Chapter 8 #2
She did not decide to. There was a chair against the wall where the chairs go at three in the afternoon and her legs took her the two steps to it, and she sat down in the middle of her own dining room in front of a woman in an oatmeal coat, which is the single thing about that afternoon she would change if she could change one.
Emerson did not move toward her. She did not put a hand out. She stood where she had been standing and watched, with an expression that Talia would have called sympathetic on anybody else’s face.
“There’s a thing you’re going to do now,” Emerson said, “and I’d ask you not to, because it won’t work.”
“Don’t.”
“You’re going to go back through the last three months and re-weigh all of it.
The truck in the street and the roof and the township and whatever else he’s been doing where you can see him.
And you’ll try to decide whether four seconds in February outweighs three months in the spring, as though those are the same kind of thing and can go on the same scale.
They aren’t. I watched him do it for eighteen months.
He is extremely good at the visible part. ”
“You don’t know anything about him.”
“I know more about what he said between eight and midnight for seven weeks than you do,” Emerson said, “and I’d rather have your part, for what that’s worth, which is nothing.”
Talia got up out of the chair, which took more than it should have.
“Get out of my restaurant,” she said.
“Yes,” Emerson said.
She picked up her handbag. She did it without hurry. She went to the front door and she put her hand on it and then she stopped, and turned around, with the light coming in behind her.
“You don’t remember me,” she said.
* * *
Talia looked at her.
“What?”
“I worked here.” Emerson nodded at the room — at the long window table, at the brass rail, at the door behind the pass.
“Fifteen years ago. The summer I was nineteen. I ran the floor Thursday to Sunday for fourteen weeks and I slept above the hardware store and I have never in my life worked that hard for anything.”
Talia’s mouth was open. She could feel that it was open.
“Your father was still alive. He used to stand right there —” she pointed, without looking, at the right spot ” — and say hands, just that, if somebody came out of the kitchen wrong.
You were twenty-three. You’d come back from wherever you’d been and you were running the pass on Fridays and you were very, very good at it, and the whole room turned around when you came out of that door. ”
“I don’t—”
“No,” Emerson said. “You don’t. I’ve stood in front of you four times since and you have shaken my hand four times. At the Christmas thing in the lobby, two years ago, you told me where to park.”
“Emerson—”
“That isn’t an accusation. There were nine of us that summer and a dozen the next and you were twenty-three and your father was dying and I was a girl carrying plates.
” Her voice did not rise, not once, not anywhere in it.
“I’m telling you so you understand that I have thought about this dining room every week of my adult life and I have never once been in anybody’s head the way you were in that room.
Not anybody’s. That’s all I have ever wanted and I have never had it for free the way you had it. ”
She got the door open.
“Your husband,” she said, “was the first person who ever couldn’t do without me. It took seven weeks. It was extremely easy.”
And she went out, and the door came to behind her without a sound, because Jared had fixed it.
* * *
Talia stood in the middle of her dining room for a long time.
Then she went into the kitchen and put both hands flat on the stainless and stood there while her whole body shook, which took about a minute and a half, and then stopped, and then started again.
Renata came in at four. Talia was breaking down leeks.
“Everything okay?”
“Fine.”
“Was that—”
“Candles,” Talia said. “And the wells need changing, both of them, and go tell your father I need him to bring the van at nine tomorrow.”
They did ninety-four covers that night. She has no memory of any of them.
Except one, which she never could lose.
At about nine o’clock a family came in off a boat, summer people, early, the first of that year — a man and a woman in their fifties and a daughter of about twenty-five — and the daughter asked whether the building had always been a restaurant.
And Talia stood at their table with a towel over her shoulder and told them about her great-grandfather and the four generations and the eight years it was shut, the way she had told it forty times that spring and would tell it four hundred times more, and she heard her own voice do it perfectly while a woman in an oatmeal coat stood in the middle of her chest saying he was on to the next thing before I was out of the doorway.
The daughter said it was the best story she’d heard all year.
Talia said thank you and asked if they wanted the whitefish.
* * *
Bailey came at eleven with two beers and put one on the pass and took one look at her and put both beers back in the bag.
“Okay,” she said. “Sit down.”
“I’m fine.”
“Talia.”
She sat down on an upturned crate in her own kitchen with her boots off and told it, all of it, in order, in about three minutes, because she had been running it on a loop since twenty past three and it had worn a groove.
Bailey listened without saying a word, which was not a thing Bailey did.
At the end she said: “She came to break it.”
Talia nodded.
“She sat in Chicago or wherever and worked out the single most damaging true thing she had, and she drove four miles and handed it to you in your own building, and then she did the other one on the way out so you’d have two.”
“I know that, Bailey.”
“Then say the next part.”
Talia put her head back against the wall.
“It’s still true,” she said.
Bailey didn’t answer.
“That’s the thing. It’s a horrible woman doing a horrible thing on purpose and every word of it is true, and I can’t put it down, because he did say okay, and he did ask about the numbers, and there is no version of this where I get to un-know that.
” Her voice came apart in the middle and she let it.
“I’ve had three months of him in a truck at five in the morning.
Three months. And I was starting to — Bailey, I was this close. ”
“I know you were.”
“I had his shirt in my hand on the back stairs.”
“I know,” Bailey said. “Everybody in this county knows.”
Talia laughed, horribly, once.
Then she stopped laughing and sat on a crate in a kitchen that was hers, in a building that was hers, with forty dollars of leeks in front of her and a full book for Saturday, and understood that she had spent three months letting a door come open an inch at a time and that she was going to have to go back and shut it, and that she did not want to, and that she was going to anyway.
“I’m done,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I mean it this time.”
“I know you do,” Bailey said. “That’s what worries me.”