Free The Dutch House by Ann Patchett Page A

moon, it was that impossible. There were bars over the windows and I raised my hand to touch them.
    “Those keep out the knuckleheads,” my father said. “That’s what your grandfather used to say. He put them on.”
    I looked at him. “My grandfather?”
    “Your mother’s father. He was a fireman. A lot of nights he slept at the station, so he put bars on the windows. I don’t know if he needed them, though; not much happened back then.”
    My fingers curled around one of the bars. “Does he still live here?”
    “Who?”
    “My grandfather.” I had never put those two words together before.
    “Oh, heavens no.” My father shook his head at the memory. “Old Jack’s been dead forever. There was something wrong with his lungs. I don’t know what. Too many fires.”
    “And my grandmother?” Again, the sentence astounded me.
    I could tell by his face that this wasn’t what he’d signed on for. He only wanted to drive through Brooklyn, show me the places he knew, the building where he had lived. “Pneumonia, not too long after Jack died.”
    I asked him if there were any others.
    “You don’t know this?”
    I shook my head. He peeled my fingers off the window bar, not unkindly, and turned me back towards the car while he spoke. “Buddy and Tom died of the flu, and Loretta died having a baby. Doreen moved to Canada with some fellow she married, and James, James was my friend, he died in the war. Your mother was the baby of the family and she outlasted all of them, except maybe Doreen. I guess Doreen could still be up there in Canada.”
    I reached down deep to find something in myself I wasn’t sure was there, the part of me that was like my sister. “Why did she leave?”
    “The guy she married wanted to move,” he said, not understanding. “He was from Canada or he got a job there. I can’t remember which.”
    I stopped walking. I didn’t even bother to shake my head, I just started again. It was the central question of my life and I had never asked before. “Why did my mother leave?”
    My father sighed, sank his hands down in his pockets and raised his eyes to assess the position of the clouds, then he told me she was crazy. That was both the long and the short of it.
    “Crazy how?”
    “Crazy like taking off her coat and handing it to someone on the street who never asked her for a coat in the first place. Crazy like taking off your coat and giving it away too.”
    “But aren’t we supposed to do that?” I mean, we didn’t do it, but wasn’t it the goal?
    My father shook his head. “No. We’re not. Listen, there’s no sense wondering about your mother. Everybody’s got a burden in life and this is yours. She’s gone. You have to live with that.”
    After we were back in the car the conversation between us was done and we drove into Manhattan like two people who had never met. We made our way to Barnard and picked Maeve up right on time. She was waiting on the street in front of her dorm wearing her red winter coat, her black hair in a single heavy braid lying across her shoulder. Sandy was always telling Maeve she looked better when she braided her hair but at home she’d never do it.
    I was overwhelmed by the need to talk to my sister alone but there was nothing to be done about it. If it had been up to me we would have said goodbye to our father on the spot and sent him home, but there was a plan for the three of us to have lunch. We went to an Italian restaurant Maeve knew not far from campus, where I was served a giant bowl of spaghetti with meat sauce, something Jocelyn never would have believed possible for lunch. My father asked Maeve about her classes and Maeve, basking in this rare light, told him everything. She was taking Calculus II and Economics, along with European History and a course on the Japanese novel. My father shook his head in disbelief over the novel part but offered no criticism. Maybe he was glad to see her, or maybe he was glad he wasn’t standing on a