Chapter 10 #2
“Whitney was a lovely girl. A very suitable girl. Her family and ours had been talking about it for a year. Lucas knew her a little. He’d never said yes.
He’d never said no. I thought—” Maureen stopped.
“I told him his father would have wanted it settled. That’s what I said.
At his father’s funeral. Your father would have wanted it settled. ”
She was quiet for a moment.
“He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me.
Then he walked out of the library and out of the house, still in his black suit, and I didn’t see him again for three days.
” She looked down at her hands. “He went to a bar with Zane Kramer and Heather Stiles. And sometime that night, he decided that if I was going to arrange his marriage the way I’d arranged his father’s, then he would give me a wife I could never, ever arrange.
The one woman in Atlanta I would never have chosen.
And he’d make me seat her at my own table, at Christmas, in front of everyone. Where Whitney would have sat.”
Amelia’s hands had gone cold around the cup.
“He picked you,” Maureen said, “because you were the most shocking thing he could think of. Because you were the woman who cleaned his office at night, whose name he had never asked. That’s why.
That’s the whole of it. It was never about you.
It was aimed at me.” She paused. “You were the weapon. I was the target.”
* * *
The sunroom was quiet. Out in the garden, a bird was going through the dead leaves under the magnolias, turning them over one at a time.
Amelia looked at the tea in her cup. She thought about the kitchen in August. You know how he gets about the year he turned twenty-nine.
This was it. This was what Heather had meant.
The funeral, and the library, and Whitney Hale, and his father living thirty years as a guest in his own house.
That was the year Lucas turned twenty-nine.
And Heather had known all of it, had been sitting in that bar the night it happened, and had heard it again this summer in the car.
Every piece of it. And Amelia, who had married him eleven months after that night, who had been in that year, had never heard one word.
“I learned about the bet the first spring,” Maureen said.
“At the Derby. I had already seated you at my right hand that first Christmas, before I knew. And the Christmas after, and the one after that, I did it anyway.” She looked straight at Amelia.
“I want you to understand that I did that knowing. I told myself it was generous. That I was being gracious to a girl who didn’t know.
I think now I was proving something to my son.
That he couldn’t shock me. That I could make even this look like my idea. ”
“You’ll sit by me, dear,” Amelia said.
Maureen flinched. It was small. Amelia had never seen her do it before.
“Yes,” Maureen said. “That.”
She was quiet for a long moment. Then she said the thing Amelia had never heard her say, not once in five years, not about a spilled glass or a late arrival or a wrong word at dinner.
“I’m sorry.”
She said it plainly. She didn’t dress it up. She didn’t make it into a compliment.
“I’m sorry, Amelia. For the table. For the Derby.
For five years of being gracious to you when I should have been honest. And for the library.
For the funeral. For all of it.” She picked up her cup and put it down again without drinking.
“None of it excuses what my son did. I’m not telling you this so you’ll forgive him.
I’m not sure he should be forgiven. I’m telling you because you should know what it was.
You’ve been living inside something for five years without knowing its shape.
That isn’t right. Nobody should have to do that. ”
* * *
Amelia sat in the wicker chair and held it.
It didn’t excuse him. Maureen was right about that.
A grieving man who wanted to hurt his mother was still a man who had used a stranger to do it.
He had still made the bet. He’d still let it stand.
He’d still married her with it open and hanging on Zane’s wall.
Nothing Maureen had said changed one line of that.
But something had changed. Something had moved, like furniture being shifted in the next room.
For three months she had believed she was chosen because she was nothing.
Because she was the lowest thing in the building.
Because a rich man and his friends thought it would be funny to see if they could dress up a nobody and pass her off.
She had carried that for three months. The cleaner on 28.
She had looked in the mirror every morning and seen a joke.
That wasn’t what it was.
She hadn’t been picked because she was nothing. She’d been picked because she was the one thing his mother could never have arranged. She’d been picked as a weapon, and aimed at this house.
It wasn’t better. She wanted to be clear with herself about that. Being a weapon was not better than being a joke. Either way, she’d been a thing somebody picked up to use.
But it wasn’t the same. And she didn’t know yet what to do with the difference.
“Thank you for telling me,” she said finally.
Maureen nodded.
Amelia stood up. Maureen stood too. They looked at each other across the wicker table and the untouched tea, two women who had sat at the same table five Christmases in a row and never said one true thing to each other.
“Does he know you’re telling me?” Amelia asked.
“No.” Maureen almost smiled. “He hasn’t spoken to me since August. I expect this will not improve matters.”
At the sunroom door, Amelia turned back.
“Why now?” she said.
Maureen looked out at the garden, at the bird in the leaves.
“Because I saw your face at the Waverly,” she said. “When I reached for your shoulder, and you stepped back.” She was quiet a moment. “I have been reaching for people’s shoulders for forty years, Amelia. Nobody ever stepped back before.”
* * *
It was dark when she got home. She climbed the outside stairs slowly and let herself in and didn’t turn on the lamp. She sat in the green chair in the dark with her coat still on.
Her phone buzzed.
She almost didn’t look. When she did, it was Jonah Cordero. They had talked a few times since the day with the wall. Short conversations on the second floor, about the renovation, about her kids, about his sister’s program in Savannah. He had never called her. This was the first time.
She answered.
“Amelia. Hi. Sorry to call so late. Is this a bad time?”
“No.” Her voice sounded strange in the dark room. “It’s fine.”
“I’ll be quick. I have a friend in Washington. Nora Pace. We were in school together. She’s on the board of the Adler Foundation. You know it?”
She knew it. Everybody who did her kind of work knew it. The Adler was the biggest scholarship foundation in the country. It sent thousands of kids to college every year.
“Everybody does.”
“Their president’s retiring in the spring. They’re doing a search. Nora called me tonight to ask if I knew you.” A small pause. “Somebody on their board read your Harlan file. The panel chair passed it around. They want to talk to you, Amelia. About the job.”
She sat still in the dark.
“I told her I’d ask,” Jonah said. “I’m not selling it.
I don’t sell things. It’s why my firm is small.
” A pause, and she could hear him thinking.
“It’s a lot of building. Sixty people, old brick, probably a load-bearing wall no one’s looked at in fifty years.
I thought you should know it’s there before somebody tells you it isn’t. ”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”
“Take as long as you want. Nora’s patient, and I’m an architect. We’re used to waiting on people who haven’t decided anything yet. Good night, Amelia.”
He hung up.
She sat with the phone in her lap. The room was dark except for the streetlight through the front window, making a long pale shape on the old pine floor.
Good night, Amelia.
Washington. The Adler Foundation. A whole new life, in a city that had never heard the name Fletcher. Where no one would know about a bar in September, or a dollar on a wall, or the chair at Maureen’s right hand. Where she would just be the woman who wrote the Harlan file.
She thought about Maureen’s loose strand of hair. She thought about Marisol, on the twenty-eighth floor, being told good night.
She got up. She didn’t take her coat off. She went down the outside stairs and got in the Honda and drove downtown, through the empty streets, to the loading dock of the Fletcher tower, and cut the engine next to a Vega Services van.
She looked up. Twenty-eight floors. She counted them as she had counted Christmases. The lights on the top floor were half on, the way they were at night, and one window at the corner was brighter than the rest.
She sat there with her hands on the wheel for twenty minutes. She did not go up.
Then she drove home. She still did not know what she wanted. But she knew which building she had driven to at eleven at night, not to find out.