27. Lena
LENA
“What it costs him,” I say. “You mean what it costs you.”
Diana doesn’t move.
“I’ve had a month of people explaining my own life to me in the third person,” I say, “and I’m done being softened up in corridors. Say it straight or let me get dressed.”
“Very well.” Her chin comes up a fraction. “It costs him a great deal. It also costs me. I do not see why one of those has to be a lie for the other to be true.”
“Because you’re not standing here for him.
” My heart’s going but my voice isn’t. “If this were about Connor you’d have gone to Connor.
You came to a shop on a Saturday when you knew I’d be barefoot on a carpet with my clothes on a hook, and you offered me money in a hallway where nobody can see you do it.
That’s not a woman protecting her son. That’s a woman getting a deed out of a name she can’t control. ”
A tightening starts at the outside of her eyes and stays there.
“You’ve become very direct,” she says.
“I was always direct. You were in rooms where nobody let me finish.”
I’m not sitting down for this. I know that much. I stand there barefoot on that horrible carpet in a red dress I haven’t paid for yet, and I say it.
“You think the building’s a hold I’ve got on him.”
“I think it functions as one whether you intend it to or not.”
“Then you’ve never understood what that place is.
” My hands are shaking, so I put them behind me and hold onto the wall.
“My grandmother stood behind that desk at four in the morning in her housecoat. She kept that hotel through a recession and a fire and a husband who left. She gave a girl with no shoes a room one January and never took a cent for it. And when she died, a man in an office wrote her whole life off as a bad roof on the wrong street and put a sheet over her things.”
I have to stop there, because my voice has started to go and I will not cry in front of this woman. I breathe until it’s mine again.
“And then I married your son and let all of it go. Because I was told, gently, over and over, by people exactly like you, that it wasn’t the kind of thing our family concerned itself with.”
“Lena—”
“I’m not finished.”
She goes quiet. That has never once in my life happened, and I’m too scared to enjoy it—under the dress my whole body is one held breath, because nobody talks to Diana Kingsley like this, and I’m doing it barefoot with a wall holding me up.
“That deed is the only thing on this earth with my name on it and nothing else,” I say.
“Not a joint account. Not a card with somebody’s company behind it.
Not a house I lived in for six years that I couldn’t have put a nail in without a phone call.
” The wall is cold under my palms. “Mine. One name. No conditions. So no, I won’t hand it to you at any price, and it isn’t a negotiating position, because you’re offering me money for the one thing I have that money is the opposite of. ”
The corridor’s very quiet. Somewhere out in the shop a hanger goes along a rail.
“And it isn’t leverage on him. I don’t want anything from Connor, and he knows that better than anybody alive. He gave me that building understanding that I might never speak to him again, and you can’t get your head around it, and I’ve worked out why.”
“Have you.”
“Yes.”
“Do go on,” Diana says.
And I do. God help me, I do, standing in a dressing-room corridor with my toes going numb.
“You’ve been carrying that whole family on your own back since you were young, and nobody has ever thanked you for it. Not once. You said so yourself, in front of your father, in a room I wasn’t even in—and it still reached me, because in that family everything does.”
Her face has stopped doing anything at all. Somehow that’s worse than being interrupted.
“The name, the tables, the calls, the smiling at people you can’t stand. You do all of it, and nobody in that house even sees it, and nothing has ever come back to you but more of it.”
She doesn’t move. My heart is slamming so hard now I can hear it over my own voice.
“And then your son stood up and said he’d rather have nothing.
” My throat closes on it, and I finish it anyway, quieter.
“That’s the part you can’t forgive. It was never me at all.
Because if he can walk out of all of it and still be a person, then what have you been doing since you were thirty-four? ”
She doesn’t answer.
“You’d have been magnificent at something else.
” The worst part is that I mean it. “I’ve watched you run rooms full of men who thought they were running them.
Instead you spent your life keeping a name usable, and now your son would rather be broke than keep it, and there isn’t a number in the world that fixes that. ”
The corridor lights buzz.
“We’re done here,” I say. “The building’s not for sale. Not today, not in the spring, not ever, and if you send a lawyer he’ll get the same sentence with fewer words in it.”
Diana stands there.
Then she adjusts the bag on her arm and looks at me once more, the whole length of me, the red dress and the bare feet, and she says, “That dress is a mistake.”
“I know,” I say. “That’s why I’m buying it.”
And she goes. Down the corridor and out through the shop, past the rails, past Marisol coming back with a shoebox under her arm, and she doesn’t turn around and she doesn’t say goodbye.
I stand there shaking until the front door has properly shut.
My legs are water. My face is burning. I want to sit down on this horrible carpet and howl, and I don’t, because the shop girl is watching.
Marisol looks at the door. Then at me.
“Was that?—”
“Yes.”
“In here?”
“In here.”
Marisol puts the shoebox down on a chair very slowly.
“Okay,” she says. “So we’re getting the shoes too.”
On Tuesday morning a car pulls up outside Bennett House and Ambrose Kingsley gets out of it.
I’m halfway down the stairs with a level in my hand and I stop dead on the landing, because it takes my brain a moment to accept what it’s seeing.
There’s a nurse. There’s Angela with a folder she clearly hasn’t been allowed to open.
There’s a wheelchair coming out of the back that he is plainly not going to sit in, and there is my husband’s grandfather standing on Rowan Street in a dark wool coat, with a line under his nose and a portable machine on a strap over his shoulder, looking up at the front of my grandmother’s hotel.
I get down those stairs fast.
“You are not supposed to be out.”
“I’m eighty-five. I’m not supposed to be anything.”
“Does Connor know?”
“Nobody knows.” A pull off the machine. “Angela knows. Angela’s in a great deal of trouble.” Angela, behind him, does not appear to be in any trouble whatsoever. “Are you letting me in? Or does this hotel keep people on the pavement?”
So I let him in.
He comes through that door and stops in the middle of my dusty lobby and just stands there, taking it in.
The counter. The stair. The plywood on the sawhorses with the drawings weighted down under a level and a coffee cup.
The dust sheets, the smell of plaster, the light coming in low off the street.
“Ah,” he says.
That’s all. Just that.
“Do you want to sit down?”
“In a minute.” He goes over to the reception desk and puts his hand flat on the top of it, and his hand isn’t steady, and he leaves it there. “This is oak.”
“It’s original.”
“Of course it is.” He knocks it once with his knuckle. “Nobody would put this in now. You couldn’t get a board like it.”
Then he lets the nurse bring the chair over and he sits down in it, in the middle of the lobby, facing the desk, and gets his breath back with his eyes closed. It takes a while. The machine hisses and ticks, and I stand there and don’t fuss at him, because fussing would finish him off entirely.
“Right,” he says at last. “I’ve come to say a thing. Then I’ll go and be shouted at by a woman with a blood pressure cuff.”
“Okay.”
“My grandson wants to play your voice at my party.” His eyes open. “I’ve been told about it. I’ve thought about—” The breath runs out, and he waits for the machine to hand it back. “Very little else.”
“Ambrose—”
“The answer is yours.” A breath. “That’s what I came to say. In your building. Not on a telephone.” Another. “I’ve noticed people in my family have a habit of telling you things in cars.”
My throat closes.
“It’s my anniversary,” he says. “My name on the invitation. My room. My fifty years.” The machine ticks.
“None of it gives me a vote. It’s your voice.
You said it in a bathrobe on a hotel bed, and nobody asked—” He stops, starts again.
“Nobody has asked your permission for anything that’s happened to it since. ”
“And if I say no?”
“Then we have a party.” Breath. “My grandson stands up and says his piece with nothing behind him, and I sit in the front and I back him, and I back you.” Breath.
“And not one person in that room hears a word from me about what should have been on that screen.” He lifts a hand off the arm of the chair and lets it drop.
“And if you say yes, I’m in the front for that too.
I’ll look at every face in the room while it plays.
” The ghost of a smile. “And I will enjoy myself.”
I have to turn away and look at the drawings for a minute.
“Why are you being like this?”
“Because I’m dying.” He says it perfectly evenly.
“And I’ve stopped being able to see the point of the other thing.
” The machine ticks again. “I ran that company by deciding what was best for people and telling them afterward. I did it to my daughter. Look what I got.” Breath.
“I did it to my grandson. Look at him.” Another. “I’m not doing it to you.”
He looks at me then, properly, the way he looked at the desk.
“You’re the only one of us who’s come out of this month with any dignity. Somebody ought to say that to your face.”
I sit down on the bottom stair with my elbows on my knees because my legs have gone.
“Wear the dress,” he says.
“I bought it.”
“Is it hideous?”
“It’s red.”
Ambrose Kingsley laughs. The laugh turns into a cough, and the cough brings the nurse at a pace I don’t like, and then he lets them take him out to the car and he doesn’t look back at me once. I stand in my doorway on Rowan Street and watch that car until it turns.
I call Connor that evening, after the plasterer’s gone and the light’s gone with him.
He answers on the first ring, and he doesn’t say hello.
“Lena.”
“I’ve got your answer.”
There’s a sound like he’s put his hand over something.
“Okay,” he says.
And it comes up through me before I can get a word of it out—heat rolling up under my breastbone, my pulse loud in my wrists, the whole month at once, the ballroom and the pull-out sofa and my own laugh cut off a tape and played in strangers’ kitchens.
I put my hand flat on the oak until the wood is the steadiest thing in the room.
When I speak, my voice comes out level, and I don’t know how.
“Play it,” I say. “All of it. From the top, the joke, them laughing, the turn, every word after. Nobody cuts a frame of it and nobody warns anybody first.”
“You’re sure.”
“I’m not finished.” My heart’s absolutely going.
“Then give them the rest of the tape. Not just the room. Everyone who saw the clip sees the turn, however you do it, whoever you have to hand it to. If it’s going out at all it goes out whole, because the piece has had a month on its own and I’m not spending the rest of my life being a woman with a good explanation. ”
The line’s quiet.
“Say something,” I say.
“I’m trying to.”
“Don’t cry on me, Connor, I’ll go.”
“I’m not.” He’s not far off it. “Okay. All of it. In the room and then out of the room.”
“That’s the answer.”
“That’s the answer,” he says, like he’s putting it somewhere safe.
And we say a few more things about nothing and then we hang up, because if we’d stayed on any longer one of us would have started on the other subject.
I stand in the dark lobby for a long time afterward with my phone face-down on the counter.
Because there’s the decision I just made, hard and finished and mine to live with, and underneath it there’s another one. One nobody has asked me for. One I haven’t said out loud to a single living person.
Not to Marisol, who’d have opinions. Not to Lidia, who’d be brisk about it. Not to Ambrose in a wheelchair in my own lobby, and not to Andrew in a parking lot, and not to Connor Kingsley on a telephone in the evening with his voice coming apart.
It’s been down there for weeks. I can feel the shape of it under everything, pressing up like a floorboard that’s lifted and hasn’t yet been nailed.
And I’m not saying it until after that room, because the minute I say it, it stops being mine.