Chapter 9 — The Same Porch

Late that Saturday afternoon, I stood once again on the porch where I had been thrown out ten years before, in the same fading light, and I raised my hand and knocked on the door of my childhood home.

There was a long pause, and then footsteps, and then the door opened, and my father was standing there.

He had aged more than ten years should have accounted for, as though the decade had pressed on him with more than its ordinary weight; his hair had gone white, his shoulders had rounded and drawn inward, and when his eyes found my face they went wide with a shock so total that for a moment he could not speak at all.

“Evelyn?” he finally managed, my name coming out of him like something he had not said aloud in a very long time.