Chapter 4
Winslow
The Richmond office had a buzzer that didn't work and a door that stuck, so you had to put a shoulder into it, and Winslow had never once come through it without the sense of arriving somewhere she didn't have a key to.
She had a garment bag over her arm. That was the errand. Callum's suit for his parents' thing had come back from the tailor to the house rather than the office, and Dara had asked in a text with three apologies in it. Winslow had said of course, and driven ninety minutes, and that was Thursday.
She could have sent it. There was a woman at the family office in Richmond whose entire function was moving objects around the Commonwealth on behalf of people who could not be bothered. Winslow had her number. She'd used it twice in ten years and hated it both times.
Nobody at the front looked up. A girl was on the phone doing a call sheet. A boy was asleep sitting up with a legal pad on his chest.
"Is he in?" Winslow said.
The girl put her hand over the receiver. "He's in the back with Senna. You can go on, or I can take that."
"I'll go on."
"You want coffee? There's coffee."
"I'm all right, thank you."
The girl went back to her call sheet. She had not asked Winslow's name and did not appear to require it, which meant either that she knew exactly who Winslow was or that she assumed she was a courier, and there was no way to establish which without saying a thing that would embarrass one of them.
The war room was at the back. Glass on two sides, blinds half open.
Winslow stopped in the corridor with the garment bag hanging off her arm.
Callum was at the whiteboard with a marker.
Senna was sitting on the table, one foot on a chair.
Neither of them was talking. He wrote something.
She shook her head. He erased half of it and wrote it another way.
She pointed at it with two fingers, no word attached, and he said, "Yeah, I know," and fixed it.
Then they both laughed at the same time. At nothing. At a thing on a whiteboard.
There is a shorthand two people build when they spend nine hundred hours in a room. Winslow knew that. She had built one herself once, with a sound guy named Ruthers in a rented Corolla in West Virginia, and it had meant nothing, and she'd have said so under oath.
She used to have this one, though.
She used to be the person he wrote half a sentence in front of.
In 2016 he had read her the whole of a speech in a motel in Abingdon at one in the morning, twice, and then a third time with the parts she'd cut taken out, and he had said better? like a man asking about a haircut.
Her arms had gone heavy. The garment bag slid to the crook of her elbow. She got a hand under it and stood in a corridor that smelled of toner, ears doing a high thin ring under the office noise, and made herself take a breath all the way down to the bottom.
Then she walked in.
"Suit," she said, and lifted it.
Callum turned and his face did the switch, the public one, warm and quick. "You didn't have to drive that down."
"I was coming anyway." She wasn't.
"Winslow." Senna came off the table with her hand out. Her grip was direct, dry, and easy. "I'm so sorry about the tailor. That was my mess."
"It's Dara's mess," Callum said.
"It's my mess. I gave Dara the wrong address." Senna took the bag off Winslow's arm before Winslow could decide whether to let her. "Hang it on the door there. Winslow, do you want coffee? I'm going to tell you not to have the coffee."
"So I've heard."
"Then somebody in this office loves you."
That was all. Sixty seconds, and every one of them kind.
Senna hung the bag, went back to the board, and said a thing about Kellerman.
Callum said, "Give me two minutes with my wife.
" Senna said, "Take three," and walked out, and shut the glass door behind her with a courtesy that made Winslow's face go hot.
"Everything all right?" Callum said.
"Fine."
"You look—"
"It's the drive."
He nodded. He was already half turned back toward the board. "Six o'clock Saturday, Mom wants us there at five. Don't let her put me at the head of the table."
"Okay."
"You're a lifesaver."
She got all the way out to the lot before her hands started, and then they went for a while, and she sat with them in her lap until they stopped.
She sat in a parking lot in Richmond for eleven minutes with the engine off.
The thing she kept going back over was the two fingers.
Not the laugh. Anybody laughs. It was that Senna had corrected him without a word in it and he had taken the correction without a word in it, and that particular transaction is not available to people who have known each other eleven months. That is a thing you build.
A boy came out of the building with a box of paper and put it in a trunk. Somewhere behind her a truck backed up for a long time, beeping.
Winslow got her phone out and looked at it. There was nothing on it that anybody needed her for. She put it face down on the passenger seat and drove ninety minutes home.
She did not say anything. Not that day. Not that week.
***
Marlowe Fairbanks did a hundred and ten people in her own house twice a year and had never once used a caterer's tent, on principle, and the principle was that a tent looked like you were trying.
The dining room had been cleared to the walls. The whole downstairs smelled of woodsmoke and the paperwhites Marlowe forced in bowls every January. Two women from Bedford were in the kitchen. They had been coming thirty years and had their own coffee cups on a shelf.
Winslow came up the steps at five and got her coat taken by a boy she'd known since he was eleven.
"How's school," she said.
"It's all right."
"That's a no."
"It's all right, Mrs. Fairbanks," the boy said, in a voice that meant he'd been told to say that, and she let him have it and went in.
"Sweetheart." Marlowe had her by both hands before she was out of the doorway. Sixty-four, silver at the temple, in a dress that had been in style twice. "You're thin. Don't argue with me. Graham, look at her."
"I have looked at her. She looks fine," Graham said from the hall table, glasses down, envelope in his hand. "Winslow. Save me. Your mother-in-law has put the Pettits next to the Hobsons."
"They hate each other."
"They loathe each other."
"That's why," Marlowe said, going.
Eleanor was in the front room in the good chair with a rug over her knees, ninety-one and refusing a plate, and she got Winslow's wrist as she went past.
"Sit down two minutes."
"Gran, I've got the door."
"The door has been getting itself open in this house since 1948." Eleanor's hand stayed where it was. "How's the literacy business."
"Nine counties."
"Pauline Odell still running it?"
"Pauline Odell will bury us all."
"She'll bury me first, and she'll say something unkind at the service, and she'll be right." Eleanor let go. "You look tired. Go on and do the door."
By seven the house was full and roaring, and Winslow was in it, working the near corner of the long room.
She sent a state delegate toward a bar he was too polite to ask about.
She got a woman's granddaughter's name right.
She stood at Callum's elbow through eleven separate conversations, turned her body toward him whenever he spoke, and laughed at the interstate joke for possibly the four hundredth time.
At some point his hand came to the small of her back. It stayed there while a man from the Chamber talked about culverts, and she stood inside the warm weight of it and could not feel one thing.
"Ten years in June," the Chamber man said. "Is that right?"
"Ten years in June," Callum said.
"Now how'd you land her, is what I want to know."
"Attrition," Callum said, and the man laughed, and Winslow laughed. It came out of her at exactly the right volume with exactly the right amount of air behind it, and she thought, calmly, from one step back and a little above it, look at that, it still works.
She got out to the sunporch a little after nine for a minute of cold.
The paperwhites didn't reach out there. It was wet stone and cigar smoke off somebody on the lawn. The noise came through the glass at half volume. She stood with her arms crossed and her back to the door and let her face go.
The door opened and shut behind her.
"There's a bad chair out here," Marlowe said, "and I'm going to take it, because if I stand another forty minutes I'll be no use tomorrow."
"I'll go back in."
"Don't you dare."
Marlowe sat down in the bad wicker chair with a small noise, set her glass on the sill, and did not look at Winslow at all, which was somehow worse.
"Callum's father used to leave these things at nine-fifteen," Marlowe said.
"Every time. He'd get a phone call at nine-fifteen.
There'd be a crisis. I'd do the last hour by myself and make his excuses, and I got so accomplished at making his excuses that people would tell me afterward how much they'd enjoyed talking to him. "
Winslow didn't turn around.
"That was a long time ago," she said.
"It was."
"Everybody knows the story."
"Everybody knows the ending of the story." Marlowe's voice stayed easy. "The rain, the driveway, the vow, and his mother crying at the table. It's a wonderful ending. I was there. They tell it at weddings."
Out on the lawn somebody laughed at something.
"Nobody tells the eleven years in the middle," Marlowe said. "There's no good way to say it. You stand at a window in your own house and get very, very quiet, and everyone says how well you're holding up."
Winslow's hand had come up to the doorframe at some point. She was holding it hard enough that her knuckles had gone yellow.
"I'm fine," she said.
"I know you are."
"I am."
"I know."
The door opened and Graham put his head out.
"Pettits are leaving," he said. "Somebody's got to be sorry about it."
"I'll be right there."
He went. The room noise cut off again behind the glass.
Marlowe got up out of the bad chair.
"I'm not going to ask you anything, sweetheart," she said. "I'd have run off a porch if anybody had asked me. I'm only going to tell you that I have stood exactly where you're standing, in shoes I picked out for it, and I know what that face is."
She squeezed Winslow's arm above the elbow once, went in, and did the last hour herself.
Winslow stayed on the sunporch until her hands were cold enough to be a reason.
Through the glass she could see the whole of it going.
Graham with a hand on a man's shoulder at the door.
Eleanor in the good chair with two of the Hobson children on the rug in front of her.
Callum in the middle of the long room with his head back, doing somebody's accent, four people around him waiting to laugh, and his wife nowhere in the frame at all.
She fixed her face. She went in, found the Pettits, and was sorry about it.