Chapter 7
The first one dropped out on Monday.
So sorry, Amelia. Family thing at Sea Island that weekend, can’t get out of it. You’ll do wonderfully without me! That was Sloane. Amelia read it at her desk and felt nothing much. She’d expected Sloane.
On Tuesday it was Carl Benning, who had been on the selection committee for three years and had never read more than a dozen files. His assistant sent the email. Mr. Benning regrets that his schedule no longer permits.
On Wednesday it was two more. A woman from the museum board whose horse was sick. A man from a bank who wrote a long careful paragraph about stepping back, given everything, out of respect for the family’s privacy at this difficult time.
By Thursday there was nobody left.
“Six people,” Amelia said. She was standing in Patrice’s office with her phone in her hand. “Six. Every single volunteer. Not one of them said it, but they all said it.”
“Nobody wants to sit in a room with you,” Patrice said. “Or with him. Or with the two of you, God forbid, in case they have to watch.” She took her glasses off and rubbed her eyes. “They’d rather miss the whole thing than be in the room where something happens.”
“So I’ll do it alone.”
“Three hundred files. Forty places. Offers have to go out Monday morning, or these kids miss the early deadlines and lose the guarantee for this year.” Patrice looked at her. “You cannot read three hundred files alone in three days, Amelia. Not well. And you won’t do it badly. I know you.”
“Then who?”
Patrice didn’t say anything.
Amelia understood. It went through her, cold and then hot.
“No.”
“He’s the only one who said yes,” Patrice said.
“I called him Wednesday night. I didn’t tell him the others had dropped.
I just asked if he’d sit on the committee this year, since the fund has his name—since it’s his gift.
He said yes before I finished the sentence.
Then he said, only if she agrees. If she says no, I’m not coming. ”
Amelia looked out the window at the parking deck across the street.
“Forty kids,” Patrice said quietly. “They don’t know about any of this. They just want to go to college.”
* * *
He came at eight on Friday morning, in jeans.
That was the first thing. She had never seen him in jeans on a weekday in five years.
They were dark and new-looking and he wore them with a plain white shirt, sleeves rolled, and he looked wrong in them, the way he always looked wrong in anything casual.
Like a painting of a man at a barbecue. She used to tease him about it.
She used to say he looked like he was wearing a costume of a normal person.
She did not say it now.
“Morning,” he said from the doorway of the big conference room.
“Morning.”
The files were already on the long table, three hundred of them, in stacks by region. She had been there since six. She had coffee in a paper cup and her hair up and a pen behind her ear.
He looked at the stacks. Then he looked at her, carefully, like a man walking onto ice.
“Tell me how you want to do this,” he said. “I’ll do it your way.”
So she told him.
She told him the scoring sheet and the three questions she cared about most. She told him what to look for in the essays, and what to ignore in the grades, and which kinds of letters from teachers meant something and which kinds were form letters with a name typed in.
She told him the rule that every file got read by two people, and if the two scores were more than five points apart, it went in a third pile, and they fought about it later.
He listened to all of it without one question. When she was done he nodded and pulled out a chair on the far side of the table from her, as far away as the table allowed, and sat down.
Then, without either of them saying a word, he took the stacks from the south Georgia counties and the coast, and left her the city and the mountains.
She watched him do it.
It was how they had always done it. Every time they’d ever split anything, a room to clean, a party to work, a list of Christmas cards. He took the half with more driving in it. She took the half with more people. They had never talked about it. It was just how their hands moved.
She looked down at her files before he could see her face.
* * *
They read.
The room was quiet except for the pages turning and the old building ticking in the heat.
Somebody’s car alarm went off in the deck across the street and stopped.
At ten she got up for more coffee and came back and found a fresh cup on her side of the table.
Black, one sugar. She hadn’t seen him leave the room.
She didn’t say thank you. She drank it.
At noon Tasha brought sandwiches up and set them on the corner of the table and looked back and forth between them with big eyes and said, “I’ll just be downstairs. If you need anything. Or if anybody needs a witness.” Then she fled.
Lucas made a small sound. Amelia looked up. He had his hand over his mouth. He was trying not to laugh.
She looked back down fast. Her own mouth wanted to twitch, and she held it flat.
In the afternoon they traded stacks for the second reads.
She read his notes on the south Georgia files, and they were good.
Of course they were good. He wrote the way he talked, short and plain, but he saw things.
On a girl from Waycross he had written: Says she wants to be a nurse.
Real answer is in the last line about her grandmother’s feet.
Wants to be the person who notices. On a boy from Brunswick with a perfect record: Everything’s right. Nothing’s true. Read it again.
She read it again. He was right. The essay was polished and empty, written by somebody who knew what the committee wanted to hear.
That was the thing about him she had never been able to explain to anyone.
He was good at seeing people. He always had been.
He could sit across from a man in a meeting for ten minutes and tell you what the man was afraid of.
It was what made him so good at his work.
It was what had made her feel, for five years, so completely seen.
She put down the Brunswick file and sat there a moment.
He had seen her, all right. That was never the question. The question was what he’d been looking for.
* * *
They stopped at ten that night. Neither of them had said more than thirty words to each other that weren’t about a file.
Saturday was the same, but easier, and that was worse.
The old rhythm came back into the room like water under a door.
By noon they were reading each other’s scores and nodding without speaking.
By two she was holding a file out across the table and he was taking it without looking up, and neither of them had asked.
By four he had made a joke about a teacher’s letter that said a student was very punctual, which was the kind of thing you said about a student when there was nothing else to say, and she had almost laughed.
Almost. She caught it in time.
He noticed. He didn’t say anything. He just went back to his file.
At eight that night they got to the third pile. The fights. There were twenty-two files where their scores were too far apart, and Patrice’s rule said they had to settle every one.
Most of them were easy. They talked it through, and one of them gave. Then they got to Marcus Hill.
Marcus Hill was from Macon. Seventeen, a C student, with a record that fell apart completely in tenth grade. Two semesters of failing grades. Then two years of straight A’s. His essay didn’t explain the failing grades. It didn’t mention them at all. It was about fixing lawn mowers.
She had scored him low. Lucas had scored him high.
“No,” she said. “Not in forty. He doesn’t explain the gap. If he can’t be honest about it now, he’ll hit a wall freshman year and hide it, and he’ll drop out before anybody knows he’s in trouble. I’ve seen it.”
“He doesn’t explain it because nobody asked him to.” Lucas turned the file around on the table. “Read the counselor’s letter. Second paragraph. His father left in tenth grade. He was working thirty hours a week. He pulled it back up by himself.”
“The counselor explains it. He doesn’t.”
“He’s seventeen and he’s from Macon. He’s not going to write a sad essay about his dad for rich people in Atlanta.
” Lucas’s voice was quiet. “He’s going to write about the thing he’s good at, and hope somebody reads the second paragraph.
You taught me that. In the first year. You said the kids who need it most are the ones who won’t ask. ”
She opened her mouth.
He was right. She had said that, in those words, at their kitchen table, years ago.
“Fine,” she said. “Fine. But then you’re wrong about Lily Nguyen.”
“Lily Nguyen is perfect.”
“Lily Nguyen is perfect, and she’s getting into Emory without us, and she has two parents who are doctors.
You scored her high because her essay was beautiful.
It was beautiful. It’s also about a trip to Vietnam that her parents paid for.
” Amelia pushed the file across. “She doesn’t need us. Somebody else does.”
He read it again. She watched him get to the end and sit back and look at the ceiling.
“Damn,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You’re right.”
“I know.”
“You’re right, and Marcus Hill is in.” He looked at her. “Deal?”
“Deal.”
He held out his hand across the table, the way you’d shake on a bet, and then he realized what he’d done. His face went white and his hand stopped halfway, and for one horrible second it hung there in the air between them.
And she laughed.
She didn’t mean to. It came up out of her before she could stop it.
It was the look on his face, the pure horror, a man who had just reached for a handshake and remembered too late what handshakes meant between them.
It was so awful it went all the way around to funny.
She laughed out loud in the empty conference room at nine at night with her hand over her mouth.