Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The picture was up on her phone when she came up from the trail.
A flower shop window with two pieces of paper taped in it. Her flyer, orange and unmistakable, and above it a smaller sign she’d had to zoom in on to read. Office space. Second floor. By appointment.
Jason hadn’t said a word about it. He’d sent the dinner news, plain as a grocery list, and then the picture, and then nothing. That was Jason. He handed you a door and let you decide whether to walk through it.
Cecelia had looked at it eleven times on the trail and had not decided anything.
The elevator let her out on the third floor and she went down the hall past the suite she’d given up, past her father’s door, to the room at the end that the lodge had rented her at the corporate rate because the girl at the desk had read the paper and liked her for it.
One bed. One window. A coffee table with a wobble. Her own card on file.
She was fitting her key into the lock when her father’s door opened.
He was in the charcoal suit, the one he wore when he wanted a room to know who’d paid for it.
He had his phone in one hand and his reading glasses in the other.
He looked at her as he had in the lobby yesterday, and the day before, and every hour since she’d walked out of his suite with her jacket over her arm.
“You’re going out,” she said.
“I have a dinner.”
“I know. He told me.”
That stopped him with one hand on the door. He looked at her for real then, the full appraisal, the one that used to find the wrinkle in a blouse from across a ballroom. “Did he.”
“He tells me things. I’m trying to pick up the habit.”
Her father put his glasses in his breast pocket. He straightened a cuff that didn’t need it. “Then you’ll understand this is between him and me.”
“Nothing about me is between you and anyone. Not anymore.”
The hall was quiet enough that the ice machine around the corner carried.
He didn’t answer her. He never answered a sentence he couldn’t win.
She’d learned that at nineteen, and she’d learned to stop handing him sentences he could, and it had taken her until this autumn to find out there was a third option.
“You look tired, Cecelia.”
“I’m sleeping fine.”
He knew she wasn’t. She knew he knew. Eight years of reading rooms for him, and the one face she’d never been able to read was the one she’d learned it from.
He pulled the door shut behind him and started down the hall toward the elevators. She stood there with her card in the slot and the lock blinking green at her, and she had the whole length of the carpet to decide whether to let him go.
“Dad.”
He stopped. He didn’t turn around.
“Order the trout. It’s the best dish on the menu.”
His shoulders came down a fraction. That had happened once before, in a lawyer’s office, when she was six, and she hadn’t understood it then. The elevator opened for him. He got in without a word, and the doors closed. She went into her room and sat on the bed with her boots on for a long time.
“Whoever brought the black licorice,” Wendy said, “I want a name.”
“It’s a classic.” Faith kept pouring. “Not all of us were raised on gummy worms.”
“The lucky ones were.”
They’d come up the hall in a pack, all five of them, and the room had filled up with them.
Boots by the door. Coats on the one chair.
Wendy had kicked hers off before the door finished closing, which Cecelia was choosing to take as a compliment, and Rylee had taken one look at the wobbling coffee table and folded a sugar packet from the tray under the short leg without a word.
Now the bowl in the middle of it was a landslide.
Gummy worms, peach rings, sour straws, those chalky hearts nobody admitted to buying.
Rylee was on the floor with her back against the bed.
Lydia had claimed the chair once the coats came off it.
Wren sat cross-legged nearest the bowl with the concentration of a woman who’d come for the candy and would take the conversation as it came. Faith stood. Faith always stood.
“Forty-one,” Wendy said, to the room. “That’s how many lampposts there are between the bakery and City Hall. I know because I taped every one of them. Tripp says the council owes me a kidney.”
“The council owes you nothing,” Faith said. “You volunteered.”
“I was recruited. There’s a difference.”
“Who recruited you?” Wren asked.
“Councilwoman. Caught me at Cliff’s and said she’d heard I could talk anybody into anything.” Wendy bit a worm in half. “So I talked myself into forty-one lampposts. Joke’s on her.”
Cecelia laughed, and it surprised her, and Lydia clocked the surprise.
They talked about nothing for a while, which she hadn’t known she needed.
Brent’s ride at the rodeo, which Faith had a great deal to say about.
A calf at Sagebrush that had gotten into the tack room and eaten a saddle blanket.
Whether the diner’s new pie was better than the old pie, which turned out to be a question with sides.
Cecelia sat in the middle of it and passed the bowl when it came to her and let their talk run over her.
Then Lydia said, “So are you staying?” and the room went quiet without anybody deciding it should.
Cecelia turned a peach ring over in her fingers.
“I want to.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Lydia said.
“It’s all I’ve got right now.” She set the ring down.
“My father’s lawyers have called twice. My father hasn’t called at all.
I’m paying for this room on a card that has about a season left in it, and the only work I’ve ever done, I did for him.
” She looked at the ring instead of at them. “I want to stay. Wanting isn’t a plan.”
“It’s where the plan starts,” Faith said.
Now. Say it now, before they made it easy for her again.
“I wanted to thank you. For the rodeo. You didn’t have to walk me in like that, and I know what it cost, and I haven’t said it, so.”
“You’re saying it now,” Lydia said.
“I’m saying it now.”
Wendy took a worm out of the bowl and bit its head off. “Honey, I’m going to tell you the truth about that night, and I want you to hold still while I do it. We didn’t walk you in for you.”
Rylee looked up. Faith didn’t, which meant she’d known it was coming.
“We went for Jason,” Wendy said. “That man had a business to launch and a town about to make up its mind about him, and if there’s one thing this family knows, it’s how to stand in a row.
So we stood in a row.” She chewed. “And then you came through that gate with your chin up and every eye in the place on you, knowing what was waiting, and you didn’t slow down. That’s when it got to be for you.”
Nobody in the room moved to soften it.
“It was in the paper,” Cecelia said. “You all read it.”
“Every word.” Faith set the licorice down. “And nobody here is going to tell you it wasn’t yours. It was yours. You buried a meeting on purpose.”
“Yes.”
“And then you stood in front of the council and said so, out loud, with a reporter in the room, when your own father was telling you not to.” Faith met her eyes. “I’ve lived here my whole life, Cece. I can count on one hand the people who’d have done the second half.”
Cecelia’s throat did what her hands had stopped doing years ago. She looked at the bowl until it passed. Wren, without a word, pushed the peach rings an inch closer to her.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.”
“Eat a peach ring,” Wendy said. “Then keep showing up. The hearing’s coming, and the whole town’s going to be in that gym, and about half of it is still deciding what to do with you. Sit on our side.”
“Front row,” Lydia said. “Where they can see you.”
Her phone buzzed on the bed behind her. She didn’t reach for it. Lydia did. Lydia had been raised with two brothers and no sense of boundaries, and she read the screen and grinned and turned it around to the room.
Tell Wendy I saw her.
“He saw me,” Wendy said. “Of course he saw me. Man sees everything and says nothing. It’s exhausting.”
“What’s the picture?” Wren asked. She’d leaned in. “Is that the Bloom Shop?”
Cecelia held her hand out and Lydia gave the phone back, not fast. The window, the flyer, the small sign above it. Five women looked at it and then at her, and every one of them got there at a different speed.
“He didn’t say anything about it,” Cecelia said. “He just sent it.”
“He wouldn’t,” Faith said. “That’s not how he does it.”
“How does he do it?”
“He shows you the door.” Faith’s mouth went almost soft at one corner. “He held one open for Tate all summer. Then Rylee walked through it.”
Rylee had been quiet through most of this, her fingers working a gummy worm into a knot.
“I stood up at the first one,” she said.
“The hearing. Told a room full of strangers I’d lived the life your father was selling and walked away from it.
” She tied the worm off and set it on the table, done.
“You’ll want to know where the microphone is. ”
Cecelia looked around the circle. Faith with her chin up. Lydia in the good chair. Wren guarding the bowl. Wendy with a worm in her teeth and no intention of letting a silence last. Rylee on the floor, waiting.
“Where is it?”
“Left of the podium,” Rylee said. “About four steps. Wear the boots.”