It was the young man from the apartment on Main Street. He stood on our front step on crutches, one leg locked in a black brace from ankle to knee, breathing as if the walk from the curb had cost him everything he had. He had light brown hair, a gentle jaw, and a pair of gray eyes that I knew. I had seen them before, across a Thanksgiving table, on a girl who had been dead for six years. He looked at me and then at Caden. “Mr. Mike,” he said. “I am sorry. Aunt Lisa told me to wait. But I could not stay in that apartment one more day, knowing you did not know.” Behind me, I heard Lisa make a small, broken sound.
“Marcus,” I said. The name came out of me like something I had buried. I had not said it in more than ten years. “The son of Annie.” Behind me, Lisa let out a breath and sagged against the doorframe. Caden looked from me to his mother, bewildered. “Dad, who is Annie?” Lisa answered, barely above a whisper. “My sister. Your aunt. She passed when you were fifteen. You went to the funeral, honey. You were so little.” Caden shook his head. “I do not remember an Aunt Annie. I do not remember anyone from your side.” Lisa closed her eyes. “That is because your father decided we would not talk about them.”
I owed my son an explanation, and I owed Marcus one more. We went into the kitchen, all four of us, and Lisa helped him into a chair. Then I told it. Twelve years ago, the husband of Annie, a man named Ray Deaton, had stolen eleven thousand dollars from the business of my brother, where he worked as a bookkeeper. He had forged checks. He went to jail for two years. When the family came begging for us to forgive him, I said something I have regretted ever since. I said, “I never want to see any of you again.” I meant Ray. I did not say that. I said any of you.
A young man on crutches at the front door was the nephew a husband had shut out of the family for twelve years.
Lisa sat down across from me. “I never held it against you, Mike,” she said, with her hand over mine. “I understood. But Annie was my only sister. When she got sick, I went to see her in secret. For two years I drove to Pine Bluff every weekend and told you I was at church.” I stared at her. “Church,” I said. “I thought it was a group of women.” She gave a tearful smile. “It was. The only member was my sister.” Marcus cleared his throat. “She made Aunt Lisa promise to look after me. I was seventeen when she died, with a father in prison. Aunt Lisa paid for my first year of community college.”
He told the rest in a low steady voice. At twenty four he got a job on a construction crew. At twenty eight, last spring, he fell from a second story scaffold, shattered his leg in four places, and lost his job and his insurance in the same week. The surgeries were expensive. The apartment was a place to heal. Lisa had been paying the lease, the groceries, and the physical therapy, every dollar of it from her own paycheck at the school district and a little from our savings. “I should not have taken it,” Marcus said. “I tried to pay her back. I could not even stand up. I felt like the son of Ray, and I did not want to bring that into your house.”
I looked at this young man, the son of Annie, sitting on my kitchen chair with his leg propped on a stool. All I could see was the little kid who used to chase fireflies in our back yard, the one who held my hand at a Fourth of July parade because he was afraid of the cannon. I had thrown him out of my life, without a single thought, because of a man he had barely known. I felt the shame of it travel up my spine like cold water. “Marcus,” I said, and my voice cracked in the middle. “I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it. I punished the wrong people.”
He shook his head. “Mr. Mike, you do not have to…” I held up my hand. “Yes, I do. I have a spare room upstairs, with a bed and a window on the maple. It is yours as long as you need it. You do not pay rent. You do not do anything but get better.” Lisa began to cry, quietly, with her hand over her mouth, and then Caden got up from his chair, walked around the table, and put his arms around his cousin, awkward and long limbed. “I am Caden,” he said. “Apparently I have a cousin.” Marcus laughed, a sound like a door opening after a very long winter.
He moved in that weekend. Lisa cooked a pot roast the way her mother used to. I sat at the table and watched the three of them eat, and I could not remember when my house had last felt so full. Marcus did his exercises on the living room carpet, grunting, while Caden held a stopwatch. By Christmas, he was walking with a cane. By March, without.
In April, I took him to see my brother, who still ran the business. The two of them stood in the lobby for a while without saying anything. Then my brother held out his hand and said, “So this is the son of Annie, huh? She would have been proud.” He offered Marcus a job in the office, the books, since the young man had picked up a degree at night. Marcus accepted. He is the best bookkeeper they have ever had, and he checks every number twice.
Last Sunday, we drove to Pine Bluff, all four of us, to the little cemetery where Annie rests under a cedar tree. Lisa laid a bouquet of yellow roses. Marcus stood beside the stone with his hat in his hands. I went and stood next to him. I did not say anything for a while. Then I said, to the stone, “I am sorry I stayed away.” The wind moved in the cedar. Marcus put his hand on my shoulder, firmly, like a man who had decided to forgive. “Come on, Uncle Mike,” he said quietly. “Let us go home.”
