27. Carrington
CARRINGTON
It was a small house that had been white once.
The yards on that street ran into each other without fences, so Carrington couldn't tell where one of them stopped.
Somebody up the block had left a mower standing in the middle of the grass.
Deborah Mensah's car was in the driveway with its hood pointed at the road and no room behind it.
Carrington left hers at the curb and turned the engine off.
She had dialed her sister's oldest friend at two in the morning on Wednesday and nobody picked up. At seven, Deborah called back and said to meet on Sunday at four. She was off the line before Carrington could agree to it.
Now, she pressed the doorbell, a brass button with paint dried in the ring around it. Deborah opened the door with her glasses up in her hair.
"Come in."
There was no hall. Two steps and she stood in the room itself, on a mat, with her coat still on. Nowhere to set anything down, and she hadn't brought anything anyway.
"That's the good chair," Deborah said. "The other's mine."
Carrington sat in it. She had to stoop lower than she expected and she had to put a hand on the arm going down. Deborah went out to the kitchen, ran the water, and came back with two glasses. She put a coaster at Carrington's side and the glass on top of it and took her own chair.
Somebody had added on to the room more than once, and nothing in it matched anything else, and nobody had ever tried to make it match.
On the wall behind Deborah's head was a photograph from the private room at the Wren Hotel.
A cake going past in somebody's hands. A girl of four in a paper crown.
Clara at the end of the table with her mouth open in the middle of a word.
Carrington had already left by the time that cake came out.
"Thank you for the time," she said.
Deborah drank some of her water.
"I've come to offer you something, and I'd like to say all of it before you answer.
" Carrington had her hands flat on her knees.
"Every other weekend, Friday evening to Sunday, at your house or at mine, whichever suits Grace. A key to the gate and the courtyard door, so that you have access when you’d like. "
Deborah didn't interrupt her once. When Carrington stopped, she turned her glass a quarter turn on the arm of the chair and left it there.
"I called that house in March," she said. "I gave a woman my name and my number and I said the number twice so she'd have it down right. Nobody called me back. And now you've driven out here on a Sunday with a key."
"Yes."
"You've never been to this house."
"No."
Deborah nodded.
"If you want to be named on the guardianship, I'll have Diane start it tomorrow," Carrington said. "It can be varied. I wouldn't fight you on it."
"I don't want the girl," Deborah said.
"But you wrote to Family Services."
"I wrote one page and it took me a month. There was nothing in it about taking her anywhere." Deborah took her glasses down out of her hair and into her lap. "Yet you drove out here still thinking I'd come for her."
Carrington had nothing to say after that.
"How is she?" Deborah said.
"She's stopped talking," Carrington said. "Not at school and not to me. It’s been twelve days. She only writes her replies."
Deborah's hands came together in her lap. "Where's Lucy Harper?"
"She left."
"Why?"
Carrington closed her hand around the glass she hadn't drunk from and didn't lift it.
"A caseworker asked whether our relationship was personal.
I said no. Ms. Harper said yes. I never asked her to lie for me, but I wanted her to.
She didn't, and I wrote her a severance check. She wouldn’t take it, though. "
Whoever owned the mower up the block finally started it. It ran a while and stopped, and Deborah still hadn't said anything.
"All right," Deborah said.
"I'd like to apologize to you." Carrington looked at the photograph and not at Deborah.
"At the cemetery you said something to me about an envelope.
I brought an envelope to that birthday and I left before the cake, and the reason was that I couldn't think of anything else. That's not a defense of it."
Deborah didn't help her.
"I didn't speak to my sister for two years. I don't have a reason for that I'd say out loud in this room. And you left your name at my house with a woman who wrote it down properly, and it never came to me. I want you to know that I wouldn't have called you back if it had."
She stopped there. Her mouth was dry. The water was still next to her where Deborah had put it, and she left it alone.
"I'm sorry," Carrington said.
Deborah sat back in her chair. "You've said that very well," she said. "You've been practicing it in the car?"
"Yes."
"That's all right. You still said it." Deborah pushed her glasses back up into her hair.
"Nobody in that family has ever said it to me.
Clara didn't either. I sat by her bed for three weeks.
She never once said she was sorry about the years she let go by with you.
I'd have liked to hear it, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise now she's dead. "
"What do you want?" Carrington said. "I'll do it."
"When I call that house, I want somebody to call me back."
Carrington waited for the rest of it.
"That’s all," Deborah said. "I don't need a key. I can drive."
"You'll get a call back," Carrington said.
"From you?"
"Yes. From me."
Deborah stood and carried both glasses out to the kitchen, hers empty and Carrington's untouched. Carrington heard the tap run, and then Deborah came back drying her hands on a towel she brought in with her.
"I'll write to Family Services in the morning and take back my statement," she said.
"I didn't come here for that."
"I know you didn't. If you had, I'd have shown you the door." Deborah folded the towel over the back of her own chair. "You told me what was going on in that house. That's all I asked for."
Deborah walked her to the door, and they said goodbye. Carrington got into the car and sat with her keys in her hand. She drove home owing Deborah nothing at all. She would rather have owed her anything at all.
At half past eight, Carrington clicked the closet door shut and read Grace two pages of the book.
Grace had her eyes closed before the end of the first one but wasn't asleep.
Carrington told her that Deborah had asked after her, waited to see whether Grace would say anything back, and then said goodnight and went down.
Carrington dug her phone out of her pocket and dialed. Diane Bell picked up on the first ring. Carrington had never once called her on a Sunday.
"I'm going to write to Melinda myself," Carrington said.
"About the household list?" Diane asked.
"About the answer I gave her."
"Don't," Diane said.
"Why not?"
"Because nobody is asking you about it anymore.
Ms. Harper doesn't live on that property, and the list you signed is accurate today.
" Something creaked at Diane's end. "What you're proposing is to write to a state agency and tell them you lied to a caseworker during a review of your guardianship of a child.
That is not something I can work with. I've never advised a client to do it, and I'm not going to start with you. "
"I understand you."
"Then let me draft it."
"No."
"Let me read it before you send it then."
"No," Carrington said.
Diane said nothing for so long that Carrington thought the call dropped. "Send it to the office, not to her," she said. "It gets scanned in either way and it can't get lost. And make sure to date it." She hung up.
Carrington grabbed a notebook and pen. The first attempt began: I write further to the household schedule returned to your office, and she read it back.
No good. The second one started with Grace and turned into an argument by the fourth line, and she was arguing with a woman who hadn't accused her of anything.
The third one she wrote while standing and leaning over her desk.
Ms. Alvarez.
At the visit on the twentieth you asked me whether my relationship with Lucy Harper was personal. I told you it was not. That was a lie and I knew it while I was saying it. Ms. Harper answered the same question, knowing what it would do to her.
I required her to conceal it. She agreed because I asked her to and for no other reason. I ended her employment the same afternoon. I am not asking you for anything, for her or for myself.
One further matter. The statement from Deborah Mensah asked to be considered as somebody with a relationship to my niece.
I opposed it. I was wrong. She has known Grace since the day she was born and she is the only other person left alive who knew her mother.
If my opinion carries any weight in that file, I would like that on the record.
She signed and dated it, then she folded the page in thirds, put it in the envelope, ran her tongue along the flap, and pressed it down under her thumb. She held it there longer than she needed to, just to make sure it was secured.
In the morning, Grace went out to the car without waiting to be told. Carrington stayed at the window until the gate had shut behind them, then took the envelope off the desk and drove into town on her own.
The collection box stood on the corner outside the post office, next to a rack of newspapers she didn't look at. She pulled the handle down, laid the envelope in the tray, and let go of it.