I thought about the letter, folded in my coat.
Give him a way back.
“I won’t slam it,” I said.
I went to see Dwayne on a Sunday afternoon in October, when the first cold front had come through and the cottonwoods were turning yellow along the creek. He lived in a neat gray house with a three-car garage and a flag on the porch. A boat sat in the driveway, covered in a blue tarp.
Marlene answered the door. She was a small, tired woman with gray-blonde hair and a worn gray cardigan. When she saw me, her face did something complicated.
“Karen,” she whispered. “He’s in the den.”
“Is he home?”
“He hasn’t left the house in a week.”
She led me through the kitchen. Dwayne sat in a leather recliner in front of a television that wasn’t on, a heavy, sandy-haired man in a flannel shirt, with Tom’s long jaw and none of Tom’s ease. He saw me in the doorway and went gray under the tan.
