wondered if you had to sit down and reason things out point by point nowadays. His reasons, hers, then you looked not for a preacher but for an arbiter. Could you outargue your opposite number? On the strength of that, would she fall into your arms? He wondered. He asked her if her generation still believed in Romance. He tried to make his voice sound incidental. But to her it seemed to come out of a puzzling hush.
She really didn’t know what he meant by the word. It wasn’t love everlasting; it wasn’t youthful love fading into a long pastoral twilight that never ended. As a little girl, she could remember watching her father and her grandmother sitting side by side on the piano bench singing their “gushing oldies,” she called them. But what she remembered best was the way her father turned the pages of the songbook once Grandmother Louise’s hands were no longer so quick. He turned them on the beat, with a poise and precision that were uncharacteristic of him.
Her father had turned the pages with devotion.
Romance?
As a substitute for what? she’d asked He’d nodded his head as if he’d understood her question exactly, then he’d shaken his head, sadly, as if no answer were available. He’d given himself a kind of rousing and rueful grin and played the song over, moving to the beat.
“Give me one reason to stay here and I’ll turn right back around.”
With no reason not to, he’d left, and she didn’t know where he’d gone.
She’d finished her exams. There’d been a moment when she’d stood in her apartment, with Valerie waiting for an answer, and added up her options. She could stay there—the apartment was paid through the summer—and do advance reading for her fall classes. She could take the research assistantship her psych professor had arranged for her. There was a job in New York as an intern in a human rights organization that suited her major perfectly. She could go to New York City and do that. She could go to Boston, then Cape Cod, then Mount Desert Island in Maine with Jonathan, free of charge. Chad the Volunteer wanted her to visit his Tennessee town.
Or she could go home, to Lexington, which was finally what she decided to do. Jonathan insisted on driving her there, seven hundred miles south. In passing he’d see a horse farm or two and they’d swill good Kentucky white lightning from a moonshiner. She’d let him take her. Jonathan had seen to it that they’d gotten a late start, and they’d had to stop in an Ohio motel. She had let him make love to her. He had a carefree insouciance about everything he did, and he was nimble for such a tall man, masterful, really, when it came to the things of the world—she’d give him that. But once he was inside her it was as if he sank to her bottom with an adoring groan. Was that Romance? She’d seen the best of him and there really wasn’t a worst, so the next morning she claimed he’d gone far enough out of his way. She insisted he drop her at the Greyhound station in Columbus.
She had keys to the front and back and side doors of her father’s house, the basement door, the garage, which stood apart, and the car inside it. The house was empty. It smelled of a mustiness so keen she knew it had been empty for some time. The few plants in the sunporch looked dead, but she watered them just in case. She carried her suitcases upstairs, where she had a room. The bed was too small; her feet hung over. It had been their joke—that her father, when he’d bought the bed, was thinking of his little girl. Or—no joke and never spoken—he’d been thinking of Michelle, who was considerably shorter than her sister. Annie said she didn’t mind and slept with her feet hanging over the end.
But she had minded—so much had changed, ended or never been.
She took her father’s room, where the mustiness included him. The smell of his hair on the pillow, the distant trace of his soap, cologne and shaving cream. Out of his closet, caught in the fabric of his clothes, a woodsy, nutty smell that had begun to go stale. Pictures of Michelle and Annie were scattered around the room. She turned them all over. There was one of the four of them—her mother included—that, as chance would have it, had caught them all with expectant expressions on their faces, all to varying degrees pleased. The picture had been taken at the start of a family vacation. She remembered them singing and her father remarking that this was a rare occasion in a family like theirs and he wanted to make a record. He had set up the camera on a tripod, set the timing device, then jumped into the picture himself. She was not yet ten—could she trust her memory? Her mother should have been fidgeting, and her twelve-year-old sister glowering off at the horizon. Why weren’t they? Remarkably, the picture singled no one out. She was beside her father, but beside her sister too. Her father looked proud and relieved—he looked at peace. There was something dreamy in her mother’s expression, as though she were already basking in the sun. Her sister looked almost demure, no hint of the single-minded ambition that would take control of her and get her killed. And she, Annie, was happy to be one of them, happy to be included, a child of good fortune, the smallest in line to inherit the greatest good.
At first she let the picture stand.
Unpacking, five minutes later, she turned it over with the rest.
Annie stayed there three days without contacting anybody, her cell phone still turned off, inserted into a dresser drawer. One morning while she was still in her father’s bed, a lawn boy came to cut the small lawn and to pull some weeds, but he was done in less than an hour. The phone rang a number of times, but the message machine picked it up. Not one of those calls was from her mother. No recording that said, “Just checking, Ben, to see how you are. A friend to a friend. Stay in touch.”
No one came to the door.
When the tape on the message machine ran out, she disconnected the phone. Apparently her father had had mail and newspaper delivery discontinued. Nothing was left to sour in the refrigerator, although she’d found pasta and vegetables in the freezer. He had not rushed off on the spur of the moment, expecting to be right back.
She felt no urgent need to find out where he’d gone.
On the fourth day she went out herself. She got into his car and drove around town. She had to drive a while to get to where they used to live, and partway there she gave up. Last thing she wanted to see. The city had expanded rapidly the past few years, and she drove through mall-centered neighborhoods she wasn’t sure had been there the year before. The state university, which had been a forbidden—and forbidding—place for her when she was growing up, seemed institutional to her now, more like the grounds of a state hospital than a campus. She drove downtown, where color-coded signs had been erected so tourists could stay on the right trail. There was a historical trail that would take you from the old slave market to the Henry Clay house. There was a funkier bluegrass trail. A trail led you from horse farm to horse farm. The city had been smartly packaged, and these trails were like its bows. She could understand why her mother sold so many houses here. Annie drove out to an amusement park and a dance pavilion where she’d hung out during her senior year in high school. Closed. Open on the weekends. She realized then that she didn’t know what day it was.
Her mother worked out of an office in a converted Victorian mansion with a wraparound veranda that said, We take care, we’re grounded, we sell houses that last. Her mother was not often there. Real business was being done in gated communities out beyond the belt. These communities had names with the words “crossing,” “ford” or “pond” in them, as if only when you’d crossed a creek or brought your stock to water could you consider yourself home. Annie had to laugh. If she were alive and sitting at her side, Michelle would have said, Why do you let it get to you? That’s the difference between us, Annie. Don’t you see it’s not worth your time? Thinking there was always a difference between them, Annie might have answered, I let it get to me because I like to laugh.
Her mother was visible from the shaded street that Annie drove down. Her office had a big bay window that gave onto the veranda, and there she sat at her desk, filling the window; unless there were some funhouse imperfections in the glass, in the four months since Annie had seen her, her mother had put on weight. Her blond hair looked wildly thatched, as if in the rush to do business she hadn’t combed it that morning, or as if she were trying for some middle-aged spiky look. The side of her face, her cheek, had lengthened like a chop. Annie decided it was the glass. Or