“Mom.”

“What is it, honey?”

I hesitate. I want to ask her about her experience this evening, about how she reacted to leaving the house for the first time in so long, but I can imagine how that conversation would go. I am perfectly fine, she would say, affronted that I would even suggest otherwise, and so directly. Perhaps it is best to approach such things sideways.

“I found the key.”

“What key?”

“To the room at the end of the hall.”

Agnes chews on this for a long moment before releasing a low, flat, “Oh.”

I am driving slowly because I do not want to get home, not yet.

“I saw where you hid it.”

“You did, did you?”

“I thought that room had been locked since—forever.”

“It had been. Before. And it has been since.”

“Are you going to tell me why you had it? Why you hid it?”

She is quiet for a long, long moment. “I would rather not.”

Her non-answers are beginning to annoy me. “Come on, Mom.”

The streetlamps glide toward us through the night, momentarily light up the car yellow, and then flee quickly behind us, retreating into the darkness. The moon is low and bearded with gauzy clouds. This is a country road, I think, for no real reason. We are in the empty country dark.

“You were so young, you and Lizzie,” she says at last, carefully. “I hadn’t thought it right, to tell you where he did it.”

“You mean Dad?”

Neither of us looks at the other. I am watching the road roll toward us, and she too is staring straight ahead, the artificial light periodically flashing over us. Maybe it is easier, not to look.

Everyone knows my father hanged himself—because gossip travels fast in small towns—and even if my mother had wanted to keep it from me, there was no way she could silence the whispers. I always knew my father had hanged himself, but it never occurred to me to think beyond that, or even to imagine it. What it looked like. Where I was at the time. It was always just the words. It’s not something you want to stop and really think about.

The silence in the car is incredible, heavy, absolute.

“He did it in that room. He’d found the key, somewhere, while cleaning up, I think—you know he always liked to keep things tidy. I’m not sure how he figured out it was for that room. He must have tried all the doors before he fitted it into the lock. Before then, he’d never seemed to notice the room. I’d told him once, early on, that it was just another room, one we kept closed, and that was that. He never asked, never mentioned it, never showed any interest whatsoever.”

I can think of nothing to say, so I say nothing.

“I was no good afterward. I wanted to know why. I thought I might find some clue in there. I spent hours sitting in that wretched room, waiting for him to appear … willing him to appear.”