Chapter 11 #2
It wasn’t loud. It was never loud with these people.
Jim Hartwell called to say that the golf trip to Kiawah in January was probably going to be a smaller group this year.
The Carters’ Christmas party invitation, which came every year on heavy card stock, did not come.
Carl Benning’s assistant rescheduled a lunch and then did not reschedule it again.
Two men at the club stopped talking when he walked into the grill room, and then started again, too loudly, about football.
The circle was closing. It had closed around her in September, when the calls came too warm and the lunches turned into audiences. Now it was closing against him.
He found that he didn’t mind as much as he’d expected.
He’d known these people all his life. And he knew now, as you know a thing you’ve always known but never said, that he had never liked a single one of them as much as he liked the night crew on twenty-eight.
He liked Marisol, who told him he looked like death and brought him a tamale at two in the morning.
He liked Big Mike, who’d been a linebacker at Valdosta State.
He liked Ashley, who was nineteen and saving for nursing school and still jumped a little every time he said good night.
He would never have known their names if it weren’t for Amelia. He would never have known anybody’s name.
* * *
He drove to West Paces on Wednesday.
He had not been in his mother’s house since August. He had not spoken to her since the list. She had called him twice in September and once in October, and he had let the calls go to voicemail, and he had not listened to them.
The housekeeper let him in. His mother was in the library.
Of course she was. He stood in the doorway and looked at it. The tall shelves of books nobody read. The leather chairs. The window onto the side garden. The fireplace, lit, because it was December.
Six years ago, in this room, in his black suit, he had stood where he was standing now, and she had told him about Whitney Hale.
She was sitting in the wing chair by the fire with a book in her lap. She looked up when he came in. She didn’t look surprised.
“Lucas,” she said.
“Mother.”
He didn’t sit. He stood in the middle of the room. He had thought about what he would say. He had it in order, as he always did. And then he looked at her, small and silver in the big chair, and he let most of it go.
“The marriage you arranged for me,” he said, “is the reason the woman I love found out she was a bet.”
His mother didn’t move.
“You told me about Whitney at Dad’s funeral.
In this room. I went out of this house and did the worst thing I’ve ever done, and I did it to hurt you.
That’s mine. I did it. Nobody made me. But you should know why.
” He took a breath. “You arranged Dad’s whole life.
I watched you do it for thirty years. And when he died, you started on mine.
At his funeral. Before we’d even buried him. ”
“Yes,” his mother said quietly.
“I’m not done.” He heard his own voice. It was steady.
“I’ve spent my whole life treating what you want like it’s the weather.
Something that just happens, that you plan around.
I’m finished with that. You don’t arrange me anymore.
And you will never, ever again seat my wife anywhere as a favor.
Not at Christmas. Not at a benefit. Not at a funeral.
If she ever comes into this house again, it’ll be because she chooses to, and she’ll sit wherever she wants. ”
The fire snapped. Outside, in the side garden, a wind moved the bare branches of the crape myrtles.
His mother closed her book and set it on the table beside her.
“She was here,” she said.
He stared at her.
“Three weeks ago. I asked her to come, and she came. I told her everything.” His mother looked up at him. “The funeral. Whitney. Your father. This room. I told her why you did it. And I told her I was sorry.”
Lucas didn’t say anything. He couldn’t.
“You never told her,” his mother said. “You told her it didn’t matter why. That’s what your father used to say. It doesn’t matter why.” Her mouth made a small tired shape. “It mattered. She had a right to know it. I thought if you weren’t going to tell her, someone who was there should.”
He stood in the middle of the library. It went through him, all of it. Anger first, hot and fast. His mother. His mother had done it. Arranged it. Again. Gone around him to his wife, as she’d gone around everyone her whole life.
And then, right behind the anger, the truth.
She hadn’t arranged anything. She’d told Amelia the truth. The thing he should have told her in the kitchen in August. The thing he’d had six years to tell her, and hadn’t, because every year of silence made it worse. His mother, of all people, had done the one thing he couldn’t.
“Good,” he said.
His mother blinked.
“Good,” he said again. “It should have been me. It should have been me, six years ago. But good.”
He looked at her one more time. She was sitting straight in the wing chair, with her hands folded, and there was a strand of her silver hair loose over one ear. He had never seen that before.
“I’ll see myself out,” he said.
* * *
He sat in the car in her drive for a long time.
It was getting dark. The magnolias along the lawn were black shapes against a gray sky. Somebody in the house turned on a lamp in the front room, and a square of yellow light fell out across the grass.
He had brought the dollar with him. He didn’t know why. He had taken it out of the frame on Saturday, after Zane left, carefully, and folded it once and put it in the inside pocket of his coat. Now he took it out and unfolded it and laid it on the passenger seat.
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.
Heather’s small round handwriting. His own signature. Zane’s.
He had ended it with Zane. He had faced his mother. He had lost the circle, all of it, the golf trips and the Christmas parties and the whole world he’d been raised in. He had done more in one week than in six years.
And there was nobody to tell.
He couldn’t call Amelia. She’d asked him to go, and he had gone, and he would keep going until she said otherwise.
He couldn’t call Zane. He couldn’t call anyone in the circle.
He thought about calling Walt, and didn’t, because what would he say?
I did the right thing, finally, years late, and I need someone to know?
That was the old habit. That was a man looking for a medal.
Nobody would ever know about the library. Nobody would know about the eight sentences. None of it would count for anything. It would not bring her back one inch. It would not undo one dinner, one Christmas, one night of her sitting at a table while the people around it laughed.
He looked at the dollar on the seat beside him.
It had been worth so much, once. It had been worth his whole life. And now it was just a small, soft, worn piece of green paper, with writing on it, in the dark.
He sat there with it until the lamp in his mother’s window went out.