Chapter 12
The knock came while I was still at the window.
It was soft—two taps, then a pause. I waited, listening for Dad’s footsteps, but heard only the kitchen faucet running. When I opened the door, Karen stood on the porch with her coat buttoned to her throat.
“Could you come outside?” she asked. Her eyes flicked past me, toward the kitchen. “Please. Not in front of him.”
I stepped onto the porch and pulled the door nearly shut behind me. The cold bit through my shirt. Karen stood at the bottom step, hands tucked under her arms, leaving space between us that neither of us crossed.
For a moment, she seemed to be searching for the first safe thing to say.
“I didn’t know if you’d stopped,” I said.
“I almost didn’t.”
The porch light caught the dampness in her eyes, but she didn’t cry. She looked tired, and smaller somehow, though I knew that was only the dark and the hour making familiar things seem different.
“I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “Not to your dad. Not to my parents. You.”
I waited.
“When you took the food and left, I felt like I didn’t matter anymore.” She swallowed. “Like you’d already chosen who you wanted to be with.”
“I chose to take dinner to my father after you told him not to come.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” The words came out sharper than I intended. I lowered my voice. “You made him disposable so your parents wouldn’t have to sit across from a man whose jacket embarrassed you. I wasn’t going to leave him alone with that.”
Her arms tightened around herself.
“I didn’t think of it that way.”
“That doesn’t make it less true.”
“No.” Her gaze dropped to the porch boards. “It doesn’t.”
A car passed on the street, its headlights sliding briefly across her face. When the light was gone, she looked up again.
“I was trying to keep the day from becoming uncomfortable,” she said. “My parents can be—”
She stopped. The unfinished defense hung between us.
Then she let out a breath.
“No. That’s what I always do. I reach for the explanation that makes me sound less cruel.” Her fingers worked at the edge of one sleeve. “I was afraid they’d judge the house, the meal, me. I thought if everything looked right, I could keep them from seeing anything wrong. And I decided your dad was the thing I could remove.”
I kept my hands at my sides. I wanted the words to be enough. I wanted them to be nothing.
“Fear explains why you did it,” I said. “It doesn’t excuse what you did.”
“I know.”
The answer wasn’t a plea. She didn’t ask me to tell her she was a good person, or say her parents had made her this way. She just stood there with the cold gathering on her coat and let the sentence stay where I’d put it.
That should have made it easier. It didn’t.
“Can we still be married?” she asked.
I looked past her toward the street. The porch light made a pale circle around us; beyond it, the neighborhood was dark and still. Somewhere inside the house, a cabinet closed. Dad was giving us the privacy she had asked for without asking what we were saying.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Her chin dipped once. She took the answer without reaching for another one.
“I can’t promise forgiveness tonight,” I continued. “And I can’t promise that saying the right thing now means we go back to how we were.”
“I’m not asking you to pretend it didn’t happen.”
“You’re asking if there’s still a marriage.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t answer that before I know what changes.”
Her eyes shone in the porch light. She looked as if she might ask what changes, or how much time I needed, or what she could do to make my answer easier. Instead she pressed her lips together and waited.
I felt the old instinct rise: tell her where to stand, what to say, what would prove she meant it. Arrange the next moment so nobody could surprise me. I thought of Dad’s hand on the worn seam of his jacket, and let the instinct pass without obeying it.
“I’m not going to give you a test,” I said. “And I’m not going to make this choice for Dad.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to.”
“Good.”
She looked toward the front door. “I don’t know if he’ll want to see me.”
“Neither do I.”
“Will you tell him I’m here?”
“You can tell him yourself.”
Her face tightened, not in anger. In fear, maybe—but fear had stopped being a reason I could use to carry her across a threshold.
“I don’t know what to say,” she whispered.
“I can’t choose that for you either.”
For a second, she seemed ready to retreat to the car. Then she looked at the door again. Her hands came free of her sleeves and settled at her sides.
I stepped back, leaving the way to the porch clear.
“You don’t have to go in because I’m here,” I said. “The next choice has to be yours.”
May you like
Karen looked at me, searching my face for a promise I didn’t have. I gave her none.
Then she turned toward Jack’s door alone.
