15. Tara
TARA
The next morning, Constance Montgomery stood in my kitchen deciding what to insult first. She chose the table.
Her gaze moved over the secondhand top and the paint-stirrer shim under the near leg with a sour look on her face.
“Surely you could afford nicer furniture,” she said, almost to herself. “You live like a starving graduate student.”
“I live like a tenant. Good morning, Constance.”
Last night I’d memorized the town car plates and had sent the information to Dana with a brief explanation.
If she comes back, don’t engage alone. If she knocks, you’re within your rights not to answer. Call me after.
After the car left, I lay awake past midnight listening to the house tick and settle. The most enjoyable evening of my new life had been tainted by her appearance and the anxiety of wondering if or when she might return.
She knocked at seven. Any later and she would have had to track me down at the site, which made me think she was tracking me. Not my preferred way to start Thursday morning.
When I opened the door, she was alone on the stoop, the car and driver waiting for her eventual return. She looked at me with her typical disdain. This time it didn’t bother me; we were on my ground now.
Letting her in was my decision, not hers, although I doubt she realized that.
Inside, I took the chair Declan had sat in, and I left her standing. She’d have refused the other chair anyway. Sitting would have made her a guest.
“He doesn’t answer his telephone, Tara,” she said. “So I’ve come to the source of the interference.”
“He’s forty years old. If he’s not answering, it means he doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“He’s hauling rubble in a neighborhood that smells like fried grease because the girl he married is conducting an experiment.” She turned away from me and toward the window. “I’ve come to ask what it costs to end it.”
In the mansion I was furniture with a pulse. Not nice furniture, either, the kind that was barely tolerated. The way she said my name landed worse than “the girl” ever had. I wasn’t furniture anymore. I was a problem she needed to handle.
I surveyed her while she talked. It was what I did with old buildings. The chignon hadn’t changed. The winter-pale eyes, the tailored clothing, the estate ring she turned on her finger when she thought she had the advantage. Everything about her was maintained, pointed, polished.
It was telling that she’d come by herself, without a lawyer and a non-disclosure agreement. She had driven hours to a rented rowhouse when the telephone had failed her.
I noted it, location and extent. Then I let her finish talking.
“The divorce can take a month or it can take years,” she said.
“My lawyers are very thorough, and the proceedings would be public in a way yours have not been. You’d be amazed what the society pages will print about a woman in your position.
They’ve ruined girls like you before. I’ve watched them do it. ”
“I’m sure you have.”
“Your brother’s rehabilitation is weeks old.” The feigned gentleness felt like a knife to the gut. “Reputations in the trades are weather, not stone. It would be a shame if someone re-examined the Church Street file and found it less tidy than originally thought.”
A threat, or maybe a promise, issued by a woman who’d spent decades manipulating people. She could put things in motion without a written memo or instructions to trace. She had more men like Victor Hale on the payroll who knew how to interpret a benign suggestion.
“Oh, and about your little landmark petition.” She stared me down. “Jerry sends his regards.”
“Meridian lost the building.”
“You of all people should know the difference between a stay and a rescue, Tara.”
There it was. She’d trained Jerry Meridian at her own table, and she’d kept the student in her address book. The trust had put the building beyond her. The hearing was still within reach, though, and I couldn’t count her out until a final decision was made.
Without the historic designation, the Settlement House was vulnerable. If my argument failed, the trust might be willing to sell the building.
“Are you finished with the threats?” I asked.
“Those were courtesies.” She came to the table then, and from her bag she took out an envelope, heavy cream stock, the family’s stationery, and laid it between us. “This is the offer.”
I didn’t open it. I let it sit where my brother’s plate had been the night before.
“There are museums that owe me,” Constance said. “Boston. Winterthur. A directorship, not a clerk’s desk at a municipal commission with a pathetic budget. You’d have the career you always wanted. The real one.”
She watched me not touch the envelope. “You leave Philadelphia, and Thomas for good this time, and let my son come home. He’s playing at poverty, Tara. The costume will chafe. That’s always how it goes. The only question is whether you profit from his little seasonal play or merely survive it.”
The career she’d gutted, offered back as exile, far away, where the light wouldn’t hit it.
“No.”
“You haven’t even opened the envelope.”
“I’m not interested in your offer.”
Her mask held. Then I leaned forward and said the thing I’d come to understand months ago.
“You didn’t keep me out of the division because I’d have managed it badly, Constance. You kept me out because I have integrity and wouldn’t have been easy to control.”
Her hands went still on the estate ring.
“The restoration business is like laundry to you, and you’ve spent her entire adult life doing the folding. Any educated historian would have figured that out, reading you like a historical record without even trying. That’s what I was trained to do. You knew it the day Thomas brought me home.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Tara.”
“It’s not flattery, Constance, it’s fact.
You married into the Montgomery name at twenty-three and paid for your seat at the table with obedience,” I said.
There was no emotion in my words, which was a deliberate choice.
“And then I came along and refused to pay that same price. To you, that was always an insult. To me, it just different accounting.”
“Yes.” Her voice didn’t rise, it broke form instead.
The precision slipping, the words arriving faster than her controlled diction.
“I gave that house over half my life. My face is on that stair wall. I sat at tables with men who spoke to my husband through me, smiled, made myself necessary, and I will not watch my sacrifice be erased by—”
She stopped mid-sentence to collect herself. And after the gap where the sentence died, she spoke her true thoughts, truth, quieter than anything she’d said all morning.
“Do you think I was unaware of what you were doing? The job interviews? The attorney retainer?” Her laugh was dry and unamused.
“Nothing happened under that roof without my knowledge. The staff report to me. They always have. And for what happens outside the house, I have very thorough people. Everywhere.”
I’d often wondered how far her reach went. Hearing just how far made me shiver.
“I let you go,” she said. “I watched you slowly disengage for months and then bided my time. Your leaving was the solution to my headache. The house would be better off without you, and one day a new portrait would take the place of yours. Thomas would—” She stopped again, and what crossed her face was shock and confusion.
“I never even considered you might take him with you.”
And there it was. The one thing she hadn’t anticipated. The exhibit she never liked had walked out of the museum, and her precious heir had followed it through the door. As the curator of the museum, Candance had no idea how to bring her son back.
I almost felt sorry for her.
She moved toward the door and I followed her. This was my home and I was going to see her out. On the threshold, she turned and looked at me with something I’d never seen from her before. It took me a moment to place it, but it looked like pity.
“He’ll come back home,” she said. “They always do.”
“He’s been gone three months.”
“A short diversion.” Her voice was matter-of-fact.
“The Montgomery name is patient. It waited out my husband’s restlessness and his father’s need for a diversion before him.
It will wait out Thomas too. You think he’s building a new life down there in the dirt.
But he’s really just a man standing in a hole he dug himself.
One morning he’ll look up from the hole and remember who owns the sky. ”
She went down my crumbling treads without holding the rail. The town car driver opened the passenger door for her while I stood in my doorway and watched her go.
Back inside, I photographed the envelope she left and sent the picture to Dana.
Unopened. But she offered Winterthur.
Dana’s reply came fast for a Saturday.
Congratulations. That’s the most expensive insult I’ve seen all year. Keep it sealed.
I stashed the envelope in the kitchen drawer on top of the unsigned settlement papers I’d been moving from counter to table for weeks and had finally put away in there. Two documents keeping each other company in the dark. Paper that had the power to change lives.
Then I made tea and drank it in the quiet of my kitchen as the satisfaction of the win faded.
Here was the possibility I couldn’t escape. The company and estate had taken Thomas back once already. So slowly that I didn’t realize it at first. Tom, the man I married, was taken away from me one boardroom meeting and dinner at a time. T
Could a few weeks of rolled-up sleeves and lime-stained hands withstand the pull of five generations of gravity? The only person alive who’d lived through this before had delivered had delivered her prediction with confidence.
He’ll come back home. They always do.
I’d had my own doubts, and Constance’s certainty that Thomas would return to her only deepened them. It was the one thing she’d said that felt structural.
I laid my hand on the table, testing for movement after placing the shim I’d cut myself.
The table held, steady.
I wasn’t sure about anything else.