24. Connor
CONNOR
“Stay,” she says.
That’s it. One word, and she steps back out of the doorway to let me in, and I have to stand there for a second on the step and make my legs work.
The lobby’s dark except for a lamp on the reception counter that isn’t nearly big enough for the room.
There’s dust sheeting over the stair rail and a pile of tools in the corner and the smell of old plaster and new sawdust, and somewhere back in the building a radiator’s knocking.
She locks the door behind me out of habit and puts the keys in her coat pocket.
“Sit,” she says, and there’s nowhere to sit, so we both end up standing at the counter under that lamp like people at a bar.
She turns the envelope over in her hands. My name’s not on it anywhere, only hers.
“You’re shaking,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Should I be worried?”
“No.” My mouth’s completely dry. “It’s a good thing. I want to say that before you open it, because you’ve had a month of envelopes and none of them have been good.”
She looks at me for a second longer. Then she slides her thumb under the flap.
She only needs the first page.
I watch her read the top of it, and her face does nothing at all, and then she goes still in a way I’ve only seen once before, at a hospital, years ago, when a doctor came out and said her father’s name in a certain tone.
“This is a deed.”
“Yes.”
“This is the deed.”
“Yes.”
She puts it flat on the counter and smooths it with her hand like it’s going to change if she looks away, and she reads the whole first page again with her finger going along under the lines. She’s done that with every contract since I’ve known her.
“It’s my name,” she says.
“It’s only your name.”
“There’s no company on here.”
“No.”
“There’s no trust. There’s no pending review.” Her voice has gone thin. “Connor, there’s not a single condition on this thing.”
“There isn’t one anywhere in it,” I say. “You can sell it in the morning to somebody I hate. You can knock the top two floors off. You can put my mother’s name on a brick if it amuses you. It’s yours and it isn’t contingent on anything and it doesn’t come back to me if this goes badly.”
She stares down at it. The lamp’s making a warm ring on the counter and her hands are inside it and the rest of her isn’t.
“The holding company owns this building.”
“The holding company owned this building. I bought it back.”
“They wouldn’t sell.”
“They would to a family member paying above the assessment for a property they’d written down as a problem.
” My chest is going. “They didn’t know it was for you.
Nobody asked. The lawyer who did it doesn’t work for the family and never has, and the whole thing went through inside a fortnight because it turns out nobody in that office actually cares what happens to Rowan Street. ”
“With what money?”
And there it is. She’s got there faster than I thought she would, and she looks up at me with her chin coming around, and I know exactly what she’s about to say because I handed her the piece myself on a cold step outside Marisol’s.
“You told me there was one account that was genuinely yours,” she says. “You told me you’d already spent most of what was in it and you weren’t going to talk about it.”
“I know.”
“Connor.”
“It was that.” I make myself hold her eyes. “It was everything in it except what I need to live for a while. It’s the only money I’ve ever had that came from a thing I did instead of a name I was born with, and I’ve been sitting on it since I was thirty because I never needed it for anything.”
Her face comes apart.
Not loudly. She puts her hand flat over her mouth and shuts her eyes and breathes through her nose, once, twice, and her shoulders go, and I stand there on the other side of a counter with my hands at my sides and don’t touch her, because I haven’t been given anything that says I can.
“Sorry,” she says, from behind her hand.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not crying about the building.”
“I know.”
Then she gets it back. I watch her do it, the way she pulls herself in, and she takes her hand down and wipes under her eyes with the side of her thumb and looks straight at me.
“How long have you had this?”
Here we go.
“The purchase closed the week after the article ran,” I say. “The one with the photographs. The deed’s dated a few days after that. I’ve had it in my coat since.”
She goes very quiet.
“The Genevieve week.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve had that in your pocket since the Genevieve week.”
“Yes.”
She looks down at the counter, and then up at the dark ceiling of her grandmother’s lobby, and when she speaks her voice isn’t angry. That’s what guts me. She isn’t shouting at all. She’s asking me a fair question in a perfectly reasonable voice, and it’s so much worse than being shouted at.
“Do you know what that week was like for me?”
“Some of it.”
“That was the week I sat in a chair and read a nice woman explaining to a newspaper that she’d never wanted to marry you, and it was the kindest thing anybody with your name had done for me in a month.
A stranger, Connor.” Her hand goes flat on the deed.
“That was the week the foundation took me off the committee. That was the week I crossed Kingsley off a lease with a pen because it was the only thing in my life I could actually change.”
“I know.”
“I went to bed that week thinking not one person in that entire family had done a single decent thing.” She taps the paper. “And this was in your coat. In your coat, Connor, in the same room as me twice.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
There are plenty of answers to that. All of them true, and every one of them a door out of the room.
I don’t take any of them.
“Because I wanted to give it to you at the right moment,” I say. “Some good day, when the building was—when you weren’t—” The sentence dies on me. I try another one. “There was never going to be a right moment. I knew that inside a week. I kept it anyway.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No. That’s the excuse.” My throat’s closing and I push through it.
“The answer’s worse. I didn’t give it to you that week because that week was ugly.
If I’d brought this into the middle of it, you’d have asked me things.
Where the money came from. What my mother said, whether I’d told anyone at all, and the honest answers were all bad, and you’d have looked at me while I gave them.
So I kept it in my coat and I told myself?—”
I stop. My hands are doing nothing useful at the ends of my arms.
“I chose the calm,” I say. “Again.”
The radiator knocks somewhere at the back of the building.
“Smaller this time. Quieter. With a present in it, so it wouldn’t look like the ballroom.
But it’s the ballroom. I saw a version of that week where I didn’t have to sit in the ugly part with you, and I went toward it, and I’d have kept going toward it if you hadn’t—” That one dies too.
“I’m still doing it. That’s all I know how to say. ”
She’s not moving at all.
“Thank you,” she says.
“For what?”
“For not making that sound better than it is.” She folds the deed along its own crease. “You’d have gotten away with it, you know. If you’d said you were waiting for the paperwork, or for the survey, I’d have taken it.”
“That’s why I didn’t.”
She puts the pages back in the envelope and holds it against her chest with both arms, and for a while neither of us says anything at all.
“The Jubilee,” I say, and her eyes come up. “I want to ask you something about it, and you can tell me to go home.”
“Say it.”
So I say it.
“I want to play the whole take at the Jubilee. The recording, from the top, in front of the same people who were in that ballroom, on the same kind of screen, uncut.” My heart’s absolutely slamming.
“The joke. Them laughing. And then the turn, and everything you said after it, all the way to the end. Nobody edits a second of it.”
She doesn’t answer straight away. She turns and looks out through the front glass at the wet street, and I make myself shut up and let her.
“They’d hear all of it,” she says.
“All of it.”
“Including the part where I sound like a girl who has no idea what’s coming.”
“Yes.”
“That’s the part I hate, Connor. Not the joke. Everybody’s made that joke. It’s the rest of it, me sitting there in a robe being so sure about you, and a whole ballroom getting to watch a woman be that sure when every one of them knows how it turned out.”
I have to breathe before I can answer that.
“Then we don’t play it,” I say. “That’s what I came here to say.
It’s your voice. It’s a thing you said out loud when you were twenty-six, before any of this, and it belongs to you.
” I put my hand on the counter because it wants to do something.
“And I need you to believe the next part. I’ve already decided what I’m doing at that party.
I’m saying it out loud with my mother sitting there whether there’s anything on the screen behind me or not, and your answer doesn’t change any of that.
So there’s no version where you’re deciding what happens to me.
You’re only deciding what happens to your own voice. ”
She turns around.
“You worked that sentence out in advance.”
“Every word. In the car.”
“It shows.” But her shoulders have come down an inch. “I need to think about it.”
“Take as long as you want.”
“That’s not true, there’s a date.”
“Then take all of it up to the date,” I say. “And if the answer’s no, you don’t have to give me a reason, and I’ll never bring it up again, and I’d like you to believe that.”
“I do believe it,” she says, and she sounds surprised about it.
“There’s one more,” I say.
“God.”
“It’s the last one.”
“They’re never the last one.” She sets the envelope down. “Go on.”
My mouth’s gone dry again, so I just start.
“Let me keep showing up.”
“Meaning what.”
“Meaning what I did last night. Boxes, or a plumber, or driving to Saugatuck at six in the morning because your car’s making a noise.
” My hands have gone cold. “Whatever you decide about us. If you tell me in January that we’re done, I’d still like to be a person who carries things up your stairs.
And if you choose him, I’d like it to still be true then. ”
Her head comes up at that.
“You know about that.”
“I know he’s a good man and I know he looks at you like a man deciding something.” I have never wanted so badly to be somewhere else. “I’m not asking you not to. I’d be asking you to be lonely so I feel better, and I’ve asked you for enough.”
She’s quiet for a long moment.
“Say what you actually want, Connor. Not the noble version.”
The backs of my knees go loose and the heat comes up my neck all at once. She can still do that to me, across a counter, after everything.
“All right.” My voice isn’t steady and I let it not be. “I want to know which one this is. Whether you want me here because I’m useful and I’m what’s available, or whether you want me here.”
“Both,” she says. “Don’t make me say it twice.”
The room goes very strange. The lamp, the dust sheet, the knocking radiator, all of it at once, and my eyes are stinging and I have absolutely no idea what to do with my face.
“Okay,” I manage.
“Don’t do anything with that,” she says. “I mean it. Nothing’s decided. I’ve got a building and a job and a lawyer and I’m not folding any of that up because you said a good sentence in a lobby.”
“I know.”
“Okay.”
“I should go,” I say. “You’ve been up since five.”
“Yes.”
I get my coat straight and I walk to the front door and put my hand on the handle.
It’s the original brass, worn down in the middle where a hundred years of hands have gone, and it’s cold, and it turns halfway and sticks.
And I stand there with it half-turned.
Because there’s the letter from my mother’s lawyers sitting on a hall table in a house I’m about to lose, and there’s a name on an archive card, and there’s my grandfather standing up out of a chair in front of a fire, and there’s a man in this city who has cancelled a dinner we’ve had every month since I was twenty-eight.
She’s going to hear all of it. From somebody. In a car, or from Walter, or from a woman at a party who assumes she already knows.
I take my hand off the handle and turn around.
“There’s more,” I say.
She’s still at the counter with her arms folded.
“More.”
“A lot more, and none of it’s good, and you should hear all of it tonight. From me.” I come back into the light. “So you’re never piecing it together secondhand again.”