The Different Phone Call

She called her father from a rest stop outside Rochester, not because she had news, but because she'd finally understood what Frank Vance had meant, weeks ago, about a different phone call for a different daughter, and had decided she was tired of being the daughter who waited to be asked.

"I found her," Mara said, without preamble. "Josephine. I know everything now. About the dog, about the money you two never talked about, about why you and Mom couldn't stay married even though neither of you ever did anything a courtroom would call wrong."

Frank was quiet long enough that Mara thought the call had dropped.

"I loved your mother enormously," he said finally, "and I could not live inside thirty-one years of a silence I wasn't allowed to help carry. That's not a confession, Mara Jean. That's just the truest sentence I've got, and you asked for the true ones now, so there it is."

"I'm not calling to make you feel guilty."

"I know. That's rather the point, isn't it. Your mother would have assumed you were, and spent a week rehearsing an apology for a crime nobody committed." Something that might have been a laugh, or might have been the opposite of one, traveled down the line. "You're not her, you know. You went and found the girl. You called the man you were angry at instead of writing him a letter and mailing it to the wrong century."

"I'm trying to be better at the asking part," Mara admitted. "The needing-things-out-loud part. I'm bad at it. I come by it honestly."

"Then ask me something," Frank said. "Right now. Out loud. Something real."

Mara looked out at the rest stop, at the ordinary gray Minnesota sky, at a life that had, three weeks ago, contained nothing but other people's endings.

"Will you come to Larkspur sometime? Not for anything. Just so I'm not the only Vance who ever goes back."

"Yes," her father said, immediately, like a man who had been waiting twenty years to be handed a question that simple. "Yes. I'd like that very much."