My father came for Sunday dinner every two weeks now.
He had moved back to New Orleans in September -- a small apartment in Mid-City, near the bakery where he had found work. He was thinner than he had been the year before, but less thin than he had been twenty months ago, when I had opened the door and seen him in the hallway of a house that no longer felt foreign. He was sober. He had been sober for fourteen months. He did not make a production of this.
He and Dominic had achieved a relationship that I had not tried to define because it seemed to be doing fine without definition. They talked about the river, about the Saints, about the rebuilding of the lower warehouse district that Dominic had a professional interest in. my father deferred to him in ways that were not quite respect and not quite wariness but something in the middle, the relationship of two men who shared a person they both understood they had failed to protect and who were both, quietly, trying to do better.
I watched them sometimes, across the dinner table.
I thought: we are all making something from what was broken. We are all being imprecise about it, which is the only way to do it.
I had stopped keeping my distance from things that mattered.
Or -- more accurately -- I had started choosing what to file and what to simply have. It was a distinction that had taken her twenty-six years to understand and I was still practicing it.
* * *
The case had resolved in October.
Victor Salas had accepted a plea agreement that would keep him from trial -- his lawyers had argued health, age, the documented cooperation of his son in the years before. He would serve reduced time. He would live to see the outside of a federal facility.
I had sat with this for several days.
I had wanted, I admitted to myself, something more complete. Something that closed the way I wanted things to close -- fully, without remainder. I had wanted a conclusion rather than a settlement.
I had come to understand, instead, that what had been given back was more durable than a verdict: my mother's name in the permanent federal record, attributed correctly, the work I had done in 1998 through 2001 acknowledged in the official accounting of what had happened. Margaret Callahan, the file read, primary civilian source. Her testimony the foundation of eleven counts.
My mother had finished what I started.
And in the finishing, so had I.
* * *
Dominic came home at seven, which was early.
I heard the door and the familiar rhythm of his return -- the specific acoustic signature of a man who moved through this space like it was his, which it was, and like it was theirs, which it also was, and the distinction between those two things had long since stopped requiring clarification.
I was in the kitchen. He came to stand in the doorway.
"You're home early," I said.
"I cleared the afternoon." He came in and set his jacket over the chair and went to the counter and stood close enough thatthe warmth of him was present in the room. "I remembered what day it was."
I looked at him.
"You remembered," I said.
"I remember most things," he said. "You know this."
I did know this. I had been studying him for a year and I had sufficient evidence.
I turned to face him fully. He was looking at me the way he had looked at me in the garden in November of last year, in the dark with the party going on behind them, the full attention that had not flickered once in twelve months of proximity and discovery and difficulty and the small accumulated ordinary evidence of two people choosing each other day by day.
"I didn't plan for this," I said.
"No."
"I was very certain it was not going to happen."
"I know. I was watching you be certain."