Chapter 14 #2
He told her about the week after. About going up to twenty-eight at midnight, knowing she’d be there, with his tie still black. About saying, I’m sorry. I’ve never asked. What’s your name?
“I asked because of the bet,” he said. “I want you to know that. I’ve never lied to you about that and I’m not going to start. The first night, I asked because of the bet.”
He told her about being afraid. Every year.
That it was never one decision to keep quiet.
It was a thousand small ones, every morning, every Christmas, every time Zane told the story at a dinner and he laughed and said nothing.
How every year he didn’t tell her made the telling bigger, until it was so big he couldn’t see around it.
“There’s something else,” he said. “About that. I’ve never told anybody this part. Not Heather. Nobody.”
She waited.
“In our second year, I wrote it down. All of it. The bar, the bet, Zane’s wall, everything.
Four pages. I was going to give it to you.
I kept it in my desk at the tower for a month, and I took it out every night and read it and put it back.
” He was looking at his hands. “And then the board said no to you. And you came home and made dinner and said it didn’t matter.
And that week I put the letter through the shredder, and I set up the fund.
” He looked up. “That’s the order it happened in.
I had the truth in a drawer, and I chose to write a check instead. I want you to know that I know that.”
She hadn’t known. She sat with it. Of everything he’d said, it was the thing that made the most sense of him.
And he told her about the car.
“I told Heather all of this,” he said. “Almost all of it. Not the—” He stopped.
“I told her about my father, and the reading, and the maps. I told her about the library. I told her how I felt the night I made the bet. I told her about the pilot money. I sat in the car every morning for eight weeks and told another woman the inside of my head. Because she was there that night, and she already knew the worst of it, and I could talk to her and never have to watch her face change.” He looked up at Amelia for the first time in a long while.
“You should have had all of it. First. Before anybody. It was yours. I gave it to someone else because I was a coward. I’m sorry.
That’s not enough. I know it’s not. But I’m sorry. ”
* * *
It was nearly three in the morning when he stopped.
He sat in the green chair with his hands on his knees. He looked exhausted. He looked like a man who had carried something up a long flight of stairs and set it down and didn’t know yet if he could stand up again.
“There’s one more part,” he said.
She looked at him.
“There’s one part I didn’t tell Heather either.
I’ve never told anyone.” His voice was low.
“It’s when I knew. The night I fell in love with you.
Where it was, and what you were doing, and what it was like.
” He shook his head, slowly. “You asked to hear that part where I can’t take it back.
In front of everyone. So I’m not going to tell you tonight. I’m going to tell you there. In April.”
She didn’t say anything. She couldn’t.
He stood up. It took him a second. He picked up his canvas jacket from the back of the chair and put it on.
“Thank you for letting me come,” he said.
“Lucas.”
He stopped at the door.
She didn’t know what she’d meant to say. She sat on the edge of her bed with her face still wet, looking at him across the little lamp-lit room. The man who had thought she’d be grateful. The man who’d read to his dying father from old map books. The same man.
“Drive safe,” she said.
He nodded. He went out. She heard him go down the outside stairs in the dark, every step, and the plain blue car start up on the street, and go.
She sat there until the window went gray. She didn’t cry anymore. She was past it. She just sat and held all of it, everything he’d said, the whole ugly true shape of it. It was the hardest night of her life. Harder than Zane’s study. Harder than the kitchen table.
There was nothing romantic about it at all.
It was the first time in six years she had ever been told the truth.
* * *
The Adler Foundation flew her to Washington the last week of March.
Nora Pace met her at the airport herself. She was a tall woman in her fifties with short white hair and a laugh that filled rooms. She drove Amelia into the city through the cherry trees, which were just starting to bloom along the river, pink and white against the gray water.
Amelia spent two days at the Adler. She met the staff, sixty people in a bright old building near Dupont Circle.
She met the board. She met a room full of Adler scholars, college kids from Detroit and El Paso and the Mississippi Delta, and one of them, a boy from Tupelo, told her he’d read her Harlan proposal online and it was the first thing he’d ever read about programs like his that sounded like it was written by someone who’d been there.
On the second evening, Nora took her to dinner and offered her the job.
“President,” Nora said. “Starting in July. It’s a big job. It’s a big city. But you’d be good. I think you’d be better than good.” She smiled. “Jonah told me you would be. Jonah doesn’t say that about people.”
Amelia sat across from her in a quiet restaurant in Georgetown and held the offer letter in her hand.
She thought about it. A whole new life. A city with no Fletchers in it.
Sixty staff. Thousands of kids. An apartment in some old brick building near the river, with the cherry trees outside.
Nobody at the table would know about a bar in September or a dollar on a wall.
Nobody would ever look at her and see the cleaner on 28.
She’d just be the woman who wrote the Harlan file.
She wanted it. That surprised her.
“Can I have until the end of April?” she said.
“Take until the end of April,” Nora said. “We’ll wait.”
She didn’t say no.
* * *
She told Roxanne on the first of April, sitting on Roxanne’s back steps in the warm evening while Roxanne smoked the one cigarette a week she pretended she didn’t smoke.
She told her about Washington. The job, the cherry trees, the boy from Tupelo. She told her about the night in the apartment. Everything he’d said. I thought you’d be grateful. The map books. The one part he was saving.
Roxanne listened to all of it. When Amelia was done, she smoked the rest of the cigarette down without a word, looking out at her little yard.
“He shredded a letter and wrote a check,” she said finally.
“Yes.”
“And he told you that. Nobody made him.” She stubbed the cigarette out on the step.
“I was right about him, you know. All of it. Worst thing I ever heard a rich man do.” She was quiet.
“And he gave you the program, and let that board walk out on him, and lost every friend he had, and came up your stairs and said the ugliest thing he’s got to your face and never touched you. And he says good night to Marisol.”
“Rox.”
“I’m saying he might be real.” She said it like it cost her money. “I’m not saying go back. I’m not saying don’t take Washington. I’m saying I think he might be real, and I’ve never said that about him, and I’m going inside before I say anything else.”
* * *
That night she stood in her small kitchen in Cabbagetown and looked at the calendar on the refrigerator, next to the Harlan letter.
April. The Foundation’s annual dinner. The Waverly Club, the gold ballroom, the same four hundred people. The eighteenth. A Saturday.
She had written it on the calendar in February, the day after she named her terms. She’d drawn a small square around it in black pen.
He’d kept the first promise. The program was gone from the Fletcher name. The Kirby Fund was on a crooked door above a hardware store. He had no seat, no say, no secret. It had cost him his mother’s voice and every friend he’d had, and he hadn’t asked for one thing back.
The second promise was still out there. Two and a half weeks away. The story, out loud, in front of everyone. The ugly part and the true part.
In her bag on the card table, folded in half, was an offer letter from the Adler Foundation. Unsigned.
She took the Adler letter out of her bag and unfolded it and read it once more.
Then she got a magnet from the drawer and put it on the refrigerator, next to the calendar, next to the Harlan letter, so that every morning between now and the eighteenth she would have to stand in her own kitchen and look at both of her lives at once.
She turned off the light. From the door, in the glow from the street, she could still see the white square of it on the fridge.
“All right,” she said to it. “Two and a half weeks.”