Chapter 6 #2
She knew that with total certainty, sitting there with a plate in front of her.
She would have taken it and done it beautifully and written the most careful, humane, well-evidenced document anybody had ever seen, and she would have told herself she was making it kinder, and a man would have lost his job in a season his wife was dying in, and Clara would have driven home feeling useful.
That was the whole architecture of her. Somebody wants something difficult done. Clara does it well. Clara does not ask whose it is.
"No," she said.
"I'm sorry?"
"No. I won't do it." She picked her bag up. "Fire him yourself or don't fire him, but you're going to have to be the one who did it."
She paid for her own lunch, which took an argument, and drove north with the windows down.
She got as far as Morro Bay before she started laughing.
She got a driver's license photograph taken in Morro Bay and put Devlin back on it.
She bought a bed.
That was the one that got her, actually — not the license.
She had been sleeping in room three for two months and Imani needed the room for the holidays, and there was a place above the hardware store on Main with two rooms and a view of a laundromat, and Clara rented it and bought a bed and a lamp and one chair, and stood in the middle of it on a Tuesday afternoon with the tag still on the mattress.
Everything in that apartment, she had chosen.
Nobody had approved it. Nobody had a better idea about the lamp.
She sat down on the floor with her back against the wall, in a nearly empty apartment over a hardware store in Cambria, at thirty-eight years old, and thought: I could do this for the rest of my life and be happy.
And then, immediately after it, in the same breath, without any warning at all: and nobody would ever know what any of it cost.
She let herself cry for about ninety seconds. Then she got up and went and bought a shower curtain.
Hugo came up in the second week of December, because she called him.
They walked the bluff path north of town with the wind coming off the water and he did not bring a folder.
"So," he said.
"So."
"You've been consulting."
"I've been consulting."
"You did the Ellwood in seven days and Prentice's been telling everybody in the county." He put his hands in his coat pockets. "Which, professionally, is very annoying for me, because I'd rather you did it for me."
"Is this the pitch?"
"This is the pitch." He stopped walking.
"Not a job. I said job in October and it was the wrong word and I've thought about it since.
A company. Yours and mine, and you run it, and your name goes on it — your actual name, the one they printed.
I'll put up the money and I'll stay out of the operating decisions, and I will put both of those things in writing before you agree to anything. "
Clara looked at the water.
"Why," she said.
"Because I'm forty-three and I've got four hotels and I'm never going to have more than four on my own, and I've spent six years watching somebody run circles around me from behind a man who didn't know he was standing in front of her.
" He shrugged. "And because I'd rather work with you than against you. I'm not complicated, Mrs. Whitmore."
"Clara."
"Clara."
They walked on a while.
"I have to say the other thing," he said, "or it'll sit there."
"Hugo —"
"It'll take eight seconds." He kept looking at the path.
"I find you extremely impressive and I'd like to have dinner with you at some point in the next ten years, and none of that has any bearing on the offer, and the offer stands whatever you say to it, and if the answer to the dinner is no forever, that's completely fine and I won't bring it up again. That's it. That's the whole thing."
Clara stopped on the path.
Here is what she noticed, and she noticed it with terrible precision, the way she noticed everything.
He had described her work back to her accurately. Not generously. Not as a compliment. He had said cost per occupied room in October and runs circles around me in December, and both times he had been talking about the thing she was actually good at, and both times he had gotten the details right.
Two men in her life had ever made her an offer, and they had done it nine years apart.
One of them had promised her a place beside him and had meant it and had never once, in nine years, said out loud what she was good at.
"The answer to the dinner is no," she said.
"Understood."
"The answer to the company is not yet."
He glanced over at her, and for the first time he looked properly surprised.
"That's not a no," he said.
"No, it isn't."
"Okay," Hugo said. "Okay." And he turned and started walking again and did not say one more word about it, which was, she thought later, the most persuasive thing he could possibly have done.
She walked back into town at dusk.
She made coffee in an apartment with one chair in it and stood at the window and watched the fog come up Main Street past the hardware store.
And somewhere around six o'clock she realized she had not thought about Adrian Whitmore all day.
Not once. Not at the Ellwood, not on the bluff, not in the car. A whole day of her life, from the alarm to the fog, with him nowhere in it.
She stood at the window and waited to feel free.
What she felt instead came up slow and cold and took a long time to name, and when she finally had it she put the coffee down.
Seven years she had spent being unable to go one hour without thinking about the man — his calendar, his speeches, his father, his daughter, his company, what he needed at four in the afternoon.
And it had turned out to be removable.
All of it. In twelve weeks. Like a splint you take off a leg that has finished healing.
Which meant it had never been love holding her there.
It had been duty, and she had been carrying it so long she had mistaken the weight for meaning, and the worst part — the part that made her put her hand flat on the window glass in an empty apartment in Cambria — was that if it had been love, if any part of those seven years had actually been love, then she should not have been able to set it down this easily.
She should still be bleeding.
She was not bleeding.
She was fine.
Clara stood in the dark with her palm on cold glass, and understood that she was going to have to find out which of them that made her.