11. “Sunday Three”
“SUNDAY THREE”
Iwoke at the compound on Sunday morning with my hands still.
That was the new thing. The new thing was that my hands were still.
They had not been still in three weeks. I lay in the soft cotton of one of Atlas’s t-shirts in the dormer room of my childhood and I held my own wrist with the other hand and I felt the steady small pulse there and I thought: oh.
So this is what it is when you stop hiding.
I had not slept enough. I had slept exactly enough.
There was a soft knock.
Aspen in the doorway, still in her robe, her coffee cup steaming.
“You are not nervous,” she said. Not a question.
“I am not.”
“That is new.”
“It is new.”
She came and sat beside me on the bed.
“Tell me.”
“There is nothing to tell. We are still on the shelf. Daddy is letting Foster work the leak. Atlas and I are not going to talk about us in front of him until that is done. Tonight is just a Sunday dinner. Tonight is just Atlas at the table and me at the table and the boys playing poker afterwards and everybody pretending that nothing has changed.”
“Has nothing changed.”
“Everything has changed. Nobody at the table is allowed to say so.”
She drank her coffee.
“I hate the shelf,” she said.
“The shelf is a kindness.”
“The shelf is a stalling tactic.”
“It is both.”
She kissed the top of my head and she left.
Sloane came an hour later.
She found me at the small writing desk in the dormer room, in jeans and Atlas’s t-shirt, with my coffee cold beside me and a manuscript open across my lap.
“You are reading.”
“I am. The Sumi Tan revisions. They are good. She is going to be a real one.”
“You are reading on a Sunday morning at the compound.”
“I am.”
“You have not read on a Sunday morning at the compound since you were sixteen.”
“I know.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed without being asked. She watched me read for a count of three. She drank her coffee.
Then she said: “El.”
“Sloane.”
“Be careful tonight.”
“I will.”
“I am not telling you how to live your life. I am telling you because I love you. Daddy is holding it together. He is holding it together because Foster has been holding the leak together. The minute one of those two things gives, the other is going to give too. Do not be the one who gives first. Hold your face. Hold your hands. Hold the table. Atlas is going to do the same.”
“I know.”
“You always know.”
“I always do.”
She left.
Mrs. Harris appeared at my door at 4:15 p.m. with a dress bag in her hands and a particular expression that meant: your father wants you downstairs in forty-five minutes and you look like you have been reading in that chair all day.
I showered.
The water was hot. October water — still summer-warm but with the first edge of cold.
I stood under it and I thought about the shelf.
The shelf was the word my father had used.
The shelf was a thing my mother used to talk about too.
She had said the shelf was the most expensive piece of furniture in the house.
She had said the shelf was where you put the things you knew you were going to deal with later, and she had said the trick was to not pretend you did not own a shelf.
We owned a shelf.
We were going to deal with it.
I put on the cream-colored dress my father had laid out for me.
Simple. Elegant. The kind of dress that said: I am calm enough to walk into a room without trying.
The silk was cool against my skin. The fit was almost right — Mrs. Harris had pinned it last week and had let it out an eighth of an inch at the waist for the third time this season. I looked at myself in the mirror.
I looked like a woman who was holding her face.
That was what my father had asked.
The TV in my childhood room was on the news channel when I came back from the bathroom.
The senator’s late-week press statement was airing again — the short one, the one he had recorded Friday for the local affiliates, the one he had given because the leak had not yet stopped generating questions and his press office had decided that one careful sentence on a Friday afternoon would buy them through the weekend.
He sat behind his desk in his Hartford office, looking very much like a man who was being patient about a problem he had not yet been allowed to call by its full name. His hands were folded on the desk. His jaw was set.
“… an isolated breach of office protocol that we are taking seriously,” he was saying. “… ongoing internal review… no further comment at this time…”
I watched him on that screen and I realized that I was watching a man who had been asked by his own private investigator to hold his fire while the chain finished assembling itself.
He was very good at holding his fire.
My father had me at the compound by 5 p.m. Aspen and Sloane showed up at 5:47. Mrs. Harris made prime rib. The table was set for thirteen: the senator, me, my two sisters, and the ten men from the circle.
Atlas arrived at 6:42.
He was wearing the gray sweater he’d worn on Christmas Eve when I was sixteen. The sweater he’d worn that night when I’d handed him a glass of mulled wine and he’d looked away from me like I’d burned him.
He was not looking away now.
He was not looking at me too long either.
He was holding his face.
My father pretended not to see, but I caught him watching.
Watching the moment when Atlas’s eyes found me across the entryway and lingered for one count and then released.
Watching the way something underneath the floor had not changed, exactly, but had quieted.
Like two people who had been told there was time, and had decided to use it.
Dinner happened. Prime rib and roasted potatoes and Brussels sprouts with bacon crisped just right.
Mrs. Harris had somehow made everything taste like home and formality at the same time.
The wine was a Bordeaux my father had been saving.
The silverware was the good silver. It was the meal Mrs. Harris cooked when she wanted the room to remember the room.
Hawk raised his glass to talk about the lake-house renovation.
His voice carried the particular warmth of a man talking about a project that mattered.
He was describing some issue with the permitting, some idiocy with the county planning board, and the table laughed in the way that rich men laugh at the problems of bureaucracy.
I watched Atlas from the corner of my eye.
His hand was steady on his wine glass. His face was composed.
But his eyes kept finding me across the table.
Once a minute. Maybe less. He was disciplining himself the way I had been disciplining myself.
Sterling’s voice cut in about the clinic he was planning to expand outside Hartford.
He was talking about pediatric services, access in underserved areas, the whole thing with the passion of a man who understood that healthcare policy was a moral issue.
My father listened with the careful attention of a senator who understood that healthcare policy was everything.
Cole sat at the far end of the table not saying much, just watching everyone else.
There was something knowing in his expression — the expression of a widower who understood loss well enough to recognize when someone was about to stop losing and start living again.
He caught me looking at him and he gave me a small nod.
Acknowledgment without a comment. The kind of nod the boys had been giving me since I was fifteen.
Knox made some comment about his latest acquisition that was dry enough to make Aspen laugh. The laughter echoed off the wood-paneled walls. The whole room smelled like roasted meat and wine and the particular scent of privilege and history settling into every corner.
The conversation flowed. The wine flowed. No one mentioned the leak. No one mentioned Ardent. No one mentioned the fact that there was a forty-six-year-old man at the table whose hand under the cloth was one inch from his oldest friend’s daughter’s knee and not touching it.
Nothing was on the floor tonight.
Tonight was the shelf.
At 8:14, my father stood.
“Walk with me,” he said to Atlas.
Not the library. The porch.
Atlas set down his glass. He stood. He followed my father out through the kitchen and out the back door and onto the back porch where the path lights down to the boathouse were on against the dark October lawn.
I watched the door close behind them.
I felt all of my sisters’ attention snap toward me at once.
“Don’t,” I said.
“We did not say anything,” Sloane said.
“Your faces are very loud.”
“Your face is very loud,” Aspen said. “You are in love with him and the entire table knows it.”
“Not the entire table,” Sterling said helpfully. “Cole only figured it out Friday night.”
“I knew by the boathouse situation,” Knox said.
“I knew when Eden started getting dressed like a person with something to prove,” Hawk said.
I set down my fork.
“Daddy is asking him a question on the porch right now.”
“Daddy is asking him to hold the line for another week,” Cole said quietly. “Daddy is not asking him anything else. Not tonight.”
I looked at Cole.
Cole had been watching this room for a decade. Cole had buried his wife at thirty-eight and had then made a decision about how to be in the world, and the decision had been: very gentle, very steady, very honest. He set his fork down.
“Eden.”
“Cole.”
“It is going to take a minute. Let it take a minute. Atlas is going to be fine. Your father is going to be fine. The rest of us are going to be fine. The leak is going to be handled. After that you and Atlas can do the thing you have been waiting to do. Tonight is not that night. Tonight is a Sunday dinner. Eat the cobbler.”
Aspen squeezed my hand under the table.
I drank the entire glass of water in front of me to avoid having to speak.
The back door opened.
My father and Atlas came back inside.
Atlas’s expression was completely neutral.
My father’s expression was the same.