No. Not once on the morning of her wedding. That was the thing. He had not been there on the morning of her wedding at all.
He was supposed to be the best man. He'd flown in from New Orleans, where he worked on towboats on the lower Mississippi, twenty-eight days on and fourteen off, and he'd come to the rehearsal dinner at the restaurant in Cold Spring and given a toast so warm and so funny that Nora's own mother, who disliked everyone, had wiped her eyes. Then he'd gone out with two of Daniel's college friends. The college friends had come back at one in the morning. Tom hadn't.
At ten the next morning there had been an empty chair at the end of the front row and a ring in Daniel's cousin's pocket instead of his brother's. At four in the afternoon, between the cake and the first dance, a call had come from the Kingston police. A bar fight. A broken window. A man with a broken nose who wasn't pressing charges if the window got paid for.
Daniel had left his own wedding reception for an hour and twenty minutes. Nora had danced with her father and with her uncle and with Daniel's boss, and she had smiled until her face ached, and when Daniel came back he had walked straight across the dance floor to her and put his hands on her waist, and they had danced to a song she could no longer remember while his fingers shook against her back like something electrical.
"Where is he?" she'd whispered.
"Gone," Daniel had said. "I told him to go."
Later, much later, in the hotel room, with her dress over the chair and his tie on the floor, he'd told her what he'd said in the parking lot of the Kingston police station. "I told him to go home and not come back until he was somebody I recognized."
"And what did he say?"
Daniel had been quiet a long time. "He said I'd never recognized him. He said I just liked having somebody around to be better than."
That had been seven years ago. In seven years Daniel had mentioned his brother maybe a dozen times, always lightly, always sideways, the way you mention a tooth that hurts only when you bite down. A birthday card came twice and then stopped. Nora had sent a birth announcement when Lila was born, to an address in Louisiana that might or might not have been current, and nothing had ever come back.
When Daniel died she had tried. She had called the last number Daniel had for Tom and gotten a recording. She'd emailed and gotten nothing. Daniel's cousin Marcy in St. Paul had said Tom was "on the river, somewhere, you know how he is," and promised to keep trying. The funeral had come and gone. There had been no one standing at the back of the church, and Nora had told herself she was relieved.
Four months after the funeral, a sympathy card had arrived with a Baton Rouge postmark and no return address. Inside it, under the printed lily and the printed verse, someone had written in heavy blue ballpoint, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. —T. That was all.
She had put it in the recycling. Then she'd taken it out again and put it in the drawer with the death certificates, and she had not looked at it since.
Now he was here. In Marlow Landing. Riding Daniel's train.
Nora went into the kitchen and stood at the sink in the dark. Out the window over the faucet she could see the end of Ferry Street where it dropped toward the river, and the lights of the station, and beyond them the black water and the far shore, where the town of Newburgh lay strung along the hills like something spilled. Somewhere down there was a man with her husband's face.
Lila's coin, she remembered, was still on the kitchen table. She went and picked it up. It was warm from the room and heavier than it looked. She turned it over in the light from the stove clock. To thine own self be true, it said around the edge. And in the middle, the nine.
Her father had kept his in the kitchen drawer under the dish towels, a little rainbow of beginnings, and then the drawer had stopped getting new ones, and one winter he had stopped coming home at all, and then there had been a phone call. She had been fourteen.
Nine months. That was longer than her father had ever made it.