Chapter 10
Roxanne did not want to tell her. That was clear from the start.
She came up the outside stairs on a Sunday afternoon with a pie from the Kroger and put it on the card table and then stood there in the middle of the front room, not taking her jacket off, looking at the wall like it had done something to her.
“What,” Amelia said.
“Nothing.”
“You bought a pie. You never buy pie. You say store pie is a crime against grandmothers.”
“It is.” Roxanne sat down in the green chair. She took her glasses off the chain and put them on and took them off again. “Okay. I’m going to tell you something. And I want it on the record that I don’t want to. I want it on the record that I hate this.”
“It’s on the record.”
Roxanne sighed through her nose. “You know my crew does the Fletcher tower. Nights.”
“Since before I was on it.”
“Marisol’s on twenty-eight. Since September. I moved her up there when Donna retired.” Roxanne looked at the pie. “She came to me Friday. She said, Rox, I have to tell you something about your girl’s husband, and I don’t know if it’s good or bad.”
Amelia sat still on the edge of the bed, where she’d been folding laundry.
“He comes up,” Roxanne said. “At night. Two in the morning, some nights. Not every night. Two, three times a week. He’s working late.
Marisol says he looks terrible. He sits in that big corner office with the lights half off and works till the crew comes through.
” She paused. “And he knows their names.”
“What?”
“All of them. Everybody on twenty-eight. Marisol. And Tran, and Big Mike, and the new girl, Ashley, who’s been there three weeks.
He knows every one of them by name. When they come through his floor, he stands up.
He says good night to each one. By name.
Good night, Marisol. Good night, Mike.” Roxanne’s mouth twisted.
“Marisol says the first time he did it, Ashley almost dropped her mop. Nobody on twenty-eight’s been said good night to in the history of that building. ”
Amelia didn’t say anything.
“He asked them,” Roxanne said. “Back in September. He came out of his office one night and went down the hall to every single one of them and said, I’m sorry, I’ve never asked.
What’s your name?” She put her glasses back on the chain and let them drop.
“That’s what Marisol said he said. Word for word. ”
The room was quiet. Out the back window, the fig tree was bare now, the big leaves gone brown and fallen.
“He hasn’t told anybody,” Roxanne said. “Marisol asked around. Nobody at the Foundation knows. Nobody in his office. He sure didn’t tell me. He doesn’t know you know. He doesn’t know I know.” She looked at Amelia. “He’s just doing it. At two in the morning. For nobody.”
Amelia looked down at the towel in her hands.
She remembered. She remembered exactly. Their third year.
A dinner party at the Hartwells’, some long boring night of wine and talk.
Somebody at the table had been complaining about their cleaning service.
Something about a woman who’d moved a vase.
And Amelia, who had had two glasses of wine and was tired of all of them, had said, You know the worst part of that job?
It isn’t the work. It’s that nobody ever learns your name.
You’re there five nights a week for years, and nobody ever learns your name.
The table had gone a little quiet. Then someone changed the subject.
Lucas had not said anything. Not then, and not in the car after. She had thought he hadn’t heard. Or had heard and hadn’t cared. She’d been hurt about it for a week, and then she’d let it go, the way you let a lot of things go in a marriage.
He had heard.
He’d heard, and he’d never answered. And now, three years later, he was going up to the floor where she’d pushed a cart for two years and never once been asked her name. He was standing up from his desk at two in the morning. He was saying good night to Marisol.
She folded the towel. She folded it carefully into thirds and set it on the pile.
“Well,” she said. “That’s nice for Marisol.”
Roxanne looked at her.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I said too.
” She got up and went to the tiny kitchen.
“I hate it, Amelia. I want that on the record. I hate that it’s decent.
I want to hate him clean, and he keeps doing stuff like this, where nobody’s looking.
” She opened a drawer, looking for a knife. “You want pie or not?”
“I want pie.”
They ate the store pie, which was a crime against grandmothers, and talked about other things. Amelia did not say anything more about the twenty-eighth floor.
But that night she lay awake in the dark for a long time. And she kept hearing it, in a voice she’d never actually heard say it. Good night, Marisol.
* * *
The note came on Tuesday.
It was in the mail, in a square cream envelope, in Maureen’s small perfect handwriting. Amelia knew it before she opened it. She had received a thank-you note in that handwriting after every dinner for five years.
Amelia —
I would be grateful if you would come to the house on Thursday afternoon, at four. There is something you should have been told a long time ago. I would rather tell you myself than have you learn it any other way.
You are under no obligation. If you do not come, I will understand.
— M.F.
She read it three times, standing at the mailbox at the bottom of the outside stairs. Then she went up and put it in the kitchen drawer, with the list and Heather’s card.
She didn’t decide to go. On Thursday at three she was changing out of her work clothes.
* * *
The house on West Paces sat far back from the road behind a long lawn and a line of old magnolias.
It was white brick, with black shutters and a slate roof and a front door the color of dark blue ink.
It had been built by Lucas’s great-grandfather.
Amelia had been inside it maybe fifty times.
She had never walked up the front steps without her stomach tightening.
It tightened now.
A housekeeper she didn’t know let her in and took her to the sunroom at the back of the house. It was all glass on three sides, full of ferns and old wicker furniture and the low gold light of a November afternoon. There was a tea tray on a table. Two cups.
Maureen was standing at the far window, looking out at the garden.
She turned when Amelia came in. She looked smaller than she had at the benefit.
She was wearing a gray cardigan and slacks, not a dress, and her silver hair was not quite as perfect as it usually was.
There was a strand loose over one ear. Amelia had never seen Maureen Fletcher with a strand of hair loose.
“Thank you for coming,” Maureen said.
“Your note said I should have been told something.”
“Yes.” Maureen gestured at the wicker chair. “Please. Sit. I’ll pour.”
Amelia sat. Maureen poured the tea. Her hands were a little unsteady on the pot. She poured two cups and set one in front of Amelia and sat down across from her with the other, and didn’t drink it.
For a while neither of them said anything.
“You know about the bet,” Maureen said at last. “And you know that I knew. Lucas gave you a list, I understand. I’m on it.”
“The Derby party.”
“The Derby party.” Maureen looked at her cup. “She’s done beautifully. I’d never have guessed. I said that about you. To my son. I thought I was being generous.” Her mouth twitched at one corner. “I have thought about that sentence a great deal these last weeks.”
Amelia said nothing.
“But you don’t know why he made it,” Maureen said. “Do you? He’s never told you.”
“He said it didn’t matter why.”
Maureen closed her eyes briefly. “That,” she said, “is his father talking. Robert used to say that. It doesn’t matter why.
About everything.” She opened them. “It matters. You should know. And since my son won’t tell you, I’m going to.
Because it’s my fault more than anyone’s, and I’m too old to let him carry it for me. ”
* * *
She told it simply. Maureen didn’t do anything simply, but she told this simply, in her low even voice, with her hands folded around the cup.
“My husband was sick for a long time,” she said.
“Two years. You never met him. He was a quiet man. A kind man. I married him because my mother thought I should, and his mother thought he should, and it was a very suitable match. That’s how we did things.
That’s how my family had always done things.
” She looked out at the garden. “He was a good husband. He was a guest in his own house for thirty years, and he was very polite about it. And I let him be. I never once asked him if he was happy.”
Amelia held her teacup and didn’t drink it.
“Lucas watched that. All his life. I didn’t know how much he watched it until later.
” Maureen’s voice didn’t change. “When Robert got sick, Lucas started working at night. He couldn’t sleep.
He’d sit with his father in the evenings and then go to the office downtown and work until three or four.
On the twenty-eighth floor.” She paused. “Where you were.”
“I cleaned around him,” Amelia said.
“For two years, I’m told.”
“For two years.”
“And he never asked your name.”
“No.”
Maureen nodded slowly. “Zane told that part at the Derby party. As if it were funny. He didn’t even know her name.
” She set her cup down on the tray. It rattled a little.
“Robert died in September. Six years ago. The funeral was on a Friday. There was a reception here, after. In this house. Two hundred people.” She looked at Amelia directly.
“And in the middle of it, I took my son into the library, and I told him that his engagement to Whitney Hale would be announced at Christmas.”
Amelia went still.