Chapter 19 — EMMETT

We sold Wren House.

I want to be honest about how easy that decision was, because people expect it to have been hard.

It took me about four minutes.

The trust vested in my daughter, subject to a trusteeship until she is twenty-five, and Harlan Voss and I are the trustees, and the first thing we did was list a house with a gravel drive and a chandelier in a two-storey entrance hall and a marble floor at the bottom of it.

It sold in March to a family from Boston with three children.

The wisteria on the south wall stays. It is in the contract. Voss put it in and did not charge me for the drafting.

Emmett was not at the closing.

He does not come to things like that.

He lives in Waterbury now, in his sister's house, the one with no mortgage on it, and he drives for a medical transport company three days a week taking people to dialysis, and he is sixty-one and says he will do it until he cannot.

Here is what he has never said.

He has never said that Adam was his son.

Not to me, not to Voss, not to a courtroom, not once, not in five years.

I asked him directly, once, in the summer after the trial, sitting on the back steps of his sister's house in Waterbury while Wren asleep in a car seat in the shade.

I said: "Emmett. Was he yours?"

And he looked out at the yard for a while and then he said:

"Mrs. Thorne, I drove that boy to school for four years."

"That's not an answer."

"I know it isn't."

"Why won't you say it?"

And he said: "Because the day I say it out loud, it stops being about him and starts being about me."

I have not asked again.

He has never taken a test. Voss offered to arrange one privately and he declined, and when Voss pushed he said the only sharp thing I have heard him say to anybody, which was: "I've had twenty-six years of somebody else deciding what I was allowed to be to him. I'll decide the rest."

He sees Wren about every three weeks.

He calls her Miss Wren, which is ridiculous, and which she has now started calling him back — she says Mr. Emmett with total seriousness, and he answers to it every single time as though it were the most normal thing in the world.

He taught her to ride a bicycle last spring.

In a driveway in Waterbury, on gravel, because his sister never had it paved.

I stood in the kitchen window and watched a sixty-one-year-old man run bent double behind a four-year-old on a driveway for about forty minutes, and then let go, and then stand up straight with both hands over his mouth.