THE COURT: Mr. Hargis?
MR. HARGIS: Mrs. Severance has instructed me to decline. She's not interested in visitation.
THE COURT: All right. That's her right. We're adjourned.
That was the third time.
I sat at my kitchen table in Italian Village on the night before Thanksgiving with two hundred and eleven pages of photocopies spread out in front of me in a fan, and the radiator knocking, and the photograph on my phone of a white cotton rectangle with a child's hand traced on it in blue thread, and I read my own words in the mouth of a man I had never met. Couldn't you afford a better suit. Twenty-four years apart, in two rooms in the same city, in front of the same woman, the same six words. I had not even had the decency to come up with my own.
Thanksgiving at Claudette's was at one o'clock. It had been at one o'clock for eight years, a small, exact meal for six or eight people at the end of the long table under the chandelier: Claudette, me, her friend Mrs. Lowenthal from the symphony board, a widowed cousin from Dayton, sometimes a retired minister from First Community and his wife. At four I would kiss Claudette's cheek and drive home and sleep, and at eleven-thirty drive to Weber Road to meet my father coming in off the holiday shift with the Kroger sandwiches.
I went at one o'clock. I brought the manila envelope.
I didn't make a scene. I want that understood, because the thing I'd done in the lobby of the Palace was enough scenes for one year. I sat through the soup. I said, when it came round to me, that I was grateful for my family, and Mrs. Lowenthal said, "Isn't that lovely," and Claudette looked at me down the table with an expression I couldn't read. After the pie, when the cousin from Dayton had gone to lie down and Mrs. Lowenthal had gone to find her coat, I asked Claudette if we could talk in the library, and she said, "Of course," in a voice that told me she already knew why.
The library was the room with the portrait of my grandfather and his unread books. She sat in the wing chair by the fireplace, where Marta had laid a fire that nobody had lit, and I sat across from her on the edge of the sofa, and I took the transcript out of the envelope and put it on the coffee table between us, on the glass, beside a silver dish of mints.