He rested his cheek against the petals for a moment. “It’s okay,” he said, heavily.
“They’re your daughter’s?”
He kept his eyes closed. Shook his head. “No.”
To give him some privacy, I stared at the floor. At the petals he had dropped. At the specks of gold in the green flat carpet weave. I did feel, against my will, creeping into my cheeks, a surge of what could only be called pleasure, which came from the fact that something interesting was starting to happen, something I myself had instigated, a feeling I found repellent in its selfishness but still unyielding.
“Are they from your wedding?” I asked, softly.
“No.” He held a handful of petals close to his face.
A funeral, I wondered. One of his beloved parents. What a rude thing for me to do, to take something precious and throw it all over the room like that.
“No funeral,” he said, as if he had read my mind. He closed his eyes. “They’re from nothing,” he said. “They came in the book.”
I nodded. “What do you mean?”
“The Ohio flora book,” he said. He rested his face on the bedspread again.
“It came with flowers?”
“I found the book and inside were these flowers.”
“You mean when you bought the book?”
“They were in the book when I bought it.” He smoothed the petals near his hair. “I bought it used,” he said, by way of explanation.
I took a step forward on the lush green carpet, careful not to crush the petals he’d dropped. “I don’t understand,” I said, slowly. “They’re not your flowers?”
“No,” he said.
“Then why are you upset?”
He opened his eyes and looked at me straight on. “Because they meant something,” he said.
“To someone else.”
“To someone.”
He kept gathering up the petals, smoothing them over the comforter, gathering and smoothing, and as I watched him I felt the very beginning, the very tiny initial curdles of irritation start to cluster and foment inside me. Something in the house was beginning to close in on me, and my softer feelings of sympathy at his old-man isolation were starting to harden and shrink into a kernel of annoyance that emitted a vaporous cloud of what could only be called entitlement. Like I owned this house. Like I lived in it, or could, or should. Like I was there to do whatever I wanted, me making the mark for all young women, and he would not, or could not, stop any of it.
“Maybe they did come from a wedding,” he said, bringing a cracked petal to his nose and sniffing it.
I walked over to the old oak dresser and pulled open the top drawer. Empty. Second drawer. Empty. Went to the nightstand drawer, by the bed. Empty.
“What is this place?” I said.
In the hallway, I opened two more doors, master bedroom, master bath, bed made, drawers closed. I turned on the lights. So neat, as if no one lived there, or wore anything, or sweated.
“What are you doing?” he called.
“Who lives here?” I called back.
I opened the linen closet, with its piles of fluffy towels in rows. Opened the dresser drawers in his bedroom, full of stacks of white undershirts. His nightstand drawer contained only a Bible and a comb. The Bible’s spine was unbroken, a firm brick of a book, and I was surprised to see it because he had not seemed like a religious man, but more than anything devout, it reminded me of the Bibles in drawers in American hotel rooms, and I imagined this man on a business trip opening a drawer and seeing one and interpreting it as something other people did in their bedrooms, something he then came home to imitate. I felt a wave of revulsion pass through me, thick and heavy, and something else, too, something I couldn’t pinpoint.
“Where’s Nina?” I called out.
“Egypt,” he mumbled, from the other room.
“I mean here,” I said. “Where are the photos? Drawings? Where is anything of her at all?”
I looked behind the headboard. Nothing. Under the bed. Nothing. Opened the drawer of the other nightstand. Hearing a rattle from the back, I pulled out the drawer and flipped it over, and onto the taut bedspread fell a silver nail clipper and a ring.
“She doesn’t like having her picture taken,” he called from the other room. “She is unusually unphotogenic.”
The nail clipper was of the same style I had in my own nightstand drawer back at the apartment. I picked it up and clipped a nail, out of habit.
“She has never enjoyed the drawing of pictures,” he said.
I put down the clipper and picked up the ring.
“Too much green,” he said.
I was about to say something about the drawing of pictures, how most kids would be forced to draw a picture in school at some point, even if they didn’t like to, and she could do it without using green, and how most parents would save the occasional picture, even if it sucked, and put it on the wall, or on the refrigerator, when my fingers reacted to the ring I was holding. It’s hard to explain. I had picked up something new, but it did not feel new.
“Hey,” I said. “I know this ring.”
I tried to say it in a friendly voice, but a prickle of fear traveled down the backs of my arms.
“She does send an occasional e-mail,” he said.
“Sir?”
“But I do not know how to save them on the computer.”
I bounced the ring around in my hand. I bounced it, to make it casual. It wasn’t the most unusual ring, just the kind teenagers buy at street fairs for twelve dollars, with a silver band and a yellow-orange stone. But I’d had a ring very similar to it, extremely similar. I’d had it until just that past summer, when I’d thrown it into the Kern River as a gesture of growth.
I turned the ring over. It was the exact same size as mine. The stone had the same dullness.
“What is this?” My voice came out a little too high. I walked over to the other bedroom. “Sir?”
He glanced up from his curled position by the bed. “Perhaps you can show me,” he said, “how to alter my mail settings.”
I held the ring up to the light. “Where did you get this?”
He sat taller, squinting. “Is that the ring?” He beamed at me. “Oh, good! I was wondering where that was! It’s not a photo, but there! There’s a piece of her, right there.”
“Where did this come from?”
“That’s Nina’s,” he said. “That is Nina’s ring.”
“But where did she get it?”
“She gave it to me on her last visit,” he said, face glowing. “She wanted me to have something of hers.”
“When was her last visit?”
“Four years ago,” he said.
I turned the ring over. It had a scratch on the underside, where mine had had a scratch, too. A very, very similar, if not exact, scratch.
“This is my ring,” I said.
“Oh no,” he said, straightening up. “That is my daughter, Nina’s. She gave it to me. She got it at a street fair.”
“I threw it in the river,” I said.
He frowned. “She said it was collateral, for our next meeting. She loves that ring. Reminds her of the sun.”
I stared at him. He had a petal stuck to his cheek, and he looked like a boy who’d been out playing in the meadows.
“Or maybe it was five years ago,” he said.
The ring slipped around in my hand, just as mine had. I’d watched it sink past the bright water, into the current.
“Have you ever been to the Kern River?” I said.
“The Corn River?” he said.