Free Three Junes by Julia Glass Page A

Directly below, he could just see one of the birdfeeders they kept filled, even since Fenno’s absence. It hung like a pendulum from a dogwood tree, stilled by the weight of the snowfall. Across the burn, the kennel fence resembled lace. The dogs, nowhere to be seen, were probably hunkered away in their house, filling it with their feral warmth. “Fenno, this isn’t your business, really.”
    “I think it is. I think anything you plan to do with something as much a part of Mum as her legs or her hands is very much my fucking business.”
    “Well then, perhaps the dogs should be buried with her, Egyptian style.” Despite the cold radiating from the pane against his forehead, Paul’s face and neck burned. He thought about the potential vengeance he held in that packet of letters. He should be relieved Fenno hadn’t guessed at that. “Fenno, I hate it when you curse. For one thing, it’s affected.”
    “I’m sorry. I’m worked up about this.” Fenno’s voice, softened, came from directly behind Paul’s back; its sudden proximity unnerved him.
    Paul said, without turning around, “I just don’t want you, any of you, to expect me not to change anything. I don’t want you to treat me like the curator of your mother’s memory.”
    “And I just don’t want you to do anything on impulse.”
    “Maybe a little impulse would do me good,” said Paul, and it was right then, looking into the snowflakes, deliberately blinding himself with their brightness, that he thought of Greece. A fleeting notion, but one he grasped like a root reaching toward a swimmer tumbled over and over by a fierce rogue current.
    “What would do you good, Dad, is a little self-pity. Suffer and whine a bit, would you please? I’m not joking. And then, I don’t know, start going to parties. Make the small talk you hate or roll up your sleeves and pry into other people’s lives. Stop standing back all the time. Stop being so . . . sober.”
    Paul smiled at the withheld obscenity. “The American approach to bereavement: martini therapy.”
    “Right now, you could use American anything,” Fenno said tartly. “Why don’t you come for a visit? You’ve never come for a visit.”
    Paul heard the packet of letters fall back on the desk. When Fenno next spoke, Paul could tell he was standing in the doorway. “This is just me speaking, you know. Me blowing off steam. I’m not some kind of . . . delegate. Just so you know, so you don’t feel . . .”
    Paul turned around. “Ganged up on?”
    Fenno’s smile erased the fragility Paul had read into his face. “I’m going downstairs to make coffee for Mal. He claims to hate the colonial implications of tea.”
    Paul looked down at the birdfeeder, trying to gauge from the snow on its miniature roof how much had fallen. Fenno and his friend were to fly to New York late that night—though in the wake of Lockerbie (which would hold the headlines, Paul knew, for weeks to come), bad weather seemed the least of a traveler’s worries.
    Fenno had always been conscientious; in that way, he was very much an oldest child. Impulse, Paul thought, was even more foreign to his son’s constitution than it was to his own. He thought everything through to its every consequence, trivial or major. He saw the details others neglected to see (what he had seen between his parents, Paul did not want to know). Just now, Fenno had said he would take the youngest dog. Rodgie was two; if he lived a good, hardy collie’s life, he’d depend on Fenno another ten years. Fenno would have thought that out.
    “WELL HALLOO THERE, if it isn’t
you
—and where’s our peerless leader?” Marjorie emerges from a wide straight road that intersects Paul’s rugged lane. She carries a large cardboard box awkwardly fitted with a twine handle. “On your way to breakfast? I could eat a Trojan horse—ha, so to speak.”
    “Let me take that,” says Paul, and she gladly hands over her box. He has no choice but to join her.
    “I