Leah came into the hall and stopped. Her hair was shorter than I remembered, and there were fine lines at the corners of her eyes that made her look more like our mother. For a second we stared at each other. Then she stepped forward and hugged me so tightly I could feel how much she was shaking.
"You got tall," she said into my shoulder.
"I was tall last time."
"I didn't notice. I was busy being angry."
We held on a little longer. Her youngest child stood in the doorway studying me with the suspicion reserved for adults who appear unexpectedly in family photographs. Leah introduced us, and the little boy asked whether I knew how to build a spaceship. I said I knew how to read the instructions. He seemed uncertain whether that qualified as a skill.
Dad was living in a small ground-floor apartment five miles away. Leah drove us there after breakfast. On the way she explained his medication schedule and the limits of what she knew about his prognosis. He tired easily. He could still make decisions and care for himself with help, but he could not pretend to be as independent as he had once been. She told me he had been attending recovery meetings for years, even after his drinking stopped being the most immediate threat to his health.
"I don't expect you to rewrite the past," she said as we turned onto a residential street. "Neither does he, whatever he says when you're in front of him."
"Do you forgive him?"
She considered it. "Some days. I still get angry when I remember what Mom went through. I still have to tell him no when he asks for more than I can give. I don't think forgiveness is a door you walk through and never have to open again."
We pulled into a small parking lot beside a building with cream-colored siding. Leah reached for the engine key but didn't turn it yet.
"One more thing," she said. "He tried to write to you himself last year. I stopped him because I thought you needed distance. When he got sick, I decided the choice was yours. I should have been more direct."
"You couldn't have known Rachel would intercept a letter."
"No. But I could have tried harder after the answer came."
I touched her arm. "Neither of us could have fixed this by guessing what the other person wanted. Let's stop making guesses now."
She nodded, turned off the car, and we went inside.
My father was sitting in an armchair beside a window when we entered. Thomas Keller had always been a broad man, his shoulders rounded from years working with machinery. At sixty-eight he looked smaller than I remembered, though perhaps memory had made him larger. His hair was mostly white. A folded blanket rested across his knees, and the old habit of gripping a coffee cup in both hands remained.