CHAPTER 4
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My hand is flat on the gallery rail, and the rail gives.
It isn't much — a millimetre when I put my weight behind it, maybe less. But I feel it in my palm and I don't like it, professionally, the way you don't like a smell in a basement.
Twenty feet down, the great-room floor sits there being solid. I'm not thinking about falling. I'm thinking about span. About whoever set these posts, and how far apart he let them get before he called it finished.
The powder-coat has gone chalky. It leaves gray on my fingertips. I rub it off on my cardigan and lean into the rail again, and it gives again in the same soft, apologetic way.
Somebody should fix that. It's Thursday, so Nora's in the house until six, and Nora tells Julian things because Nora is paid to. I'll mention the rail to neither of them.
The gallery runs the whole south wall of the library, and by two in the afternoon the light has been lying on the spines for hours. Up here the air smells of warm paper. Nobody has taken a book down in a year. I know because the dust along the shelf edge is unbroken, like snow no one has walked on.
The morning blue is somewhere inside me doing whatever the morning blue does. It comes at eight in a seven-day acrylic box with the lid hinged on the left, and I take it, because the argument costs more than the pill does.
There's a flat red pencil in my cardigan pocket with brENNAN SYSTEMS stamped down one side. I've taken it out and put it back four times since the morning pill. I take it out now. I don't write anything. I put it back.
Court-ordered.
That's what I have. Two words a stranger said to me yesterday like they were ordinary, like of course I'd know what they meant. I haven't told Julian I met him. I don't intend to. He already knows — the drive has cameras and the gate keeps a log and the house enjoys being useful.
Three routes to an answer. I'll take them in order, and I'll write down what each one costs.
Route one is the tablet.
I sit in the window seat with it warm on my knees and I type the words in properly. Court-ordered service contract. Conservatorship. Calder County probate.
It gives me everything. That's the trouble. Pages of it — plain-language explainers, a legal aid page in a friendly font, a summary of the statute pitched at exactly the reading level of a woman recovering from a head injury. All of it correct. None of it about me.
There's a filing search. It wants a case number.
I put my own name in the box instead. It returns nothing, courteously, and suggests I check my spelling.
Every one of those pages came to me down the same wire, through the same gray box in the west wing, past the same system. I know that the way I know the rail is under-supported. Nobody told me. I know it because it's the only thing holding it up.
I carry the tablet out of the library, along the landing, down to the bottom of the stairs and into the boot room, where the walls are stone and thick. A thing that behaves identically everywhere isn't luck. It's a design.
It behaves identically everywhere.
Route one costs me forty minutes and returns one fact. Whatever I ask, I'm asking the house.
Route two is the reading nook, and the reading nook has a telephone.
Cream plastic, a real cord, a dial tone. It's older than the house's manners.
Before I call the number I want, I call three I don't. You don't test a beam by loading it once. You load it four times and watch what changes.
The first is the diner in town. A girl answers on the fourth ring, tells me the kitchen shuts at eight, and asks if I want to hear the pie list. I say no thank you. The house says nothing.
The second is the hardware counter on the main street. A man with a smoker's voice tells me they stock three-quarter ply but not in oak, and would I like him to order it. I say I'll think about it. The house says nothing.
The third is the number on the back of the electricity bill. Eleven minutes of hold music and then a woman confirms the account is current. I put the receiver down. The house says nothing.
Then I take the old rates letter out of the sideboard drawer, where it's been folded in thirds since spring, and I dial the county number printed along the bottom.
It rings once.
“I've put that through for you, Evelyn.”
Warm. Unhurried. Pleased to have been of service.
The line clicks and a menu starts, and the menu is very patient with me. Press one for assessments. Press two for permits. Press three for the clerk of the probate court, which is where I go, and the clerk of the probate court would like my case number.
I don't have a case number. Nobody has ever given me a case number. That's the whole shape of it: to find out whether there's a file with my name on it, I need the number of the file with my name on it.
I press zero. I press zero four times. On the fifth it thanks me and hangs up.
Three calls, no comment. One call, helped.
Once is an anecdote. I go through to the back hall, where there's an extension on the wall by the coats, two rooms and a closed door away from the nook, and I dial the county again.
It rings once.
“I've put that through for you, Evelyn.”
Twice is a result.
I turn the rates letter over and start the arithmetic on the back of the envelope it came in — days, doses, the gap between what the discharge paper says and what my husband says. Ninety on one side. Six weeks on the other. Six years in this house. Numbers behave. Numbers stay where you leave them.
“You've been at that an hour and twenty minutes. Shall I bring the room up? You always read cold.”
My hand doesn't move. I make a point of that.
“No, thank you — I'd rather keep the cold where it is. It's about the only thing left in this house that still tells me what month we're in,” I say.
“Of course.”
The kitchen at four in the afternoon smells of onion skin and cold poultry, and Nora is taking a chicken apart on the block by the window.
I come in and stand at the end of the counter, on her right, where I can watch her hands. Faces lie. I learned that at twenty-three, standing on a slab with a site manager telling me the pour was fine. His face was fine. His hands were doing something else entirely.
Nora's hands are broad and red at the knuckles and completely unhurried. The knife goes in at the joint with a wet knock and the leg comes away whole.
“Nine of the forty-one are worth eating,” she says, without being asked. “The rest are for the wasps, and the wasps have never once thanked me for it.”
“Forty-one? There are forty-one apple trees out there and nobody's ever mentioned it to me?”
“Forty-one. I counted them the first autumn I was here, because nobody else had, and I've had no reason to count them again.” The knife finds the second joint.
“The good ones are the row nearest the wall. They get the heat off the brick, and brick holds heat better than anything else on this property.”
“So we've got nine apple trees and thirty-two wasp hotels.”
“That's the estate for you, and I gave up arguing with it years ago,” she says, and something happens at the corner of her mouth that isn't quite a smile but is in the family.
“You could smoke the wasps out. My father did it with a tin can and a rag and it held for years.”
“Your father had years to spare, by the sound of him.” She turns the bird over. “I've got one chicken and one hour, and the chicken is winning.”
Her plait is iron-gray and thick as a wrist and she wears it the same way she wore it the first day I came here, six years ago, when I stood in this kitchen in a coat I never wore again and she asked me whether I took sugar and then never asked me anything about myself again.
Eleven years she's kept this house. Longer than I've been in it.
Longer than the marriage. She was here before me, and I have never once thought about what that means.
I'm thinking about it now.
“Nora, how long is it since anybody—”
“A delivery is scheduled between four and six. No signature will be needed.”
The knife stops.
It doesn't jump. Nothing clatters. The blade is halfway through the wing joint and it simply stops, half a second, the way a machine stops when the power blinks. Then it goes on and the wing comes free and she lays it in the dish with the others.
Half a second. I've stood on enough sites to know what half a second of nothing costs.
“Thank you for letting us know,” I say, to the room, because you have to.
“You're very welcome.”
Nora wipes the blade on the cloth over her shoulder.
“Nora, can I ask you something a bit daft?” I keep my voice exactly where it was when we were talking about wasps. “Does the house ever say anything to you when there's nobody else in the room?”
She doesn't look up.
“It's a machine, Mrs. Vance, that's all it is.” The knife goes into the carcass along the breastbone, steady as a metronome. “It doesn't say anything to anybody, and I've never once asked it to.”
Which is not an answer. It's a beautifully built little wall, and she put it up fast, and she's put it up before.
“Six years and you've never called me Evelyn,” I say.
“No, I don't suppose I have,” she agrees. And then, after a moment, with the knife still going: “The good ones want picking inside the week, or they'll go over and there's no getting them back.”
Julian is charming at dinner.
He is charming the way weather is weather — no effort in it, nothing to point at. He's cooked, which he does twice a week and does well, and he's put the good plates out for no occasion, and he asks about my day and then actually waits for the answer.
I tell him I sat in the library. That's true.
He tells me about a man on the board at Halcyon who's been mispronouncing the name of his own foundation for two years, and the way he does the voice makes me laugh before I've decided to, and for a second the table is just a table and he's just my husband and the light is kind to both of us.
“You laughed at that,” he says, pleased about it. “Properly laughed, with your shoulders in it and everything. You haven't done that once all week, and I've been keeping a count, which I'm aware is not an attractive habit in a husband.”
“The man deserved it. You did the voice on purpose.”
“He did, and I certainly did.” He fills my glass with water rather than wine, because of the tablets, and he does it without making anything of it. That's Julian. He never makes anything of it.
Then he reaches for the bread.
“I spoke to Simon about it this morning,” he says, buttering it.
“There's no order that stops you doing anything at all, whatever anyone's told you, and I'd rather you heard that from me than off a piece of paper.
It's a service contract, that's the whole of it.
It's for the insurance, and the insurance people write the way insurance people write.”
The butter goes on evenly, corner to corner. He never leaves a bare edge.
“Mm. That's more or less what I'd have assumed,” I say.
“They use the words they use, and nobody has ever asked them not to,” he says. “Legal people. It sounds a great deal worse than it is, and then it sits in somebody's head for a fortnight doing damage the actual document couldn't manage on its best day.”
“It usually does sound worse. That's mostly what the words are for.”
He puts the bread on my plate rather than his own, which is a thing he has always done, and which I have always liked.
I did not ask him about an order.
I have not said the word court to him, or contract, or insurance. I haven't mentioned a man in a gray truck, or a red pencil, or a county telephone menu that wants a number I don't have. I asked him nothing. He has answered.
So it isn't only listening. Listening is a machine that waits. This is a machine that carries.
I count the plates instead. Two dinner, two side, two glasses, one board, one knife. Counting is a floor. You can stand on it.
I eat the bread. It's very good bread.
Later, when the plates are done, I take the envelope with the arithmetic on it out of my cardigan pocket, and I stand in the middle of the kitchen where the little glass eye above the door has the best possible view of me, and I look at what I've written.
Ninety. Six. Eleven. Forty-one.
Then I fold it in half and drop it in the bin, on top of the onion skins, and I press it down with two fingers so it stains.
“I'll add liners to the order, Evelyn. You've used the last of them.”
“That's kind of you to think of it,” I say, and I mean it to sound like I mean it, and it does.
Upstairs, the pencil goes back in the pocket of the cardigan and the cardigan goes over the chair, and I lie down in a room that dims itself for me at the right hour without being asked.
So I stop writing things down. I put the numbers where nobody can open a drawer and find them.
Ninety. Six. Eleven years of Nora. Forty-one trees. I say them at the ceiling until I fall asleep, and in the morning I still have every one.