Chapter 14
He had left in the morning, that time in February, because she asked him to.
She had asked it at seven, standing in the kitchen doorway in her robe while he sat on the edge of her bed pulling on his shoes.
She hadn’t been kind about it. She’d said, “That doesn’t count.
Last night. It doesn’t count for anything.
Nothing counts until April.” And he had looked up at her from the bed with his shoes half on and said, “All right,” and finished tying them, and gone.
He hadn’t touched her since. He hadn’t tried.
Three weeks later, on the last Monday in February, Patrice called her into her office and shut the door and said, “It’s done.”
* * *
It had happened at the Foundation’s board meeting the Friday before. Amelia hadn’t been there. She’d been told not to come, gently, by Patrice, who said it would be easier for everyone if she didn’t have to watch.
“He did it himself,” Patrice said. “Didn’t send a lawyer.
Didn’t send a letter. Walked into the boardroom at ten o’clock and stood at the end of the table and said the scholarship program was leaving the Foundation, as of the first of the month, with the endowment, to become an independent fund under your maiden name.
He said he would have no role in it of any kind.
He said it was not open for discussion.” She took her glasses off.
“Then he sat down and waited for them to discuss it anyway.”
“Did they?”
“For two hours.” Patrice almost smiled. “Carl Benning called it a family matter being played out in public. Then he resigned from the board. Then Libby Carter’s husband resigned from the board.
Then someone asked Lucas what he thought people would say, and he said, and I’m quoting, I expect they’ll say what they’ve been saying for six years.
The difference is that now I’ll agree with them. ”
Amelia sat still in the chair across from Patrice’s desk.
“And Maureen?” she said.
Patrice was quiet for a moment.
“She didn’t fight it,” she said. “I thought she would. She chaired that meeting for two hours and never said one word against it. When it was over, she called the vote, and it passed, and she adjourned the meeting.” Patrice folded her glasses.
“Then she walked out without looking at him. Somebody told me she hasn’t spoken to him since.
It’s her Foundation, Amelia. Her father-in-law started it.
Your program was the only new thing it’s done in twenty years, and it walked out the door in front of the whole board.
That’s a hard thing for a woman like her. Even if she knows it’s right.”
Amelia looked down at her hands.
“You’ll need an office,” Patrice said briskly, putting her glasses back on.
“You can’t stay here. I found you two rooms above the hardware store on Edgewood.
They’re awful. You’ll love them. And I’m sending Tasha with you, because she’ll quit if I don’t, and I’d rather lose her to you than to a dentist.”
* * *
The rooms above the hardware store were awful.
They were up a steep flight of stairs from a side door that stuck.
The floors sloped. One window didn’t open and the other didn’t close.
The radiator banged like somebody hitting it with a hammer.
There was a water stain on the ceiling shaped like the state of Florida, and the whole place smelled faintly of fertilizer from the store below.
She loved them the second she walked in.
She moved in on the first of March with Tasha and twenty-one file boxes and a card table from Roxanne’s garage that was definitely not a loan.
Patrice sent the old coffee maker from the Foundation break room, the one that hummed.
Luis and Marisol came on a Saturday with a Vega Services van and carried up two desks from a used office store and would not take a dollar for it.
Marisol hung a calendar from a tire shop on the wall and stood back and said, “Now it’s an office. ”
On Monday morning Tasha stenciled the name on the glass of the door at the top of the stairs. She’d bought a kit online. It took her an hour, and one of the letters was a little crooked, and neither of them cared.
THE KIRBY FUND.
Amelia stood in the hall and looked at it.
Her family’s name. Her own name, from before any of this. On a door. On a thing she had built that could not be taken back.
* * *
He wasn’t there.
She had half expected him to be. Not in the room.
She knew he wouldn’t come into the room.
But she had expected something. Flowers on the step.
A card. A plant with a bow on it. A coffee left on the stoop by Walt at seven in the morning, black, one sugar.
The old Lucas would have sent something.
The old Lucas would have sent a big something, something you couldn’t miss, so everyone would know.
Nothing came.
Not that first day. Not that week. She caught herself checking. Looking at the stoop when she came in. Looking at her phone. She was angry at herself for looking, and she looked anyway.
There was nothing. No message. No sign.
He had said yes to you don’t get a say in anything, and it turned out he’d meant that too.
She kept watching. All that month, she watched for it, the way you watch for a crack in something you’ve just glued. The place where he’d slip. Where he’d do the thing for the credit. Where he’d make sure someone saw.
It didn’t come. Libby Carter called, thrilled, to say nobody had seen Lucas at the club in weeks.
That the Hartwells had dropped him from the Kiawah trip.
That Carl Benning was telling people he’d lost his mind.
That the Carters didn’t invite him to their oyster roast, and he’d never missed it in his life.
Libby asked, in her softest voice, whether Amelia thought he was all right.
Amelia said she didn’t know, and hung up, and sat at her card table in the office that smelled like fertilizer. He was letting it happen. He wasn’t calling anyone to explain.
She tried, all that month, to find the place where he was performing.
She couldn’t find one.
* * *
He texted on the third Thursday in March. It was only the second text she’d had from him since August.
Can I come tell you something? In person. You can say no.
She looked at it.
You can say no. He had never asked her that before. Not in five years. He hadn’t asked before he made the bet or before he paid for the pilot or before he stood up at the Waverly and put his name on her work. He’d never asked if he could.
She texted back: Tonight. 8.
* * *
He came up the outside stairs at eight. She heard him on every step. When she opened the door he was standing on the little landing in the cold, in the canvas jacket from the ice storm, with his hands in his pockets.
He didn’t come in right away.
“I’m going to tell you everything,” he said.
“Everything I told Heather. In the car. For eight weeks. And everything I didn’t tell her either.
Everything you should have heard first.” He stopped.
“It’s going to be bad. Some of it’s going to be very bad.
If you want me to stop, say so, and I’ll stop and go. ”
She held the door.
“Come in,” she said.
He sat in the green chair. She sat on the edge of the bed, through the doorway, across the room from him. Not close. She didn’t turn on the overhead light. Just the lamp on the card table, between them.
He didn’t touch her. Not once, the whole night.
And he told her.
* * *
He started with his father, and she let him, though Maureen had given her the shape of it already.
What Maureen had not had was the inside.
A quiet man with big hands who liked old maps and fishing.
The two years he was sick, and Lucas reading to him every evening from the map books until he fell asleep, and then not being able to go home.
Driving downtown at eleven at night to sit on twenty-eight and work until the crew came through, because working was the only thing that made his head stop.
“There was a woman who cleaned my floor,” he said.
“Every night. For two years. She’d come in around midnight, and she’d empty my trash can and wipe the glass table and run the vacuum around my feet while I read.
Two years, Amelia. Five nights a week. And I never looked up.
I never once asked her name.” He was looking at the lamp.
“She was the only other person awake in that building, most nights. The only person I saw between my father’s bed and the sunrise. And I never asked her name.”
Amelia didn’t say anything. Her throat was tight.
He told her about the library, in fewer words than his mother had used, and about the bar, and drinking until he couldn’t feel his hands.
And then he told her the worst part. He told her the way she had asked for it in February, with nothing wrapped around it.
“I said I’d marry the cleaner on twenty-eight,” he said.
“I said it to hurt my mother. I said she was the one woman in Atlanta my mother could never have chosen. I said I’d dress her up and make my mother seat her at the family table at Christmas, and my mother would have to smile about it in front of everyone.
” He stopped. His hands were flat on his knees.
“And I said—Zane asked what if she said no. And I laughed and said she wouldn’t.
I said she cleans offices at two in the morning, of course she’ll say yes. I said she’d be grateful.”
The room was quiet.
“That’s what I thought of you,” he said. “When I was twenty-nine. Before I knew your name. I thought you’d be grateful.”
Amelia sat on the edge of the bed with her hands pressed together between her knees. Her face was wet. She didn’t wipe it. She didn’t say anything. She let it be what it was.
He waited. He didn’t ask if she was all right. He didn’t reach for her. He just waited, until she gave a small nod, and then he kept going.
* * *