He didn't answer. He pulled out the third stool and sat down heavily, still in his Carhartt, snow melting on the shoulders and dripping onto the white quartz. Dana stood behind him with her hands gripping the back of his jacket, as if he were the one who might fall.
"Where is she," Russ said.
"Upstairs," Lucy said. Her own voice surprised her. It came out steady. "She locked her door."
Their father nodded slowly. He looked at the pie, as if he had just noticed it. "Sour cherry," he said, and something happened in his face that Lucy had never seen before, a kind of caving in. "Win's birthday pie."
"I make it for Lucy now," Irene said.
"I know." He swallowed. "I know you do."
"Dad," Lucy said.
He looked at her. His eyes were red-rimmed, the way they had been at the funeral, when he had stood at the back of St. Peter's beside Dana and not come up to the front pew, and there had been a look between him and Irene across the whole length of the church that Lucy had not understood at the time.
She thought she understood it now.
"Is it true," she said. "Is Paige Mom's."
He held her gaze for a long moment. She could see him thinking about lying. She could actually see it, the way you can see a fish under the surface of a pond before it turns and is gone. She could see it move in him, and then she could see it turn.
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, kiddo. It's true."
Behind him, Dana let go of his jacket and put both hands over her mouth.
***
He told it badly, stopping and starting over, looking at Dana as if asking permission for each sentence. Dana kept giving it, a tiny nod, a tiny nod, even while her face was coming apart.
He had met Winnie Ostrowski at a bonfire at Lake Wissota the summer he was twenty-three. She was twenty. She had been wearing a man's flannel shirt, he said, and she had beaten him at horseshoes three games running, and then she had asked him for a ride home because her friend had left without her. He had driven her to Bloomer. She had talked the whole way, about how she was going to have a greenhouse someday and grow lemons in Wisconsin out of spite.