“Older than me?” I had to interrupt. “Way older.” Her eyes got big and she giggled, “He’s got white hair and wrinkles and hair sticks out of his nose too.”

I pulled Sarah too my chest again. I was so hurt. Catherine had had an affair. She had been with someone else. She had loved someone else. I felt so betrayed; so wronged. I wanted to die at that moment. I clutched Sarah to my chest as I slid down on the couch and I sobbed out loud.

“Are you crying because of Uncle

Henry?”

“No baby, I’m crying because I miss mommy.” I lied. The truth was that I did wish that Catherine were there at that moment so that I could scream at her; so that I could interrogate her; so that I could inflict verbal injury upon her. I screamed inside of my head “Why! Why? Why did you do this to me?”

And, finally out loud, “Why!” “Why what daddy?”

“Nothing honey.” I shook my head and buried my face in my hand.

Sarah lifted up from my grip and smiled and flared her eyebrows, “Okay, lover!” she giggled, and through my tears and pain, so did I.

* * *

Later that evening, while I was alone, after Sarah had gone to sleep, as I was rummaging through some papers in Catherine’s desk (in a corner of our semi-finished basement), I pieced things together. Henry, I remembered, was one of Sarah’s clients. Or rather his wife was her client. Henry’s wife was a terminal cancer patient who had contracted skin cancer on her upper lip but despite her late age (she was almost sixty at the time) she had vainly refused treatment because she knew that the proposed surgery would have blemished her beauty. The cancer eventually spread and metastasized to her brain and Catherine was employed as her visiting nurse during the later stages of her illness. Catherine fed her and comforted her and changed her diapers and performed other menial tasks until the day she died. The woman, Lenore was her name, refused to go to a hospital and made Henry promise to let her die at home. Catherine quit that job after Lenore’s death. She said that she couldn’t stand the heartache of befriending people knowing that they would soon pass away. It was just too much for her emotionally. And shortly thereafter Catherine discovered that she had become pregnant with Sarah and her career became a moot issue.

I sifted through all kinds of papers on top of and inside of Catherine’s desk including medical bills and unfilled prescriptions and grocery lists; every odd thing. I got lost in the memories of some of the photographs I found and I became particularly distracted when I came across a pendant that I had given Catherine on the day after our first kiss. The morning after our kiss I woke up early and rode my bicycle all the way up to St. Clair Avenue to a pawn shop that I had passed many times but had never entered. I remembered my mother going there to hock her engagement ring once to buy groceries. I walked in with the almost twenty dollars I’d saved from delivering news-papers and I picked out a Beautiful necklace. As it turned out the necklace I chose cost over three-hundred dollars. The clerk laughed when I pulled out twenty odd dollars in single dollar bills and change and then directed me to some necklaces in my price range. I settled for diamond chips instead of diamonds but I think the clerk still gave me a generous deal.

I got a little choked up and began to cry. I had forgotten that I had given the necklace to Catherine. I was touched that she had thought to keep it. I found it in a lower drawer in a little white box accompanied by the note that I had written. I unfolded the note and it read:

I wish that I could kiss you forever. Love Mathew.

I cried out loud for a while but then, through tear clouded eyes, I continued my search for clues to Catherine’s relationship with Uncle Henry. I didn’t find a single tittle of information; no love notes; no cards; no scrap of paper with his name or phone number.

I did find Catherine’s journals, a series of diaries that she had kept since high-school, but the pertinently dated logs had been stripped of their pages, charred pieces of which I remembered seeing recently on the hearth of our seldom used basement fireplace. After hours of self-inflicted mental torture while searching through Catherine’s private papers I found not a thing. I sifted, carefully at first, and eventually impatiently, until it was almost morning and the floor around Catherine’s desk (along with her desktop) were covered with a collage of papers, photographs and mementos. And then, just before dawn, I started to pack.

6

I too had a secret.

I had an escape vessel that nobody knew I had.

After waiting for several hours for the darkness of night to pull the sun up over the horizon, I left Sarah sleeping in her bed, her little body from head to toe buried beneath the warm blue and green patch quilt that Catherine had made for her while she carried her in her belly, and I slipped outside through the rear sliding glass doors, in case anyone was watching the front of the house, and I crept through the patch of woods that separated my yard from my neighbor, Harriet and Gabriel

Crump, to the rear. I pushed aside low leaning autumn shorn tree branches and kicked through fallen pine needles and rotting tree limbs until I reached the Crump’s garage. The morning air was dry and brisk and my arms were cold because I had foolishly worn only a short sleeve polo shirt. I sidestepped along the side of their garage and then along their house and then sauntered out from the path to the end of the Crump’s driveway as though the property were my own and I stooped and picked up the newspaper and looked around to see if I had been watched or followed before dropping the paper back where I had found it. I stepped into the street walking toward the little white house where my good friend John Bonjiovoni lived. It was Saturday so the street was quiet except for the creaking of the tree limbs swaying in the breeze and the low fading hum of the Crump’s heat-pump. I could smell the strong scent of firewood burning in someone’s wood-burning- stove and I could almost taste the soot in the air. The sky was overcast and the wind blew briskly sending leaves scuttling past my path as I scurried (the lack of light still too little for my personal comfort) like a scared gofer to the safety of its hole until I reached the sanctuary of John’s Garage.

John was almost seventy years old and the longest standing citizens of my neighborhood. He inherited his house, a well maintained two story red-brick colonial anchored by wide towering sandstone chimneys on each side and adorned with black shutters which flanked the windows and a slate roof, from his parents. After he got married he raised his family there. I met him while walking my dog, Socks, my now long deceased Labrador retriever, almost twenty years prior just after we had moved into the neighborhood. A quick “Hello, welcome to the neighborhood!” turned into an hour-long conversation about old sports cars, of which he had a small collection: a candy-apple-red GTO, a yellow Grand Torino with fat red stripes painted diagonally across the sides and a sapphire blue nineteen-sixty-five Mustang convertible that Catherine fell in love with one warm Spring day when the old man took us for a jaunt through the country. The Mustang was his baby and it was the only car he had kept once his health began to fail.

John approached me a few months previous and asked me if I wanted to buy the Mustang from him. I told him that I wished that I could, but I just couldn’t afford it. To which he replied in his raspy baritone voice,

“How’s a dollar sound to you? Can you afford that?”

His eyes bugged out grandly and he had to reach out to catch his teeth as they almost slipped from his mouth when he said that. He had lost so much weight since he had been diagnosed with cancer that his dentures no longer fit his gums causing him to look even gaunter than he was. I refused his offer at first. “Look,” he said, “I’m dying and I checked with the big guy and he said ‘no John you can’t take the mustang with you to hell.’ So what am I supposed to do with it? My kids never cared much for old cars. They’d just sell the Mustang. I want you to have it. You’ll take care of it. You’ll appreciate it.”