Chapter 23 #2
Sara and Ben found them at the cider stand.
Sara warm and curvy and immediately bending down to Toby’s level to admire his wings, Ben six and a half feet of silver rabbit Other with his ears back and his arms crossed, softening only when Sara touched his sleeve.
Toby’s kindergarten teacher and the least sociable tavern keeper in four counties. Cornelia took a long breath.
And then Flora arrived, petite and pale green and grinning, in a magenta tracksuit that read GHOUL’S NIGHT OUT across the seat. She planted herself squarely in front of Maris with the air of a female collecting on a bet nobody knew they’d made.
“I see you brought the whole circus.” Flora’s eyes swept over the grandparents, weighed them and found them wanting. “You’ll be the Charleston lot. He’s got Jefferson’s chin, poor thing.”
Cornelia blinked at the name.
“You knew Jefferson?”
“No.”
Flora drew Maris aside before Cornelia could ask any more questions. “They’re staying at the Inn. I’ve put them in the blue room at the back. They’ll want their rest. Before they say whatever it is they’ve driven four hours to say.”
“What makes you think they’ve come to say anything?”
Flora’s sharp eyes went to Cornelia’s camel coat. “The coat,” she said, and disappeared into the crowd.
“Mama!” Toby, tugging her hand, wings bouncing. “It’s time, it’s the contest, Mr. Garrick said I have to go stand with the other kids. Will you watch, will you watch—”
“I’m watching,” she said. Her voice came out thick. “I’m always watching, baby. Go.”
He went, cardboard wings and all, up onto the little stage under the orange lights, and stood in a row of tiny witches and one determined tomato.
Then Houston’s amplified voice boomed and what have we HERE, and Toby turned round and spread his homemade grey wings as wide as his arms would go, and the crowd roared.
And Garrick, who did not make sounds in crowds, who held himself still as a post in front of people, made a sound Maris had never heard him make.
He was laughing. Low and stunned and helpless, gold flaring hot in his grey eyes as he watched a five-year-old in cardboard be exactly, gloriously, publicly him.
Cornelia watched Garrick laugh, her expression unreadable, but Maris suspected she’d just realized exactly what Toby had done when he’d chosen his own wings.
The reckoning came at the Inn, afterwards.
They walked Toby back in the dark, sugar-crashed and boneless.
He was asleep against Garrick’s chest before they left the square, one cardboard wing crushed flat, and neither of them had the heart to fix it.
Flora had the room ready and a warm light in the window and the good grace, for once, to make herself scarce.
Garrick gently laid Toby down on the trundle bed in the grandparents’ suite. Then he stepped back and said he’d wait in the truck to run Maris home. He looked at her silently for one second before he left—I’m right outside—and it steadied her more than she wanted to admit.
Then it was the three of them and a sleeping boy and a decanter of port Lawton had brought from Charleston. He poured them each a glass before Cornelia took over.
“Maris,” Cornelia said, “please sit. There’s something we’d like to put to you.”
Just as Flora had predicted.
“We’ve been talking, Lawton and I.” Cornelia leaned forward and gave her an earnest look. She was very good at this. “About Tobias. About his future. And before you say anything—please. Let me finish, and know that every word of it comes from love.”
“I know it does.”
“There’s a place for him at Ashby Prep, Jefferson’s old school.
I spoke to the head myself, and they’ll take him in the spring.
There’s no question for a boy of his caliber.
” The tiniest hesitation. “Now, Jefferson’s trust doesn’t release until Toby is twenty-one, but Lawton has spoken to the lawyers, and as sole trustee he can release it early, for the boy’s education.
All of it. Ashby, and then whatever comes after.
He would never want for anything. Not ever. ”
“Jeff hated Ashby,” she said.
A pause exactly long enough to be heard.
“Jefferson,” Cornelia said, “was very happy there.”
Lawton leaned in, his face kind and determined.
“And a house, Maris. Near us. Not charity, just a house in the boy’s name, three streets over, so he’ll grow up with family.
His cousins. His grandparents. His father’s people.
” His voice broke on that, just slightly.
“We lost Jefferson. We can’t lose the last of him to four hours away up a mountain. ”
The fire in the small woodstove popped. Toby breathed, slow and deep, in the trundle bed.
It was, she understood, a genuinely good offer.
That was the terrible part. There was no villain in the room.
The Pinckneys had offered an excellent school they were certain Jeff had loved.
Money that was already, in every moral sense, Toby’s.
A house, free and clear. Grandparents who would drive four hours and kneel in a coat that had never touched dirt because they loved a boy that much.
Everything a child could want, and everything she had lain awake worrying she couldn’t give him.
Stability. Security. A floor under his feet that couldn’t drop out.
All of it. On one condition, so obvious they hadn’t even had to say it out loud.
That he leave Fairhaven Falls.
There would be no more festivals. No cardboard wings, no Sara on her knees in the dirt, no baby in a bee costume, no gate in the garden wall. No enormous gentle stone male laughing helplessly in a crowd because a boy had chosen to be like him.
“You’d take him to the city,” she said, and her voice came out steady, which surprised her. “And I’d… come. To the house three streets over.”
“Of course you’d come.” Cornelia’s smile arrived, warm and final.
“Darling. You’re his mother. We’d never dream of separating you.
” A pause, gentle as a knife. “We only think—for him—that his life is bigger than a little town full of, well.” She gestured faintly at the window and the town beyond it.
“Don’t you want more for him than this, Maris?
Truly. In your heart. Don’t you want him to have everything? ”
And Maris sat in the firelight with her sleeping son’s crushed cardboard wing across the trundle bed, and could not, for one long and terrible moment, find a single word to say that wouldn’t break something.