I hoped the medicine would make him too groggy to argue. That way I’d at least get a night’s sleep before we started in on each other. I bent to pick up the suitcase and carry it on into the back bedroom.

“Seldom as you come,” he said, “it don’t seem fitting to speak no more than a half-dozen words and then be off to bed.”

“It’s late, Daddy. I’m tired from the trip up here. You’re tired. We can talk tomorrow.”

“All right,” he said, the petulance draining from his voice. “I’ll make that coffee in the morning.”

We stood there looking at each other a few moments, keeping our distance. We hadn’t kissed or hugged and I knew we wouldn’t. I remembered how he’d pulled up a chair beside Momma’s bed those last days. He’d sit there for six hours without once getting up but never hold her hand or kiss her forehead. “He carries what he feels for people deep inside. Even as a kid he was that way,” Aunt Margaret said. “Your momma knows that.” But I had wondered then as I did now what good love was that couldn’t be expressed.

“Good night,” I said.

I walked through the kitchen, toward the back bedroom, past Ben’s room. I knew if I paused and turned on the light the room would be much as it had been fifteen years ago: paperbacks and fishing magazines filling a bookshelf, a couple of rods propped up in a corner, chest of drawers. No mirror.

I WOKE TO MEMORY—THE YELLOW-FLOWERED WALLPAPER I hung in the ninth grade, the poster I bought at a Ricky Scaggs concert, the bureau mirror where Momma and I checked my dress the evening of my senior prom. And the bed where I lay, the same bed my mother had died in my junior year at Clemson.

That spring, pill bottles had lined the bureau, and a bedpan lay under the night table. The indentation of my mother’s body and head remained on the mattress and pillow each time we lifted her up. The room seemed dark even when the curtains had been pulled all the way back, and no matter the number of times Aunt Margaret and I opened the windows or cleaned the room it always seemed dank and musty like a root cellar.

Those weekends I slept on the couch. Ben, who drove the truck down to Clemson to pick me up on Fridays, took me back to school Sunday evenings. My grades suffered that semester, and I almost lost my scholarship.