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Instead, I chose to come back to Wexton and hang a shingle of my own. It boiled down to this: I can't stand being away from Delia.
Ask any guy, and he can tell you the moment he realized that the woman standing next to him was the one he'd be spending his life with. For me, it was a little different: Delia had been standing next to me for so long, that it was her absence I couldn't handle. We went to college five hundred miles apart, and when I'd call her dorm room and get her answering machine, I'd imagine all the other guys who were at that very second trying to steal her away. I'll admit it: For as long as I could remember, I was the object of Delia's affection, and the thought of having competition for the first time in my life put me over the edge. Going out for a beer became a way to keep myself from obsessing about her, but eventually, that one beer became six or ten.
Drinking was in my blood, so to speak. We've all read the statistics about children of alcoholics. I would have sworn up and down, when I was a kid, that I'd never turn into the person my mother had been-and maybe I wouldn't have, if I hadn't missed Delia quite so much. Without her, there was a hole inside me, and I suppose that to fill it, I did what came naturally in the Talcott family.
It's funny. I started drinking heavily because I wanted to see that expression in Delia's eyes when she looked only at me, and it's the same reason I quit drinking. She isn't just the person I'm going to spend the rest of my life with, she's the reason I have one.
This afternoon I am meeting a potential client who happens to be a crow. Blackie was wounded when he fell out of a nest, or so says Martin Schnurr, who rescued him. He nursed the bird back to health, and when it kept hanging around, fed it cold coffee and bits of doughnuts on his porch in Hanover. But when the crow chased a neighbor's kids, the authorities got called. Turns out, crows are a federally regulated migratory species, and Mr. Schnurr doesn't have the state and federal license to keep him.
“He escaped from the place where the Department of Environmental Services was holding him,” Schnurr says proudly. “Found his way back, ten whole miles.”
“As the crow flies, of course,” I say. “So what can I do for you, Mr. Schnurr?”
“The DES is going to come after him again. I want a restraining order,” Schnurr says. “I'm willing to go to the Supreme Court, if I have to.” The likelihood of this case going to Washington is somewhere between nil and nevermore, but before I can explain this the door to the office bursts open and there is Delia, frantic and crying. My insides seize. I am imagining the very worst; I am thinking of Sophie. Without even a glance at the client, I pull Delia into the hall and try to shake the facts out of her.
“My father's been arrested,” she says. 'You have to go, Eric. You have to.“ I have no idea what Andrew might have done, and I do not ask. She believes I can fix this, and like always, that's enough to make me think I can. ”I'll take care of it," I say, when what I really mean is: I'll take care of you.
We didn't play inside my house. I made sure to get up early enough so that I was always the one knocking on Delia's door, or Fitz's. On the occasions that we settled at my place, I did my best to keep everyone outside, under the backyard deck or beneath the sloping saltbox roof of our garage, and that's how I managed to keep my secret until I was nine.
That was the winter Fitz started to play league hockey, which left Delia and me alone in the afternoons. She was a latchkey kid–her father was always working at the senior center–something that never bothered her until we happened to see a TV
movie about a twin who died and had his ring finger sent to his brother in a velvet box. After that, Delia didn't like being by herself. She started to come up with reasons to hang out at her house after school–something I was more than happy to do, if only to get