Chapter 11
The frame was still on the kitchen table.
Lucas had not moved it. Not once, in more than three months. Denise dusted around it. Denise had asked him once, in September, whether she should put it somewhere, and he had said no, and she had looked at him a long time and then never asked again.
It sat in the middle of the round oak table where Amelia had left it, facing his chair. You keep it. You won it. She hadn’t said that to him. She had said it to the empty kitchen, on her way out, and he had heard it from the top of the stairs.
He sat across from it every morning.
It was five o’clock on a Saturday in December, and still dark, and the house was cold because he kept forgetting to turn the heat up.
He had moved back in from the Four Seasons in October, when it became clear she was never going to take the house.
He didn’t sleep in their room. He slept in the small guest room at the end of the hall, the one with the single bed, and he got up every morning at four or five and came down and made coffee and sat here.
He looked at the dollar.
L.F. bets Z.K. one dollar.
He had spent a long time, these three months, trying not to think about Heather.
It had not worked. He had tried thinking about the bet instead, and the proposal, and the pilot money, and every one of them was bad enough to keep a man awake.
But Heather was the one he kept trying to walk around.
And a week ago, Ray Denison had finally called him from Charlotte, after weeks of deciding whether to, and told him about the lunch at the Waverly, politely, in full, and after that there was no walking around it.
He went home to me.
Ray had repeated it word for word. Ray was a gentleman of the old kind, and he had said it the way you’d hand a man back his wallet.
Then he’d said that Denison would be working with a different adviser going forward, and that he hoped Lucas would be back at the table after the new year, and that he was sorry for Lucas’s troubles.
Then he had hung up, and Lucas had sat in his office with the phone in his hand for a long time.
He went home to me.
She had said that. After everything. After the frame and the funeral and the money. In front of fourteen people. She had stood up for him, in a way. Or for the marriage. Or for the truth of it, that there had never been anybody else he wanted to go home to.
And it was true. And it was not the point, and he knew it.
He made himself look at it now. At five in the morning, in the cold kitchen, with no one to see.
For eight weeks, he had driven Heather Stiles to meetings in his own car.
He had told Walt he wanted to drive himself.
He had told himself it was because the merger was hard and he needed to think, and it was easier to think with his own hands on the wheel.
That was a lie. He had never needed to drive to think in his life.
He had driven her because he wanted to talk to her. And he had wanted to talk to her because she already knew.
She had been in the bar that night. She’d heard all of it.
His mother, and Whitney, and the funeral, and what he’d said about the woman on twenty-eight.
She knew the worst thing he had ever done.
She had known it for six years. So when he talked to her, there was nothing to be afraid of.
There was no face to watch change. Whatever he said, she’d already heard worse.
And so he had told her things. Things about his father.
Things about that year. Things about how he’d felt, sitting with his dying father every night and then going downtown to work until the crew came through.
Things he had never told his wife, because telling his wife would have meant starting with the bar.
And then, one morning in July on the way to the airport, he had told Heather about the pilot money.
He had been proud of it. That was the truth.
He had wanted to tell someone. For three years he’d been reading the kids’ files at his desk at night, and reading Amelia’s thank-you letters to an anonymous donor she thought was a stranger, and he had never been able to tell a soul.
And Heather had asked him something about Amelia’s program, idly, in the car, and he’d told her.
He’d watched her face while he said it and it had been warm and interested and it had not changed at all.
He had given another woman the one good secret he had. The one he’d kept for his wife.
He had told himself it wasn’t an affair.
And it wasn’t, in the way people usually meant it.
He’d never touched her. He’d never wanted to.
But he knew now what it was. He had taken the parts of himself his wife had earned, years of earning, and he had handed them to a woman who hadn’t earned anything.
Because it was easier. Because Heather’s face would never show him what he’d done.
It was cowardice. That was the name for it. Plain cowardice. There was no other word, and he didn’t look for one.
He sat with the frame until the window went gray.
* * *
Zane came at noon.
Lucas heard the car in the drive, Zane’s big white SUV, and then Zane’s voice in the front hall talking to Denise, loud and friendly. “Denise! My favorite woman in Georgia. Is he up? Of course he’s up. He’s always up.”
Then he was in the kitchen doorway in a quarter-zip sweater and khakis, his face pink from the cold, holding two coffees from the place on Roswell Road.
“There he is.” Zane held out one of the coffees. “Brought you the good stuff. You look like hell, buddy.”
Lucas didn’t take the coffee.
Zane set it on the counter, not bothered. He looked around the kitchen. He saw the frame on the table, and his face lit up.
“There it is. I knew it. I knew she didn’t take it.
Man.” He came over and picked it up, turning it to the light.
“I’ve been missing this thing. You know my wall looks like a dentist’s office now?
Just the governor and the fish. It’s depressing.
” He grinned at Lucas. “Listen. I know things are bad. I know. But it’s been three months, and she’s got her little apartment, and you’re here, and honestly, I’d like my dollar back.
It’s the best story I’ve got. People ask about it. ”
Lucas looked at him.
Thirteen years. They had met the fall they were both twenty-two, at a wedding in Savannah, both of them hungover and bored, and they had skipped the reception to drink beer on a dock and laugh at everybody.
They had laughed at everybody for thirteen years.
That was the friendship. That was all it had ever been.
Zane never took anything seriously, and around Zane, Lucas never had to either.
“Put it down,” Lucas said.
Zane laughed. “Come on.”
“Put it down, Zane.”
Something in his voice made Zane put it down. He set it back on the table, but he was still smiling, still easy. He had never in his life been in a room he couldn’t laugh his way out of.
“Okay,” Zane said. “Okay. It’s down. What’s with you?”
“Do you know what that is?” Lucas said.
“It’s the dollar.”
“It’s a bet I made about a woman whose name I didn’t know.
The week my father died. To hurt my mother.
I made it because I was grieving and I was angry, and I picked the one person in my building who had no way to protect herself, and I used her.
And you framed it. And you’ve told it at dinner for six years.
You told it on the dock at the lake in front of a caterer.
You told it to my mother at the Derby. You told it at parties where Amelia was in the next room.
And you told it to her face in August, at your own house.
Who would have bet on that?” He stopped.
His voice was quiet. “That’s what it is. That’s the story.”
Zane looked at him.
For a second, just a second, Lucas thought something would happen. He thought Zane might finally see it. He watched Zane’s face, pink and soft and puzzled, trying to take it in.
Then Zane laughed.
It wasn’t mean. That was the thing. It was never mean. It was the same big easy laugh it had always been, the laugh from the dock in Savannah, the laugh from a thousand dinners. It came out of him because it always had.
“Come on, man,” Zane said. “It’s funny. It was always funny. You always laughed.”
“Yes,” Lucas said. “I did.”
He was surprised how calm he felt. He had thought about this conversation for three months. He had thought he would shout. Instead he felt clear and quiet, like the air after a storm.
“I did laugh,” he said. “I laughed every time, and it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done.
You’re not getting the dollar back. You’re not going to tell that story again, not at a dinner, not on a boat, not anywhere I’ll hear about it.
We’ve been friends for thirteen years, and I don’t think you’ve ever taken one thing seriously, and I let that be the thing I liked about you.
I don’t like it anymore. Go home, Zane. Don’t come back. ”
Eight sentences. He counted them afterward.
Zane stood there. His mouth was a little open. He looked at Lucas the way you’d look at a dog that had just spoken.
“You’re serious,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Over the dollar? Lucas. Come on. It’s me.”
“I know it’s you.”
Zane waited for the laugh. He looked for the old face, the one that would crack and say I’m messing with you. It didn’t come.
Finally Zane picked up his own coffee from the counter. He left the other one. He went to the kitchen door and stopped and turned back, and for once he wasn’t smiling.
“You’re going to be real lonely,” he said. “You know that? Everybody you know is my friend too.”
“Probably.”
Zane shook his head. He went out. Lucas heard the front door, and the big white SUV start up in the drive, and go.
He sat back down across from the frame.
His hands were shaking. He put them flat on the oak table and watched them until they stopped.
* * *
Zane was right. By Monday, it had started.