25. Connor
CONNOR
She doesn’t say anything for a second. She looks at me standing there in the middle of her lobby with my coat on, and then she reaches over and pushes the lamp a little further along the counter so it takes in both of us.
“Sit down,” she says. “There’s a crate.”
There is a crate. I sit on it, lower than her by a head, and the cold of it comes straight up through my coat, and she leans back against the counter with her arms folded and her ankles crossed and waits.
“Start wherever,” she says.
So I start with my mother.
The roses, the corridor, Sunday in front of the fire. She’s had the shape of it since the stoop—what I give her now are the dates, and the name of the man on the board, and the deadline, and I don’t cushion any of it, because cushioning is what got us here.
Lena listens to all of it without moving.
“The letter’s come?” she says.
“Tuesday.”
“Have you read it?”
“Twice.”
“Is it as bad as she said?”
“It’s worse in the way lawyers make things worse, and exactly as bad in every way that counts.”
She nods slowly, and that’s all. She doesn’t gasp and she doesn’t tell me she’s sorry, and I’m so grateful for it I have to look at the floorboards for a second.
Then Walter.
I give her the property manager calls—she knows those. The reporters in the first week, which she’d guessed. The foundation, which I told her weeks ago and which still makes my face hot.
And then I give her the part she doesn’t have.
“He’s moved past hotels,” I say. “He’s been ringing your world now. Design.”
Her arms come uncrossed.
“Say that again.”
“He rang a preservation trust that had you on a shortlist for something in the spring. He rang somebody at a magazine that had been talking to Erin about running the Bennett House renovation when it’s done.
And he rang the practice.” I make myself say the whole of it.
“Andrew’s practice. He asked a partner there whether they were comfortable with the exposure, given the situation with the family. ”
She goes absolutely still. All the color comes up her neck at once, the way it does when she’s been hit somewhere she didn’t have covered.
“When?”
“Some of it in the first fortnight. The practice was more recent. I found out about the practice because the partner he spoke to used to work with a woman who plays golf with my publicist, and it came back around to me the way everything in this city does.”
“And what did the practice say?”
“They said Andrew Reid runs his own projects and they’d thank Walter not to call again.” A beat. “That’s the good part of the story. There isn’t any more good in it.”
Her hand has come up to her collarbone and she’s holding onto the neck of her sweater.
“I didn’t know about any of that.”
“No.”
“I’ve been standing in that building for a month thinking the worst thing that happened to me was people not returning calls.” Her voice isn’t steady now. “There were calls.”
“Some of them, yes. I don’t know how many and I’m never going to know.”
Then the part that’s hardest to say sitting down, so I say it fast: the paralegal who rang me by accident in October, thinking I was somebody else in the office, and read me figures off a page. My mother had somebody running the numbers on the end of my marriage days after the ballroom.
Lena’s looking at me.
“So she had somebody working it out while I was still sleeping on Marisol’s pull-out.” She says it slowly, like she’s setting something heavy down. “I was still in the dress the first morning. I hadn’t even got a toothbrush.”
“Yes.”
“And you understood then.”
“I understood then that the roses hadn’t been a mood.” I put my hands on my knees to keep them somewhere. “That’s the moment I stopped being able to tell myself a story about my own mother, and I still didn’t come and tell you, and you can add that to the list.”
The last of it is short.
“She had the raw takes pulled in September. She watched all of it. She knew what you said at the end and she chose the piece that made you look like a woman who married me for money, and she picked the night.” I look up at her. “The room, the screen, the press. She planned the exact night, Lena.”
The radiator knocks. Out on the street a car goes past with its wipers going.
“Okay,” she says.
That’s it. Okay.
She doesn’t flinch. I hand her the worst of my own family piece by piece and she takes every piece with her eyes open, and her questions are short and none of them are for reassurance.
She doesn’t ask whether I’m all right. She doesn’t ask whether my mother loves me.
She doesn’t try to make any of it smaller so the room’s easier to be in.
And I keep waiting to be let off and I don’t get let off, and somewhere in the middle of that a knot behind my breastbone lets go, and I can name it after all.
Relief. Ugly, enormous relief. All my life the truth’s been managed around me for the comfort of whoever was in the room, and tonight a woman stood in a cold lobby for an hour and let every piece of it land.
“You’ve been carrying this on your own,” she says, when I’m done.
“That was the choice, apparently.”
“It’s a stupid choice.”
“Yes.”
“You made it for six years.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t make it again,” she says, and turns away to move a bag of grout off the counter that doesn’t need moving.
Then she says, “Since it’s the night for full versions.”
I look up.
“Here’s mine.” She sets the bag down. “The mixer. You asked me how it was and I said fine. It wasn’t fine.”
“You don’t have to?—”
“I know I don’t.” She leans back on the counter. “Fiona Brennan started a smile at me and stopped it in the middle. Beth Sullivan saw me coming, touched the arm of the man she was with, and the two of them drifted to the far end of the room where the food was. Nobody made a scene. Nobody had to.”
“Fiona’s been to your house.”
“She has.” Her chin’s level and her eyes have gone too bright.
“And Louise got her phone up in front of her face and was talking into it before it had even connected, and walked out into the corridor. Louise sat on my kitchen floor the night my dad went into hospital. She brought me a phone charger because she’d thought about where I’d be sitting all day.
And she raised that phone at me like a woman warding something off. ”
The lamp goes white at the edges of my vision.
I’m on my feet. I don’t remember standing up.
“Louise Tanner,” I say.
“Don’t.”
“Her husband sits on a board with?—”
“Connor.” Sharp. “Don’t. That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you. The second I hand you a name you’ll go and do something with it, and then it’s a thing that happened between you and Louise’s husband, and the part where a woman I loved wouldn’t look at me disappears into somebody’s business.”
I stand in the middle of that lobby with nothing in my hands and nowhere to put what’s in me instead.
There’s a pulse slamming in my jaw. My ears are roaring.
I want to ring every one of those husbands before the hour’s out.
I want to walk into that function room and go down the length of the table.
I want to burn every Rolodex in this city down to the spiral—and every number in every one of them learned it from me.
That’s the part I can’t stand still under.
I went silent, so the whole town went silent.
Fiona and Beth and Louise didn’t invent the freeze-out.
They read it off me, and then they did it to her face.
It’s rage, and it’s useless, and half of it is mine to answer for.
There’s no call to make that doesn’t make it worse.
There’s nobody to lean on, no favor to pull in, nothing to buy back.
A woman raised a phone at my wife in a hotel function room, and the only correct thing I can do about it is stand here in front of her and feel it.
“I hate this,” I say.
“I know.”
“I don’t mean it politely. I mean I don’t know what to do with my hands.”
“I know,” she says again, and her mouth does something that isn’t quite steady.
And then—because it’s after midnight, and we’re both scraped down past careful—she laughs.
One ugly note of it, her hand coming up too late to catch it, and then more, until she has to grip the counter, and it jumps to me like a spark off wool.
I’m standing in a lobby full of dust sheets, furious enough to chew brick, laughing until my eyes run, and neither of us could say what’s funny, because nothing is.
She wipes her face with the heel of her hand. “God. Look at the pair of us.”
It’s the first time we’ve ever been angry at the same thing at the same time, both of us pointed outward, and after a month of aiming everything at each other it feels like putting a bag down.
She walks me to the door eventually.
“The toast,” I say.
“Still thinking.”
“That’s fine.”
“I’m not going to tell you which way I’m leaning, either.
” She gets the deadbolt back. “Because the second I say it out loud in front of you it stops being mine. You’ll start planning around it, or you’ll start being careful with me, or I’ll watch your face do something and I’ll be deciding for you instead of for me.
So you’ll get an answer and you’ll get it before the night, and until then you get nothing. ”
“Okay.”
“You’re not going to ask me again.”
“No.”
“Good.”
I put my hand on the brass, and then I don’t turn it, because there’s one thing left and I’ve been holding it since the counter.
“Lena. What you said earlier. About both.”
“Yes.”
“Is that a thing I’m allowed to come back to?”
She looks at me for a long moment. There’s grout dust on her sleeve and her hair’s coming down out of the clip and she’s the best thing I have ever seen in my life.
“Ask me again after the Jubilee,” she says.
“Why after?”
“Because right now there’s still something in it for you.
” Her voice is gentle and it doesn’t move an inch.
“You’re about to do the biggest thing you’ve ever done and I’m the reason you’re doing it.
If I answer you tonight you’ll walk into that room with my answer in your pocket, and I don’t want you doing any of it for a prize.
Do it and lose everything and come and find me after, when there’s nothing left to win by it, and then ask. ”
I stand there with my hand on the handle.
“That’s fair,” I say.
“It’s not fair, it’s just right.” And then, quieter, “I’d like you to ask.”
The door closes behind me and it doesn’t slam. She shuts it the way you shut a door on somebody you’ll see again, and the bolt goes over, and the lamp goes off inside, and I stand on Rowan Street in the cold with my breath going up.
And I feel it start. The clock. The date I asked an old man to give me and then went and told a woman I’d keep, sitting in the middle of my chest and running, the way a thing runs once you’ve wound it yourself and can’t put a hand in to stop it.
Three weeks and change, whatever the events office claws back. A ballroom. My mother in the front of it.
I get in the car and I don’t put the radio on, and I drive home to a house that isn’t going to be mine much longer.
The whole way there I keep expecting to be frightened, and it keeps not arriving.
What I’ve got instead is closer to hunger.
There’s a thing I have to say in front of a room full of people who watched my wife walk out, and every day between now and then is just a day I have to get through to arrive at it.