Chapter Thirty-Nine
Lucy
I painted the last place card at four-fifteen on the afternoon of our eleventh anniversary, standing at the kitchen counter in the owner’s house with my hair still wet, and I painted it too fast, and I didn’t care.
Thirty of them. Thirty was the whole list. Last year there had been three hundred, and at the end of the night the staff had swept them into black trash bags. This year I painted a few every evening at the drafting table in Truckee, each one for the person who would sit behind it.
And in the bottom right corner of every one, small, in pencil: L.H.
Rhys came into the kitchen while I was blowing on the last card to dry it. He was in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled and no jacket, and he stopped in the doorway.
“Is that mine?”
“Don’t look.”
“Luce.”
“You’ll see it at the table. Like everybody else.”
He smiled and didn’t look. He went and got two glasses of water and put one next to my elbow and leaned on the counter across from me and watched me paint instead, which, I was learning, was what he did now when he didn’t know what to do with his hands.
“Can I ask you something?” he said.
“You just did.”
“Can I make a toast tonight?”
I put the brush down.
He saw my face. He didn’t rush it. “You can say no. I’d understand no. I’ve had one toast on that dock and it was the worst thing I ever said out loud.”
I looked at him for a long time across the counter. At the gray coming in at his temples that hadn’t been there a year ago. At his hands, which were still, flat on the stone.
“Keep it short,” I said.
“Okay.”
“And don’t write it on a card.”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I’ve been saying it in the truck for a week.”
* * *
At seven-forty, the lanterns were lit over the water.
Owen had built the table. Thirty feet of it, down the middle of the floating dock, out of Douglas fir offcuts from the fire station roof, sanded smooth and oiled, with a long crooked knot at the far end that he’d refused to plane out because, he said, “It’s the only honest thing on this lake.
” Hazel had done the flowers, jars of lupine and sweet peas, nothing arranged.
Juniper had a crown of daisies that the girl from my class had made her, and was lying at the head of the table, not moving, receiving visitors.
There was no band. There was a Bluetooth speaker Jonah had duct-taped to a piling.
“It’s rustic,” he said when I looked at it.
“It’s duct tape.”
“Rustic duct tape.”
Cilla came down the gangway in a black dress and sunglasses she didn’t need at this hour, picked up her place card, turned it over twice, looked at the Bay Bridge in fog, and then looked at me over the top of the sunglasses.
“Did you hire a planner?” she said, perfectly deadpan. “Everything’s so pretty.”
I laughed so hard I had to put my hand on the table. My mother, who didn’t get it, looked from one of us to the other, and Cilla patted her arm and said, “Old joke, Hazel. Terrible joke. I’ll explain after the wine.”
The girl from my class came down the gangway with her mother.
The girl was in a yellow dress and had clearly been told to behave, and her mother was in her church clothes, holding her purse in both hands the way people do in a place they’ve only ever been to work.
I went up to meet them and took the mother’s hands.
“I’m so glad you came.”
“I didn’t know what to bring,” she said. “I’ve never been on this side of it.”
“You don’t bring anything. You just sit down.”
She found her card and turned it over and saw the lake from the corridor where she’d pushed a cart for seven years, and she didn’t say anything for a second. “Can I keep it?” she asked finally. “After?”
“It’s yours. That’s what they’re for. Nobody sweeps these up.”
She put it in her purse, very carefully, before anyone else could touch it.
Her daughter had already found my mother and was telling her something intensely about T-squares. Halfway down the table, I heard her say, very clearly, in the voice of a teenager who has decided to be loud about something, “No, Mom. That’s her. She drew all of it.”
A year ago a girl about that age had sat on the terrace wall above this dock and asked, Wait—isn’t she the wife?
I sat down in my chair with that and held it.
* * *
The sun went down over the ridge and the lake went peach, then plum.
We ate trout the kitchen staff had cooked and then sat down to eat with us, because Rhys had asked them to.
Carol sat next to my mother, and I heard her say, “Thirty kids in a room or thirty rooms on a floor, honey, it’s the same job.
Nobody sees you do it and everybody notices if you don’t. ”
“Oh, I like you,” my mother said.
At the far end, Owen and Jonah were still arguing about the knot.
“It’s a structural flaw, man.”
“It’s character.”
“It’s a hole.”
“It’s a hole with character,” Owen said, and poured him more wine. Dev Kapoor and his wife came late from the city and brought a cake from a bakery in the Mission, and Dev picked up his place card, a single clean line drawing of a pen, uncapped, and laughed out loud.
“Is this a threat?”
“It’s a reminder,” Cilla said. “Read everything.”
Rhys sat beside me. He didn’t work the table. He didn’t get up once. At one point his phone buzzed on the dock beside his plate, and he turned it face down without reading it and put his hand back over mine.
“That could’ve been important,” I said.
“It could’ve been,” he agreed, and didn’t pick it up.
Then he took something out of his shirt pocket.
It was last year’s place card. The watercolor of the lake at dusk, the one he’d pulled out of a trash bag while the staff swept the floor. It was creased down the middle and soft at the corners, and there was a coffee ring on the back.
“I kept it,” he said quietly.
“I know. Jonah told me.”
“I’ve looked at it every day for a year.” He smoothed it on the table next to his plate. Next to this year’s. “Every day. I know every stroke on it now. There’s a boat you only put in with the tip of the brush. You can’t see it unless you’re looking.”
I hadn’t remembered the boat. I looked down, and there it was, a white fleck on the dark water.
This year’s card, beside it, was the dock at dawn. Steam on the water. Two coffee cups on the planks. The edge of a boot.
He picked up his fork and tapped it, once, against his water glass.
It was such a small sound. My whole body heard it anyway.
My shoulders went up. My hand found the stem of my glass and tightened.
Three sessions with the fern lady in Sacramento, and my body still remembered exactly where it had been standing the last time he did this, and what it had felt like to smile through it.
He felt it. He leaned down before he stood.
“You okay?” he said, very low. “Say the word and I’ll sit down and eat cake.”
“Say it right,” I said. “That’s the word.”
He waited until I nodded.
Then he stood up at the head of Owen’s table with the lanterns behind him and the lake going dark, and thirty people went quiet.
“Under a minute, bro,” Jonah said.
“Under a minute,” Rhys said, and didn’t tell a single joke.
“Eleven years ago, I married Lucy Hart on this dock,” he said.
“The lodge behind you was a drawing on a napkin in her pocket. She drew it. She drew every room in it and every room in three more. She drew thirty-one notebooks of rooms, and she signed them, and then she stopped signing them, and I didn’t notice.
Last year I stood right about here and thanked the wrong person for my life. I’m not going to do that again.”
Nobody moved. Out on the water a fish jumped and the rings went out slow in the lantern light.
“Hazel,” he said, and found my mother down the table. “You taught her to look. I didn’t know how. She’s been teaching me. Thank you for her.”
My mother put her hand flat on her chest and didn’t say anything at all.
“And there are two people who should be at this table and aren’t.
” His voice went, and he let it go, and waited for it to come back.
“We lost them in 2020 and 2022. I wasn’t with Lucy for that, not the way I should’ve been.
I am now. We think about you,” he said, not to the table, not to anybody the table could see, “and we think about you together now.”
The lanterns had gone into long gold smears.
My mother was holding my hand and I don’t know when she took it.
Carol was crying and not hiding it. Across the table, the girl from my class was staring at Rhys with her mouth a little open, as if nobody had ever told her grown men were allowed to say things like that.
He looked down at me. Just me. For a second it was only the two of us on the dock, and the water, and a boat you could only see if you were looking.
Then he raised his glass.
“To the woman who drew all of it.”