Chapter 8
Birdie
My grandmother had a heart attack at four in the morning, standing at her own sink, rinsing a coffee cup.
Not a big one. That's the phrase they use, and I want to say for the benefit of anybody who hasn't heard a cardiologist say it: there is no such thing as a small heart attack when it's the only grandmother you have.
Ash drove. Forty minutes to Beaver Valley with her in the back seat telling him he was riding the brake.
"Ma'am, I'm doing sixty."
"You're riding it. I can hear it."
"You're having a cardiac event."
"I can multitask, Ashley."
They kept her nine days.
On day one she asked the cardiologist how many of these he'd done.
"How many what, Mrs. Bly?"
"How many of me."
"Ah. Several hundred."
"How many died?"
"Grandma—"
"It's a fair question, Scarlett, he's got a number." She folded her hands on the blanket. "Doctor. How many?"
And to his eternal credit, that man stood at the foot of the bed and said, "Eleven."
"Eleven," said my grandmother. "All right. I like you."
"Thank you."
"Do you know how many people have given me a straight number in the last month? Two. You and my granddaughter's — " she paused for approximately one-tenth of a second — "friend."
"Grandma."
"Friend, I said."
On day two she made a nurse cry, and then made her a friend for life, and by day five that nurse was bringing her a second dessert off another patient's tray, which I want reported to somebody.
On day four, the deeds.
I'd taken them out of the pump house myself at six in the morning with a wrecking bar and a garden spade, which is a family tradition apparently, and I drove them to the foundry in my grandfather's truck and I walked into a hundred-year-old iron building where eleven men were sitting around a table trying to decide what to tell me.
Kasimir opened the door. I hadn't met him. Half his face is a road map and the other half is a very handsome man in his thirties, and he looked at the accordion folder under my arm and looked at my face and stepped aside without a word.
Izzy Marchetti was up a scaffold with a heat gun. She said, "Oh, thank God, another woman," and came down.
I put the folder on the table.
"Here's how this goes," I said.
"Birdie—"
"Roman. Here's how this goes."
Eleven men. I'd like to tell you I wasn't scared. I was so scared my back teeth hurt.
"You want these," I said. "You should want them. Six parcels, half the ridge, and they're worth — Ash, what did the lawyer say?"
"He said a number and then he apologized for it."
"Say the number."
Ash said the number.
The room made a sound.
"So," I said. "You could file them. You'd have Vane in court for four years, and he'd have you in court for four years, and while that's happening every one of those parcels is frozen and none of you make a dollar off it, and the whole time there's a man out there who knows exactly which pump house floor you dug this out of and exactly which seventy-nine-year-old woman has been standing on it. "
"We're aware," Ash said.
"Or you take my condition."
"Which is."
"They go in her name," I said. "Every parcel. Odile Bly, sole owner, six for six. Not the club. Not a trust, not an LLC with a wolf on it — her, her name, her signature, a woman with a landline and a hip that predicts rain."
Nobody spoke.
"Explain the why," Roman said. Not challenging. Making room.
"Because Callum Vane has spent eleven months buying land off men in offices," I said.
"Men who could be bought. That's the entire machine — he finds out what a man needs and he gives him a little more than that.
It works every time and it will work on every single one of you eventually, and I don't mean that as an insult, I mean you're a club that is nineteen hundred dollars a month underwater. "
"That's fair," Ash said.
"Roman."
"That's fair," Roman said.
"But he can't buy my grandmother." I put my hands on the table.
"He can't. There's nothing she needs. She's seventy-nine, she's got a paid-off house and a blind horse and forty acres and a granddaughter, and the only thing she has ever wanted in her life is to sit on that porch until she doesn't. There is no offer.
He can't find the number, because the number doesn't exist."
Tobin said, slowly, "So he has to come ask her."
"He has to come ask her," I said. "In person. On her porch. Out loud. And she'll say no, and she'll say it with coffee, and he'll have to keep coming back, and every single time he comes back he's a man standing in a yard instead of a man on a phone."
Izzy said, from the back, "That's actually beautiful."
"Thank you."
"That's genuinely — Kaz, isn't that beautiful?"
Kasimir considered it. Then he said, "Yes."
Cricket dropped something.
"One problem," Ash said.
"Say it."
"She's seventy-nine and she just had a cardiac event. What happens when she dies?"
The room got uncomfortable in a hurry. Tobin said, "Ash, Jesus—"
"No, he's right," I said. "Say the rest of it, Ash."
"When she dies, it's an estate," Ash said.
"It's a probate file, it's public, it's a judge, and it's six parcels with six dead men's names in the chain and a very good lawyer standing there with eleven months of receipts saying he bought all of it in good faith.
He doesn't have to beat her. He has to outlive her. "
"Yes," I said.
"You knew that."
"I've known that since the corridor."
"So what's the answer?"
"There isn't one," I said. "There's a stall.
That's what I'm offering you — a stall that lasts as long as she does, and a club that isn't holding the paper while it happens, and if you want a better one than that, gentlemen, I have been thinking about this for eleven days and it is the best I have got. "
Kasimir said, "It's enough."
Everybody looked at him.
"Say more than that, Kaz," Ash said.
Kasimir shrugged one shoulder. "A stall's a year. In a year we're not broke. In a year we've got the barn, the clinic, forty acres of hay nobody's cutting." He looked at me. "You keep asking for a plan that ends. There isn't one. There's just next year."
Cricket said, "That's the most I've ever heard him talk."
"I'm aware," said Kasimir.
They voted. Eleven to nothing, and Ash said afterward he'd never seen a vote go eleven to nothing on anything, including lunch.
Vane came to the hospital on day six.
I was in the corridor with a vending machine coffee, and he came around the corner in a coat too nice for the weather, and I knew him before he opened his mouth because he had my grandmother's whole description walking around inside him.
"Miss Bly."
"Mr. Vane."
"How is she?"
"She's watching a program about a woman who married a lighthouse."
"Is that a real program?"
"It's on channel forty-one," I said. "It's very good."
He smiled. Genuinely, I think, which was the horrible part. He had a pleasant face and a quiet voice and he stood at a polite distance and never once did anything you could point at.
"I understand there's been a change in the recording of some parcels along the ridge," he said.
"There has."
"Six of them."
"Six."
"Filed Tuesday."
"Filed Tuesday."
"That's a very great deal of land," he said, "in the name of a woman in a cardiac unit."
And there it was, right in the middle of the sentence, delivered so mildly you could have missed it, and I understood in that second exactly what Roman meant about him. He never touches anyone. He just says a true thing next to a door.
"You know what's funny," I said.
"Tell me."
"You've had eleven months and you've talked to lawyers, and title companies, and a county recorder, and a man in a stolen jacket. And in eleven months you never once drove up the drive and asked her."
"I did, in fact—"
"You asked her what it would take," I said. "That's not asking. That's shopping."
His head tilted about four degrees.
"Everyone has a figure, Miss Bly."
"She doesn't."
"That's a thing people believe about their grandmothers."
"Sure," I said. "But here's the part I actually came out to the hallway for, so listen, because I'm only doing this once. My grandmother knew your father."
Nothing on his face. Nothing at all. Which is a reaction.
"She fed six boys at her table in 1998," I said, "and she knows why.
Every single reason. And she has never told one living soul, and she never opened the envelope, and she has been sitting on the whole thing for twenty-eight years for exactly one purpose, which is that it stays in the ground as long as everybody's polite. "
The corridor was very quiet. A cart went by somewhere.
"So you can buy the county," I said. "Buy the whole thing, buy the mills, buy the water tower.
Nobody's stopping you. But the ridge goes through her, and she doesn't sell, and if you ever put a man on her porch again, she stops being polite.
And when she stops being polite, Mr. Vane, it will not be a lawsuit.
It'll be an interview. She's seventy-nine and she's charming and she'll do it in her kitchen with the good cups out. "
Callum Vane opened his mouth.
And then he didn't say anything.
Four seconds. I counted. A man who has talked his way across half of western Pennsylvania stood in a hospital corridor with his mouth slightly open and nothing came out of it, and I have been in rooms with senators and horses and I have never been prouder of anything in my life.
Then he closed it, and nodded once, and said, "Tell her I hope she feels better," and left.
I went into the bathroom and shook for six minutes.
They let her out on day nine.
That night I found Roman in the room above the bar at the foundry, sitting on the edge of a bed with his boots off, holding a folded piece of paper.
Downstairs the club was making a noise I can only describe as structural. Somebody had a fiddle. There was no reason for a fiddle.
"What's that?"
"Title work."
"Roman."
"I'm reading it."
I took it out of his hands and put it on the dresser.
"There's a party downstairs," I said.
"There is."
"For my grandmother, who is at home, in bed, at eight-fifteen."
"She sent a casserole to it."
"She sent a casserole to her own party."
"She sent two," he said. "One's marked not for prospects."
I sat down next to him.
"Say the practical thing," I said. "You've been carrying it around for two days, you keep starting."
He turned the ring on his finger that isn't a ring, it's just a thing he does with his hand.
"The foundry's got four rooms nobody uses," he said.
"Two on this floor, two under the roof. There's a barn on your grandmother's place that hasn't had a roof since Reagan and I've got eleven men and no work for them till spring.
Petunia's got two winters in her, maybe three, and she needs a stall with a south wall.
" He said it all to the floor. "There's a clinic in Ellwood that lost their large-animal tech in June, I asked, they've been running to Butler for everything and they're bleeding.
I called them Thursday. They said if you walked in the door with your license they'd take you Monday. "
I waited.
"That's it," he said. "That's the whole thing."
"Roman."
"That's what I've got, Birdie. I'm not going to stand here and — I'm forty-one and I killed a man in your grandmother's kitchen and you watched me do it, and I'm not going to make some kind of a speech on top of that—"
"You just did."
He stopped.
"You just made one," I said. "It had a roof and a horse and a job and a south wall in it. Roman, you built me a whole life out loud and put a stall in it."
"...It's a good stall."
"It's the most romantic thing anybody's ever said to me and I want you to understand that's partly sad."
He laughed, and I got hold of the front of his shirt, and downstairs somebody started the fiddle again.
I'd like to say we went somewhere private.
We were somewhere private. That was the whole problem — the president's room has a floor, and the floor is the ceiling of a bar containing eleven men, one fiddle, and a woman named Izzy who was leading a call-and-response that I believe she was making up as she went.
"They can hear everything," I said.
"Yes."
"Roman, they can hear everything."
"They're not listening."
"There are eleven of them—"
"Birdie," he said, "there's a man down there playing a fiddle at a casserole. Nobody is listening."
And then he kissed me, and the fiddle went into something with a beat, and I stopped caring somewhere in the vicinity of the second verse.
Slower than the tower. That's what I remember.
In the tower we'd been cold and half-drowned and running on adrenaline, and this was a warm room with a lamp on and nowhere to be and a man taking an actual, physical hour to learn where my hands were.
He kept stopping to look at me. I'd say what and he'd say nothing and then do it again.
At one point the whole bar downstairs shouted at something and the floor actually moved, and I said, "Was that for us?" and he said, "That was darts," and I said, "You don't know that," and he said, "That was darts, Birdie," and neither of us could stop for a minute.
His hands shook once. Right at the start. I put mine over them and held them still and didn't say anything about it, and he put his forehead against my collarbone and breathed out, and that was the last careful thing either of us did.
After, with the noise still going underneath and the lamp still on:
"Ask me something true," I said.
"Like what."
"Anything. That's our thing now, apparently. We ask each other true things in dark rooms and then something explodes."
"That's a bad pattern."
"It's our pattern."
He was quiet a second.
"I turned up the drive," he said.
"You did."
"Four years I didn't, and then I did, and there was a woman on a roof with a hammer yelling that it was a terrible roof."
"It is a terrible roof."
"I know it is," Roman said. "I've known since 1998. It's the first thing I ever said to your grandmother that she didn't have an answer for."
And downstairs, at eleven-forty at night, eleven grown men began to sing, badly, in what I'm fairly sure were four different keys, and neither of us moved for a very long time.