14. Lucy
LUCY
She spent three nights crunching up sixty feet of gravel before she thought of walking on the grass beside it.
The grass made no noise at all. It was also wet with dew until nine in the morning, so she carried her shoes in one hand and put them on at the top with her feet already soaked, and twice on the way back down she stepped into the flower bed to the ankle.
Every night now, she left the light on over the stove. A dark cottage would have meant she was somewhere else. A lit one meant she was up reading with her feet on the couch, and about two nights a week that was true.
She learned the rest of the schedule by watching the staff.
The range light came on at twenty to six, and the chef let herself in under it through the courtyard door, which had a bolt at the top nobody had ever used.
That made at least half an hour before six the deadline.
Lucy wanted to be up in that house at night more than she wanted to be sensible about it, so she set an alarm for a quarter past five and went up anyway.
She was always the one who went up to the main house.
Carrington had not once come down the path, and neither of them had said anything about it.
The cottage had one window and it faced the courtyard, six feet from the bed.
Anybody crossing at night could look straight in.
Carrington's room had a door that shut and locked, so they used Carrington's instead, and stayed quiet for Grace, asleep two doors down the landing.
On Friday, a van came at half past five.
The gate motor started when she was thirty feet down the path with her shoes in her hand.
She stepped sideways into the hedge. It was clipped flat on the outside and nothing but wet sticks on the inside, and she wedged in as far as her shoulder and stopped there, one bare foot still on the gravel, standing in a bush at half past five in the morning like a teenager.
The driver came around the hedge with the first crate on her hip and set it down on the kitchen step. Then the range light came on across the courtyard.
"You're early," the chef said.
"I've got the whole ridge before eight," the driver said.
They stood there talking about the driver's sister for a minute and a half. Lucy's arm went dead against the branches and the cold came up through the bare foot she had on the gravel. She clamped her free hand over her mouth and held it there until the door shut behind them. She was going to laugh.
She let herself into the cottage at twenty to six with wet sticks down the front of her shirt and a scrape along her forearm she would have to explain to Grace at breakfast. She put the coffee on. Then she reset the alarm for a quarter past five and showered.
Grace started reading to her on Tuesday.
Kayla had finished with the ocean book at last and sent it home in Grace's bag. It stayed against the base of the lamp on the nightstand for two days without being opened. Grace wanted to finish the fox book first, and she wanted to read it herself. All of it, out loud, without help on the words.
"You can say it if I get stuck for a long time," Grace said. "Not right away."
"How long is a long time?" Lucy asked.
Grace thought about that. "Longer than you waited when I got stuck on rescue."
So Lucy sat on the end of the bed with her hands under her thighs and let Grace work through a paragraph and a half about the weather. Grace read slowly and flatly and got everything right, and then Grace came to the part where the fox talks to the light, and she did a voice for it.
It was terrible. Grace pushed her chin down into her neck to get it low and gravelly, held it for four words, then lost it and had to push her chin down again on the next line.
"That's not what she sounds like," Grace said.
"What does she sound like?" Lucy asked.
"Not like that," Grace said, and did it again anyway, worse, and kept reading to the bottom of the page.
Lucy pulled her hands out from under her thighs and put them flat on the blanket instead. Twice, Grace stopped on a word, and Lucy counted to five in her head, and Grace worked it out on her own both times.
"Twenty-two pages," Grace said, when she shut it. "That's four more nights. Maybe three."
"Three if you keep going like that," Lucy said.
"Will you be here when I finish it?" Grace asked.
"Yes," Lucy said.
"Okay," Grace said. She put the book back on the nightstand and put the ocean book on top of it.
The picnic was on Saturday, at eleven, at the shelter with the roof.
Lucy cut fruit into a plastic tray at half past nine and covered it and drove Grace over.
Carrington came in her own car and arrived nine minutes later.
Sixty-odd families crowded under and around the shelter.
Kayla's mothers had brought two coolers and a folding table nobody had asked them to bring, and somebody's grandmother ran a bean bag game on the grass for an hour without ever once explaining the rules.
The woman in the fleece from the school lot came around with the clipboard again, checking off what had actually turned up against what people had written down.
"Fruit," she said, finding it on the list. "Nobody else brought any."
"Good, we brought enough," Lucy said.
The woman looked past her at the shelter. "Is Grace's aunt here? I've got her down for the fall committee."
"Ms. Cole is by the tables," Lucy said. "In the gray blazer."
Grace ate four strawberries and half a hot dog, then played the bean bag game with Kayla for the rest of the picnic. Carrington stayed by the tables for two hours and talked to three people, without ever sitting down once. Lucy stayed at the other end of the shelter the whole time.
At one o'clock, the two of them carried a cooler each out to the lot, walking on opposite sides of the path, and then Carrington drove one way and Lucy drove the other with Grace in the back saying that Kayla's mom had put root beer in with the water bottles and hadn't told anyone.
It was an ordinary Saturday in a park with two hundred people in it, and Lucy drove home wanting to do it again the next week.
Mira and Anjali were Lucy's two closest friends from college, and she had canceled on both of them twice this month already.
Mira had a half day from the courthouse where she worked as a paralegal and picked the restaurant near it.
Anjali brought her son, Milo, two and a half and newly in love with the sound a fork made against a table.
"Fourteen days," Mira said, before Lucy had her coat off. "Four texts, and one of them was a thumbs up."
"I've been busy," Lucy said.
"Everyone's busy. I'm busy. I answer," Mira said.
"You answer during depositions," Anjali said. "You need help."
Lucy sat down and put her napkin in her lap and told them about Grace instead.
About the fox book and the voice and the twenty-two pages.
About the bean bag game with no rules. About Grace, who had not said a word in a classroom for eleven days straight, standing on a piece of tape in front of two hundred people and counting anemones out loud.
Anjali put her hand flat on her chest for that one. Milo dropped the fork.
"Okay," Mira said, and put her glass down. "Now the other thing. You've looked well since the coast. Anjali said it in the car."
"I did say it," Anjali said, going after the fork.
"Are you sleeping with her?" Mira asked.
The fries came. Lucy took one off the top of the pile and ate it and wrapped her hand around the base of her glass. Her mouth had gone dry and the fry did not help.
"It is a job," Lucy said. She heard the tense come out of her mouth and she said it again. "It's a job. It's a good one and that's all it is."
Milo reached over the side of his booster seat for the fork and couldn't get it and hit the tray with his open hand instead, twice, until Anjali gave him a breadstick, and nobody at the table went back to the question.
"Fine," Mira said. "My cousin still flinches when somebody says the name."
"Your cousin lost a bid," Lucy said.
"And eleven pounds," Mira said.
Anjali closed Milo's fist around the breadstick. "I'm glad it's just the job," she said. "The last one nearly finished you."
"It did," Lucy said.
"You were on my couch for a month," Anjali said.
"I know," Lucy said. "It's a good house and a good kid, and I go home at the end of it."
Mira raised her glass an inch off the cloth at that and drank and started in on the deposition she had come to complain about.
At ten to two, Anjali stood up with Milo on her hip and said she had to finish a spreadsheet nobody would read.
Lucy paid before either of them could reach for it, the way she had at every lunch since February, and neither of them said one word about it.
Grace went to Kayla's straight from school on Monday and was staying until six.
Lucy had set it up the Thursday before. Kayla's mothers had been asking since the assembly, so saying yes to them was easy. The chef went home after lunch on Mondays and the van did not come back. Lucy had worked the whole thing out standing in the kitchen with a dish towel in her hand.
She was at the cottage window at four, and she saw Carrington come around the corner of the house and start down the path.
She had never seen her on the path at all, day or night; Carrington had always waited for Lucy to come up.
Now she came down the middle of the gravel in a gray suit with her coat over her arm, in heels, on a wet path, past the hedge and the flower bed and the little buried path lights, at four o'clock in the afternoon, where anybody in the kitchen wing could have looked out and seen her.
Lucy opened the door before she knocked.
"The chef leaves at two," Carrington said. "Nadia's at the office until six, and the gardeners aren't due until Wednesday. I have until quarter to six."
"I know," Lucy said. "I told Nadia the schedule myself."
"I checked it again anyway." Carrington put her coat over the arm of the sectional.
"Of course you did," Lucy said.