Chapter 12
twelve
ZACH
Dan Lemont has never once in his life let another man make an announcement.
He had us through into the great room before the plates were cleared, standing with his back to my grandmother’s fireplace with his coffee still in his hand, which is what he does at every closing we have ever had with him.
Jill arranged people. Romina came up from Denver with the folder.
Petey moved a chair to where my grandmother wanted a chair.
My wife came in last and stood near the door.
She does that. She has done it at every party in every house we have ever owned, and I stopped trying to talk her out of it years ago, because the one time I hauled her into the middle of a room she didn’t speak to me for the rest of the night.
So I found her across all those heads. She gave me a small nod, and I thought, one more hour and I’ll have you in a car.
Then the signing.
Magda wanted my grandfather’s pen for it.
It didn’t work, so Romina gave her one out of her bag and she signed her name with that and said he’d have found it funny.
I put my name under hers. A company changing hands took less time than ordering lunch.
Everybody clapped, and my grandmother put her hand flat on the paper for a second before she let it go.
Then Dan started talking.
He did the part about my grandfather. He did the part about the parcel behind the highway and the rude word on the napkin, which got its laugh, because it always gets its laugh. He did the part about two families and one mountain.
Then he said, “And we are not letting this thing get designed by a firm out of Denver.”
I knew what was coming and I let it come.
“We’ve now got Shayna running design,” Dan said. “Start to finish. Doors, floors, all of it.”
The room did what a room does. Jill made a noise. Magda said “oh, good” out loud to nobody in particular. Simon Gold, my wife’s best friend in the world, put his cup down so he could clap properly.
I hadn’t meant for it to come out in that room.
I had it planned for the drive down, the two of us, my hand on her knee, the whole thing laid out in order so she could see what it was for.
Dan got there first. And you do not stop Dan Lemont mid-speech in front of his wife and my grandmother on the morning of a signing.
So I stood there and let it happen, and I was already writing the version I’d give her in the car.
“It’s kind of you,” Shayna said. “Honestly, I’d be learning from Lydia more than anything. She’s the one with the eye in this family. Everything you’re standing in, she found.”
Which was true, and generous, and I remember being pleased with her for saying it.
And my wife said, from over by the door, “I’ve been asking for that job for two years.”
She didn’t say it loudly. She said it the way you’d read something off a label.
Petey laughed, because he thought it was a joke. Then he stopped.
Nobody had anywhere to look.
Simon looked into his cup. Magda looked at me, mild and patient, waiting to be told what the joke was. And Romina, who has worked for this family since before I was any use to it, walked the length of that room and went and stood next to my wife by the door for no reason at all.
Shayna said, “Lydia—” and then, “I didn’t know. Zach, did you not?—”
And I fixed it.
I put my arm around my wife. I pulled her into my side and I laughed and said, “She’s been up since before the birds doing flowers nobody asked her to do. It’s been a long week for everybody in this house.”
And then I said, “Come here, all of you. Come on. Before Dan does the napkin again.”
And they came. The whole room came over, laughing, glad of it. Jill got the coffee moving. Romina had the folder open on the map table before anybody had finished turning around. It was gone inside ten seconds and not one person in that house thought about it again.
My wife was very still under my arm.
I felt it. I felt her go still against my ribs. I read it as embarrassment, squeezed her shoulder, and she let me.
Magda caught her hand on the way past.
“Now you’ll have some help, sweetheart. You’ve been carrying far too much of it.”
And my wife said, “Thank you, Magda.”
I got her in the hall by the coats before lunch.
“Lyd.”
“Don’t.” She wasn’t crying. I’d have known what to do with crying.
She had her back against the coats with one hand behind her holding onto somebody’s sleeve, and she was looking at a spot on the floor about a yard in front of my shoes.
“I was going to tell you in the car.”
“Right.”
“It was Dan’s ask. It came with re-papering their stake and I said yes, and I should have told you the day he asked.”
“When did he ask?”
I didn’t want to answer that. “June.”
She nodded slowly, like somebody being given directions to a place she had already been.
“Lydia. She ran a gallery. She’s qualified. This isn’t a favor to a family friend, whatever it looked like in there.”
“I know she’s qualified.”
“Then what?”
And she said, “Say the rest of it.”
So I said the rest of it, and I said it like a man handing over a gift.
“I did it for you.”
She went so quiet that I heard the kitchen door swing at the far end of the house.
“For me.”
“Baby, you won’t let me fix it. Every time I put a title in front of you, you tell me it’d be worse.
You tell me they’d all say I gave it to my wife.
So I put somebody over the top of it. So it becomes a department instead of a favor.
So there’s a room you can walk into where you are the only person who knows anything, and nobody in this family gets to call it a hobby ever again. ”
I believed every word of that. I still believe most of it.
My wife looked at me for a long moment.
“You gave her my job,” she said, “so that nobody would think you gave me my job.”
“It’s a good outcome, Lyds.”
“Sure.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.” She reached up and straightened my collar, which she has done since the second month I knew her. “You should get back in. They’ll be waiting for you.”
And I was relieved.
I stood in that hallway with my collar straight and felt relief go through me like a drink.
My wife had taken it well. I went back in and did the rest of the day, Dan got his favorite jokes in, Magda got some wine into her and told the story about the sign being broken all summer one year.
Simon made everybody cry. Shayna stayed at the far end of the room, which I noticed and thought was decent of her.
Lydia was everywhere. She was brilliant. She got Jill’s coat, she found the good glasses, she sat on the arm of Magda’s chair for an hour. She laughed at Petey.
She didn’t come near me once, but I knew it was because she was trying her best to work the room and combat the exhaustion she must’ve been feeling.
I asked her to come up.
“I’m okay,” she said, scrolling through her phone at the corner of the emptied room.
“You’re… okay?”
“Yeah.” She put the phone in her back pocket and smiled at me, tired. Straightening up the table, she added, “I’ll be up later.”
So I went up.
I was asleep before she came to bed. I don’t know that she did.