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The lights were on in my parents’ house when I reached Maple Bluff, and through the windows I could see my father in the living room, drinking scotch while my mother cooked dinner. The scent of fried chicken wafted across the pool and my stomach grumbled. The pool was bright and inviting, the lake beyond it reflecting the houses from the opposite shore, everything looked exactly the way it had looked all my life.

Dean had thought loving me meant helping me leave, while Paul thought loving me meant giving me the kind of life we’d grown up with.

I crossed the lawn toward the pool house to change for dinner still believing Dean and I could figure out the difference.

16

Lorrie

Tuesday — August 21, 1984

Dinner had been one of my favorites. Fried chicken, watermelon, potato salad, and fresh green beans. My mother made the best fried chicken I’d ever tasted, and no matter how many times I watched her or she tried to show me, I couldn’t get it quite right.

Pain flooded through me as I thought of my own time where both of my parents were gone. In that moment I vowed to hold onto every detail, to talk to my father, to ask my mom about recipes I’d never mastered. Little details that made all the difference when the ones you loved were gone forever.

Paul pulled up to the pool house after dinner bearing pink tulips and a look on his face like he’d been rehearsing a difficult conversation in the car and dreaded every moment of what was coming.

I knew that face, had seen versions of it for years, before talks about money, before conversations with the children when one of them had gotten into trouble, and before the night he told me his mother’s diagnosis was worse than Patricia had admitted.

His summer jacket was folded over one arm, his tie loosened at the collar, and his hair was slightly out of place which was another tell that he was dreading whatever confrontation was about to happen. He looked handsome and tired standing there with the flowers in his hand as the sunset turned the lake gold and cicadas sawed away in the dark trees around my parents’ yard.

“Sorry I couldn’t leave early enough to make dinner,” he said.

“My mother saved you a plate. Fried chicken night. It’s in the fridge.”

“I haven’t eaten since breakfast.” A half smile crossed his face. “I’ll call and thank her tomorrow.”

I looked at the tulips. “They’re pretty.”

He frowned at them as if remembering why he’d come, though he didn’t know that I knew why he was here.

I opened the door because leaving him outside would have been satisfying for about six seconds and childish after that, and because if I was going to ask the questions I’d had since talking to the investigator, I wanted to see his face when I asked.

He stepped inside, bringing with him the faint scent of Polo cologne and whatever leather cleaner he used in the Saab. For one dizzy second, I was fifty again, watching him come through the front door, older and grayer, his right hand flexing after a long day. Then the image slipped, leaving twenty-five-year-old Paul holding flowers and looking lost.

“You can put them there,” I said, nodding toward the small counter beside the kitchenette. “There should be vases to the left of the sink.”

He found a vase, filled it with water, and arranged the tulips with an awkwardness that made me remember the first year of our marriage, when he brought me daffodils from a grocery store and cut the stems with a steak knife because we didn’t own kitchen shears yet.

I hated remembering that, not because it was unpleasant, but because it was sweet.

He turned from the counter.

“Lorrie.”

Paul stood with his hands at his sides.

“I need to tell you something,” he said.

I folded my arms. “About your father?”

He took a step back, and that was an answer before he even opened his mouth.

“You know?”

“Martin Vale came into Side A.”

Paul closed his eyes briefly, then opened them. “I see.”