What Your Father Remembers, and Doesn't

Frank Vance answered on the fourth ring, the way he always had, as though picking up before the fourth ring might suggest he'd been waiting by the phone, and Frank Vance had spent his whole life allergic to looking like he needed anything.

"Mara Jean." He still used her middle name like a full stop. "Sandra said you'd call eventually. She's better at predicting you than I am."

"I'm going through Mom's letters," Mara said, and did not elaborate, because elaborating had never gotten her anywhere with her father, only around him. "Peg Anders says there was an accident. A girl. Something with a bus, before I was old enough to remember."

The silence on the line had a texture to it, the specific weight of a man deciding, in real time, how much of the truth a phone call could safely carry.

"That's your mother's story to tell," he said finally. "Was. Is. I don't know what tense we're supposed to use for a dead woman's secrets."

"She left me a box of letters and a note that says finish this. I think that makes it my story too, whether either of you meant it to be."

Another silence, shorter this time. Mara could hear a television somewhere behind him, laugh track rising and falling like a tide he'd stopped noticing years ago.

"There was a girl on the bus route," Frank said. "Hurt bad. It wasn't your mother's fault, not legally, not in any way a court would've cared about. But your mother wasn't in the habit of only caring about the things a court would care about." He exhaled, long, the sound of a man setting down something he'd been carrying so long he'd forgotten it had weight. "We didn't talk about it. Not once, in twenty-two years of marriage. I used to think that was because it didn't matter to her anymore. I understand now it was because it never stopped mattering, and she didn't think she'd earned the right to make it my burden too."

"Is that why you two—"

"That's a question for a different phone call, Mara Jean. Maybe a different daughter." But he said it gently, the closest thing to an apology Frank Vance had offered in a decade. "Ask around near Larkspur, if you want the rest of it. There was a woman — a neighbor of ours, back then — who kept in touch with the family longer than your mother could stand to. Name was Louise Petrakis, if she's even still alive to ask."

Mara sat with the phone warm against her ear long after he'd hung up, turning over a name she hadn't expected — not the girl's, not yet, just one more thread in a box that kept refusing to run out.