“Once, in the tide of Dunbar past…”
The first is Melissa Penelope.
The second is Kristin Carey.
* * *
—
And so it then comes to this:
There’s one more story I can tell you now, before I can leave you in peace. To be truthful, it’s also my favorite story, of the warm-armed Claudia Kirkby.
But it’s also a story of my father.
And my brother.
And the rest of my brothers, and me.
* * *
—
See, once—once, in the tide of Dunbar past, I asked Claudia Kirkby to marry me; I asked with earrings and not a ring. They were just small silver moons, but she loved them, she said they were something. I wrote her a long letter, too, about everything I ever remembered, about meeting her; and her books, and how kind she had been to us Dunbars. I wrote to her about her calves, and that sunspot, center-cheek. I read it to her on her doorstep, and she’d cried and she’d told me yes—but next, she already knew.
She knew there would also be problems.
She could tell from the look on my face.
When I told her we should wait for Clay, she squeezed my hand, and said I was right—and like that, the years climbed by. They climbed by and we had our daughters. We watched everything form and change, and though we feared he would never come back here, we thought waiting might just bring him to us. When you wait you start feeling deserved.
When five years had passed, though, we wondered.
We’d talk in the night, in our bedroom, which had once been Penny and Michael’s.
Eventually, we came to a decision, after Claudia finally asked me:
“How about when you turn thirty?”
I agreed, and again, the years went by, and she even gave me one extra; but thirty-one, it seemed, was the limit. There hadn’t been a postcard for a long time by then, and Clay Dunbar could have been anywhere—and that was when finally I thought of it:
I got in my car and drove there.
I arrived in the night in Silver.
I sat with our dad in his kitchen.
As he’d often done with Clay, we drank coffee, and I looked at that oven, and its digits, and I stayed and half bawled and I begged him. I looked out across the table:
“You’ve gotta go out and find him.”
* * *
—
As soon as possible, Michael left the country.
He took a plane to a city and waited.