Chapter 13
She sent him a text on the first Thursday in February. It was the first one she’d sent him since August.
Can you come to the Foundation tomorrow at six. I want to talk to you.
The answer came back in under a minute. Yes.
Nothing else. No question marks, no is everything okay, no of course, anything. Just yes. She looked at it on her screen. Then she put the phone face down on the card table and went back to what she was writing.
She had been writing it for three weeks.
Since the ice storm. Since the cold floor and the vending-machine sandwiches and I’d do it again, and that’s the problem.
She had written it on legal pads and on her laptop and once on the back of a Kroger receipt in the car.
She had torn it up and started over more times than she could count.
It wasn’t long. It didn’t need to be. It was two things.
* * *
He came at six exactly. She heard Tasha let him in downstairs and say, “She’s in the big room,” in a voice that was trying hard to sound like it didn’t care, and then his steps on the stairs.
She was standing at the window when he came in. She’d thought about sitting at the long table and decided against it. She didn’t want a table between them. She didn’t want it to look like a meeting.
He stopped inside the door.
He was in a dark coat over a sweater, not a suit. He’d gotten a haircut. He looked tired, but a different kind of tired than he’d looked in the fall. Less gray. More settled, somehow, like a man who had finally put something heavy down.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi. Close the door.”
He closed it. He stayed by it, the way he had in October.
She turned to face him. She had the paper in her hand, the last draft, folded in half. She didn’t look at it. She knew it by heart.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, “about what it would take.”
He went still.
“Not to come back,” she said quickly. “I want to be clear. I’m not saying that.
I don’t know about that. I don’t know if I’ll ever know about that.
” She took a breath. “I’m saying what it would take for me to even stand in a room and listen.
Just listen. To whatever you have to say.
For the rest of it to even be a question. ”
“All right,” he said.
“There are two things. I’m not going to negotiate either one. You can say yes or no. If it’s no, that’s fine. I mean it. I’ll understand. But it’s these two things or it’s nothing.”
“Tell me.”
She looked at him. His hands were at his sides. They were still.
“The first one is the program,” she said. “It leaves the Fletcher Foundation. For good. It becomes its own thing. With my name on it. Not Amelia Fletcher. Kirby. My own name. The Kirby Fund.”
He didn’t move.
“The forty million goes with it,” she said.
“You said it was for the kids, so it goes where the kids go. But the day it leaves, it stops being yours. You don’t sit on the board.
You don’t pick who does. You don’t get a say in anything.
Not one kid, not one dollar, not one decision.
And you never, ever do anything for me in secret again.
Not for the program, not for me, not for anything.
No anonymous donors. No phone calls to Patrice that she’s not supposed to tell me about.
” Her voice was steady. “If you ever want to give me something, you give it to my face. Where I can see it. Where I can say no.”
He was quiet for a second. Just one.
“Yes,” he said.
“You haven’t heard the second one.”
“Yes to the first one. Tell me the second.”
She had to look away from him to say it. She looked out the window, at the parking deck across the street where they had stood at midnight in October with his hand an inch from her arm.
“The second one is the story,” she said.
“All of it. You tell it yourself. Out loud. At the annual dinner in April, at the Waverly, in front of the same people who stood up and clapped for your forty million. The people who’ve been telling it at their dinner tables for six years.
You get up and you tell them what it really was.
” She turned back to him. “The ugly part. All of it, with no excuses. Why you did it. What you thought of me. Everything they laughed about. And then—” Her throat went tight.
She pushed through it. “And then whatever the true part is. If there is one. I don’t know if there is one.
But if there is, I want to hear you say it there.
Out loud, in front of everyone, where you can’t ever take it back. ”
The room was quiet.
“That’s the second one,” she said.
He looked at her for a long moment. She couldn’t read his face. That was new. She had always been able to read every line of it.
“Yes,” he said.
* * *
That was all. No pause. No let me think about it. No questions about the board or the lawyers or how the money would move. No asking what happened after, if he did both.
Just yes. Twice.
She didn’t trust it.
She stood by the window with the folded paper in her hand and she didn’t trust it, and she knew why.
He had always been good at yes. Yes was easy for him.
Yes was what he said in meetings when he’d already decided, what he said to his mother, what he’d said to Zane in a bar six years ago.
Yes, I’ll bet you. Agreeing had never been the hard part for Lucas Fletcher. The hard part was the doing.
“You didn’t even think about it,” she said.
“I’ve been thinking about it since August.”
“You don’t know what you’re agreeing to. The second one. You’ll be standing up in front of everybody you’ve ever known—”
“I know what I’m agreeing to.”
“Do you? Your mother will be there. Half your board. The Hartwells. The Carters. They’ll never—”
“Amelia,” he said. His voice was quiet. “I know. You asked me for the two hardest things you could think of. I can tell that’s what they are. That’s why I said yes.” He paused. “You don’t have to trust it. I wouldn’t. You’ll see in April.”
She looked at him. He looked back.
“And after April?” he said. “If I do both. What happens then?”
“I don’t know.”
He nodded slowly, like that was the answer he’d expected.
“These aren’t the price of me,” she said.
She needed him to understand this. “I’m not saying if you do these two things, I’ll come home.
I’m not selling you anything. These are the price of me listening.
That’s all. After that, I don’t know. I might not come back.
I might—” She stopped. She didn’t say Washington. “I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m not doing them to get you back. I’m doing them because you asked, and because they should have been done years ago. Whatever you do after is yours.” A small tired movement at the corner of his mouth. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it. It’s yours.”
She didn’t have anything to say to that. She put the folded paper in her pocket.
* * *
Her car wouldn’t start.
It was nearly eight when they walked out together, and the rain had come back, cold and thin, the kind that wasn’t quite ice and wasn’t quite not. The parking deck was almost empty. She got in the silver Honda and turned the key, and it made a sad clicking sound, and then nothing.
She tried it three times. Click. Click. Nothing.
He was standing by the driver’s door in the rain, with his coat collar up.
“Battery,” he said.
“I know it’s the battery.”
“I can drive you home. Or I can call someone. Whatever you want.”
She sat in the dead car and looked at the dashboard. She thought about calling Roxanne, who was out on a job. She thought about a cab, forty minutes in the rain.
“Drive me home,” she said.
His car was two rows over. It wasn’t the dark gray one. It was a plain dark blue sedan she’d never seen, the kind a dentist would drive. She stopped beside it.
“Where’s your car?”
“I sold it,” he said. “In September.” He opened the passenger door for her. He didn’t look at her while he said it. “I didn’t want to drive it anymore.”
She stood in the rain and looked at the plain blue car. She thought about the gray one pulling out through the Buckhead gates every morning for eight weeks, with Heather in the passenger seat.
She got in.
* * *
He drove her home through the wet dark streets, slowly, with both hands on the wheel.
Neither of them talked. The wipers went back and forth.
The heater hummed. She watched the city go by, Ponce and then Boulevard and then the old mill, and the rain made the streetlights run down the glass like paint.
He pulled up in front of the yellow shotgun house. The landlady’s porch light was on downstairs. The outside stairs went up into the dark.
He put the car in park. He didn’t turn it off. He sat with his hands on the wheel, looking straight ahead through the windshield, waiting for her to get out.
She didn’t get out.
She sat there. The wipers went back and forth. Her heart was going hard and slow.
“Come up,” she said.
He turned his head and looked at her.
“It’s cold,” she said. “I’ll make coffee. You drove me all the way over here.” She heard how it sounded. She didn’t take it back. “Come up.”
Neither of them pretended it was a good idea. She could see him not pretending. She could feel herself not pretending either.
He turned off the car.
* * *
He’d never been inside.
He stood just inside the door, with the rain dripping off his coat onto the old pine floor.
The four little rooms in a row. The card table from Roxanne.
The green thrift-store chair. The plain bed through the doorway, with her quilt on it.
The claw-foot tub in the back. The Harlan letter taped to the refrigerator.
He looked at all of it. He didn’t say anything about any of it. He stood there with his coat on and his hands at his sides like a man in a museum, trying not to touch.
She put the coffee on. The little machine from Roxanne’s garage gurgled. She stood with her back to him at the tiny counter and listened to it and felt him there, behind her, in her kitchen, in the only place in the world that had never been his.