THE CHRISTMAS HOMECOMING

The drive is six hours and he did it in one go, and he has said that he spent about four of them working out what he was going to say when somebody opened the door.

He never used any of it.

There was a car in the driveway he did not recognise. Grey, new, parked square in the middle of the turning circle in the way a person parks when they do not expect anybody else to need to get past. The porch light was on. There were lights in the front room and music, not loud, and the particular laughing that happens when there are five people and one of them has just finished a story.

He stood on his own front step for about a minute before he knocked.

Brenda opened it.

She was in a burgundy dress and she had a glass in her hand and there was a half-second, right at the start, before she had put anything together, when her face did what a face does when a person is genuinely pleased. Shawn has held on to that half-second. He has said more than once that whatever else came out of that Christmas, he is certain his sister was glad to see him for about half a second.

Then it went.

"Shawn."

"Merry Christmas."

She did not step back.

That is the whole thing and it took less than a second and if he had been any less tired he might not have registered it. A woman standing in the doorway of a house that is not hers, filling it, with the door held at about forty-five degrees.

"You should have called."

"I know. Where are they?"

She said it easily and without any pause at all, which is the part that told him something was badly wrong rather than mildly wrong.

She said their parents had gone away for Christmas with Uncle Thomas.

Uncle Thomas had died four years earlier. Shawn had paid for half the headstone. He had sent the money to his mother and she had sent him back a photograph of it on her phone, badly framed, with her thumb across one corner.

He did not say any of that.

He has been asked more than once why not. It is the question everybody asks, and he has two answers, and the second one is the one he does not like.

The first is that a person does not tell a lie that can be undone in nine seconds by anybody with a phone unless that person is already past the point of thinking straight, and that somebody in that state, cornered in a doorway, will do something worse.

The second is smaller. He says that if he had opened his mouth right then it would have turned into an argument about him. About twelve years. About not calling. About what sort of son sends money instead of coming. She would have been right about most of it, and he would have been back in the car by nine o'clock feeling righteous and knowing nothing.

So he smiled and said that was a shame, and asked whether he could come in and get warm.

She let him in.

There were five people in the front room. He knew two of them. One of the two was a man of about forty-five in a good jumper, who stood up and shook his hand and said Eric, and held on a beat longer than he needed to.

The house was wrong from the first step.

New floors, wide oak, the kind that costs a fortune and shows every mark. A stone fireplace where the old tiled one had been. Through the arch, a kitchen with a stone worktop and two ovens and an island in the middle that had never had anybody chop anything on it.

Two sofas, cream, both of them still carrying that stiffness furniture has before people have properly sat on it.

His parents had lived in that house thirty-one years. They had replaced the boiler twice and the roof once and nothing else, ever. Not because they could not have. Because it did not occur to either of them to want to.

His mother had kept the same kitchen table since 1991. She had turned down a new one three separate times, once from him, by cheque, and she had posted the cheque back with a note saying the table was fine and to put it towards something sensible.

That is what he could not get past. Standing in that room with a glass of somebody else's wine, it was not the money.

It was the taste.

Every single object in that house was somebody else's idea of what money looks like. Not one of them was a thing either of his parents would have chosen if you gave them a hundred thousand dollars and a week to spend it. He had been inside the door ninety seconds and he knew it, and he could not have told you how.

He said something about the fireplace being nice.

Brenda said they had done it two summers ago. Eric said, from the sofa, without looking up, that the old one had been a fire risk.

Shawn went to get a glass of water and opened the fridge because he was not thinking about it, and then stood there with the door open for longer than a person normally does.

In the door, behind the milk, was a prescription bottle.

Maria Miller. Dispensed the previous Thursday. Sixty tablets and the bottle nearly full.

He knew what it was because he had paid for a version of it four years earlier when the insurance changed. It is the one for her heart. She takes it at eight in the morning and eight at night and has done since she was sixty-two.

Nobody goes away for a fortnight and leaves it in the fridge door.

He shut the fridge and said nothing and went out to the back porch because he needed thirty seconds where nobody could see his face.

It was about four degrees out there.

On the hook by the back door, where it had hung his entire childhood, was his father's grey sweater.

It was damp. Not wet. Damp, the way wool goes when it has been in unheated air for days.

Shawn stood in a cold porch in the dark holding a wet sweater and did the arithmetic anybody would do, which is that people who go away for Christmas take their heart tablets, and do not leave their coat outside in December, and do not go anywhere without telling the son who pays for the roof.

He rang Michelle Park at twenty-nine minutes past nine on Christmas Eve. She is his company's lawyer and she has been for nine years and she answered.

He told her what he had, which was almost nothing. A dead uncle. A bottle of tablets. A sweater.

She listened for two minutes and then asked him one question, and it was not the question he was expecting.

She asked whether the house was still in his parents' names.

He said of course it was.

She said: go and find out.