He stopped first at the restaurant and said nothing to Linda except, “Coffee, please.”

“Well, if it isn’t you,” she said, looking at the face she and the rest had never forgotten. “I’ll be damned.” Unlike everyone else, she would never like him, honor him, worship him, because she’d seen Ruth lose weight and grieve when he didn’t return, and when Marco had gone to live with the old people over at the white houses, and she always believed he could have stayed home and that he could have returned home. She felt things in her bones, as she put it, and she’d felt him and it wasn’t good.

“What’ll you have, Thomas Just?”

He didn’t eat. He only drank coffee until he had summoned whatever it was a man of once courage needed to go to his father’s. They had never gotten along. His father’s reputation had even become worse as he’d gotten older.

He found the older man asleep and confused. He stood by the door. He picked up his father’s shaving mirror and looked briefly at himself. Jesus, he didn’t even recognize what he saw. There were new lines, whiskers.

A moment of sun came through a crack in the curtains. Thomas shone a mirror around the room. It reflected on wood, knives, bottles, old yellowed newspapers, maybe even pain in the wooden faces his father had half carved, and a sense of time passing. Until the light came to rest on his father, the woodcarver’s, eyes, the face of the mask-maker.

“Who’s that with the mirror?” He shaded his eyes, trying to see. He looked old to Thomas, his eyes bloodshot, his long hair tangled as he lifted his head.

Thomas didn’t answer.

When the man opened his tired eyes, he saw Thomas. He squinted through the light. “Are you a ghost? Thomas?”

“Both.”

“Well, whatever you are, that goddamned light hurts my eyes.”

Floyd the father of Thomas lifted back his old quilt and got up, fully clothed. Then he went to Thomas. “My son.” He clasped the deathless body. “At last.”

Thomas didn’t clasp him in return.

His father wasn’t the handsome man he had once been, though there was still a hint of the lady-killer.

“Hey, old man, how you doing?”

“Good, good now, my son.”

He made instant coffee. While Thomas drank it, he said, “I need to wash up.”

Thomas saw him hide something in a drawer. It was early autumn and the crickets around the house were loud.

“Where have you been all this time?” The older man sensed his son’s hostility. Well, why not? He had dated other women even when his wife was ill, before she died. He’d remarried right away. A younger woman. It didn’t last, and maybe Thomas knew he’d attacked Ruth that night he was drunk.

Thomas didn’t answer.

“Anyway, I’m glad you are back,” said the carver. “And I’m proud. It’s a good time for us. We are going to come back. Have you heard? As a people, I mean.” Floyd may have been a man who mistreated women, who hated and drank, but he had loved and known his own father, Witka. As he looked Thomas over, he wondered what Witka would think of his son. He wasn’t certain.