Chapter 29 Nate - June 2024, Camden, Maine #2
I watched her decide. She had a whole sentence available and she was holding it, and I could see the shape of it, and I could see her weigh what it would cost me to have it arrive tonight, in a hallway, on the worst week of her life. She let it go.
"They do a breakfast downstairs," she said. "It's terrible. It's the eggs, and I don't know what they do to them." She took her hand off my sleeve. "Come at seven and we'll have it anyway, and then I'll go up and you can sleep for three hours."
"Okay."
And that was the whole conversation, four sentences about breakfast, and both of us knew exactly what had been in the room, and both of us walked away from it on purpose, and it went into an account with a date on it in September.
Two days later they got him sitting up on the edge of the bed with a therapist under one arm and my grandfather told her the room was too cold and then apologized for it, and my uncle Marsh arrived with a briefcase he did not open, and my father did four hours in that chair and was, in his way, wrecked.
And on the Sunday morning, with Big Jack stable and my mother backed by three cousins and a sister-in-law and the entire town of Camden, I did the thing my whole life has trained me not to do. I did not call ahead. I said goodbye in the morning and got in the car and drove the whole day.
Maine to New Hampshire to Massachusetts.
Down through Connecticut with the radio on a station and then off.
Across New York on the interstate. Through the whole length of Pennsylvania in the afternoon with the mountains going by and the light getting long, and I did not stop except for gas and I did not compose one single sentence the entire way.
I have drafted apologies four ways at midnight.
I have written a congratulations and deleted it, over and over.
I did a whole day in a car and arrived with nothing prepared.
I came into the South Hills in the evening and turned up a street I had never driven on in my life and found the number. And there was a truck in the driveway.
I sat behind the wheel for about ten seconds, which is the only part of that day I would do differently, and then I got out and walked up a stranger's driveway in a shirt I had slept in and rang the bell.
Bo Berglund opened the door. Four Cups. A thousand and some games. A number in the rafters in Pittsburgh and a face like the Iron Range, and he stood in his own doorway in a cardigan and looked at me.
He did not say who are you. He did not say what are you doing here.
He looked at me for about two seconds, and then past me at the car with the Pennsylvania plate and the Maine dust on it, and then back, and something in his face opened about a quarter of an inch, which on that man is a door coming off its hinges.
"Michael," he said, over his shoulder, without turning around. "Set another place."
There was a pot roast on the table and it had been on the table about ten minutes. Riley was on his feet before I got through the dining room door and he did not say anything at all, which I have never once known him to do.
"I didn't call," I said.
"No," he said. "You didn't."
"Sit down, both of you," said Michael Berglund, coming through with a plate and a fork and a napkin. "Before the meat goes."
So I sat down at that table. There were four men eating a pot roast. Two of them had known the truth about the third for three years. The fourth was me. Nobody had introduced anything. Nobody said one word about what I was doing there or why I looked like a man who had been driving since morning.
Bo asked me about my hip.
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. You've got a hitch coming out of your left turn and you've had it since March."
"Bo," said Michael.
"It's a Sunday. He drove here." Bo put a piece of bread in the gravy. "How's your grandfather?"
"He's alive. He's got the left side to get back."
"Big Jack Sinclair." Bo said it to his plate. "I met him twice. He talked to me for forty minutes in a rink in Duluth in 1979 and I was nobody, and he asked me two real questions and remembered my brother's name the second time." He chewed. "That's the whole review."
"He'd like that."
"He knows it. Men like that always know it."
And then I put my fork down. "Riley. The itinerary."
He went very still.
"I've read it about forty times. It's been in every room in my house. It was on the desk in the second bedroom for two days, and you know what's in that desk."
"I know what's in that desk."
"I'm accepting it. All of it, whereas clauses and all. Separate flights, Lisbon, H. Baker, the whole thing."
Michael Berglund put down a serving spoon very quietly.
"And I've got one amendment. The lighthouse stays on the map."
He did not say anything for a second. "It's an hour's walk up a cliff. There's no road to it. I checked that too."
"I know. I read the map. I've been reading that map for eleven days."
"I circled it in red pen like a lunatic."
"You circled it in red pen, and then you handed me the whole thing and did not say one word about it, and in seven years you have never once handed me anything without a joke on top of it." I put my hand flat on the cloth. "So it stays. The lighthouse stays on the map."
And there was a beat at that table, three or four seconds, in which nobody said anything.
Then Michael Berglund stood up. He went across the room to a drawer in the sideboard, one of those drawers that has forty years in it, and he opened it and put his hand straight on a thing without looking, which meant he had known exactly where it was for some time.
He came back to the table and put a ring of keys down in front of me and slid it across the cloth.
Three keys on a loop of green cord with a paper tag on it, and the tag had a name on it in somebody else's handwriting, in ink that had gone soft.
"That's the farmhouse," Michael said. "That's the front, that's the back, and the little one is the shed with the gas bottles in it, and my cousin will tell you she doesn't lock anything, and she locks everything.
" He sat down and picked his fork back up.
"Rosalina next door has the other set and she'll have been in there airing it out since April, because I told her about it in April. "
"You told her in April," Riley said. "Michael, he only said yes four minutes ago."
"Yes," said Michael Berglund, and ate.
Bo Berglund looked down the table at his partner of thirty-six years with an expression I intend to remember, and did not say anything at all.
And I looked up. Riley Kowalski was sitting across a stranger's dinner table with his hand flat beside his plate, looking at me over the dishes, and I have seen that exact face on that exact man precisely one other time in my life.
April of 2017, a ballroom in Chicago, thirty feet away, over a staffer's shoulder, reading a seating chart upside down.
The face of a man who has just been handed a five minute power play.