Chapter Nine #2
“Because Marisol would have told him to shut the paper down before she’d let him drain his own retirement to keep her employed, and he knew that, and I think — I think a part of him needed somebody to know who wouldn’t make him have that fight yet.
” She looked at me with something that wasn’t quite pity, something closer to recognition.
“You understand that part, don’t you. Needing one person to know a true thing before you’re ready to let it cost you anything. ”
I understood it better than I wanted to, well enough that I didn’t trust my own voice to answer her right away, and so I said nothing, and looked back down at the folder, at seventy-one thousand four hundred dollars my father had spent two years quietly bleeding out of his own future to keep three reporters and a folding table and a dying institution’s lights on, because he had never once, in fifty years, learned how to let something he loved fail in front of witnesses.
“Does he know you know?” I asked, finally.
“No. And I’d like to keep it that way until you’ve decided what you’re going to do with it, because I have to work with the man five days a week, and you only have to be his daughter, which is somehow the harder job, but at least it’s a job you get to leave the room from at the end of the day.
” She started gathering her own things, the small, businesslike motions of a woman closing out an afternoon she’d rather not have had.
“Is there anything left in it?” I asked. “The account. Or is this folder the whole remaining story.”
“There’s a little left. Less than a year’s worth, at the rate he’s drawing it down, and that’s assuming nothing else goes wrong with the roof, or the presses, or his heart, all three of which I would not bet against at this point.
” She said it without cruelty, the flat delivery of a woman who had already run these numbers alone, more than once, in a back room nobody thought to check on.
“I’ve wanted to say something to you for months, Lorna.
I didn’t have the standing either. It’s a strange thing, working somewhere you love enough to watch it die quietly rather than be the one who makes everyone say the word out loud first.”
“I’m sorry you found it in a box you were just trying to be helpful about. That’s a rotten way to learn something true about someone you love.”
“It’s not the worst way I’ve learned something true this month.”
She almost smiled at that, the way Marisol had the day I pitched the ER story, a small crack in a face that had clearly decided long ago not to spend its cracks carelessly. “Then I suppose you’re building up quite a season for it.”
Pierce had called twice that afternoon while I was still bent over Walt’s folder, both calls gone straight to voicemail because I’d silenced the phone without looking at it, a habit that had become, somewhere in the last month, less about avoidance and more about simple triage — I only had so many hours in a day for other people’s collapses, and today both of them had turned out to be my father’s.
I would call him back. I told myself that plainly, the way you’d note an item you fully intended to get to, and then I called Sadie from the parking lot before I did anything else, because I needed, badly, to hear one uncomplicated sentence from someone in this family before I drove to Walt’s.
“Guess what,” she said, instead of hello, which was new, and which I decided on the spot to love without reservation.
“Tell me.”
“JV debate. I made it. First alternate, which sounds like nothing, but Coach Elstad told me I write a rebuttal like someone twice my age, and I need you to understand that from her that’s basically a marriage proposal.
” She was talking fast, the good kind of fast, the kind that meant she’d been waiting all day for someone to ask.
“Please don’t make me explain to Dad why this is a bigger deal to me right now than anything happening in the capital.
I already know how that conversation goes and I don’t have it in me today. ”
“You don’t owe him an explanation for any of it.
Not today, not ever, if you don’t want to give one.
” I found I meant it more simply than I’d meant anything all afternoon.
“It matters plenty, Sadie. First alternate on a debate team is not nothing. It’s a foothold, and you built it yourself, and nobody handed it to you. ”
“That’s very dramatic for a Tuesday.”
“It’s been that kind of a week,” I said, and she laughed, the real one, not the polite one, and for a second I forgot I was sitting in a parking lot with seventy-one thousand dollars folded up in my bag.
“Are you okay?” she asked, the question flipping without warning the way teenagers’ questions do, suddenly older than the sentence before it. “You sound like you’re using your calm voice. The extra calm one.”
“I’m okay. Long day at Grandpa’s paper, that’s all.”
“Okay. I believe you the normal amount,” she said, which was, from a fifteen-year-old, its own small mercy — enough belief to end a call on, not so much that I’d have had to spend more of it lying. “Love you. Go handle Grandpa’s whatever-it-is.”
I hung up steadier than I’d been in an hour, which was its own small proof that a fifteen-year-old could still do for me exactly what I’d spent her whole childhood doing for her.
I drove to Walt’s house instead of my own and sat outside in the dark a full minute before I went in: seventy-one thousand four hundred dollars, and a man inside who’d spent two years making sure I never found out.