I couldn’t quite look Lorraine in the eye, just as my father could not look at me.

“How long?” I asked.

My father looked confused, so Lorraine answered, showing me the wedding ring. “Five years. We met at a church dance.”

The Church of Bewildered, Lonely Failures?

“That’s nice,” I said. A sense that they’d been together much longer than five years.

How could I find fault? I did then, but, now that the hurt has passed, how could I blame my father for being successful, for having a new wife? He had lived with an abusive father and had had an absent wife for a companion.

“We rent out the three cabins on the property,” Lorraine said. “We also sell wild honey and candles and soap. People come for riding lessons sometimes. Your father has done a good job of diversifying.”

Diversifying.

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

So it went. Fifteen minutes later, a torrent of heavy rain like bullets on the roof woke me up. I realized I was being lulled. Into small talk, into normalcy. Mostly by Lorraine. And I couldn’t afford that. It was too much like being back in my house with my family. Everything I’d put aside. I didn’t have the armor for that. I would lose my mind staying here too long, in this alternate reality. This false place.

“I need to talk to Dad,” I said, interrupting Lorraine on the subject of jam.

Lorraine gave Lawrence a protective look and then a look toward me that was open to interpretation. A welcome with an end date and a warning both.

“I have chores and a phone call.” She went past the kitchen into the back. Maybe even into what used to be my room.

But my father was not a talker.

“A long time,” he said. “Such a long time. Too long.”

I had not come to my mother’s funeral. I had not written or called. I had two early letters from him I’d never opened and then I’d changed addresses, left no forwarding information. Thought that was the only way. A rage that you never lose.

After another awkward pause, a nod, a vague exchange of what might be called “catching up,” I could only feel relief. No way to reconcile. No way to find within my father the things I had needed from him—because they had never been there. Not withheld. Never present.

Kinder to us both to consider him an eyewitness and move on. Safer.

I pulled out a slightly damp photo of Silvina.

“Do you know her?”

“Yes. Of course.” No doubt. No hesitation.

I sat back in my seat, chest tight. “Of course?”

He still wouldn’t look at me. “She lived up on the ridge for a time when you and Ned were teenagers.”

“What?”

“Yes—in that new development. New back then. They kept to themselves. Never came down to the farm.”