Chapter 12
Cheryl Lassiter came into the Tierney House on the thirteenth of July at four in the afternoon, and she was shaking.
Talia had never seen it. In nine years she had seen that woman stand through a funeral, a board fight, and a Christmas her son did not come to, and she had never once seen Cheryl Lassiter’s hands do anything but exactly what she told them.
“I need to sit down,” Cheryl said.
Talia got her into the chair by the window and got her a glass of water and did not ask, because you don’t.
Cheryl drank about half of it.
“Did you know?” she said.
“Know what?”
“Look at my face and tell me whether you knew.”
“Cheryl, I don’t know what you’re—”
“He gave away the house.”
* * *
The room did something.
Later Talia could not reconstruct the order of the next ten minutes properly. She remembers the water glass. She remembers Renata coming halfway out of the kitchen and going back in. She remembers Cheryl’s wedding ring going round and round on a finger it was too loose for.
“Say that again.”
“The house on the lake. Your house. My house.” Cheryl’s voice was absolutely level and absolutely wrong.
“He has given it to the county. In perpetuity — that’s the phrase, I made the woman read it to me twice.
It’s to be a warming shelter. There’s to be a kitchen in it and bunks in the north bedrooms and it cannot be undone, not by him, not by me, not by a court. ”
“When.”
“The last Tuesday in June.”
“That’s —” Talia did the arithmetic and it came out wrong and she did it again. “That’s twelve days ago.”
“Thirteen, by my count,” Cheryl said. “I found out this morning. From Georgia Pelkey, in the Mercantile, who assumed I knew, because why on earth would a man not tell his own mother.”
She put the glass down. It rang on the table.
“There’s no name on it,” she said. “He had it written in that the name cannot appear. Not on the building, not on a sign, not in any paper that so much as refers to it. I lived in that house for forty years, Talia. I brought him home to it. His father died in the room over the porch.”
* * *
Talia sat down across from her because her legs had stopped agreeing to the alternative.
“Did he tell you why?”
“He hasn’t told me anything.” Cheryl’s chin came up and stayed there.
“That is the reason I am shaking and not the house. I could have borne the house. He decided a thing about my life and did not tell me, and I have had exactly this done to me by Lassiter men for forty-seven years, and I sat in a hotel room in February and swore I was finished sitting quietly about it.”
“Forty-seven?”
“I was married at twenty-three. I said forty to you on the telephone in February because I was rounding and because it sounded better.” Cheryl made a small, terrible sound that was almost a laugh. “Forty-seven. You round when it’s that long.”
Talia reached across the table and took her mother-in-law’s hand, which she had never done in nine years, and Cheryl let her, which she would not have in any other week.
“I told you not to go back to him,” Cheryl said.
“You did.”
“I meant it. I still mean it.” Her fingers tightened.
“But I have been sitting in the car outside this building for twenty minutes because I could not work out whether I was coming in here to warn you or to tell you what my son did, and I have decided I owe you the second thing even though I would rather do the first.”
“Cheryl—”
“He gave away the only thing that was ever going to make him look like his father,” she said, “and he did it where nobody could see, and he is going to get absolutely nothing for it, and if that isn’t the first unselfish act of his entire life then I have raised a stranger.”
* * *
She left at half past five. She would not stay for dinner and she would not be driven.
Talia stood at the front window and watched the car go up the street, and then she went into the kitchen and stood in the middle of it with her hands over her mouth.
Renata said, “Chef—”
“Don’t,” Talia said, into her own fingers. “Don’t, honey. Give me a minute.”
They did ninety-one that night. She worked the pass. She talked to tables. She sent back a plate of Marilyn’s that was perfectly fine, and apologized for it in front of two cooks, which she had never done in her life.
And the whole night, under everything, one sentence kept going around in her like a stone in a dryer.
Thirteen days.
He had come to the pass in March at five in the morning and sat at a bad table.
He had held a ladder. He had brought coffee and said nothing about it.
He had stood in the street and let her take him apart over a roof and had not once said I am driving up that hill four nights a week.
He had gutted a house beside her for sixteen days.
And then he had given the house away — nine rooms, the boathouse, the water, his father’s room, the whole visible weight of what the name meant on this shore — and gone home and not told anybody, and let thirteen days go by, and would have let a hundred go by, because the only way it counted was if she never found out.
That was not a gesture. She had made a study of his gestures that spring; she could have taught a class on them.
That was a man rebuilding himself where no one was looking, on the assumption that he had already lost.
* * *
She counted the drawer at midnight and did not see any of the numbers.
At half past twelve she took her apron off, hung it on the hook by the service door, walked out the front of her own building and up the street to where his truck was parked, which is where it had been parked every night for five months.
He was in it. Of course he was in it.
He saw her coming and got out fast enough to bang his elbow on the doorframe.
“Is something wrong? Is it—”
“Your mother came today.”
He went very still.
“Ah,” he said.
“Thirteen days, Seth.”
“Talia—”
“Thirteen days, and I had to hear it from a seventy-year-old woman shaking in a chair in my dining room because Georgia Pelkey told her in a grocery store.”
“I know. I should have told her. That’s — I got that wrong, and I knew I was getting it wrong while I was doing it, and I’ve been trying to work out how to—”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He stopped.
The street was empty. There was one light on over the Mercantile and the harbor was making its noise and somewhere out past the point a boat was going somewhere.
“Because then it’s a gesture,” he said.
“It’s a house.”
“It’s nine rooms and fourteen acres and it’s the last thing I had that was worth anything to anybody out here, and if I’d walked in there and told you about it, you’d have been right to send it back the way you sent the mattress back.
” He had his hat in his hands. He had been in a truck for five months and he still had his hat in his hands.
“I’ve done that to you. I did it at the township and you told me what it cost you, and you were right, and I’ve thought about it every day since.
The only way that house means anything at all is if it’s just — done. If it’s not aimed at you.”
“And if I never found out?”
“Then I’d have given the county a building,” he said. “Which they need.”
* * *
She stood there in the middle of the street.
And what she felt was not softening. She has explained it badly to two people since and both of them got it wrong.
It was tiredness. It was the specific exhaustion of holding a door shut for five months with your shoulder and discovering that the thing on the other side of it has sat down and stopped pushing.
She had been braced. Every day since February she had been braced — against the flowers, against the roof, against the township, against the grand thing he was surely going to do next, and she had built the whole of her recovery out of being a woman who could not be bought.
And he had gone and done the biggest thing he would ever do and hidden it from her, and there was nothing to brace against, and her shoulder came off the door and she nearly fell over.
“Sixty nights,” she said.
He blinked.
“What?”
“Walt Ostrom. Ruthie. The Pelkeys.” Her voice was doing something she had no control over. “Every night under thirty-two since February. Is your heat on. Have you got somebody coming.”
His face did something she had not seen on it in years.
“Who told you?”
“Walt, in June, waiting for a fish sandwich. He thought I knew.” She put her hand up before he could talk. “Don’t. I’m not — Seth, I’m not saying this to be kind to you. I’m saying it because I’ve been carrying it for a month and it’s too heavy and I want it out of my hands.”
“Okay.”
“That question.” She was crying, which she had not done in front of him in years, and she did not stop or apologize for it.
“That’s the question. That’s the four seconds.
You’ve been driving up that hill sixty times to ask three old people the thing nobody asked about me, and you’ve never said a word about it to a living soul. ”
“It’s not a trade,” he said. “Talia. It doesn’t buy anything, I know that, I’m not—”
“I know it doesn’t.”
“Then what—”
“I don’t know what,” she said. “I genuinely do not know what. I’ve been standing at a window watching your truck go up a hill and I don’t know what I’m doing.”
* * *
She kissed him in the middle of the street outside the Mercantile at one in the morning with the whole village asleep around them.
She did it. She took two steps and put both hands on his face and did it, and he made a sound against her mouth like a man going under, and his hat hit the ground, and for about four seconds he did not touch her at all because he did not believe it.
Then he did.
* * *
They got up the back stairs of her own building somehow, past the service door, past the hook where the apron was, and the hall was dark and the rooms were full — three of the four, summer people, asleep — so they went into the front room, her father’s room, with the window open onto the street and the curtain going.
She pushed the door shut with her foot and did not turn on the light.
“Talia.” His voice was wrecked. “Tell me what this is.”