EPILOGUE #2
“That one is going to stay, right?” he said.
“It is going to stay,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “It makes you look like somebody people should think twice about lying to.”
The black window over the sink gave me back a thin white line on the right side and nothing else. Rook did not turn around. Julian looked at my brother with something he had to put away before he could go on eating.
“Can I ask you one thing that is not a joke?” Teddy said.
“You can ask me two,” I said.
“Are you all right in this place? That is the whole question,” he said.
I went quiet until the shape of it arrived, and nobody in that kitchen filled the pause for me, and I have stopped apologizing for the pause.
“I sleep with my door unlocked,” I said. “There is a key for it on my side and I have not turned it since March, and I know that for certain, because I am the person I am.”
“Okay,” Teddy said. “That is a strange answer and I believe every word of it.”
“What is your actual job now?” Teddy said. “Mom would have made you write it on a card for her.”
“I read documents nobody has opened in a hundred years, and then I tell nine men what those documents say,” I said.
“And they do it?”
“They do it while I am right. The morning I stop being right they will stop, and that is the arrangement I asked for, out loud, in front of all of them,” I said.
“That sounds the way a cult would describe a normal job,” Teddy said.
“That is the most accurate sentence anybody has produced in this kitchen since the spring,” Rook said.
Alistair set the fallen bishop upright on its square and did not look up from doing it.
“A letter came from Vermont this week, addressed to you, in a hand I have not seen on an envelope in nine years,” he said.
“I know. I read it twice and then I put it in the drawer with my key,” I said.
“You are under no obligation to tell me what is in it.”
“She says the garden is in, and she wants to know whether you still refuse to eat mushrooms,” I said. “I told her the truth about that and about three other things.”
Alistair looked at the board a while. Then he moved a piece that stood in no danger at all, which is what his hands do when the rest of him needs a minute, and Julian let him have the move and did not take the pawn.
I put my fork down and said it into the middle of the room, in the flat voice I use for reading a figure off a page. I had decided that morning in the Gallery that it would be said before my brother went home.
“I love you. All three of you, and I am not saying it because anything happened,” I said.
Nobody made a thing of it, which was the point of saying it that way.
Rook came past me with the pan in his good hand, put his mouth against my hair without breaking stride, and went on to the sink.
I started to tell him what I wanted from him once the road was clear and my brother was gone, and I stopped that sentence halfway, because my brother was four feet away and eating.
Julian put his knife down and set it straight along the plate before he answered.
“Your word over mine, in this house, for as long as I have one,” he said.
“Is that a normal thing that people say?” Teddy said.
“In this building it is the only binding sentence anybody has ever said,” Alistair said.
“Okay,” Teddy said. “I got all the words and none of the rest of it.”
I got the rest of it. In the Cell’s grammar a man’s word outranks the paper and always has, and a man who hands his word to somebody else keeps nothing of his own to sign with.
Julian had given me the last thing he owned outright, at a kitchen counter, over eggs that were beyond saving.
Then he picked his knife back up and went on eating them.
“He means it,” Rook said to Teddy, over the water. “In case that was unclear from the delivery.”
“It was a little unclear from the delivery,” Teddy said.
“He has one volume,” Alistair said. “You have heard the other one, and you would not want it at a table.”
“What time do you leave in the morning?” Julian said.
“Seven. I open at eight and it is forty minutes if the bridge is clear,” Teddy said.
“Take the west gate,” Julian said. “The quad gets watered at six and the drive floods along the wall.”
“That is the most useful thing anybody has said to me all weekend,” Teddy said.
“The lake is warm by now,” Rook said, and put the pan in the water. “Swim it before you drive, and you will smell like a lake instead of a floor drain.”
“I open at eight,” Teddy said.
“Then swim at six,” Rook said. “No man has ever regretted six in the morning on that water, and I have asked all of them.”
Teddy took the last of the eggs. Rook watched him take them and looked around the counter with the face of a man vindicated by history. Alistair set the board up again, lost in nineteen moves, and blamed the hand again.
“Say the hand one more time and I will put the hand in a sling for you,” Rook said.
“You are the only man in this room who would enjoy that, and on those grounds I decline,” Alistair said.
Teddy came down the counter with his plate and stood over the board with his head on one side.
“Teach me that,” he said. “The game you are both terrible at.”
“He is not terrible at it,” Alistair said. “I am terrible at it, and he is patient, and those are two different diseases.”
“Sit down and bring the plate,” Julian said, and turned the board around.
“I am going to lose,” Teddy said.
“You will lose for a long time,” Julian said. “Then you will lose slower, and one evening you will not lose, and you will remember where you were sitting.”
The windows stayed open. The air off the quad was sixty-six degrees and smelled of cut grass and wet stone, and the gutters were still going somewhere past the solarium.
Teddy had his keys on the counter by his plate, a garage fob and two house keys on a ring.
He would drive himself back in the morning on a road nobody was watching, and no man in this building would ever have a reason to know where he was.
Out past the wall a truck went along the county road, and the sound of it arrived a long while after the lights had gone.
Nobody in the room turned toward the window.
Nobody counted the seconds between the two, and nobody put a hand on the counter and waited to hear whether it slowed at the gate.
That is the piece of this I could never have explained to the girl who came up that drive in September with one bag and a folder she had no business carrying.
Somewhere below us the Gallery was dark and the brass on that chair back was cool, and nobody at all was sitting in the chair at the head of the table.
I was up here, with these three, and my brother, and a plate of eggs I was going to have to finish out of loyalty.
The arms of that chair still had no wear on them, and I was in no hurry about it, because I had the rest of my life to put some there.