Third Round Touch

She told me this in the kitchen, her back to me, hands busy at the sink. The water ran hot enough to steam the window. I was sitting at the table with a beer I hadn't opened yet, watching the sweat bead on the brown glass.

"The two drinks he ordered her a third," she said. "And by then he was touching her arm. Grabbing her hand."

I didn't know who *her* was yet. I didn't ask. That's the thing about the way my wife tells a story. She starts in the middle, works backward, leaves the important parts for last. After eleven years I'd learned to wait.

She turned off the water and dried her hands on the towel that hung from the oven door. The towel had a wine stain on it shaped like Florida. She'd been meaning to bleach it for a month.

"Her name is Dana," she said. "She's twenty-four. She works at the dental office on Grand."

I still didn't ask. The beer was cold and I was thirsty. I twisted the cap off and it made that sound, the little hiss that means the day is over. She watched me drink.

"You're not going to ask me how I know her," she said.

"I figure you'll get there."

She sat down across from me. Not the chair she usually sat in, the one with the cushion, but the hard one, the one we used for stacking mail. She wanted to be uncomfortable. I could see that in the way she held her shoulders.

"She came to the house yesterday," she said. "While you were at work."

The beer stopped tasting like anything. That happens sometimes. You're drinking and then you're just holding a cold wet bottle and your mouth is dry and the bottle is heavy and you don't want it anymore.

"Why?"

"She wanted to talk to me. About you."

I set the bottle down. The label was peeling at the corner. I picked at it with my thumbnail. It was either that or look at her, and I wasn't ready to look at her yet.

"I don't know a Dana," I said.

"I know you don't."

That was the first thing she'd said all night that didn't make sense. She'd been building something, sentence by sentence, and I'd been following along, and now she'd put a wall where the floor should be.

"Then why did she come here?"

She leaned back. The hard chair creaked. She crossed her arms and looked at me the way she looked at receipts when the numbers didn't match. Not angry. Not yet. Just adding things up.

"She came because her mother told her to. Her mother is Carol."

Carol. I put my hands flat on the table. Carol was my sister. Carol lived in Tucson and called on Sundays and had a daughter named Dana who I'd met maybe three times, at weddings and funerals, a kid with braces and a shy way of looking at her shoes.

"Dana's twenty-four now," my wife said, like she could hear me doing the math. "She's not a kid anymore. She's a woman with a job and a lease and a boyfriend she's been with for two years. And she came to this house yesterday because her mother told her something, and she wanted to hear it from me first."

"Hear what?"

"That's the thing. She wouldn't say. She sat where you're sitting and she drank a glass of water and she asked me questions about you. Where you were born. Where you went to school. When we met. What you do for work. Simple questions. She had a little notebook."

"A notebook."

"In her purse. She didn't write anything down while I was looking. But she had it."

I thought about my sister. Carol and I hadn't talked in eight months. There was a reason for that, a reason that involved money and a fight at Thanksgiving and a thing I said about her husband that I shouldn't have said. But none of that had anything to do with Dana. Dana was a child at that Thanksgiving. She'd been in the other room with the cousins, watching something on her phone.

"She's not a child," my wife said again. She'd always been able to do that. Answer the question I was thinking instead of the one I'd asked.

"She's still my niece."

"She's a stranger who showed up at our door with questions about your life. And then she left, and an hour later I got a call from Carol. Carol who hasn't spoken to me since the wedding. Carol who told me, and I'm quoting, that I should ask my husband what happened in the summer of 2003."

The summer of 2003.

I was twenty-six. I was living in a studio apartment above a laundromat. I was working nights at a warehouse and sleeping through the afternoons and I was, in a way I don't like to remember, not a good person. Not a criminal. Nothing like that. Just young and careless and full of a kind of hunger that I thought was ambition but was probably just loneliness wearing a better suit.

"What happened in the summer of 2003," I said.

"That's what I'm asking you."

Her voice cracked on the last word. Not much. Just a hairline fracture. She'd been holding it together since yesterday, since Dana left, since Carol called, since she decided to wait until I got home and had a beer in my hand before she started. And now she was tired. I could see it in the corners of her eyes.

I wanted to tell her the truth. I really did. But the truth was a thing I'd spent twenty years folding smaller and smaller, until it fit in a place inside me I didn't visit. And now a girl with a notebook had come to my house and asked my wife questions, and the fold was coming undone.

"I need to think," I said.

"That's not an answer."

"I know."

She stood up. The chair scraped the floor. She walked to the doorway and stopped, one hand on the frame, and she didn't turn around.

"Carol said something else," she said. "She said Dana isn't just asking questions. She's looking for someone. She has a name and a date and a hospital and she's been looking for six months."

The window over the sink had fogged completely. I couldn't see the yard, the fence, the neighbor's dog that barked at everything. Just white.

"Whose name," I said.

She turned around then. Her face was wet and she wasn't hiding it.

"Yours," she said. "But not the one I know you by."