The first thing Ardis did was fill the kettle.
It was a small, familiar movement.
She opened the tap, held the kettle beneath it, and set it on the stove.
Then she reached for the tea tin.
I watched her from the kitchen table.
She had always made tea when she needed time to think.
When Brett was young, she would sit with a mug beside her while he explained some school trouble or another.
Sometimes he had made a genuine mistake.
Sometimes he was trying to talk his way out of one.
She usually knew the difference before I did.
That was one of the reasons I'd trusted her judgment.
Now she stood in the kitchen as if she were trying to remember where everything belonged.
The tea tin was in the same cupboard.
The cups were still on the shelf.
But she paused before taking one down.
I wondered whether she felt she needed permission.
That thought made me ashamed.
"This is ridiculous," I said.
She turned toward me.
"What is?"
"Us standing here like visitors."
She looked at the kettle.
"We are visitors to them, apparently."
I couldn't argue with that.
I pulled out a chair and sat down.
The kitchen table had a faint scratch near one corner where I'd once dropped a screwdriver.
I had promised Ardis I would sand it smooth.
I'd never got around to it.
She had stopped mentioning it years ago.
That was how a marriage worked sometimes.
One person forgot a small job.
The other person learned to live with it.
Not every unfinished thing became a fight.
But some things mattered more than a scratch in a table.
Ardis brought two cups over.
She placed one in front of me and sat across from me with the other.
We drank in silence.
I could hear movement upstairs.
A drawer opening.
A footstep.
Then a door closing.
I looked toward the ceiling.
"Do you think Brett understands what he's done?" Ardis asked.
I thought about it.
"I think he understands that we wouldn't have agreed to it."
She held her cup between both hands.
"Then why do it?"
"Because we weren't here."
She looked at me for a long time.
That answer sounded too simple.
I knew it.
But it was the only one I could come up with.
Distance had made the house seem less real to Brett.
We were thousands of miles away, enjoying warm weather, while he remained in the town where he'd grown up.
Perhaps he had begun to think of the place as his.
Perhaps the fact that we had never charged him rent made him believe that he could do what he liked.
I couldn't know what he'd told himself.
I could only judge what he'd done.
He had brought people into our home without asking.
He had collected money from one of them.
And he had failed to tell us any of it.
The kettle clicked as it cooled.
Ardis stood and rinsed her cup.
I rose to help, but she shook her head.
"Leave it."
I sat back down.
She placed the cup on the drying rack and leaned against the counter.
"When Brett was little, he used to leave the porch light on for you."
I looked at her.
She gave a small, sad smile.
"You'd come home late, and he'd hear the car. He always wanted to be the one to open the door."
I remembered.
Brett had been eight or nine, sometimes still wearing his pajamas when I'd pull into the driveway after working late.
He would run down the hallway and reach the door before I could get my key into the lock.
He'd open it and grin as if he'd accomplished something important.
I had loved those moments.
They were ordinary moments, but they had made the long days worthwhile.
Now I was trying to reconcile that boy with the man who had left us standing on the porch.
I didn't want to believe that the boy had disappeared.
But being his father didn't mean I had to ignore what the man had done.
"I keep thinking we must have missed something," Ardis said.
I shook my head.
"We might have missed a lot of things. That doesn't make this our fault."
She lowered her eyes.
I wasn't sure she believed me.
Parents are good at finding ways to blame themselves.
If a child struggles, we wonder whether we failed to teach him something.
If a child succeeds, we tell ourselves we must have done something right.
It's a comforting way to look at life.
It is also a way to avoid accepting that grown children make their own choices.
Brett had made his.
I didn't know yet what had led him to it.
But I couldn't undo it by blaming Ardis or myself.
A few minutes later, I carried our bags upstairs.
Our bedroom looked much as we'd left it.
The bedspread was pulled straight.
The curtains were closed.
A small stack of mail sat on the dresser.
I picked it up and set it down again.
Nothing in the room gave me an immediate reason to worry.
I opened the closet.
Our clothes hung where we'd left them.
Ardis came in behind me and put her suitcase near the bed.
She looked toward her dresser.
Then she opened the top drawer.
She stood there for a moment before closing it.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Nothing."
I knew her well enough to recognize when she wasn't ready to talk.
I didn't push.
We unpacked a few things.
I put my toiletries in the bathroom and changed into a clean shirt.
The ordinary work helped me settle down.
I could hear the furnace start again.
The low rumble traveled through the floor.
For a moment, I felt relieved.
At least that part of our responsibility had been handled.
Then I remembered that keeping the furnace running had been the one thing we'd specifically asked Brett to do.
It had never been permission to collect rent.
It had never been permission to turn the basement into somebody else's home.
It had never been permission to make our decisions for us.
I went downstairs.
Tyler was in the living room, looking at his phone.
He put it away when he saw me.
"Have you heard from Brett?"
"Not yet."
I nodded.
I didn't want to make Tyler feel responsible for finding our son.
But I also didn't want him to think the matter could be forgotten.
"Tell him we need to speak with him as soon as he comes in."
"I will."
I returned to the kitchen.
Ardis had opened the curtains.
The African violets stood in the afternoon light, their leaves dark green beneath the purple flowers.
She touched one of the leaves with her fingertip.
"I was afraid they'd die," she said.
"They look fine."
"Someone took care of them."
She didn't say anything else.
I knew what she meant.
We had entrusted Brett with the house.
Someone had remembered the flowers.
Someone had kept the furnace running.
But the most important part of looking after a home wasn't always the mechanical work.
It was understanding that the place belonged to people who trusted you.
I looked at the clock again.
We would have to wait.
I didn't like waiting.
I wanted Brett to walk through the door and tell us that there had been a misunderstanding.
I wanted an explanation that didn't require me to look at my son differently.
But I knew that even if he had a reason, the conversation wouldn't erase what had happened.
We had come home early because we had been excluded from a decision about our own house.
Now we were sitting in it, waiting for the person who had made that decision.
Click here to continue reading: PART 8: The Afternoon Grew Colder Outside, and I Realized That Whatever Brett Said Next Would Not Change the Fact That He Had Never Asked
The Call From Home That Turned a Quiet Arizona Morning Into Something I Could No Longer Ignore
Part 7 of 9
