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“It’s a major inconvenience. Makes life more difficult. Could be some kind of college prank.”

“You think students did it?”

“Who knows. Your father has his share of enemies in town. I’m sure there are plenty of people who wouldn’t mind inconveniencing him.”

“But isn’t it kind of an inconvenient thing to steal? It must be a lot of work.”

“You’re right.” Joan looked happier than she had in weeks. “A lot of trouble to go to.”

“Does this mean Dad and I can’t go to Ponzu tonight?”

“Oh, Flo, I hadn’t thought of that.” No one spoke as the in advertent confession filled the station wagon, crowding out the earnest voices of public radio. Her mother pulled to the side of the road and stopped the car.

“I don’t want to upset you,” she said. “I’m sorry if I have.”

“You have.” Though Flora didn’t exactly feel upset. She felt nervous.

“I don’t expect you to understand. It was just something I had to do.”

“You had to steal Dad’s license plates?”

“I’m sure that doesn’t make sense to you. I don’t want it to make sense to you. I’m fine. I don’t want you to take care of me. I’m fine.” Her mother began to cry. Flora watched her cry. “Your father holds all the cards—he has the money, the job, the house. I had to do something to make me feel less powerless. It was between the license plates and shredding all the clothes in his closet. I felt the license plates were subtler.”

“Were you scared, doing it?”

“No. It was so dark, and so quiet. Darwin is quite beautiful at night, with no other people around.”

Flora could see her mother dressed all in black, walking on the tips of her toes, like the woman in some old movie her parents had shown her, a cat burglar. She saw her standing on the bank of the river, skimming the metal rectangles into the water one after the other, as though skipping oversize stones.

“What if you had gotten caught?” Flora asked.

“There’s no sense worrying about what might have happened. I didn’t get caught. I’m here. I’m fine.”

She didn’t seem fine. “It would have been embarrassing. You could have been arrested or something.” Darwin was a gossiping town; everyone knew what was happening to her family. Flora felt their knowing on her skin when they looked at her.

“Maybe Ponzu will deliver?” her mother suggested. “You could eat it at home.”

“The whole point is that you go there and watch them cook right in front of you. That’s the whole point of Ponzu.”

“You could order Chinese. Or walk somewhere in town. Anyway, I’m sure everything will be resolved by next Tuesday. You’ll be back at Ponzu in a week.”

Her mother had chosen this night of all nights, her night with her father, to leave them stranded. She had done it not just to him but also to Flora. What if they needed to escape town in a hurry? They had never not gone to Ponzu on a Tuesday since they first discovered the place. Would the cooks think they had abandoned them? Would their free drinks sit sweating, waiting for them on the bar all night?

“I hate to ask you to keep secrets from your father.”

“You know I won’t tell him.”

What had become of them in the months since the move? What had Darwin done to them? Flora now the spy, and her mother the thief. But what about her father? Was he, too, adopting a life of crime? Or did he not care enough about them to deceive them? Instead, he was plotting their removal, their eviction and elimination from the house and his life. He was retreating into the gold room with his separate line to the outside world, into the part of him that was Lewis Dempsey, and not Dad. She could see him moving further and further away, growing smaller and smaller, a flea dancing on the horizon. What would her mother do next? Whatever it was, she would end up in jail, and her father would not bail her out and they would never go to Ponzu again and Flora’s life would be ruined and everyone would know.

“It’s just a license plate, baby,” her mother told her. “Right? Nobody got hurt.”

8

The Good Parents

I
T WASN’T
F
LORA’S FIRST
T
HANKSGIVING
without her father. Since her parents’ divorce, she’d spent the holiday with her mother’s family. Christmas she had alternated year to year, one his, the next hers, at first with a strict fairness, which slid into haphazardry. When was her last Christmas in Darwin? And yet of course it was the first Thanksgiving without him. Death, like birth, like love, opened up a world of firsts. The first Sunday, the first week, the first November, the first winter.

Flora had dreaded the day so thoroughly this year, she’d lost track. She woke that Thursday convinced it was Friday, that she’d succeeded in missing it all together. She called the operator and asked for the date, and then had to clarify: “No, I meant day of the week.”

The operator’s voice revealed no consternation, such desperate isolation old hat in her profession. “Happy Thanksgiving, miss,” she said blandly before disconnecting.

Flora would have to drive to make it between her many celebrations, and she hated driving. In fact, it was her first time in her father’s car. The car, a gray Volvo, was new and safe and did not smell of him. She clutched the wheel, and hit the brakes in spasms. She tried to calm herself—she was only stopping in to say hello to Georgia’s parents before she went to meet her mother for dinner at the Beagle Inn. What a place to become a regular.
But what did she expect in Darwin?
her mother might ask. Flora hadn’t spoken to Paul since their evening there together. She tried to imagine him at home in his hiking boots with his two sisters and his drunk father. Was he trying to imagine her?

Her last time in the McNair-Wallach house she was nine, and spying on her parents as if it were a job, and life without Georgia was unimaginable. It had been almost home, better than home. Conjuring its smell—ripe with nostalgia—in the innocuous sterility of the station wagon sent Flora’s brain careening into childhood. Then, Georgia, the budding scientist, had kept a small army of rodents—gerbils, mice, and a lone dwarf Russian hamster—and a trace of the sawdusty shavings that made their bedding germed the air. But mostly the smell was a mixture of wood, fresh paint, vanilla, and an inkling of marijuana, from the joints Georgia’s father, Ray, sneaked on the back porch. It was one of those open family secrets—Madeleine pretending not to notice the scent on his clothing and in his beard, and, in return, Ray pretending not to notice when she raided his stash and threw his pot down the garbage disposal a few times a year. In this way, the McNair-Wallachs were united, even by their secrets from one another. Then, Flora had resented Georgia her good luck in parents. Sometimes, amazingly, she still felt that way, jealous of Georgia. She kept waiting for the moment she’d be done with those feelings, move on, grow up, but the moment never arrived. Adulthood, it turned out, didn’t strike the way adolescence once had, in an unmistakable spree of new angles and attitudes.

Their house was beautiful, and little changed. For Flora, this was rare. Most of the settings of her childhood were gone or off-limits; there were few material places she could return to, to remember and compare. Ray, a carpenter, had designed and built it himself with wonderful woods, and Madeleine had chosen a crushed peach pink paint for the exterior, a color Georgia had loved, and found mortifying.

Flora knocked, and when no one answered, she let herself in.

“Hello?” she said.

The decor was what she liked to think of as “futon-chic,” the dominant aesthetic in Darwin—low to the floor, unfussy, comfortable but not luxurious—the furniture equivalent of a station wagon. Though the uniqueness of color extended within the house. Madeleine had majored in art in college and was a great weaver, and her rugs of brilliant greens and yellows punctuated the blond maple of the floors.

In the living room, in front of the small television, sat Ray’s ancient mother, Betty, and her friend from the nursing home, Hal, the football game on, though irrelevant. Ray and Madeleine were in the kitchen.

“In here,” they called out, as if she were a regular visitor who came and went with ease.

Madeleine was trimming brussels sprouts over the old aqua sink, reclaimed from a 1950s farmhouse Ray had remodeled; Ray, the cook of the family, was manning the various burners on the stove. To find them there in the same space, as if they hadn’t moved an inch, as if their life were a diorama, frozen all these almost twenty years, and yet no longer the young parents of Flora’s youth, was strange. Ray’s beard had grown grayer, and both sparser and wilder, his glasses bigger, the lenses thicker.

He shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. Then he wrapped his arms around Flora and said into her hair, “You’re still a wisp of a girl, aren’t you? Got to fatten you up for the New England winter. You’re staying awhile, in Darwin, aren’t you?”

It was so normal, so familiar. Madeleine hugged Flora tightly and quickly, then released her. This was how feeling came from Madeleine, in emphatic bursts. She could be affectionate, but only in short, strong doses. Georgia had been this way, too, a halfhearted, one-armed hugger—she hugged because one was expected to in certain instances. But hugging was not the way she demonstrated her affection. Flora had sometimes hugged her just to torture her, chanting, “I won’t let you go, I won’t let you go,” and Georgia would shriek with hysterical laughter, as though she were being tickled.

Madeleine handed Flora a mug of mulled wine. “The only thing to do during these family occasions is to start drinking as early as possible.”

Ray hunched over the oven, admiring his work. He looked up at Flora and beamed, proud, and happy to see her.

“That’s some turkey, Ray,” Flora said. She moved closer to admire.

“We’re calling him Alfred, for Alfred Russel Wallace—the man who nearly scooped Darwin,” he told her. Naming the turkey was a Thanksgiving tradition Georgia had started—the namesakes always scientists. The only one Flora knew in memory was Marie. “Alfred weighed in at eighteen pounds,” Ray said.

Betty had likely reached the stage of life where she chewed and chewed but ate little, and Hal, frail as a greyhound, looked as though he, too, would offer slim help in getting through the feast Ray was preparing.

“Did you stop being a vegetarian?” Flora asked Madeleine.

“Nope.” She rolled her eyes fondly at her husband’s excesses.

“More leftovers for the carnivores. You’ll have to come over for sandwiches, Flor,” Ray said. “Anyway, Madeleine always cheats on Thanksgiving. She can’t resist my bird.”

“Sit down, sit down,” Madeleine said, pointing to the kitchen chairs. “Tell us everything.” Madeleine’s old command. She liked to hear the details you left out for other people—when you woke up, what you ate for breakfast, which route you took when you left the house. Flora’s mother had a phobia of logistics, as if life were attempting to kill her with sheer dullness, but for Madeleine, the marginalia, the smallnesses, the scraps and bits—that was the stuff she craved and gathered like an avid collector.

So this was how it would be. They would not ask for an apology, nor would they apologize to Flora or in any way dispute their own blamelessness. No disputes, no forgiveness. Just the small things you’d forgotten returning—or reappearing, as if they’d been there all along but the view had been blocked. Or were they small things? Maybe these were the things that mattered: the gestures, the habits, the clues to the self. Maybe the events, which took up so much room—the view blockers—were really insignificant.

They looked at her, Madeleine sitting, Ray pausing where he stood, stirring flour into the gravy, waiting.

Flora obliged, sticking to recent history, telling them about quitting her job, her sudden need to return. She talked about Larks and her father’s house and her plans for the memorial. When they seemed to still want more, she decided to seek her own scraps: “Do you know someone in Art History named Cynthia Reynolds?” she asked.

“Sure, we know Cynthia,” Madeleine said.

“You know her? Well?”

“No, not well. From committees and that sort of thing.”

“She was my dad’s girlfriend. We just met.”

Ray looked at Madeleine.

“You knew?” Flora asked.

“Yes,” Ray said.

“Why didn’t I know?”

“Why didn’t he tell you, your father, you mean,” Madeleine said gently.

Flora drank her wine.

“Anyway, we didn’t really know. We never saw your father, especially once he retired. It was the usual Darwinian gossip, and you can never be sure about that. You know how it is around here.”

That Flora did know. “Worse than a group of teenage girls,” her mother liked to say of the Darwin faculty. “Of course they are-much more spare time on their hands. The leisure of the theory class allows for much mischief.” During the divorce, she had flirted with the possibility of spreading false rumors about her soon-to-be ex. “It would be so easy,” she’d said, finding the idea hilarious. “Nothing too horrible—you know, a narcotic addiction, a doll collection.”

But they had known, Ray and Madeleine, who never saw her father, who had, for many years, avoided him. Darwin had known. His own daughter the last to know.

“So, what’s she like?” Flora asked.

“Cynthia?” Madeleine smiled a little to herself. “Oh, well, you know.”

The phrase was irksome. “No, I don’t know—that’s the whole thing,” Flora said, her petulant child self surprising her as it emerged.

“She’s fine,” Ray called out. “She’s nice.”

“That’s great, Ray, what a vivid description,” Madeleine said. “Don’t you feel you know her a little better already, Flo?” But with Ray, one knew he said it out of kindness, not vagueness. He picked up a brussels sprout from the bowl beside him, threatening to throw it at his wife.

“I met her only briefly,” Flora explained. “She came by the house. She was dressed in this ridiculous outfit. She looked like a giant toddler.”

Madeleine laughed with pleasure, wrinkling the freckles on her cheeks and nose. “She’s very popular with the students,” she said. “She teaches a lecture, on … oh, I can’t remember. Not Impressionists, but some movement, and there’s always full enrollment. Lord knows, she’s one of the only women on the Darwin faculty to teach a lecture course.”

“Okay, so she’s successful,” Flora said. “But, Madeleine, I want to know what you really think. Mrs. J. said she didn’t trust her.”

Madeleine stared at Flora, her eyes darting. “The whole breathless, wide-eyed thing. I mean, you said it, the big toddler. I don’t buy it. Overcompensating, I would say.”

“For what?”

“You know Madeleine,” Ray said, rubbing his beard in mock psychoanalytic posture. “She thinks everyone is overcompensating for something. Overcompensating, projecting, transferring, sublimating. They’re all very big around here.”

“It’s not as though I’m saying something awful, Ray,” Madeleine said. “Don’t get so nervous.” She turned to Flora. “I think she’s hungry, ambitious. If she wants something, she works her ass off to get it. That’s all.”

Hungry, ambitious
. That was all. It sounded ominous.
Ambitious
was almost a dirty word in Flora’s family. Not that they didn’t have ambition, but they paired it with a neurotic dose of self-sabotage.

“Speaking of hungry,” Ray said, “Flora, come here and taste this stuffing.” And talk of the meal took over.

While they finished their preparations, they told her more about Georgia, whom they hadn’t seen in six months. They were planning a visit to Mongolia over spring break. They, too, would be sleeping in a yurt. Georgia was living there with her husband, who had been her professor.

“You can probably guess how that news was received,” Ray said, eyebrows raised toward his wife.

But they’d come around to him, though they found the closeness of his age to their own disconcerting, and the fact of his two earlier marriages and two children just years younger than Georgia.

“We have children to keep us humble,” Madeleine said. “One’s own child in many ways a mystery. It’s good to remember we’re not in control.”

“You’re not?” Ray asked.

Georgia—a stepmother, another Dr. McNair-Wallach, a proper grown-up with a substantial grown-up life, married to a man old enough to be her father. Flora had many times tried to imagine what Georgia was like now, what she did for a living, how she wore her hair. If ever Flora saw a little girl who looked like Georgia, looked how she had looked then—soft brown smudgy eyes, a button nose, big cheeks, and a thick mane of bark brown hair bobbed around her chin—Flora would ache to sit down and talk to her.
It’s me
, she’d want to call out.
It’s me
.

Flora remembered in images that came to her like sensations-like a hand plunged into boiling water, so hot it feels cold. She wanted to ask Ray and Madeleine,
Remember? Remember the time she finished her report on the black-capped chickadee so early that she wrote a second one, on the crow? Remember how she made us breakfast in bed? Remember when she organized the books in the living room chronologically?
Weren’t they remembering, too? Georgia—whom they, too, longed for, off living her life far away, as children were meant to do.