Chapter 4: Ten at the Table

"To who?" I said.

"A man named Finbar Hulme," Barrett said. "Mom will explain. Please let her explain before you open the door and jump out of the car."

"I wasn't going to jump."

"You had your hand on the handle."

I took my hand off the handle.

The Ashgrove house sat on a hill above Lake Erie behind a stone wall and a lot of wet trees.

It had more windows than my entire street, and every light in it was on.

A woman was standing in the front window.

Lydia was holding a dish towel in both hands, and she was gone from the glass before the car stopped.

The front door opened before I reached it.

A man in a gray cardigan stood in the hall, tall and heavy-shouldered, with a face that had clearly practiced being stern.

He was my father.

I had never had one, so I didn't know what to do with my hands.

He looked at me for a long time, and his face did something it hadn't practiced.

"You fixed the hay man's truck before you came?" he said, and his voice broke in the middle.

"Brake lines."

"Good," he said. "That's good. Somebody should finish what they started."

Then he put his big hand on the back of my head, very briefly, and walked quickly into another room.

"He'll be all right in ten minutes," Lydia said behind me. "He's been practicing that sentence since Thursday."

My room had a window seat and a fireplace, and there were new towels folded in a stack on the bed, and one of them was damp at the corner.

I looked at it and decided not to say anything.

Dinner was in a dining room with a table built for twenty.

There were ten of us, and the seating plan seemed to have been decided by whoever loved me most.

Lydia sat on my left, my father at the head, Eliana across from me.

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