Chapter Six
Evan
I CALL SAM O’HARA ON a Wednesday morning because I’ve run out of ideas that make sense and the ones that don’t make sense are all I have left.
“Professor O’Hara, this is Evan. I’m calling to ask whether you need a ride to the University of Maryland archives tomorrow. I understand Amy is unavailable.”
There’s a long pause. I can hear Oscar barking at something in the background. I can picture Dave eyeing the little dog with mild confusion.
“How do you know that?”
I looked at my wife’s calendar she hasn’t blocked me from and saw Amy has plans with her. I don’t tell him that. “It doesn’t matter.”
He huffs but doesn’t push. “You want to drive me to College Park?”
“It’s close to an hour each way. You shouldn’t have to make that drive alone at eighty-one.”
“At my age.” Another pause. “I’ve been driving that route for thirty years, Mr. Drake.
I drove it in a snowstorm in 1998 with a stack of primary sources in the passenger seat and a broken heater.
Chesapeake winter, the Eisenhower Interstate System, forty years of Naval Academy parking, and I survived all of it. I don’t need a chauffeur.”
“I understand that. I’m offering anyway.”
Sam is quiet long enough that I check the phone to see if the call dropped.
Then he says, “I need to be there by ten. I want the Burnside collection in the special holdings room, and the archivist locks up at four. You can pick me up at eight, and you should eat before you come because I won’t be stopping. ”
He hangs up without saying goodbye. I’ll take it.
THURSDAY IS THE GROUNDbrEAKING for Gieffel, a mixed-use Arlington development I’ve shepherded for eighteen months.
The project includes three buildings, two hundred residential units, and ground-floor retail.
My VP, Carter, has been running the day-to-day for two weeks while I’ve been unable to focus on anything except a ceramic dog bowl and a wedding ring on a dresser.
Carter calls at seven. “The mayor’s office confirmed. The press will be there at ten. Your remarks are drafted. Do you want me to send them over?”
“You give the remarks.”
Carter has worked for me for six years. He’s never given the remarks at a groundbreaking.
That’s my job. That’s the part of the job I’ve always shown up for, the shovels and the photo with the mayor, because my grandfather taught me that builders should stand in front of the projects carrying their names.
“You’re sure?” Carter asks.
“I’ll be in College Park. You handle the groundbreaking. You’ve earned it.”
I hang up before he can ask questions I can’t answer. I’m spending the day with Penelope’s father because every attempt to reach her through money or authority has failed. Carter earned the groundbreaking. I need to be somewhere where my name carries no weight.
SAM IS WAITING ON THE porch at eight with a canvas tote bag full of folders and Oscar tucked under his arm. He gets in the passenger seat, settles Oscar on his lap, and says, “You’ll take 50 West to the Beltway. I’ll tell you where to exit.”
We drive for forty minutes in a silence that Sam controls. He reads a manuscript page. He makes a note in pencil. Oscar sleeps on his lap. I keep my hands on the wheel and my mouth shut, because I learned in the first thirty seconds that this ride operates on Sam’s terms.
Near Bowie, Sam folds the manuscript page and sets it on the dashboard.
“You should know something about this drive,” he says.
“I’ve made it a hundred times. Jean used to come with me.
She’d bring a novel, read in the car while I worked at the archive, and we’d eat lunch at the diner on Route 1 on the way home.
She preferred the tuna melt. After she died, I made the drive alone.
The diner closed. The drive got longer without her in the passenger seat. ”
I don’t say anything, because Sam isn’t telling me about the drive. He’s telling me about his wife.
“I almost lost her once,” he says. “Illness wasn’t what nearly cost me Jean.
My own stupidity did. I took a sabbatical in ‘94, a year at the War College in Carlisle. She wanted to come. I told her I needed the year to focus, that she’d be fine in Annapolis with Penelope, and it was only twelve months.
” He taps the manuscript on the dashboard.
“She didn’t argue. Jean never argued when she was truly angry. She just stopped calling.”
He adjusts Oscar on his lap. The dog opens one eye and closes it again.
“It took me four months to understand she wasn’t giving me space. She was showing me what I’d chosen. When I came home at Christmas, she told me she’d been looking at apartments.”
“What did you do?”
“I canceled the second semester. I came home. She told me she didn’t need me to feel bad about it.
She needed me to be different.” He picks up the manuscript again.
“I spent the next twenty-eight years trying to be different. I wasn’t always good at it, but I was always trying. That’s the part she cared about.”
We drive. Oscar wakes up, yawns, and goes back to sleep. It makes me miss Dave. Sam told me that story for a reason. He’s taught too long to miss his target.
THE ARCHIVE TAKES THREE hours. Sam works in the special holdings room as though the outside world has ceased to exist. I sit in a chair by the door and answer emails on my phone, half-watching Carter’s groundbreaking photos come in.
The mayor looks happy. The drone footage looks good.
Carter texts me a thumbs-up. I text back congratulations and mean it.
Before Penelope left, missing my own groundbreaking would have been unthinkable.
Sam emerges once, to show me a photocopied letter from a Union colonel.
He supports it at both edges, keeping it away from his coffee.
“You need to see the date,” he says. “Three days before Burnside’s order.
Three days. Chessman had the intelligence, and Burnside ignored it because it contradicted what he’d already decided. ”
He returns to the holdings room before I can answer.
My father calls while Sam is deep in a box of Burnside correspondence.
“I heard you missed the groundbreaking,” Frank says. He’s been thinking about this. I can hear it.
“Carter handled it.”
“Carter did well. The mayor was impressed.” He pauses. “Where are you?”
“College Park. I drove Penelope’s father to the archives.”
There’s a longer pause. “Have you told Penelope about the cancer?”
“She knows. I told her before we got married.”
“You told her the medical facts. I’m asking whether you told her what it was like. The hospital. The fear. What the doctors said to your mother and me while you were asleep. What happened to your mother and me after.”
I don’t answer. He knows I never told her.
“You asked her to live inside a story she only knew half of,” Frank says. “Then you punished her when the ending changed.”
The call ends. I lower the phone. Paul’s petition is still in my email, and Penelope knows only the medical summary of the worst year of my life.
Sam finishes at three-thirty, exactly when the archivist begins locking the cabinets.
He emerges with two folders of photocopied documents, visibly pleased with himself, and doesn’t share his findings during the drive home.
He reads his photocopies in the passenger seat while Oscar sleeps on his lap, making pleased little sounds at intervals.
It’s the academic equivalent of a fist pump.
I drive. The Beltway is heavy heading east, and we sit in traffic past Greenbelt for twenty minutes without speaking. Sam eventually looks up from his photocopies.
“You drive well,” he says. “You don’t tailgate, and you use your mirrors. Jean couldn’t stand tailgaters.”
With Sam, the compliment and the lesson might be the same thing.
We pull into Sam’s driveway at five. He gathers his folders, tucks Oscar under his arm, and stands by the car for a moment.
“Thank you for the ride,” he says. It’s the first time he’s thanked me for anything. He goes inside without waiting for a response.
THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY, I show up at Sam’s house with work gloves and ask if the gutter on the east side is something I can fix.
Sam stands on the porch with Oscar and his coffee. He considers me for a long time. “Penelope isn’t here.”
I shrug. “Okay, but the gutter is.”
“The gutter has been leaking for six months,” he says. “Amy asked me to call someone. I told her I’d get to it.”
“I can get to it now.”
“You can.” He takes a sip of coffee. “The caulk is in the garage, and the ladder is behind the azaleas. The azaleas are Jean’s. If you damage them, I will end you.”
I find the ladder, then the caulk. I spend three hours on Sam O’Hara’s roof fixing a gutter while an old man reads a manuscript on the porch below me and a small dog barks at me every time I shift my weight. Dave occasionally musters a tail wag for me.
Jean’s azaleas bloom along the fence beneath my ladder. Sam doesn’t thank me. He doesn’t come up to supervise. He sits in his chair with his papers and his coffee.
I think about the attorney call while I work.
Here I am fixing her father’s gutter while hiding the ugliest thing I did after she left.
I should have told her when she answered my call after the results came back, if she hadn’t hung up on me.
Instead, I gave her only the part that proved she was right.
Every day I wait makes the truth uglier.
I finish the gutter and climb down. Then I return the ladder behind the azaleas without touching a branch.
Penelope’s car pulls into the driveway as I’m putting away the caulk.
She’s coming from the direction of town, with Amy in the passenger seat and bags from a craft supply store in the back.
She parks and looks at me standing in her father’s yard, work gloves on, and caulk on my shirt. I look at her in the car.
We don’t speak. Amy gets out and carries the bags inside without looking at either of us.
Sam’s screen door closes. Oscar barks. Dave, asleep on Sam’s porch rug, lifts his head and thumps his tail twice when he sees Penelope.
He doesn’t move toward me. Weeks since he’s seen me, and still he picks her. He’s always picked her.
She goes inside. The screen door closes a second time.
The petition remains in my email, and anything I want to say to my wife remains unspoken.