Chapter 21: Camden

My mother's house in Camden smelled like cedar and burnt toast.

It always had, on the twenty-fourth of December, and I stood in the doorway with a suitcase in each hand.

Two suitcases, for the first time in three years.

Morven had packed hers in ten minutes and complained the whole way up.

"Your father has a boat on a trailer in the front yard," she said now.

"That's right."

"In December."

"He's been fixing it since I was nine."

"It's a lovely boat."

"It has never touched water," I said.

My father came out of the kitchen in his reading glasses and a cardigan with a hole in the elbow.

He was a quiet man, and I had seen him cry exactly once, at my wedding.

He looked at Morven, and then at me, and then at Morven again.

"You're the doctor," he said.

"Morven."

"I'm his father." He shook her hand slowly. "I've been waiting a long time for somebody to come up that walk and not talk about mulch."

Morven laughed so hard that she had to hold the doorframe.

My mother appeared behind him with a dish towel over her shoulder.

She did not look like the woman in the boardroom, and for a moment I did not know her.

She looked like my mother, in an apron, with flour on her wrist.

"Come in, both of you," she said. "You're letting out the heat."

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