"Michael," he said, "how much farther?"
"Forty minutes. Maybe less if your grandfather drives like I remember."
Ethan considered this. "Does he know I'm coming?"
"He knows."
Michael had not seen his father since Lily was four, a Christmas visit that had lasted one night and ended with Frank falling asleep in front of a game and Michael leaving before breakfast, telling himself the drive was easier without traffic. The phone calls since had been dutiful and brief, six minutes at Christmas, four on Frank's birthday, both of them relieved when the other ran out of things to say. Michael had told himself for years that this was simply how they were. He had told himself a great many things for years.
He remembered being ten, a championship game, his father on shift at the firehouse, promising to try to make it. Michael had watched the gate between innings. He had told his mother he didn't care. He had been telling people he didn't care ever since.
Frank's house was a small cape on a quiet street in Worcester, the paint holding, a flag in its bracket by the door, a grill under a cover in the side yard. Frank came out before they were fully out of the car, seventy years old and still broad through the shoulders, his hands like catcher's mitts, his hair gone white and cut short.
"Dad," Michael said.
Frank nodded at him, and then looked at Ethan for a long moment. "You must be Ethan."
"This is Michael," Ethan told him solemnly, gesturing at Michael, and Michael heard the name, the careful name, the name the boy used when he was thinking about it, and understood, and did not comment.
They sat on the porch with lemonade Frank had clearly bought for the occasion, still in the plastic jug. Inside, through the screen door, Michael could see the bookshelf with Frank's old helmet on top and the framed photograph of his engine company, young men in turnout gear with their arms around each other, his father twenty-five and grinning.
"Still lawyering?" Frank asked.
"Still lawyering."
Frank nodded like this was a satisfactory state of affairs, and for a moment Michael saw the whole shape of their lives in it, two men who had never learned the second question.
Ethan swung his legs and answered Frank's questions politely. Going into fourth grade. Second base, mostly, though he had pitched one inning and it had gone fine, no one had cried. He asked Frank if firemen got scared, and Frank said, "Some days," and Ethan nodded like that was the right answer.
Ethan pointed through the screen door at the framed photograph. "Is that you?"
Frank glanced back. "Second from the left."
"You look like Michael," Ethan said.
Frank looked at Michael then, really looked, and something moved across his face too fast to name.
Michael waited for the right moment, and then, because there wasn't one, made one.
"Dad," he said, "there's something I wanted to tell you in person. I have a son. He's eight. His name is Ethan."
Frank looked at Ethan. Looked back at Michael. Said, "Well."
The silence stretched. A truck went by on the street. Ethan swung his legs and drank his lemonade.
"I brought you something," Ethan said finally, and produced from his backpack a color copy, slightly warm from the sun through the car window, of his crayon drawing: the house, the four stick figures. Michael had made the copy at the office on Friday. The original stayed in the paper bag, where it belonged.
Frank took it in both hands and held it for a long time. His thumb rested on the corner of the paper. "Which one's which?" he asked at last, his voice rougher than it had been.
Ethan leaned in and pointed. "That's my mom. That's Michael. That's Lily, she's my sister. That's me."
Frank studied the figures. "Good house," he said. "Straight lines. You draw a straight line, kid."
They stayed another hour. Frank showed Ethan the helmet, let him try it on, and it slid down over his eyes, and Frank laughed, a real laugh, rusty from disuse. When they left, Frank walked them to the car and stood with his hands in his pockets, and said to Ethan, "You come back in the fall. The leaves. I'll take you to the station."
"Okay," Ethan said.
Frank nodded at Michael. "Drive safe."
The porch light was on.
On the way home Ethan fell asleep against the window with the library book still open in his lap, and twenty miles east he surfaced halfway from sleep.
"Michael?" he murmured. "Does he like me?"
Michael kept his eyes on the road. "He kept your drawing, kid. That's his whole vocabulary."
Ethan was asleep again before the next mile marker, and Michael drove through the August evening thinking about his father holding that copy of the drawing, holding it like it might tear. He thought about six-minute Christmas calls and a championship game forty years gone, and he decided, there on the Pike with the sun going down, that he would call on Sundays now, every Sunday, whether there was anything to say or not.
He had spent forty-one years learning how not to be his father, and it had taken a boy with a paper bag to teach him the last of it: you just show up, and then you keep showing up.
* * *