Chapter 20
Winslow
The Fairbankses did Easter at the big house. In the spring of the following year there were forty-one people in it, and a baby in a bassinet in the sunporch where Marlowe had once sat in a bad wicker chair.
The paperwhites were long done. Marlowe had geraniums in the same bowls now, which Winslow suspected was not correct and had not raised.
His name was Dell. They'd argued about it for two months and lost every other name they tried. Then in February Winslow said it once out loud in a car. Callum went quiet for a mile and said, "That's the boat man's brother." She said yes, and that was the end of the argument.
He was eleven weeks old. He had Callum's chin and an expression of permanent mild grievance about everything, and Blaire had already told him twice that he was going to be a handful.
The pregnancy had been hard and the birth had been worse, and neither of those was a story Winslow intended to tell at a table.
What she'd tell, eventually, to one or two people, was that Callum had missed a vote in February to sit in a hallway at Roanoke Memorial, and had said nothing about it to anybody, and had let a reporter write four hundred words about a senator's absent record without ever once explaining himself.
She'd found out from Dara, in April, in a parking lot, and had gone home and not mentioned it for a week.
Then she'd mentioned it. In the room, on a Tuesday, out loud.
"I'd have told you," Callum said.
"When?"
"Eventually. Badly." He'd put both hands on the table. "I'm running about seventy percent. I'd like credit for the seventy and I understand I don't get to ask for it."
"You don't."
"No."
"Seventy's a hell of a lot better than nothing," Winslow had said, "and I'm not going to say that twice, so hold on to it."
Winslow got twenty minutes to herself on the sunporch and took every one of them.
It was the same bad wicker chair. Nobody had ever replaced it and now nobody ever would.
Fourteen months ago she had stood at this glass with her arms crossed and her back to the door, letting her face go. A woman had come out, sat down in that chair, and said the name Renata to her. Everything since had run out of that one hour.
She had told Marlowe so in February, in a hallway at the hospital, badly, on no sleep.
"You saved my marriage."
"I did no such thing."
"Marlowe."
"I told you what happened to me," Marlowe had said, "which cost me nothing and took four minutes. You went and got in a truck."
It came through the glass at half volume. Graham losing an argument about a seating chart. Eleanor, ninety-two now and refusing a plate, holding court from the good chair with three great-grandchildren on the floor in front of her. Somebody's dog.
Marlowe had come out once already, on the excuse of a napkin, and stood in the door for a second with her hand on the frame.
"You've got the look," she'd said.
"What look?"
"The one where a woman is calculating how long she's got." Marlowe had put the napkin down on the arm of the chair. "Take thirty. I did the last hour by myself for eleven years and I'm not having you learn it at forty-one."
Then she'd gone back in, and shut the door behind her, and headed off a woman with a casserole dish in the hall.
Adair had cornered her by the drinks table an hour ago and made her say the number out loud.
"Say it."
"Adair."
"Say it. You've had it since March and you've told nobody and I want to hear you say it in your own house."
"It's not my house."
"It's your husband's mother's house, which in this family is the same thing and you know it. Say the number."
Winslow had said the number. Then she had gone and stood by a window for a minute.
She had signed Gideon's page on the twenty-ninth of October.
She had not used one dollar of the discretionary line on it.
Nine months later she was the only director on that show whose money came from a distributor rather than from a family, and she had never once said out loud how much that mattered. Adair had known anyway.
The film was called Slackwater Rising and it was in the cut.
Four days a fortnight in Philadelphia since January.
With the baby. With Nadine on the train twice and Marlowe once, and one week in March with nobody at all, which had been a mistake she would not repeat.
It had been hard in a way she had not been prepared for.
She had not missed a single trip. Gideon had opinions about the fourth episode and was wrong.
He had told a distributor at a dinner in March that she was the best in the country under fifty.
Then he emailed her seven paragraphs about why episode four was still wrong.
The two rooms at the lake house had a crib in one and a shelf of hard drives in the other. Neither of them had ever said a word about which was which.
In June they'd gone out for a week and Callum had stood in the doorway of the second one with a coffee in his hand and said, "This one's yours," and she had said, "I know," and that had been the entire conversation, eight years after the first one.
Gideon had come to the screening in Philadelphia in February and had held the baby for forty minutes in a lobby while she did a Q and A, badly, on four hours of sleep.
Afterward he had handed him back and said, "He's got a face on him," and gone to get his coat.
That was the whole of it. She had cried in a bathroom for two minutes and gone out to dinner.
They were friends. It had cost him something to arrange that and he had arranged it anyway.
The door opened and shut behind her.
"There's a woman in there trying to feed my son a deviled egg," Callum said.
"Which one?"
"The Pettit one."
"Let her try."
He came and stood at the glass with her.
He'd taken the committee chair in November and turned down the thing everyone had assumed he'd take.
He had told her about the decision before he made it, in a room, with an hour on it.
She argued the other side for forty minutes and lost. Afterward she said that losing an argument to her own husband was the most married she had felt in six years.
There had been a piece about it in April speculating that his ambition had cooled, and he had read it out loud to her in bed doing all the voices.
"Nadine's asking about the lake in July," Callum said. "She wants to know whether to open it the first week or the second."
"Tell her the first."
"That's two weeks of the session."
"Tell her the first."
He nodded at the glass and did not argue it, which was, in its way, the entire last fourteen months in about four seconds.
"Twenty-two minutes," he said.
"You timed my twenty minutes."
"I timed your twenty minutes. I came at twenty-two on purpose so that you'd know I could have come at twenty."
"That is the single most annoying thing you have ever—"
"I know it."
She leaned into his arm.
Somewhere behind the glass Marlowe was moving people toward the table. She would do it in about six minutes and she would do it beautifully. This year Graham would be at her elbow the whole time doing the second half of it, which was new, and which nobody in that house had said one word about.
Winslow had a theory about that and was keeping it to herself.
"How's Gran doing in there?"
"She's told four people she's not eating and eaten off three of their plates." Callum put his hands in his pockets. "She asked after you within ninety seconds of getting through the door. Not after the baby. After you."
"She does that."
"She's done it every time since August," he said. "I've never asked her why."
"Don't."
"I'm not going to."
Out on the lawn somebody's boy was throwing a ball too hard at somebody's other boy.
"I'm going to say a thing," Callum said, "and it's got no build on it."
"Go on."
"I'm running the math."
Winslow turned her head.
"About what?"
"Whether to tell you that the DNC called on Thursday about 2028," he said.
"I've been carrying it since Thursday. It's four days.
I ran it four different ways in the car this morning and the winner was tell her after Easter, she's got the cut this week.
That was the winner. I'm telling you at Easter, on a porch, with the wrong answer, because I said I'd say it in the room. "
She looked at him for a long moment.
"What did you tell them?"
"Nothing. I said I'd call Tuesday." He kept his eyes on the glass. "I wanted to talk to you before I had a position, which I've never done in my life, and I'm finding it physically unpleasant."
"Good."
"That's what I thought you'd say."
"No, you didn't," Winslow said. "You hoped it. That's different and don't you go smoothing it."
Callum laughed, once, and put his head back against the doorframe.
Through the glass, Eleanor was saying a thing and four people were laughing. Graham had given up on the seating chart. A woman named Pettit was in fact trying to feed a deviled egg to an eleven-week-old.
"Tuesday," Winslow said.
"Tuesday."
"I'll want an hour and I'll want it in a room, and if you come in with a build I'm putting my coat on."
"I know the rules."
"You wrote none of them."
"No," he said. "I didn't."
"Say the Tuesday thing again," Winslow said.
"Which part."
"The part where you wanted the wrong answer."
"I wanted to tell you after Easter." He said it without any weight on it. "That was the winner. It won by a lot. I've told you now, on a porch, in the middle of a party, which is the worst available time, and I'm going to have to sit at that table for two hours knowing I've done it."
"Yes, you are."
"That's the whole discipline, isn't it."
"That's the whole discipline."
She got his hand and put it down on her sternum, the way she'd done on a bathroom floor, on a kitchen floor, on a gravel road. She held it there. They stood at the glass together for the last four minutes of her twenty and let forty-one people be loud about nothing at all.
Then Dell started up in the bassinet, furious about something, and they both went.
Fourteen years from now she would be fifty-five. There would be a girl in this house getting married, and somebody at that reception would tell the story about Graham in the driveway in the rain, and everybody would go quiet in the right places.
Nobody would tell this one. Two people at a kitchen table with four jars of candles and the power out. Eleven Thursdays of a man saying dull true things about culverts. A woman who kept the camera.
That was fine. Winslow had no intention of telling it either.
Callum got there first. He got him up against his shoulder, badly, with the elbow out, no longer minding who watched him do it. Then he stood in his mother's sunporch bouncing on the balls of his feet in front of forty-one people.
Eleanor caught Winslow's wrist on the way past the good chair.
"Sit by me."
"Gran, there's a chart."
"There's always a chart," Eleanor said. "Sit by me."
Marlowe called them to the table. Winslow got her hand on her husband's back on the way through the door, and left it there the whole distance, and nobody in that house remarked on it at all.