We drove back to the house in silence. Not the silence of two people who have nothing to say, but the silence of two people who have too much and know better than to start before they are ready. My father drove the way he had always driven: both hands on the wheel at positions most people learn and then abandon, speed precisely at the limit, gaze steady on the road ahead as though the act of paying attention to where he was going might clarify where he had been.
I watched the county go dark around us. Strip of gas station. Farm supply store with its parking lot empty.
The railroad crossing where a freight train used to shake the windows of houses a quarter mile away and people kept their porch lights on in the dark like a form of patience. I had driven this route so many times as a child that my body recognized each turn before my eyes confirmed it. The house was dark when we got there.
Evelyn had taken her things. Not all of them, not a permanent departure, but enough to make the kitchen feel oddly unpopulated and the hallway seem wider than it was. A coat hook bare.
A pair of shoes missing from the mat. The symbolic absences of a woman who understood how to make her presence felt even through its removal. My father stood in the kitchen for a moment, looking at the empty hook.
“She’ll be at Patricia’s,” he said finally. Patricia was her friend two streets over, the one who had always functioned as Evelyn’s audience and loyal recorder of grievances. “She does this when she wants me to feel responsible for upsetting her.”
“Does it usually work?”
He opened the refrigerator with the restless motion of a man who is not hungry but needs something to do with his hands.
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