Epilogue
Exactly one month after Julian plants the oak, I come home and find him talking to my mail slot.
“—which I am aware is unnecessary,” he is saying, “and I would ask you not to make anything of it.”
“Julian.”
He straightens. “You’re early.”
“Were you talking to my door?”
“No.”
“Julian.”
“I was talking to your house,” says Julian Volkov, “which is a different statement.”
He hands me an envelope and leaves. He actually leaves.
He walks down my path and gets in the car and drives up the hill.
I stand on my front steps holding a cream envelope with my name on it in brown ink and laugh, because I did exactly this to him.
I stood at the top of Point Road with an invitation in my hand and talked to a mail slot because I wanted a man I’d never met to know there was a place for him at my table.
And now, apparently, Julian has an answer.
The card is cream and heavy and engraved, which costs money, which he knows, which is why he does it.
Mr. Julian Volkov requests the pleasure of the company of Miss Penelope Harrington at dinner at Blackthorn House on Saturday evening at seven o’clock.
Underneath, in his handwriting:
It is not a joke and I would ask you not to bring anything.
I call him.
“You sent me a card. An engraved card.”
“I did.”
“You were at my house. You could have knocked.”
“I could have.”
“You could have handed it to me like a normal person.”
“I did hand it to you.”
“After talking to my mail slot.”
“My relationship with your mail slot is private.”
I sit down on the arm of the sofa because apparently we’re going to do this. “Julian, I was at Blackthorn yesterday. I ate cheese standing over your sink. My raincoat is on the hook in your back hall. I have a drawer.”
“You have two drawers.”
I stop. “I have two drawers?”
“You have had two drawers for some time. I have not mentioned the second because I was concerned you might interpret it as pressure and reallocate.”
I close my eyes. “So what’s the card for?”
“It is an invitation to dinner.”
“I’ve eaten at your house.”
“No,” he says, and I wait. “You have eaten food at my house. Frequently. You’ve brought dinner to my house. You’ve cooked dinner at my house. Once you arrived with a lobster roll and ate it in my library while explaining to me why the mayor was an idiot.”
“He was being an idiot.”
“I agreed with you at the time.”
“What’s your point?”
“I have never invited you to dinner.”
That stops me.
“You made a place for me at your table, Penny,” he says after a moment. “I would like to make one for you at mine.”
“Oh.”
“Yes.”
I look down at the engraved card. “Saturday?”
“Seven o’clock.”
“Should I dress up?”
There is a pause. “Wear the red dress.”
I grin. “You have a preference.”
“I have several. The red one is the only one relevant to the question.”
“Should I bring wine?”
“No.”
“Flowers?”
“No.”
“Dessert?”
He lets out a noise that would be a sigh in any other man. “I have made arrangements. I would like you to allow me to have made them.”
That’s a very strange sentence. I look at the card again. “What are you doing?”
“Inviting you to dinner.”
And he hangs up. He has learned to do that this year and is far too pleased about it.
Saturday is clear and cool, one of those May evenings when the light stays over the water longer than you expect it to.
I drive up the hill at seven in Gran’s garnets and the red dress from the Maritime Museum benefit, and the gate is open the way it has been open for months now.
The oak is visible across the south lawn, absurdly small beside the old beech and covered in new green leaves.
There are lights in the windows. A lot of lights.
Julian opens the door before I knock. He’s wearing the black suit, and I stop because Julian in that suit deserves a stop. He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then he says, “There isn’t a sufficient word.”
I stare at him. “You’ve used that.”
“It remains true.”
“You’re recycling material,” I tell him, trying to look stern.
“I have had a long life, Penny. Eventually some phrases must be reused.”
“You could pick another one.”
“Extraordinary.”
“Also used.”
“It has not stopped being accurate.”
He takes my coat, and his hands go over my bare shoulders on the way, cool and unhurried and entirely deliberate. I stand in the hall of Blackthorn House wondering how much of this dinner I’m actually going to get through.
He doesn’t lead me to the library. He takes me to the dining room.
I’ve been in the Blackthorn dining room perhaps half a dozen times.
It’s at the front of the house on the south side and has always looked like a photograph of a room.
A long table under a sheet. Chairs against the walls.
A sideboard with a clock on it that stopped sometime during the Coolidge administration and apparently became decorative.
The sheet is gone. The clock is ticking.
A fire is lit, although the evening isn’t cold enough to need one, and candles run down the center of the polished table.
All the chairs have been brought out from the walls and put where chairs belong.
There are eighteen of them, but only two places are set, facing each other at one end, close enough that I could reach across and take his hand.
“Julian.”
“Sit down.”
“You wound the clock.”
“Arthur wound the clock. It required a key, and the key required Arthur, and Arthur required an explanation, and I would rather not go into it.” He pulls out my chair. “Sit down, Penny. Before it goes cold.”
“What goes cold?”
He leaves the room. I hear something in the kitchen. The unmistakable sound of a spoon hitting the edge of a pot. I get halfway out of my chair before Julian comes back carrying a bowl.
The soup is pale gold, with chives over the top. I know it immediately.
“Fern’s parsnips.”
“Fern’s parsnips.”
I look at him. “You made soup.”
“Yes.”
“You can’t taste soup.”
“I am aware.”
“Julian.”
“Eat it.”
I pick up my spoon. It’s good. It’s not my soup. I use more butter and brown the onions longer, and I’d have put a little more pepper in it, but it is genuinely, unmistakably good. I look across the table at a man who hasn’t tasted food since before anybody thought Maine ought to be a state.
“How?”
“Eat it while it’s hot.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer you are getting until you’ve finished the soup.”
I narrow my eyes at him. He unfolds his napkin across his lap, which is ridiculous because he is not eating anything, and I eat the soup.
The next thing comes in a white oval casserole dish with a chip out of the rim. I know it before he puts it down, not because I’ve seen the dish but because I’ve smelled what’s inside it. Chicken and rice. Crushed crackers and butter over the top, browned a little too much at the edges.
Something inside me stops.
Nine years ago there were seven casseroles on Gran’s counter in four days.
I don’t remember who brought most of them.
I barely remember the days at all. My parents were dead on a road north of Lincolnville and people kept coming to the house and putting food in front of me because nobody knew what else to do. I couldn’t eat any of it.
Then someone put the seventh casserole in front of me and I ate. That night I stood in Gran’s dark kitchen at eleven o’clock and ate a plateful cold out of the dish. I heated the rest and ate that too, and then I sat down on the floor and cried for an hour.
I’ve never known whose casserole it was.
I look at Julian. “Where did you get this?”
“Harriet’s sister-in-law, Dot. She’s eighty-six and has apparently made that dish for every funeral in three towns since 1974.”
“Harriet knew?”
“Harriet has known for nine years.”
“Why didn’t she ever tell me?”
“Because she didn’t want you to think you owed anyone a thank-you note.”
My eyes fill, but Julian doesn’t move. He doesn’t come around the table or tell me not to cry. He sits across from me with his hands folded and lets me have this moment.
“She remembered?”
“Harriet remembered the dish. Dot remembered making it. She remembers most of them.”
“And you made this.”
“Four times.”
Despite everything, I laugh. “Four?”
“The first was bad.”
“How bad?”
“Dot said well.”
I wait, but he doesn’t add anything. “That was all?”
“That was sufficient. She has a way of saying it.”
I laugh again, wetly. “The second?”
“Also bad. The third was apparently close. She corrected the cracker and sent me home.”
“You drove casseroles to Dot’s house?”
“Repeatedly.”
“And the fourth?”
“She said it would do.”
I look down at it. “That’s high praise from an eighty-six-year-old woman in Maine.”
“I understood that.”
I take a bite, and it is the seventh casserole.
Not something like it. Not close to it. The actual casserole.
Salt and butter and crushed crackers and the slightly overcooked edge.
The casserole I ate on the worst night of my life because somebody I didn’t know had put it in front of me and said, in the only way they knew how, You’re here.
I’m here. You matter enough for me to feed.
I swallow. “It’s right.”
Julian’s shoulders relax. Barely, but I see it.
“Good,” he says.
I eat all of it, and he watches, and we talk about other things because that’s another thing he’s learned.
Not every important moment has to be stared at until it confesses.
He tells me Arthur still believes the oak is planted too deep.
I tell him Arthur told me exactly the same thing yesterday.
Julian says this is because Arthur is engaged in a campaign of misinformation.
I tell him Arthur has a lifetime of gardening experience.
Julian says he’s prepared to wait thirty years to be proven right.
Neither of us stops at the number. I notice. So does he. We keep talking.
Then Julian gets up. “There is one more thing.”
“Dessert?”
“No.”
He disappears into the kitchen. There is a pause. A long pause. Then the dining room door opens approximately eight inches and a hand appears.
Julian’s hand.