He made oatmeal with more water than milk and carried her bowl on a tray. The pantry held half a box of cereal, two cans of beans, some flour, and a jar of peanut butter with a scrape of brown still clinging to its bottom. Sarah had promised they would go to the store on Friday, although Toby had seen the grocery money envelope and knew how thin it was. He set down the tray gently and pretended not to notice the overdue notices folded beneath her knitting basket.
"Did Mrs. Alvarez call about the laundry?" Sarah asked. Toby nodded and said he would carry it over after breakfast, even though Mrs. Alvarez had stopped asking Sarah to mend clothes months earlier because she knew Sarah's hands shook when she got short of breath.
His mother studied his face as if she could read all the things he was not saying. "You don't have to fix everything, sweetheart," she told him, and he lowered his eyes because fixing things was the only plan he had.
The bank letter had arrived three days before, in a white envelope with a red strip at the top. Sarah had missed several mortgage payments after losing her regular shifts, and earlier attempts to arrange more time had stalled while the servicing office requested new forms. The newest notice warned that the property was scheduled for foreclosure sale unless the overdue amount and fees were resolved. Toby had looked up the unfamiliar terms in the library dictionary and come away understanding only that someone could take the place where his father had once lived.
The house was not large, and its paint peeled around the window frames. A heater rattled in winter, and during heavy rain Toby had to put a bowl under a leak beside the back door. But his mother could point to a dozen things his father had made: the wooden shelf above the stove, the reinforced porch steps, the crooked gate that closed perfectly if you lifted it an inch. To Toby, those repairs were not old lumber and nails; they were proof that a man he barely remembered had touched the ordinary world around him.
Sarah seldom talked about Richard Harris, except when Toby asked a question she could answer without reaching into a memory that hurt. She said he had been a mechanic with patient hands and an eye for broken things. She said he sang badly, loved hot coffee, and knew the names of stars she had never cared to learn. She said he died in a highway collision in 1979, when Toby was barely old enough to recognize his father's face.
There were no photographs of Richard on the mantel, only a faded picture in a kitchen drawer. In it he stood beside a pickup outside a garage, one elbow resting on the hood and a crooked smile on his face. His hair was dark, his shoulders broad, and his eyes looked strangely familiar whenever Toby studied them in the morning light. Sarah never stopped him from looking, but she almost always found an excuse to leave the room.