Chapter 1 — Don’t Come Out
“Get under the kitchen table, and don’t make a sound.
No matter what you hear.”
That was the first thing my father said to me when he yanked open his front door that rainy Tuesday night — not hello, not what are you doing here, just that, low and fast, already pulling me over the threshold by the sleeve.
I had driven out to his place in the suburbs of Austin without calling first.
I couldn’t have told you why.
All afternoon I’d had a bad feeling I couldn’t name, a low hum under my ribs like a smoke alarm chirping two rooms away, and by evening I couldn’t sit still with it anymore, so I got in the car and drove to my father’s house in the rain because it was the only place that feeling pointed.
My father, Glenn Rafferty, was sixty-four years old, a retired mechanic, a practical man who had never in my life done anything for effect.
He did not own a dramatic bone.
He fixed things, he paid his bills on time, he said what he meant in the fewest words it took.
And that night his hands were shaking on my shoulders, and he threw the deadbolt the instant I was inside, and turned the porch light off.
“Dad,” I said.
“What is going on.”
“Trust me, Nadine.
Under the table.
Now.”
Chapter 2 — My Mother’s Table
The table filled almost the whole kitchen — a massive slab of oak my mother had hauled home from a flea market when I was small, so heavy it had taken three men to carry it in, so solid my father had never once considered replacing it even after she was gone.
It had coffee rings worn into the grain and a dented corner and it always smelled faintly of the lemon oil he rubbed into it out of a habit that had started as hers.
I got down and crawled under it, pulled my knees to my chest, and made myself small the way I hadn’t since I was a child hiding from thunderstorms.
The tablecloth hung down on all four sides, an inch of gap between its hem and the floor.
Through that gap I could see a slice of the kitchen — the baseboards, the legs of the chairs, the bottom of the refrigerator.
My father moved around above me with a calm that I understood, even then, was performed.
He turned on the living room television, loud enough to carry.
He sat down in his chair with a grunt, as though it were any ordinary night.
And I crouched under my dead mother’s table in my work clothes, heart slamming, and had absolutely no idea what I was about to hear, only that my unflappable father was frightened enough to hide his grown daughter on the kitchen floor.
Three minutes later, the doorbell rang.
I have tried, since, to describe what those three minutes were like, and the closest I can get is this: it was the feeling of your whole life quietly rearranging itself around a fact you can’t see yet.
I did not know what was coming.
I only knew my father — the steadiest man alive, a man I had never once seen rattled, not at my mother’s funeral, not during the worst of her illness — had just hidden his grown daughter under a table with shaking hands, and that meant the ground I had been standing on my entire life was not where I thought it was.
I ran through possibilities in the dark.
Was he in trouble with someone?
Sick, and hiding it?
Had I walked into something criminal?