Chapter 4 - The Man in the Green Jacket
Martin pulled a chair away from the counter, but I didn't sit. He turned the sign on the door to CLOSED and asked the owner if he could use the small room in back. The owner nodded and left through a side entrance with his coat under one arm.
“You have a right to be angry,” Martin said.
“A right? That's generous.”
He accepted the blow without theatrics. That somehow made me angrier.
The back room held a kettle, a crooked shelf of mugs, and a photograph of two boys fishing from a dock. It was the kind of place where a person had made a life, however modest. I could see a scarf hung beside the door and a pair of dry boots below it. My father had not been frozen in the moment I lost him. He had bought shoes. Drunk coffee. Made plans for Tuesdays.
“Why did you leave?” I asked.
He filled the kettle but didn't switch it on. “Your mother and I had been fighting for months. The business was under pressure. I made promises to suppliers I couldn't keep.”
“Money?”
“Some. Mostly pride. I had ruined a production run with a bad finishing process. Instead of stopping and admitting it, I tried to make back the loss. I borrowed from a friend without telling your mother. Then I lied about it.”
“People lose money. They don't normally pretend to drown.”
“I didn't plan to fake my death.” He rubbed his thumb over the scar. “That night, I drove until I didn't know where I was going. It was raining. I left the car near the river and walked to a bus station. I thought I would be gone for a week.”
“And then?”
“Then your mother told me not to come back.”
I sat down so hard the chair creaked.
“Did she know you were alive?”
“She knew I had left. I called after two weeks. She said the police had already searched and you were barely sleeping. She said if I appeared and disappeared again, I would destroy you twice.”
“Did you argue?”
“Yes. I told her she couldn't tell me whether to see my child.”
“And then you obeyed?”
He looked at the kettle. “I was ashamed. At first I kept telling myself I'd return once I had a respectable job, once I could explain why I had gone. Then the months got longer. She stopped taking my calls.”
I tried to assemble the words into a story that made sense. There wasn't one. My mother had been wrong to make a decision for me. My father had been wrong to accept a decision that was easy for him to accept.
“Did she tell you I thought you were dead?”
“I knew the search had ended that way. Years later Ruth wrote me that the court proceedings were finished.”
“You knew,” I said.
He nodded.
I looked at the photograph on the shelf. “Whose children are those?”
“The owner's. He lets me help fix things.”
“Do they call you Uncle Martin?”
“Sometimes.”
I had not expected that answer to hurt. It did.
He began making tea because his hands needed a task. I told him about my mother's death five years earlier and watched him grip the mug so hard his knuckles whitened. Ruth, I learned, had contacted him three months ago after a former supplier recognized him. He'd asked her not to tell me until he could work out what to say.
“She told me anyway,” I said.
“She did the right thing.”
“You don't get to approve her timing.”
He gave a small nod.
I asked whether he had been involved in the company since leaving. He shook his head. He had signed away his original interest during the breakdown of the marriage, he said, and had never collected a dividend or directed the workshop. He was no hidden owner waiting to save me. Whatever he knew about the old designs lived in his head and a battered notebook he kept by his bed.
When I told him Nathan was trying to sell Vale Atelier, Martin looked genuinely bewildered. He knew I'd married; someone had sent him a copy of the wedding announcement years ago. He didn't know Nathan personally. He didn't know Nathan personally. He did remember Celeste.
“She was nineteen when your mother hired her,” he said. “She could draw leaves without making them look stiff. Your mother loved her work.”
“Then why did she leave?”
“Ask Ruth. I wasn't there.”
I almost laughed at the cruelty of the sentence. My father couldn't explain the life he'd deliberately missed.
My phone rang. Ben was calling from Manhattan. I answered on speaker without thinking.
“Emma? Lena's been asking for you. Nathan brought a man through the workroom with Larkspur brochures. He said the jobs in New Jersey are available if people sign expressions of interest this week.”
“They don't have to sign anything.”
“I know. I told him they needed information first. He called me insubordinate in front of the apprentices.”
“Tell him I—” I stopped. I wasn't there. Ben was.
“I'm sorry,” I said. “Can you make sure no one's pressured into signing? I'll call Maya and ask her to contact their counsel.”
“I can do that. When are you coming back?”
“Tonight.”
We disconnected. Martin had listened without interrupting.
“You sounded like your mother,” he said.
“Don't.”
“I didn't mean—”
“I know what you meant. That's what makes it worse.”
I stood and took my suitcase. Martin followed me to the front door, leaving a respectful distance.
“Could we talk again?” he asked.
“I don't know.”
“I'll be here.”
“That's what you should've been able to say seventeen years ago.”
I left before he could answer. I was halfway down the street when I realized I'd forgotten the photograph on my phone wasn't the only proof he existed. His voice was now in my memory, fresh and unmistakable. I had spent years wishing I could hear it again. The wish had been granted, and it was unbearable.
On the train back, I called Aunt Louise. I told her I had met Martin.
Her breath caught. “Emma—”
“You knew he was alive. Didn't you?”
May you like
She didn't say no.
That was the moment I understood my mother had not kept the lie by herself.
