11. “Sunday Three” #2
My father sat back at the head of the table.
“For the record,” he announced, in the voice he used in committee, “Foster is making progress. We have a name. We do not yet have the chain. We are going to be patient. Nobody at this table is to discuss any of it outside of this house. Are we clear.”
Around the table, ten heads nodded once.
He picked up his fork.
He took a bite of chicken.
Everyone else followed suit.
I did not move.
Atlas was back in his seat like nothing had happened.
He was holding his bourbon glass and looking at the far wall like it was the most interesting thing he had ever seen.
Under the table, his foot found the side of my shoe.
He pressed gently.
I pressed back.
We spent the rest of dinner like that.
One soft point of contact.
A language nobody at the table could hear.
At 9:14, the boys started saying their goodbyes.
Cole stood first. He clapped my father on the shoulder. He told me he was glad to see me. He looked at Atlas for a long moment and then he nodded, once, which I now understood meant: I see you, and we are going to wait this out together.
Knox left second. He kissed my mother’s framed photo on the shelf on his way out, which he always did, because his mother had gotten it for him twenty years ago and had passed away and he would never stop missing her.
Sterling left third, asking Aspen about her schedule and whether she could talk next week about something he wouldn’t specify.
Hawk left last.
He stopped in front of me.
He said, “You are good people, Eden Whitlock. And he is better than most. So that is going to work itself out.”
Then he looked at Atlas and said, “Take a walk with her down to the boathouse before you drive back. Phil left the lights on. He always leaves the lights on now. He has decided you are part of the maintenance plan.”
“Understood,” Atlas said.
Hawk left.
The dining room was quiet except for the sound of Mrs. Harris clearing plates from the kitchen.
My father stood.
“Atlas will walk you to the boathouse,” he said. “There are filing questions I want him to answer for you. Then he is driving home. We are going to have a quiet Sunday tomorrow. Mrs. Harris has put a load of laundry on. Sloane and Aspen are staying. You will sleep in your own room.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
He kissed the top of my head as he passed me.
Then he went to the library.
He did not look back.
Atlas stood.
I stood.
We walked out of the dining room together with our hands not touching and everything in me aware of the exact distance between us.
In the foyer, Mrs. Harris handed Atlas a flashlight without looking at his face.
“The path lights have been weird,” she said. “Don’t trust them.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Harris.”
“Mm.”
She did not say my name.
She did not need to.
The boathouse was different in October darkness than it had been in Friday’s pre-dawn gray.
It was colder. Quieter. The Sound was absolutely black and moving and there was no moon at all. Just stars and the memory of what had happened here three weeks ago in the span of time that felt like either five minutes or five years.
The flashlight made a small cone on the gravel path.
The wind off the water carried the smell of brine and the small woodsmoke from the chimney up at the main house.
I could hear my own breath. I could hear his beside me.
The two of us, walking down the long sloping lawn at 9:23 on a Sunday night, looked from the outside like a lawyer and a client.
Looked from the inside like two people who were very deliberately not running.
I went to the window.
Atlas locked the door behind us.
“He did not ask you anything new,” I said.
“He did not. He asked me if I was holding. I told him I was. He told me Foster needs another ten days. He told me he wants the leak closed before we have the conversation about us. He told me he is going to start the conversation himself when he is ready. He does not want me to start it.”
“He is being kind.”
“He is being a senator. Kindness is the form it has taken because we have not yet given him a reason to be otherwise.”
I turned around.
“Atlas.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to tell me about my mother.”
He looked at me.
He did not look surprised by the request. He had been expecting it. He had probably been preparing for it on the porch with my father.
“All right.”
“Tell me what I missed. Tell me what she said to you the year my father got elected. The year she gave you Robinson. I have been listening to you and my father talk about her for ten years and I have never asked you to tell me what she actually said. So tell me.”
He sat down on the leather couch.
He held out his hand.
I sat beside him.
He took my hand and turned it palm up in his lap and ran his thumb across the small line of veins at the inside of my wrist and started.
“It was 2017,” he said. “Your father had just won his third race. He had been running for six months and he had not slept in five of them. Your mother was managing the household, you, Aspen, and a thirteen-year-old Sloane in a townhouse in Georgetown that the campaign had rented because it made for better optics. I came down for the swearing-in. I stayed at your house for three nights. The first night, your mother put you in pajamas and you came downstairs in the green sweater you wore that Christmas and you sat in the chair by the fire and you watched me open the book she had given me and you smiled at me in a way that I did not yet know how to look back at.”
“You told me this once before. In the boathouse. I asked you to tell me again.”
“I know,” he said. “You told me then. I wanted to hear it again.”
“What did she mean.”
“At the time, I thought she meant the law. I thought she meant the way the book is about the things a man does and does not say to his son. I thought she was making a comment about Caleb, who was seven, and who I had no idea how to be a father to. So I read it. Three times that year. Each time I thought I understood another piece of what she was telling me.”
“And then.”
“The seventh time you read it,” I said. “When I was twenty-one. In my father’s kitchen. You have told me.” He held my hand. He did not speak for a long moment. “Yes,” he said. “I have told you.”
I started crying.
It was not a sob.
It was the small quiet kind of crying that happens when you understand something for the first time and the understanding is bigger than your face.
He did not move.
He did not try to wipe it away.
He held my hand on his lap and let me cry for a very long minute.
“Atlas.”
“Yes.”
“My mother told you to wait for me.”
“Yes.”
“And you waited.”
“Yes.”
“You waited four years after I was old enough.”
“I waited three. The fourth was you. The fourth was watching you try to marry the wrong man and try not to throw a chair through a window.”
I laughed.
The laugh came out wet.
He gave me his sleeve.
I wiped my face on his sleeve like I was twelve years old and he was my favorite uncle, and the absurdity of that — of using a forty-six-year-old divorce attorney’s sweater as a handkerchief — broke something open in me, and I leaned into him and put my head on his shoulder and let myself stay there.
He put his arm around me.
The wind moved against the boathouse window.
A loon called somewhere across the water, and then again, the second time farther away.
“Eden.”
“Yes.”
“After the leak is handled. After your father lets us off the shelf. I am going to ask you a thing.”
“All right.”
“I am going to ask you in a place you are going to remember. I am going to ask you with the right words. I am not going to do it tonight. I am not going to do it in this boathouse in the dark while your father is in his library waiting for me to drive home. I am going to do it when you are not afraid of anything.”
“All right.”
“Eden.”
“Yes.”
“Hold your face.”
“I am holding it.”
“For another two weeks.”
“For as long as you need.”
“It is going to be the longest two weeks of my life.”
“It is going to be the longest two weeks of mine too.”
He stood up.
He gave me his hand.
I stood.
He kissed me very softly. Not a kiss like Friday’s. Not desperate. Not urgent. Just a kiss between two people who had been told they would have to wait a little longer and had decided to use the waiting well.
“Drive carefully,” I said.
“Always.”
“And Atlas.”
“Yes.”
“Tell Caleb I said hello.”
“I will.”
He let go of my hand. He opened the door. He stepped out into the dark.
I stood in the boathouse window and I watched him walk up the long lawn toward the house. The path lights came on behind him in their imperfect pattern. His shadow was long across the wet grass. Halfway up he paused and turned.
He raised one hand.
I raised one back.
He turned again. He walked the rest of the way up to the porch.
The porch light came on. Mrs. Harris was at the door with his coat. He took it. He did not look back this time.
I heard the engine of his car turn over. I heard the gravel.
I stood in the boathouse window for a long minute after the car was gone.
The Sound was dark. The chimney up at the main house was sending a thin gray ribbon of smoke into the colder air. Somewhere on the second floor of the house, a light went on — my father in his bathroom probably, getting ready to read for an hour before he slept.
I stayed in the boathouse window with my forehead against the cold glass.
I thought: he is going to ask me.
I thought: not yet.
I thought: in the meantime, I am going to do my work, and I am going to read my manuscripts, and I am going to be patient the way my mother taught me to be patient, and I am going to wait for him to ask me when he is ready.
The boathouse was quiet.
I turned off the lamp.
I locked the door behind me.
I walked up the lawn alone.