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By Root 922 0

― he'd given a short knock on the door, which must have been the knuckled code, because the door opened enough to let him inside and then closed authoritatively behind him ― and once again I was by myself in the driveway. I suppose if I'd been a better estranged husband and father, I would have resumed and persisted in my knocking until I'd gotten some answers, right then and there. But I wasn't any better an estranged husband and father than I'd been a normal, complacent one. And then there was my sadness, which was huge. If sadness were a competitive event, I'd have broken the subdivisional record. Sometimes when you're sad ― as I'll write in my arsonist's guide ― you have to sit around and wait for your sadness to turn into something else, which it surely will, sadness in this way being like coal or most sorts of larvae.

But in the meantime, at least I had these new mysteries to add to the old ones. Why had Thomas told Anne Marie the truth about my not cheating on her? What had he told her about that burn on his hand? And why didn't these things make her get rid of Thomas and take me back? I had hopes of finding out, as a detective if not as a husband. Because maybe this is yet another thing that defines you as a detective: not that you're especially good at being a detective, but that you're so bad at everything else.

14

It was after seven o'clock by the time I got to my parents' house, November dark, and darker still because a fog had settled in. It was the thick sort of fog that announces some major weather shift, the spooky sort of fog that makes you think you hear the mournful sound of hounds somewhere off in the distance. It was also the sort of fog where you don't see your parents' house until you're almost on top of it, and where you almost hit your mother sprinting across the street, away from the house and toward her car. My mother must have heard the squeal of my brakes, though, because she gestured obscenely in my direction without actually looking in my direction, and then jumped in her car. Her car was parked the wrong way on the street and not in our driveway because there were already several cars in the driveway, several lining the street, too; every light seemed to be on in our house, as if it were a three-story beacon in the fog, beckoning to who knew what kind of lost sailor. I wanted to see what was going on in the house, but I also wanted to know where my mother was going in such an awful hurry, on top of wanting to know why she'd lied to me about still being an English teacher, and where she'd disappeared to the night before. And so when she peeled out of her parking spot in her green Lumina, I followed her.

I followed her closely because of the fog. I mean, I was right on top of her, my headlights much too intimate with her tail. It was probably the least inconspicuous surveillance in the history of surveilling; if I'd had a license for surveillance, it would surely have already been revoked. My mother didn't exactly make it easy on me, either: she was driving angry, and following her in the fog was a lesson in rev and brake, rev and brake. Luckily my mother didn't seem to notice me, and she didn't travel far, either, just to downtown Belchertown, five miles away from our house, where she pulled up in front of one of those old, monolithic Masonic lodges that ― because there are apparently a diminishing number of Masons to lodge there ― now house offices, studios, community theaters, apartments. My mother hopped out of her car, clearly still worked up about something; she sprinted across the street and into the front door. My mother had a long, graceful stride, too, making her the sort of fleeting figure you might admire as she disappeared out of the fog and into an old Masonic lodge.

I followed her, but since my stride is neither long nor graceful, I was more than a few steps behind. By the time I was through the front door and into the ceramic-tiled entryway, she was nowhere to be seen. There was one door to the left of the lobby, and one to the right. Mr. Robert Frost (whose house