12. Connor
CONNOR
Angela puts her head in before he gets to me. It’s the only way she’s got to be loyal, and she uses it.
“Your uncle’s in the corridor,” she says. “He didn’t ask if you were free.”
“He never does.”
“He’s got the cane.”
“Then it’s a performance.” I put my pen down. “Leave the door open, would you? And Angela—go get coffee. Take a while.”
She goes. Walter comes in like a man arriving somewhere he owns, drops into the chair across from my desk, and settles the cane against his knee, and the first bad feeling I get is that he’s pleased. Like a man who’s done a chore nobody thanked him for.
“You look terrible,” he says.
“What do you want?”
“To spare you a phone call.” He arranges himself. “There’s been a bit of housekeeping on the Bennett House property. I took care of it.”
Everything in the room gets very still and very sharp. I don’t move.
“Took care of what.”
“Your wife’s been in and out of that building with an architect.
And her friend, the loud one.” He waves a hand as though the names have already been swept up.
“So I had a word with the property manager. There’ll be no further access.
It’s closed until this whole business resolves itself.
I kept it gentle—a sensitivity, I said. Nothing anybody could be hurt by. Nothing anybody could print.”
The window behind him has the whole gray morning in it. Somewhere down the corridor a housekeeping cart goes past, and the wheel that needs replacing squeaks the whole way.
“You called him yourself.”
“I did.” He says it with a certain pride. “Twice, in fact. The second time to find out who she’d brought with her, which I thought was worth knowing, and it was.” A small nod, as if to a colleague. “Somebody has to mind the perimeter while you grieve, Connor.”
Mind the perimeter.
Every warm thing goes out of my hands and forearms at once. My heartbeat drops to something slow and heavy, and the room gets very simple. There’s a paperweight on the desk. There’s a man in a chair. There are my own hands, lying flat on the blotter, white at the knuckles.
“That’s my wife’s hotel,” I say.
“It’s a holding company asset.”
“It was her hotel. Her grandmother built it. She ran it. That building was in her family before this one of ours had a second floor.”
And Walter smiles at me, kindly, tolerantly, the way he’d smile at a boy who’s got the story a bit wrong, and says:
“Was.”
My whole life this man has handled me. He taught me to shake hands.
He taught me which fork, which reporter, how to be pleasant to somebody you’re about to cut.
And in one word, from a chair, in my own office, he explains the entire family to me.
Everything is a tense. Everything belongs to whoever’s currently holding it.
Her name on a deed was a phase the building went through.
I’m on my feet. I don’t remember standing. My chair has gone back hard enough to hit the credenza, my hands have closed at my sides, and what I want—it scares me, how exactly I can see it—is to sweep everything off this desk into his lap.
“Get out of my office.”
His eyebrows go up. “Connor.”
“Get out of my office.”
“I’m going to let that go, because you’re not sleeping and it shows.” He picks the cane up and stands, unhurried, in no distress at all. “You’ll thank me in a year. And in the meantime, the family isn’t going to sit and watch that woman turn a mothballed building into a stage.”
That one goes in under my ribs and stays. I don’t answer it. I let him get all the way to the door.
“Walter.”
“Mm.”
“Did my mother ask you to do it?”
And he stops, and he actually looks a little offended, and that’s how I know I’ve got the real answer.
“Nobody has to ask me anything,” he says. “That’s what I’m for.”
And he goes, cane ticking away down the corridor, unhurried, a man with the rest of a pleasant morning in front of him.
I don’t chase him. I want to. I get as far as the doorway with my blood loud in my ears and then I make myself stop, because whatever I’d do to him out there, the corridor has cameras and he knows it, and he’d stand there letting me do it with that same tolerant smile.
What I do instead is sit back down at my desk and shake, hands flat on the blotter until they quit, and then I get up and go to work, because work is the only thing I’ve got in my hands right now and I know how to do it.
I take the whole day on the floors. There’s a fault on a service elevator that keeps getting written up and closed out again, so I go down and stand in the machine room while the engineer shows me the relay he’s been asking about since summer, and I authorize it on the spot.
Up on eight, a housekeeper named Yvette tells me a linen cart’s been jamming a fire door because there’s nowhere else to put it, and she’s right, so we move the storage and I write it down myself.
Front desk has a woman who’s been on hold with a supplier since yesterday over a coffee order, and I take the handset and stand there on hold in my own lobby until somebody picks up.
I’m good at this. Today I need to be good at something.
Late afternoon, I stand at the end of the lobby with my hands in my pockets while the florist’s van unloads the fresh arrangement for the round table, an enormous spray, the kind we change out twice a week, and my wife’s voice arrives from a dinner years ago.
Something about flowers, and a lobby, and what the woman standing under the arrangement takes home—said lightly, the way she says the true ones, and everybody laughed. I laughed.
It lands now. In the gut, where she aimed it. Years late.
I get my phone out to write to her, and stand there with my thumb over the screen, and I don’t do it.
What do I have? My uncle locked you out and I found out from him.
It reads like a confession, and she’s had enough of my confessions this month.
I’ll have something to say when I’ve fixed it.
I haven’t fixed it. I’m not walking into her hands empty again and calling it caring.
I put the phone away. Down at the desk, one of the night men is coming on shift, and he sees me and straightens up, and I say good evening and go home to a house where nobody’s turned a light on.
The call comes while I’m standing at the counter eating cold rice out of a container.
The number’s local and I don’t know it, and I pick up because the last week has trained me to pick up.
“Hi, it’s Dana at Prescott and Hale, returning a call from this afternoon.” Bright, quick, the voice of a woman going down a list at the end of a long day. “I’m so sorry it’s late. Did Mrs. Kingsley’s counsel ever get an answer back on the revision question?”
I open my mouth and nothing comes out, and she takes the silence for a yes-go-on.
“Because he’d asked whether a distribution schedule can be amended on short notice, or whether it has to wait on the annual review, and I’ve now got that in writing from the trustee’s side.
” Paper, and the sound of a chair. “The short version is it can be done on short notice, provided the settlor requests it in writing and the trustee’s got no objection.
Weeks, not months. We’d want a sit-down to walk through which schedules are affected, because it isn’t all of them, and obviously the ones that touch?—”
She stops.
I haven’t said a word. I’m standing in my kitchen with the container in one hand and the fork still in it, and I’ve gone cold from the scalp down.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and the brightness is gone. “Who am I speaking with?”
“Connor Kingsley.”
There’s a silence on that line I could have driven a car through.
“Oh,” she says.
“Which Mrs. Kingsley?”
“I—this is the wrong number. I’ve dialed the wrong number, Mr. Kingsley, I’m so sorry. Please disregard?—”
“Dana.” I say it quietly, because I’m not going to be one more Kingsley leaning on somebody at the end of her long day. “It’s all right. I won’t make trouble for you. You were calling about my mother, weren’t you.”
Another silence, and in it I can hear her deciding, and then I hear her decide not to.
“I really am sorry,” she says, and hangs up.
I stand there.
The refrigerator does its thing and shuts off. After that, nothing. There’s nobody else here to make a sound.
I put the container down. My hands are cold.
Not cold like weather—cold like the blood’s been called somewhere else, somewhere more urgent, and the fork rattles against the counter when I set it down because my fingers aren’t taking instructions.
The kitchen is too quiet and I don’t turn a light on.
I’m afraid. There’s no better word for it and I’m not going to go looking for one.
My mother, standing over a table of cut roses, told me that if I embarrassed this family again I would lose every dollar and every door.
I heard it like a mother saying don’t make me come up there.
I stood in that garden room and thought, she’s furious, she’s saying the worst thing she can think of, one day she’ll pretend she never said it.
That was me still being a boy in that house.
Some ordinary afternoon this week—while I was carrying boxes, calling archivists, standing across a street watching my wife through a window—her attorney picked up a phone and asked a technical question. Can a distribution schedule be amended on short notice.
A threat cools off. People take threats back. Nobody takes back a phone call to a law firm.
And the timing. The timing is the part I keep hitting like a stair that isn’t there. She’d have made that call within days of the ballroom. Before I called her a liar in her sitting room. Before Celia. Before she said one word of it to my face, she’d already asked somebody how.
I stand very still in my own kitchen and listen, as if the house could tell me something. It can’t. It just goes on being large and dark and empty around me.
There’s a word in there I don’t know. Settlor. I’ve sat in rooms my whole life where people used that word, and I never asked, because asking meant admitting I didn’t know how my own life was held.
So I stand in my dark kitchen and look it up on my phone like a student.
The person who put the property into the trust. The one who set it up and, depending on how it’s written, the one who can still move things around inside it.
My grandfather built the company. My mother is the settlor.
It was there the whole time, in a definition anybody can read.
The house. The cars. The salary generous enough that I’ve never had to think about it.
The life I offered a woman in a hotel lobby as if it were mine to offer.
All of it sits inside a trust my mother can amend in writing, on short notice, if the trustee doesn’t object.
Weeks, not months.
My mother didn’t lose her temper with me. She went and found out how fast.
I put the phone face down on the counter, very carefully, like it’s already broken, and I stand there in the dark for a long time.