CHAPTER 25
Ana
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The mud in the yard had come up soft in the night, and by late morning it was taking a whole bootprint and holding it. The trees along the ridge were bare. Over the barn a loose sheet of roof tin lifted in the wind and came down again on the same nail, the way it has done all winter.
I stood on the stone step and scraped my boots and counted the cars coming up the track.
The step is dished in the middle, worn to a bowl by a century of the same boot in the same place.
Once, a car turning off that road would have taken the feeling out of my fingers.
This morning I counted them the way a person counts places at a table.
Six months.
That is the only arithmetic I have left. I did it with the brass case loose in the bottom of my pocket, because I do not need it in my hand any more. Then I went inside, and the kitchen came up around me all at once.
Rian was at the window with a dishcloth over his good shoulder.
“Your mother is out of the car with a cake balanced on her own bad knee,” he said, “and she will not let anybody take it off her.”
“Do not try,” I said. “She will hand it to whichever of you she has already decided about, and she decided in the car.”
The kitchen at Harrow Point is not a large room, and by noon there were eight of us in it, four more than the table was built for. Matteo had laid two boards over trestles at the stove end. The air was old hay dust and diesel out of a jerry can.
“Sit down, all of you, and stop pretending anybody in this house is a guest,” Luca said.
He said it with his hands up and turning at chest height, and he meant it for one person.
My mother sat down slowly in the chair with arms, because her left knee has been bad since before I could drive.
She had seen the steel band at my throat and did not ask, and I understood that she was saving it.
Delia Verdugo wears her gray-white hair in a plait over one shoulder, and she has freckles, and she is sixty-one and hides neither fact. She had met these four men exactly once, in a corridor at Foley Square. Her tea sat in front of her, untouched.
“Which one of you did the carrying, because I would like to look at him properly,” she said.
Cassian set his cup down on the boards before he answered.
“I gave the order and I went through her office door first,” he said. “Whatever you want to call it, it starts with me.”
“That is a lawyer’s answer, and my daughter is the lawyer here.”
“It is also the true one.”
“Then give me the other true one,” she said, and turned her cup a quarter turn without drinking from it. “Which of you had her off the ground?”
Rian put his hand up. I had spent the morning worrying about Cassian and about Luca, and it had not occurred to me that the worst possible man in the room would volunteer.
“That was me,” he said. “I had her over my shoulder from the stairwell down to the van, and she got an elbow into my mouth on the second landing, and I would do it again tomorrow.”
Nobody answered him. Matteo stopped slicing bread. Out there the tin came down on its nail.
My mother touched the boards once with her fingertips.
“Come here where I can see you properly,” she said. “I have a bad knee and you are standing very far away.”
He crossed that kitchen like a man crossing open ground and crouched beside her chair so that her eyes were higher than his. She took his face in both hands, the badly set nose and the ruddiness that burns instead of tanning, and looked at him as long as she wanted. I looked at the sink.
“All right,” she said, and let him go. “You can get up, and you can pass me the milk while you are standing.”
He passed it with his right hand, because the left one does not go up that far any more. She said nothing about that either, and my shoulders came down off my ears without being asked.
Luca was pouring for everybody and telling my mother the history of the stove, which he does not know.
The white line over his right eyebrow has settled into something he believes improves him.
My bruises went in the autumn, Matteo’s ribs knitted, his wrists healed.
Rian’s shoulder is the only thing any of us kept.
“And who cooks,” my mother said, “because not one of you looks like he has ever peeled anything.”
“I do the bread and the fruit and most of what happens at this end of the room,” Luca said. “I would like it on the record that I have peeled a great deal.”
“He puts things on plates,” Matteo said, without turning round. “I cook. He arranges.”
“That is a slander and he knows it.”
“You washed one leek in October and you told the story twice.”
My mother laughed, which is a short unhelpful sound she has never used kindly, and Luca took it with the dimple arriving half a beat behind the smile. Owen’s sister laughed too, the first noise she had made since Sasha brought her up from the station, and I saw Rian hear it.
“You talk a great deal,” my mother said to Luca. “I have not decided whether that is a fault.”
“It is a fault,” Luca said, “and I have made an entire living out of it, tesoro.”
Then she put her cup down and asked the thing she had come to ask.
“Is she safe,” she said. “I am not asking what you think. I am asking what happens on the day she is not.”
Cassian took his time before he picked the question up.
“Whichever of us is nearest goes, and the other three come behind him,” he said. “That is not a promise about the world. It is a promise about us.”
“Men have said things very like that to me before.”
“I know. In your chair I would not believe it either.”
“And do you sleep in this house, or do you sit up in it?”
“I sleep,” Cassian said. “It took a while, and I sleep now.”
My mother turned her cup again.
“And at the start,” she said. “When she wanted to come home and could not. One of you is going to tell me what that was.”
Luca had the answer out before anybody could reach past him for it.
“She had the best room in a very good building, and we fed her properly, and we answered every question she put to us,” he said. “Nobody was ever unkind to her.”
“That is not what I asked you.”
“I know it is not.”
“Then have another go, because I have a bad knee and nowhere to be.”
“There was a lock and she was on the wrong side of it,” Cassian said, and he took the question off Luca the way you take a hot pan off a man. “He is trying to make that sit down for you. It does not sit down, and you should not let him.”
My mother looked at Luca until he fastened a cuff that did not need fastening.
“Do not be kind to me,” she said. “I am the only person at this table who was not there.”
“Then I will be accurate,” Luca said, “which I am told is a different skill.”
Matteo put the knife down. He does not speak in company, and my mother turned her whole body toward him, knee and all.
“Nothing has come up that track since October that we did not invite,” he said.
It is the only answer any of them gave her that she wrote down afterwards, in the little book she keeps in her bag, and she did not know I saw.
“And which of them is yours, Ana,” she said. “There is one of you and there are rather more of them.”
I had a sentence ready, a clean clause about arrangements and about a word she did not grow up with, and I let it go, because it was a brief and she is my mother.
“All of them, Mama, and I am not going to explain it more than once today.”
She looked at each of the four of them, taking longer over Cassian than anybody else, and drank the tea that had gone cold while she was working.
“You have your grandmother’s stubbornness and none of her sense, and I am glad,” she said.
Owen’s sister has his colouring, sandy and sunburnt across the nose even in March, and she is older than he was. She had brought a paperback up on the train, soft the way a book goes when it has lived in a coat pocket. She put it on the boards and did not explain it.
Rian told her, and he was the worst possible person to do it, and Cassian let him anyway, which I think was the kindest decision anybody made in that house all day.
“We retired his call sign on that porch out there in October,” Rian said. “Kestrel Six. Nobody in this company carries that number again.”
“Is that a thing people do, or a thing you did for me?”
“It is written down and it is permanent,” he said, and he stayed standing while he said it, which for him is the same as kneeling. “Sasha holds the file, and Sasha does not lose files.”
“Then I would like to see it written down some day.”
“Come up in the summer and I will put it in your hand.”
“He burnt in April,” she said, turning the paperback round so that it faced her. “Every year. He put the cream on like a man painting a fence and burnt anyway, and then called it a tan.”
“He came in one morning the color of a brick and swore to me it was windburn,” Rian said.
“He rang our mother on a Sunday to ask how long to boil an egg, and he knew the answer. He asked her anyway.”
Nobody said anything to that.
“He wrote about all of you,” she said. “He never wrote about the money.”
Rian did not answer. He is the only one of them who understands that some sentences have none, and he stood beside her chair with his hand on the back of it. Luca filled a glass at the tap and put it into her hand and closed her fingers round it.
“You do not have to keep the book,” she said. “I brought it up here to put it down.”
“Then it stays on this table,” Luca said. “Nothing goes off this table without being asked first, and I will be the one who asks.”
June Pike’s letter had come on the Thursday and I read it standing at the counter.
The medical examiner has amended Wesley Pike’s death certificate.
The manner of death is no longer accident; it reads undetermined, pending, and the tip that was closed in nine hours is open. I put it in the drawer with the others.