Chapter 12 #2
"So." Clara took a breath. "All right. Uncareful. Here's a true thing: I am not moving back into this house. Not now and probably not ever, and not because of you."
Willa's face did something.
"Keep going," she said.
"I don't know what I'm doing about your father.
I'd like to be able to tell you and I can't." Clara kept her eyes on her.
"I run the company now. I'm going to be in these buildings for a long time, which means I'm going to be in your city, which means you can see me as much as you want and I will never once be too busy.
That's not a comfort. That's a fact and you can check it. "
"What else."
"I'm not going to ask you to forgive me," Clara said. "I've been in rooms where somebody does that, and it's just another way of making the other person do the work."
Willa nodded slowly.
"That's better," she said.
"Is it?"
"It's worse to hear. It's better." She slid down off the counter. "Can I ask you one more thing?"
"Yes."
"Did you love him?"
Clara laughed — one shocked sound — because it was the second time in two weeks that a person had asked her that, and because it turned out to be the only question anybody actually wanted the answer to.
"I don't know yet," she said.
"Okay."
"That's not a dodge. I genuinely —"
"No, I know." Willa picked up her glass and put it in the sink, and then stood there with her back to Clara. "That's what I figured. That's kind of what it looked like from here for about seven years."
Clara left at ten past six.
At the door Willa said, "Hang on," and went and got something off the hall table and came back with it and did not hand it over immediately.
It was the lampshade.
The stupid, terrible, twelve-year-old's lampshade made out of two hundred dollars' worth of Portuguese fabric samples and a glue gun, which had lived on the landing for four years and which Clara had last thought about in an operations office in January while a covenant negotiation waited.
"Dad had it in his study," Willa said.
Clara looked at it.
"He's had it in there since October. He moved it. I noticed because I notice things, apparently." She turned it over in her hands. "And I was going to give it to you as, like — a thing. A meaningful gesture. And then I got it off the table just now and I thought, no, actually, that's a him move."
She put it down on the console.
"So it's staying here," Willa said. "In the house. And if you want to look at it you have to come to the house."
Clara stood in the doorway of a home she owned and did not live in.
"That's the most manipulative thing anybody's done to me all year," she said, "and I have had a year."
And Willa laughed — actually laughed, out loud, for the first time since September — and said, "Yeah, well. I'm a Whitmore."
"You are not," Clara said. "You're the only one of us who isn't."
The door was open. The evening was doing the thing March evenings do above Montecito, going gold and then going fast.
"Same time next week?" Clara said.
Willa shrugged, which meant yes.
Clara got as far as the car before she had to stop and put her hands on the roof of it and stand there for a minute in the dark under the eucalyptus.
Nothing was fixed. She wanted to be extremely clear with herself about that, driving out through the gate — nothing had been fixed, and a sixteen-year-old had been awake at four in the morning on the twentieth of September and would be awake at four in the morning about it for years.
But she had booked the eucalyptus crew from the driveway, out of pure reflex, before she had even started the engine.
And that was the first thing she had done for that house since September, and she noticed it, and she did not undo it.
Adrian called on the Saturday.
"Willa says you came to the house."
"She told you?"
"She left a note on the counter." A pause with something in it. "It said, Clara came Friday. Ask me about it or don't."
Clara closed her eyes.
"Did you ask her?"
"Yes," Adrian said.
"And?"
"And she talked to me for about forty minutes, which is thirty-nine more than I've had since October.
" He was somewhere with an echo — the study, probably, or the long room nobody used.
"She told me you sat in the kitchen and let her say every single thing she'd been holding, and that you agreed with all of it, and that you told her you weren't coming back and weren't going to ask her to forgive you. "
"Adrian, if this is —"
"It isn't." Fast. "I'm not calling to thank you. We've established what thanking you is."
"Then what."
The pause went on long enough that Clara moved to the window.
"She said you told her you did the considerate version," Adrian said. "That you worked out what would hurt her least and then did it without asking her. She used the phrase the considerate version. And I've been sitting here since Friday with that, because — "
He stopped.
Clara waited. She did not help him. She had learned not to help him, and it had taken six months and it was the single hardest thing she had ever learned.
"Because that's the folder," Adrian said.
"Yes."
"That's the folder. That's exactly what the folder is.
I worked out what everybody's life was going to be and I got the sequence right and I didn't ask one person in it a single question, including you, including her, including — " a breath " — including Margot, apparently, which I found out about ten days ago and which I have no standing to be upset about. "
"No," Clara said. "You don't."
"No."
The line was quiet.
"I want to ask you something," Adrian said, "and I want to say first that you can say no, and that I will not ask again this year."
"Ask."
"Not now. Not about us." He said it carefully.
"There's going to be a point — maybe in the summer, maybe not — where I'm going to want to sit in a room with you and say some things I have never said out loud.
Not to get anything. I'm aware I've got nothing coming.
I'd just like to know whether the door is closed, because if it's closed I'd rather build the rest of my life around a closed door than a maybe. "
Clara stood at her window above a hardware store and looked at a laundromat.
She thought about a lampshade on a console table in a house she owned.
She thought about being asked, plainly, for a yes or a no — the first time in nine years that man had asked her a question with two possible answers and waited for one.
"It's not closed," she said.
"Okay."
"That is not a —"
"It's not a yes. I know." She could hear something in his voice that she chose not to examine. "It's an answer. That's all I asked for."
And he said goodnight, and hung up first again.
Clara stood in the dark for a while.
Then she got the thirty-one-page agreement out of the drawer, and read it for the fourth time, and put it back, and this time she knew exactly why she had not signed it — and she did not like the reason at all, and she went to bed angry with herself, and slept badly, and got up at six and drove to Goleta.