'm old. I keep everything. Including grudges."

The biscuits were black on the bottom.

She put two on my plate like they were trophies.

"Eat."

I ate. They were terrible. They were the best thing I'd had in five years.

She watched me with her chin in her hand.

"You threw the statement on the ham?"

"How do you know that?"

"Callie texted me. First text in five years. Just said, 'He tore it up.' With an exclamation point."

I didn't know what to do with that, so I ate another biscuit.

Gran got up and came back with an envelope.

Inside was a receipt from a data lab in Atlanta.

"The old man at the gas station on Folly Road," she said. "Your father paid him cash for his camera drive the morning after. He handed your father a blank spare and kept the real one in his shed."

"Why?"

"He said he didn't like the way your father counted the money."

"And the shed?"

"Flooded. Hurricane, two years ago. The lab says it's bad, but not dead."

"How long?"

"Ten days, they said this morning."

I counted on my fingers.

"The party's Saturday."

"That's six."

"I told them I'd pay whatever it costs to make it six. They said they'd try. They said it like people who won't."

We sat with that.

The fan turned overhead.

Gran reached across and fixed my wet collar.

"So we'll be late to something," she said. "We've both been late before."

I went to bed at eleven.

I didn't sleep. Inside, I'd learned to sleep through anything. Out here, the quiet kept me awake.

At midnight, headlights swept across the ceiling.

Tires crunched on Gran's shell driveway.

An engine idled, then cut off.

I went to the window.

A white Range Rover sat in the yard with its door open.

Bryce was standing on the porch steps in the dark, looking up at my window.

He raised his hand.

The gold ring caught the porch light.

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