Chapter 1 #3
“Amelia.” Her voice was low and friendly. She didn’t look drunk at all, up close. “Zane keeps the good bourbon in his study. Not the stuff he gives everyone. Top shelf, left side.” She smiled her listener’s smile. “And you really should see the wall. Everyone has.”
Then she went back to Lucas at the door, and they were gone.
* * *
Amelia stood by the pool for a while.
She finished the wine. She talked to a woman about a kitchen remodel and did not hear a word of it. She watched the lights move on the water and told herself, again, that none of this was anything.
She was not sure why she went to the study. Maybe it was the bourbon. Maybe she just wanted one room without eighty people in it. Maybe it was the way Heather had said everyone has, easy and kind, as if she were telling Amelia where the bathroom was.
The study was down a hall at the back of the house, past the powder room and a closet full of golf bags.
The door was half open. Inside it was dark wood and green leather and the cold of an air conditioner turned up too high.
There was a desk nobody worked at. There was a bar cart with crystal decanters.
The party noise came through the wall as a low hum, with laughter rising out of it now and then.
She found the bourbon, top shelf, left side. She poured two fingers into a heavy glass. Then she turned around and looked at the wall.
It was the kind of wall men like Zane have. Framed jerseys. A signed baseball in a glass box. A photo of Zane shaking hands with a governor. A photo of Zane and Lucas at twenty, sunburned on a boat, holding up a fish. Diplomas. A painting of a dog.
In the middle of all of it, at eye level, was a small frame with a dollar bill in it.
It was the kind of thing a business hangs by the register. The first dollar. She almost looked past it. Then she saw that the bill was covered in writing, in blue ink, in a small, round hand that ran across the white border and over the face of George Washington and down the other side.
She stepped closer.
She read it once, and it was a joke. It was a rich men’s joke about somebody else, and she felt the small tired distaste she always felt at jokes like that.
L.F. bets Z.K. one dollar. Inside eighteen months L. marries the cleaner on 28, and Maureen seats her at the family table at Christmas.
Under that, two signatures. Lucas Fletcher. Zane Kramer. And a date in September, six years ago.
She read it a second time.
The cleaner on 28.
There had been one cleaner on the twenty-eighth floor. For two years there had been exactly one. She had pushed the cart. She had wiped the glass table. She had run the vacuum around his feet while he read, and he had never looked up.
Until one night in September, a few days after his father’s funeral, when he had.
She read it a third time, and this time she only read the signature.
She knew that signature. She had watched him write it on five years of birthday cards.
On the card that came with the flowers after their first real fight.
On the card taped to the gift box on their first anniversary, which said For the only person who has ever told me the truth, in that same slanting hand, with that same long tail on the F.
Lucas Fletcher.
Behind the wall, the party laughed at something. A big laugh, a whole room of it. Then it faded back to the hum.
Amelia set the bourbon down on the desk. She had not drunk any. Her hand was perfectly steady. She noticed that from a distance, the way you notice the weather in another city. Something was coming apart slowly, one thread at a time.
The date was September. Six years ago. He had asked her name a few days later.
He had asked her name because of this.
She thought of Zane’s arms around her an hour ago. Who would have bet on that? She thought of the men behind him laughing. She thought of the two women at the bar who had looked at her and looked away, and of Denise drying her hands, and of Heather’s easy voice. Everyone has.
Everyone had.
And then she thought of Maureen.
The first Christmas. Four months married.
The big house on West Paces full of candles and cousins, and Amelia in a borrowed-feeling dress that was actually hers, terrified of the forks.
Maureen had come across the room to her and put a small cool hand on her shoulder and said, You’ll sit by me, dear.
And she had steered Amelia to the family table, to the chair at her own right hand, in front of everyone.
Amelia had cried in the car afterward. Happy crying. She had told Lucas it was the first time she ever felt like his mother saw her.
Lucas had been quiet on the drive home. She had thought he was moved.
She counted.
That first Christmas. The next one, when Maureen gave her a scarf. The one after that, the ice storm. The one after that. Last year.
Five. She had sat at that table five times.
Amelia reached up with both hands. The frame was lighter than she expected. It came off its nail with a small scrape, and the wall behind it was a slightly brighter rectangle of paint, where the sun had not reached in six years.