Chapter 15
She signed the Adler letter at four o’clock on the afternoon of the dinner.
She did it at the card table in her office above the hardware store, with Tasha gone home and the radiator quiet for once and the late light coming in yellow through the window that didn’t open.
She read it through one more time. President.
Starting July first. Then she took a pen out of the cup on her desk and signed her name at the bottom. Amelia Kirby Fletcher. All three.
She didn’t do it because she’d decided to go. She hadn’t decided anything.
She did it because she wanted to walk into that room tonight free.
Not waiting to find out if she had a future.
Not hoping he’d give her one. She wanted to walk in with her whole life already in her bag, signed, ready, hers.
So that whatever happened, whatever he said or didn’t say, the choice would be real.
So it could never be said, afterward, that she’d had nowhere else to go.
She folded the letter in thirds and put it in its envelope and put the envelope in her small black bag. She didn’t seal it.
She hadn’t told anyone. Not Roxanne. Not Jonah. Not Nora Pace, who was waiting in Washington for an answer.
She went home to change.
* * *
It was the same dress. The plain black one from the department store, taken in by the tailor on Memorial Drive who said she had good shoulders.
She’d thought about buying a new one. She decided she wanted to walk into that room in the same dress she’d worn in September, when he stood up and put his name on her work.
Her grandmother’s pearls. Flat shoes. Hair up.
Roxanne drove her. Roxanne had been invited, as the owner of Vega Services, which cleaned the Waverly on Tuesdays and Fridays and had never been invited to anything there in twelve years.
Patrice had put her on the list. Roxanne had bought a navy pantsuit for it.
It was the same navy pantsuit, Amelia realized, that she had worn to the wedding.
“You look like you’re going to a funeral,” Roxanne said in the car.
“I don’t know what I’m going to.”
“That’s what I mean.” Roxanne glanced at her. “You okay?”
“No.”
“Good. That’s honest.” Roxanne turned up the long hill toward the white columns. “Whatever happens in there. I’m at table nine. If you need to leave, you look at me, and we leave. We don’t say goodbye to anybody. We just go.”
“Okay.”
“And if he doesn’t do it—”
“He’ll do it,” Amelia said.
She didn’t know where that came from. She heard herself say it, and it sounded sure. She looked out the window at the iron fence going by, and the lawn lit up like a stage, and didn’t know if she believed it.
* * *
It was the same room. The gold and cream. The three chandeliers. The tall windows onto the bright lawn. The same string quartet, playing something light and quick in the corner.
Mostly the same people, too. The ripple went through the room when she walked in, as it had in September.
Heads turning and turning back. But it was different this time.
It was quieter. More careful. Word had gotten around, as it always did in this town.
They knew about the board meeting. They knew about the Kirby Fund on a crooked door above a hardware store.
They knew Lucas had cut off Zane, and that Maureen wasn’t speaking to him, and that Heather Stiles had moved to Charleston.
They knew something was going to happen tonight. They didn’t know what.
Libby and Sloane didn’t come over this time. They stood by the bar and watched.
Zane wasn’t there at all.
Patrice found her at the door and took both her hands. “You came.”
“You asked me.”
“I did. We’re saying goodbye to the program tonight, officially. I’m going to say some things about you from the podium. I’d like you to hear them.” Patrice looked at her over her glasses. “And he asked me for five minutes at the end. I said yes. I thought you should know.”
“I asked him to,” Amelia said.
Patrice looked at her. Then she nodded, once, and let go of her hands.
* * *
Amelia’s seat was at the front, at a small table near the stage with Patrice and two of the Foundation staff. The same spot as the program table in September. Twenty feet from the podium.
Lucas was at a table on the far side of the room. Alone, almost. The table was set for ten, and there were three people at it. Two were older men from his company’s board who hadn’t dropped him. The third was Walt, in a gray suit, sitting straight with his hands folded on the tablecloth.
Walt. At a table at the Waverly. She looked at him and he looked back at her and gave her one small nod, as he always did when he held a door.
Lucas didn’t look at her. He was sitting with his hands flat on the table in front of him. He was pale. He had no notes. There was nothing on the table in front of him but a water glass.
Maureen was at the head table, near the windows, in dark blue, as always. She was sitting straight. There was a strand of silver hair loose over her ear again. She did not look at her son once, the whole dinner.
Amelia saw Jonah at a table near the back, with some people she didn’t know. He caught her eye across the room and raised his glass an inch, just friendly, and went back to his conversation. That was all.
She was grateful for that. She would think about it later, how grateful.
* * *
Dinner went on forever. Salmon. Some kind of risotto nobody ate.
Speeches about the museum wing and the arts program and the children’s theater.
Patrice spoke about the scholarship program, and she said things about Amelia that Amelia had to look down at her plate to hear.
Built from nothing. Every word herself. The best thing this Foundation has done in twenty years, and she’s taken it with her, and she’s right to.
The room clapped. It was polite applause. It was careful.
Then it was nine thirty, and the plates were cleared, and the coffee came, and Maureen stood up.
She walked to the podium. She was small behind it. She looked out at the room, and the room went quiet, the way rooms always went quiet for Maureen Fletcher.
“My son has asked for a few minutes,” she said. Her voice was clear and even. “I have not spoken to him in eight weeks. I have no idea what he is going to say.” She paused. “I suspect I won’t like it. I’ve given him the floor anyway.”
She stepped back from the podium. And then, instead of going back to her seat, she stood there, at the side of the stage, with her hands folded in front of her. Waiting. Like someone who meant to hear every word from as close as she could.
Lucas stood up.
* * *
He came across the room slowly. Every head turned to follow him. He went up the three steps to the stage and passed his mother without looking at her, and she didn’t look at him either, and he stood at the podium.
He put his hands on the sides of it.
They were shaking.
Not a little. Not so that only someone twenty feet away could see it.
They were shaking so hard that the whole room could see it, all four hundred people, all the way to the back.
He took one hand off the podium and held it up and looked at it, and then he looked out at the room, and he didn’t try to hide it. He just let them see.
Then he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out the dollar.
He unfolded it. It was soft and worn now, creased down the middle. He smoothed it flat on the podium with both shaking hands.
“Six years ago,” he said, “I made a bet. Most of you have heard about it. A lot of you have told it at dinner. I’m going to read it to you. All of it. So you’ve heard it right, once.”
He looked down at the dollar. He read it in a plain voice. He didn’t rush it.
“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.”
The room was completely silent.
“Z.K. is Zane Kramer,” he said. “He kept this framed on the wall of his study for six years. The handwriting is Heather Stiles’s.
She’s the one who said it should be written down.
L.F. is me.” He looked up. “I signed it. Zane didn’t make me.
Heather didn’t make me. I did it. So it’s mine to answer for, and not theirs, and that’s what I’m here to do. ”
* * *
“I want to tell you why I did it,” he said. “Because I’ve never told anybody the truth about that. Not even her, until last month.”
He didn’t look at Amelia. He looked out at the room.
“My father died six years ago in September. Some of you were at the funeral. Some of you were at the reception after, at my mother’s house.
” He didn’t look at Maureen, standing ten feet from him.
“In the middle of that reception, my mother told me that my engagement to a woman I barely knew would be announced at Christmas. She said my father would have wanted it settled. My father had spent thirty years in a marriage that was arranged for him. I watched it my whole life. And that day, with him barely in the ground, I understood mine was going to be the same.”
At the side of the stage, Maureen didn’t move. Amelia saw her hands tighten on each other. That was all.
“I walked out of that house and went to a bar,” Lucas said. “And I decided to hurt her. The worst way I could think of. I decided I’d marry the one woman in Atlanta my mother could never have picked. And make her seat that woman at her own table, at Christmas, in front of all of you.”
He stopped. He looked down at the dollar.
“There was a woman who cleaned my floor at night,” he said.
“The twenty-eighth floor. I’d been working late for two years, while my father was sick.
She’d cleaned around my desk five nights a week, for two years, and I had never once asked her name.
I didn’t know it. That’s who I picked. The cleaner on 28.
Because she was the most shocking thing I could think of to bring to my mother’s table. ”
A sound went through the room. Not words. Just a sound, like air going out of something.