The workshop
Mara met him in the small workshop after lunch. Iris was at the far bench, taking the handle from a plane so she could clean the blade. She stayed where she was when Julian entered. Neither woman offered him a chair. Mara was carrying the bread he had brought that morning, now sliced and wrapped in a cloth.
“You'll need to eat something,” she said.
Julian took a piece. He had thought hunger was beyond him. The bread tasted of nothing until he swallowed and found that his throat hurt.
“Start where I left,” he said. He had meant it as an invitation to truth. Mara's face made him hear the other meaning.
“You left on a Tuesday,” she said. “You packed your car while I was at work. By the time I came home you were at the bridge. You'd told me the night before that you couldn't stay and I should do what I wanted about the baby.”
Iris stopped moving the plane handle. Julian looked at the floor. He remembered the argument, the way he had put a sentence between himself and Mara as if a sentence could share the weight. He had been twenty-one. He had thought that was an explanation for the size of his fear. It wasn't one for the choice.
“I drove across,” he said.
“Yes. You did.” Mara set the bread on the bench. “After you crossed, somebody came up the road on foot. He had your jacket. He had your keys in his pocket, though you still had yours. He was out of breath from the hill. He said he'd come back.”
Julian looked toward the open door. Beyond it the yard ran down to the water, nothing on the road changing as she spoke. “A brother? Someone dressed like me?”
“I asked him where he'd been an hour earlier. He told me what we'd fought about. He knew the broken handle on your mother's kitchen window and the name you gave the dog you had at twelve. He knew what you had whispered to me that morning. He also remembered getting into the car and deciding not to turn around.”
Julian felt himself trying to find a point where the story would give way to an ordinary one. A lie could borrow facts. A face could fool someone in poor light. Mara had lived with the face for twenty years. He had been a stranger to her for twenty years. He knew which of them could more easily mistake a voice.
“I called you,” she said. “The man in front of me asked me to. I thought he'd gone mad, or I had. You answered from the road. I could hear a truck behind you and the change in your voice when you saw it was my number.”
Julian remembered pulling into a fuel station because the call had come while he was driving. He had stood between pumps, waiting for Mara to shout. She had asked where he was. He had said he was north of the bridge. Then there had been a long silence and another breath on the line, too faint to make out. He had assumed she had someone with her. He remembered feeling relieved and ashamed together.
“Why didn't you tell me?” he asked.
“I said there was another you standing with me. You told me to stop making this harder.”
He remembered those words too. He had meant that she should stop asking him to return. They had been the last words he gave her for years. The fact that he had not believed her did not make them smaller.
Iris put the plane handle down. “He wasn't you,” she said. “Not after that road.”
“I don't know what he was.”
“He was a man who came back,” Mara said. “That's the beginning. It isn't all of him.” She sat on the bench and pressed her palms together. “I didn't open the door and say everything was forgiven. He knew he'd wanted to leave. He was frightened of what had happened and of what I'd say if I believed him. We lived apart for a while. He came to the doctor's visits when I asked. I chose him later. He had to keep choosing me, and I had to decide what that meant when he failed at ordinary things.”
Julian looked at Iris. “He was there when you were born?”
“Yes.”
“And you knew?”
“Since I was sixteen. Before that he was just my father.” She wiped her hands on a rag. “After that he was still my father. The story didn't replace him.”
Mara glanced toward the yard. “He built most of this after Iris learned to walk. He could be kind enough to stop work for a neighbor's broken step, then come home angry that our own roof leaked. He held Iris every night she had a fever. Two weeks ago he wrote her name next to a promise she had not made. I am not giving you a perfect man so you can compare yourselves and feel anything easy.”
Julian had imagined, briefly, that if another man had raised the child, the original choice had been undone. The thought was so ugly he could not let it pass without speaking. “I knew you were pregnant,” he said. “Before I left. I didn't ask what happened after.”
Iris's face did not change. That was worse than if she had been surprised. She had known him through the shape of that silence, but hearing him name it made him more real to her than the photograph.
“I told myself you wouldn't want a call,” he said. “Then enough time passed that calling would have meant admitting why I hadn't.”
Mara stood. “That was your choice. He did not make it for you, and neither did Iris.”
Outside, Dev started the saw again. Julian felt each short stroke in the floor under his shoes. The impossible part of Mara's account remained impossible. Two men had existed at once; one had just been buried. The part he could answer for was painfully ordinary. He had known about the baby and driven away.
Iris picked up the plane handle. “You asked who was in the coffin,” she said. “My father. You can come back to the yard if you remember that.”
Julian took the untouched piece of bread from the bench. He had not meant to take anything. Mara watched him wrap it in its cloth and did not ask for it back.