THEY WALKED BACK across Route 28 and up the entrance road with its yellow speed bumps and sprinkler spray.
"You know what your mother likes?" his father said.
"What?"
"When you write to her. You know, a card every now and then for no good reason. She says you send funny cards and she likes the way you write. She keeps them in the bedroom in a drawer. Has ones going back to when you were in college."
"Okay."
"Every now and then, you know? Drop one in the mail."
"Sure."
They reached Sean's car and his father looked up at the dark windows of his duplex.
"She gone to bed?" Sean asked.
His father nodded. "She's driving Mrs. Coughlin to physical therapy in the morning." His father reached out abruptly and shook Sean's hand. "Good seeing you."
"You, too."
"She coming back?"
Sean didn't have to ask who "she" was.
"I dunno. I really don't."
His father looked at him under the pale yellow street lamp above them, and for a moment, Sean could see that it pierced something in him, knowing his son was hurting, knowing he'd been abandoned, damaged, and that that did something permanent to you, spooned something out of you that you'd never get back.
"Well," his father said, "you look good. Like you're taking care of yourself. You drinking too much, anything like that?"
Sean shook his head. "I just work a lot."
"Work's good," his father said.
"Yeah," Sean said, and felt something bitter and abandoned rise up in his throat.
"So..."
"So."
His father clapped a hand on his shoulder. "So, okay then. Don't forget to call your mother Sunday," he said, and left Sean by the car, walked toward his front door with the stride of a man twenty years younger.
"Take care," Sean said, and his father raised his hand in confirmation.
Sean used the remote to unlock the car, and he was reaching for the door handle when he heard his father say, "Hey."
"Yeah?" He looked back and saw his father standing by the front door, his upper half dissolved in a soft darkness.
"You were right not to get in that car that day. Remember that."
Sean leaned against his car, his palms on the roof, and tried to make out his father's face in the dark.
"We should have protected Dave, though."
"You were kids," his father said. "You couldn't have known. And even if you could have, Sean..."
Sean let that sink in. He drummed his hands on the roof and peered into the dark for his father's eyes. "That's what I tell myself."
"Well?"
He shrugged. "I still think we should have known. Somehow. Don't you think?"
For a good minute, neither of them said anything, and Sean could hear crickets amid the hiss of the lawn sprinklers.
"Good night, Sean," his father said through the hiss.
"'Night," Sean said, and waited until his father had gone inside before he climbed into his car and headed home.