But he was no longer Thomas. She was speaking to someone else, a stranger. A man with secrets, one whose life was unknown or injured, and who’d forgotten his world before. She saw this and she saw that he was as his father had just said, a wretched man.

She walked away, knowing everyone heard and watched, and she stood with a group of women. Linda put her hand on Ruth’s arm.

She was an anchor but at least now she knew it had an end, a stopping place. It hit bottom. She could fall no deeper.

It wasn’t the reunion she had ever dreamed. His love for her had ended.

She still carried his dog tag. She remembered how the two of them had once tried to walk across the river on stones and fallen in, laughing and choking on the running water, grabbing one another.

When Marco heard that the man standing there was his father, he turned to him and saw a wretched man. He kept his silence. He kept his distance, a wise young man already, waiting, observing with his natural dignity.

“Thomas, old buddy!” said Dwight. He cast a look at Marco, who was silent, solemn, a man now himself. Dwight felt things he didn’t usually feel, the wish to take his words back, his lies, to tell Thomas that Marco really was his son, not as he had said years ago, that he’d seen Ruth with his father, but how hard to keep covering up all his many lies, especially as they continued over the years.

Everyone went to Thomas, except Ruth, her friends, and Marco, who stood with a young woman.

When Marco saw his father look past him, he knew the man, Thomas, was not his father except by blood. He, the boy who was clear-eyed and calm, nevertheless felt as if parts of him fell away, like from a statue with one arm, one leg, gone from wars or excavations or thefts. There was no bond, no spider silk of attachment. Thomas wasn’t curious about his son, his wife. Marco watched the man that was his father. He looked at the eyelashes, such a small detail, straight and dark, showing something of character Marco couldn’t quite figure. He looked at the way Thomas tried to buddy up to the other men. How they clapped him on the back, glad to see their old friend. He thought, I know why he came back right now. He came back because of the whale. He came back to help them kill the whale. Marco didn’t think that maybe his father thought he might return to tradition and find himself. He didn’t know that the man had spent years with his shirts over the back of the chair in a room that was not far from a freeway, thinking of how he could face himself, let alone the people at home who believed things about him that were lies.

Marco thought, My father’s heart comes down a pathway like a stone. He stands in the room of men I will have to be with, men who have done dishonest things, and Thomas, my father, doesn’t know it. Perhaps he doesn’t care. He is thinking of himself. He doesn’t even acknowledge my mother, his wife.