CHAPTER 25 #2
Desmond Thorne is awaiting trial. He has never been in a cell, he has surrendered his passport, he is monitored and barred from the firm. The inquiry into the man Rian killed is open too, and the gray key has been in federal custody since I handed it over.
Colette Hargrave’s letter had been in that drawer since the winter.
It is three sentences long. She gave up her license rather than make them take it; her son has work now and does not know what it cost; she was not asking me for anything.
She is disbarred by consent, and waiting to be sentenced in her sister’s house upstate.
I answered her in the warm hour. March gives you one, when the wind drops and the mud steams and a person can stand out in shirtsleeves and be lied to about April. I wrote it on a card in my own hand, with Luca’s pen and its pulled nib.
I remember.
I walked it down the track myself, past the frost-killed apple tree and the well head. The medal came up out of my collar on the hill and knocked against my chin. Steel, warm.
The card is on the wall left of the stove, in a frame with glass on both sides so that both faces read at once.
From one end of the room you get black capitals in his hand.
From the other you get one more line in mine, copying his badly and on purpose.
The corner is still torn where I threw it at Rian in September.
“There are eight lines on that card and I only ever wrote seven of them,” Cassian said.
He had come to stand beside me with the cup in his right hand, which he could not have done in October, and he turned that palm up and down once, because he still checks. I touched the back of it with two fingers.
“You had it framed with two panes so nobody would ever have to turn it over,” I said. “That was expensive of you.”
“It was a frame, and it cost what a frame costs.”
“What is it you actually do now?” my mother said later, drying a plate she had no business drying. “I have told people my daughter is a lawyer and nothing else.”
“I run a two-lawyer shop, and Kestrel Group is my first and my worst client,” I said.
“And do they pay you?”
“They pay me late and they argue about the engagement letter.”
“That is good, because you would go soft on easy people.”
Rian reached past me for the plates and got his right hand up to the shelf and made a performance out of arriving there.
“I can reach the second shelf now, which my doctor is calling a triumph of medicine,” he said.
I did not laugh. I never laugh at that joke, or at any of the versions he has been building all winter, and he tells it in company so that nobody has to look at the arm and think about a road in the dark.
“He has put that one on an open channel twice,” Sasha said, “and the second time he changed a word in it to find out whether anybody was still listening.”
“Somebody was still listening.”
“Somebody is always listening. That is the job.”
“You are supposed to laugh,” Rian said to me. “Everybody else laughs, and you stand there like a notary at a christening.”
“I am considering whether the joke is admissible.”
“Does it hurt you,” Owen’s sister said, “or is it only that it will not go up?”
“It does not hurt. It stops, and there is nothing above where it stops.”
Then he held the pose, the plate up over his head in his right hand, and I laughed. It came out sideways and much too loud and I put a hand across my mouth.
Matteo came in from the yard with the cold still on him.
“The repeater is fixed and there is nothing on the fence line but deer,” he said.
He said it the way another man says the post has come. He used to deliver that sentence from the doorway and stay standing in it. Today he hung his coat on the peg and went back to the bread, and he holds his back straight out of a habit he picked up in October.
Sasha Ilves waited until the kitchen was at its loudest, which is a professional habit, and got me by the door among the coats.
“You said you were taking clients. I have one for you, and she is my sister,” she said.
“Then bring her up on a Saturday and we will do it properly at this table,” I said.
“You have not asked me what it is about.”
“You will tell me at the table, and I will have a pad in front of me, and it will keep.”
“She will not want to walk into a house with four men in it,” Sasha said, and she looked past me at the four of them and did not soften it.
“Then she walks into a house with my mother in it, and my mother will do the rest.”
“Your mother has asked me twice what I do here,” Sasha said, “and she has decided I am somebody’s secretary.”
“She has decided you are the only sensible person here, which is worse.”
“I will take it. I have been called worse by people who had less on me.”
She nodded once and went back into the noise. Behind her my mother was telling Cassian something about my grandmother, and he had stopped moving altogether.
The light went early and orange and then went completely, and nobody put the outside lamp on. Luca opened the windows a finger’s width against the stove and my mother said the room was like a bus. Owen’s sister stayed for the meal and a long while after it, and the paperback stayed on the boards.
“Somebody is expected to say something,” Luca said, “and it will not be a speech, because I have been asked.”
“Then say the short one,” my mother said.
“Eat it while it is hot, and keep your elbows where I do not have to look at them.”
We sat down late. The lamp lay across the frame so that neither face of the card could be read from where I stood, and it did not matter, because everybody there knew what it said. My mother had the chair with arms. Sasha had the end.
There was one chair left, and it is the chair nobody in this house has ever taken.
I pulled out the chair with its back to the door and sat down in it, and Rian turned his away from the door for the first time in his life, and then the other three did the same, and nobody in that kitchen was guarding anything at all.