Chapter 16: Ray Moves Out

Ray's cabin sat at the end of a gravel road on the lake, forty minutes from town.

I knocked at a quarter past six on Friday, straight from the library, with a bag of hot sandwiches.

He opened the door in his socks again.

"Lindsey said you hadn't eaten since the pancakes."

"That's not true," Ray said. "I had a granola bar."

The cabin was one room with a bunk, a card table and a single chair.

His plaid suitcase lay open on the bunk with the shirts still folded.

"Barbara's never been out here," he said. "Thirty years. She said it smelled like fish."

"Does it?"

"Yes. I like it."

I sat on the porch rocker and he sat on an upturned bucket.

He cut his sandwich in half with a red pocketknife and gave me the bigger half.

We ate in the last of the light, with the lake going the color of tin.

"I want to ask you something, and I want you to answer it straight," I said.

"All right."

"Where were you?"

He put down his sandwich.

"Twenty-seven years," I said. "My father died when I was nine. I'm not asking about the lab. Where were you?"

"I didn't know."

"You didn't ask."

I had not planned that.

It came out flat and clear, in my library voice, and it sat on the porch boards between us.

Ray looked at his bent thumb for a long time.

"October 2015," he said. "She came back from Columbus gray as a plate. I stood in the kitchen and said, Barb, is something wrong?"

"What did she say?"

"She said, 'Lindsey's fine, Ray. Let it be.'" His voice was very quiet. "And I let it be.

"I let it be for thirty-eight years, Hallie. That's all my marriage was. A man letting things be."

I did not say it was all right, because it wasn't.

I said, "I wanted a father, and I didn't know it until you shook my hand. I'm angry, and I can't tell who at."