CHAPTER THREE
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MARY
Luca Varela had the head of the Perch dining table and was sitting on the corner of it instead of in the chair. Twelve pages lay squared under his hand. He read my whole name off the first line before I had reached a seat.
“Mary Corinne Warren. That’s the name on every line this morning, and we’re going to go slowly.”
Ten in the morning, and the east glass was one white sheet of glare off the water. I took the chair with the wall behind me and the door where I could see it, and my hands went under the table and folded themselves like a woman in a church.
Yelena had brought me a plain silk dress for breakfast and left my washed kitchen clothes, sneakers and canvas bag beside it.
I had put my wallet on top. When she asked whose notary I wanted, I gave her the name from Corinne’s old papers: Esperanza Cruz.
It was the first name I had supplied to this house instead of being given.
Esperanza Cruz set her purse on the tabletop and nobody at that table mistook it for a purse. Out of it came a book with a red cloth spine and a pen tied on a string, a stamp, and an ink pad that smelled like grade school.
“Your license, m’ija. And your face up for me.”
She held the license beside my chin and read me over her glasses. She turned the book to face me, rolled my thumb across the pad and onto the line, and tapped the space under it.
I got as far as the M and the W.
“All three names,” Luca said, without lifting his eyes off the first page. “The middle one too.”
“It’s a notary book.”
“It’s a notary book that will outlive every person sitting here, and I’d like it right. Humor me.”
Esperanza blew on the ink and took her time about it. “I knew your grandmother. She’d have thrown all three of these men out of her shop and kept the money.”
Rian laughed once at the sideboard, short and unwilling, and went back to standing with his split knuckles hooked over his belt.
“Can you tell me what it says?” I asked her. “The short version. You’ve done a thousand of these.”
“I stamp, m’ija. I don’t summarize. That’s what the pretty one is for.”
Nicolas Varela came in with a cup of coffee he never drank and sat at the far end with his forearms out on the table where the glare found them. The room rearranged itself around him. I wanted him to look up and he did not.
“Twelve pages. I read all of it out loud, and you stop me whenever you want, and I mean that, and nobody in this room gets to sigh about it.”
“And what are you in this?”
“Sovietnik,” Luca said, and turned the first page over.
“In English.”
“Counselor. It means I’m the one who reads things.”
“That’s a job? Reading?”
“It’s the only one in this family that pays and doesn’t bleed.” Luca squared the stack with two fingers. “I’d have made a wonderful baker.”
“You’d have lost a finger in the sheeter by Tuesday.”
“Which is why I read things,” Luca said.
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Luca read the contract the way people read to somebody in a hospital bed. Every noun came down on its own feet. By the third page I stopped hearing numbers and started hearing sounds, the flat tap of paper on wood.
“AVC 4, LLC, a Florida limited liability company, of the first part. Mary Corinne Warren, an individual, of the second part.”
“That’s a company. You’re marrying me to a company?”
“I’m reading you a recital,” Luca said. “The company’s the paper. The men come further down.”
The recital about my brother was on the next page.
Danny Warren, the markers at the Coliseum, two point four million dollars, purchased and held, subject to another provision Luca marked in the margin, and now read out into a room with my name on the other side of it.
I had been biting the inside of my cheek since the second page and I could taste where.
“Whose name is on which side of that sentence?”
“Neither of us gets to paraphrase it.” Luca read the line over again with the commas in. “The debt’s recited. It isn’t assigned to you and it never will be, and no lawyer in this state would try it, because nobody’s sister inherits a marker.”
Esperanza’s cigarettes were in her cardigan and I could smell them from my chair, warm and stale, and I wanted one and have never smoked.
“Then what am I buying my way out of?”
“Nothing. You’re not the payer, you’re the alliance. Your brother’s paper is why you’re at this table. It isn’t what you’re signing.”
“And if I don’t sign it, then Danny—”
“Sign it and the claim on him comes to us,” Luca said. “Not to you. To us. And then every morning after that, the men in this room decide what kind of day Danny Warren’s having.”
The reading broke three times. Yelena came around with the pot and filled a cup I never touched. A corner had folded over somewhere in the middle and two sheets went by together. Luca flattened the stack with the side of his hand. He kept talking, and the next sentence was already about notices.
On her second pass Yelena put a folded note by Nicolas’s cup. Nicolas read it without picking it up and answered her in Russian, and neither of them looked at me. Something had been arranged about me at a table I was sitting at, in a language chosen so I would not have it.
The sun came far enough over the water to lie hot along my left forearm.
My right hand was over the burn there, palm-sized and ten years old, and I did not remember putting it there, and Luca reached across without breaking the sentence he was inside and tilted the blind down two fingers’ worth and read on.
“The premises at Calle Ocho, together with the leasehold and all fixtures, shall be held to the account of the first part for the term—”
“Stop. Read that one again, slower, and then read it a third time so I can hear how it sounds when you’re embarrassed.”
Luca read it again. He read it a third time, and Esperanza stopped writing on the third pass, and Rian made a noise at the sideboard he did not bother to disguise.
I had to get that clause struck or lose Corinne’s building.
“That one’s not happening. The building stays out of this. It’s not mine to give and it’s not yours to take.”
Nicolas had put his eyes on my hands when he sat down and had not moved them since. Luca drew the black fountain pen out of his breast pocket, ran one line through four lines of type, wrote in the margin, and turned the page around to me.
“Struck. Initial here, and here, and I’ll initial under you.”
I initialed twice. Luca initialed under me. Esperanza put something into the red book in a round schoolteacher hand, and I have never been so pleased with a pen in my life.
Two pages on I put my finger down on the next clause ahead of his and read that one to the table myself.
“And this one—at the family’s discretion, without limitation? What does that actually mean at four in the morning?”
“That one stays,” Nicolas said, and put nothing after it.
“You’re answering a smaller question than the one I asked.”
“That’s true. That one stays.”
Nobody at that table moved. Esperanza’s pen waited above the page.
“So you’re buying me.”
“Yes.”
I was being bought at a dining table by a man who would not lie to me about it, and something under my sternum went loose and warm at being answered straight, and I would have paid money not to have felt it. I wanted Nicolas more than I wanted out of that room.
“What happens if I walk out of here and find a police station?”
“Nothing that helps you,” Rian said.
Rian came off the sideboard saying it and stood in the doorway I had picked my chair to see. Nobody had told him to.
“You’ve all been a tremendous help. I’ll write it up somewhere.”
Rian looked at the ceiling. Luca laid his hand flat on the pages.
“You’re living in a building you can’t show paper on, your brother’s markers are real and recorded and dated, and the man at the end of this table sits on the Coliseum’s licensing board with two county commissioners.
That isn’t a threat. It’s the first three things anybody would learn about you in an afternoon. ”
“And this you should hear from my mouth and not from your own head at three in the morning: this holds. There’s a notary at this table, the language is clean, and there are three people in this room who’ll swear that you sat here and read it with me and were calm.”
“I’m not calm.”
“You look calm,” Luca said. “That’s the part they’d be swearing to.”
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“Term, for the book,” Esperanza said, with her pen up over the table.
“Ninety calendar days. September fourth is day one; December second is day ninety. The term ends at midnight after that day.”
She wrote it in and blotted it.
Luca gathered the stack and set it in front of his brother.
“I can read it to you first.”
“No.”
Nicolas signed the last page. He did not turn any of the others. Luca stood at his shoulder and watched the pen cross the line, and I watched Luca do it.
“You didn’t read it.”
“No.”
The stack came back up the table to me. The pen was heavier than a pen has any business being, and warm off two other hands. I signed the last page, Mary Warren, the way I sign for a flour delivery, because my hand went and did it a half second ahead of me.
Luca slid a clean duplicate of the signature leaf across the table, the same block of type above an empty line.
“Full legal name. All three of them.”
“You’ve already made me do that once.”
“I know.”
“Is there a version of this morning where you only wanted to watch me write it?” I said.
“There is, and I’d have gotten away with it if you’d signed faster.”
“That’s the first true thing anybody’s said at this table.”
“Second,” Luca said. “I told you last night I’d be kind to you, and you didn’t write that one down either.”
Lawyers and their middle names. I put the nib down on the fresh signature leaf and my hand would not hold still. It skated on the M and left a hook the paper kept, and then Luca’s hand came down over mine on the pen and closed, and did not move, and did not let go.
“Breathe out. You’ve been holding it since the second page.”
Luca was close enough over my shoulder that his breath came onto my jaw, and my hand turned over under his without asking me first. My thighs pressed together under the table. It went through me and showed, in front of five people, through Yelena’s borrowed silk.
A knocking started low in me like a knuckle on a door, and I was certain, stupidly, that Esperanza could hear it from across the table.
Luca’s mouth came down to half an inch off my temple and stopped there.
He did not touch me. I did not turn my face up into it.
Neither of us took a breath, and the knocking kept the count for both of us, four full seconds of it.
“Sign it slowly. I’ve got you.”
I wrote Mary Corinne Warren on the fresh signature leaf in letters that came out bigger than I meant them to.
Esperanza’s seal came down on the tabletop with a crack and a wet click, and the smell of the pad went up between us.
“Luca,” Nicolas said, with no volume in it at all.
Luca’s hand was gone before the sound finished.
Esperanza went down the stack stamping and closed the red book over its pen. Luca capped the fountain pen and put it back in his pocket.
Rian and Yelena signed the witness lines. Esperanza kept a complete counterpart for her records, fastening its twelve sheets in a red folder before she closed her purse. Nicolas put my phone beside my elbow. I checked the missed calls before I touched the paper again.
Then two stacks came off that table. Luca took one to the sideboard, stapled it once, and put it down in front of me. The other he squared with the edge of his hand and slid loose into a leather folder under his arm.
Mine was stapled shut. His was not. Luca went out of the dining room with his, and I did not say a word about either one, and my copy went into my bag and my bag went onto my knees.
Yelena came in without knocking and put a card on the blotter where my signature had left a wet impression, and the one name printed on it was Sokolov.