Chapter 11
CONSTNATINE
Dinner was its own particular kind of suffering.
Not because the food was bad -- Cecelia had seen to that, the osso buco she'd made for my father the day before having apparently set a standard that Maria had risen to meet with something that smelled extraordinary and tasted better.
Not because the company was poor. My parents were in better spirits than I'd seen in weeks, my father sitting at the table rather than taking his meal upstairs, my mother beside him with her hand over his in the easy unconscious way of people who had touched each other so often the gesture had stopped requiring thought.
It was suffering because Cecelia was sitting across from me in my mother's wedding dress with her hair coming slightly loose from the way it had been put up, one dark piece falling along her jaw, and she was laughing at something my father had said, a real laugh, her whole face in it, and I was supposed to be making conversation and eating dinner and behaving like a man with ordinary concerns when every single thing in my awareness had narrowed to the woman across the table and the considerable distance between here and the end of the evening.
She caught me looking at one point and held my gaze for just a moment before looking back at my father, and the color that moved across her cheekbones told me the distance was not exclusively my problem.
My father was in remarkable form. Whatever combination of the occasion and Cecelia's company was responsible for it, he was sharp and present and funny in the dry specific way he was funny when he was feeling well, and he held the table with the easy authority of a man who had been doing it for forty years.
My mother watched him with an expression I recognized, the one she wore when she was storing something up, committing it to memory, which she had been doing more and more often in recent months.
I looked at them and thought about forty-one years and what it would mean to build something that lasted that long, and then I looked at my wife and thought that the word wife was going to take some getting used to and that I was not opposed to the process.
"Constantine, would you help your father to bed?
" My mother appeared at my elbow while Cecelia was talking to one of the staff, her voice quiet and her eyes on my father, who had begun to show the particular translucence that came when he had pushed past his endurance for the evening. "He won't say so himself."
"Of course." I stood, and Cecelia stood with me before I'd said anything, which was exactly the kind of thing she did that I had given up trying to anticipate.
"I'll say goodnight to him while he's still down here," she said, and moved across the room to where my father was sitting before I could respond.
I watched her kneel down beside his chair, which put her at his eye level, and take his hand in hers with the naturalness of someone who had known him for years rather than days. "There will never be enough thank yous," she said quietly, "for what today meant."
My father looked at her with an expression I had never seen him use on anyone except my mother. "My girl," he said, "I am very glad I was here to see it." He squeezed her hand. "I will see you tomorrow."
She leaned forward and hugged him gently, careful of him, and he put his arms around her and said something against her hair that I couldn't hear, and when she pulled back she was blinking hard and smiling at the same time, and he was smiling too, the full unguarded smile he saved for things that genuinely moved him.
"Good night, daughter," he said.
She stood and stepped back and I saw her press her lips together briefly before she turned and found me watching and held my gaze with eyes that were bright and a little overwhelmed, and I thought that whatever else was true tonight, that moment had just happened and I was going to remember it for the rest of my life.
"Wait here," I said quietly. "I won't be long."
Getting my father to his room took longer than it had a month ago, which was its own quiet information I filed away without examining too closely.
He was slower on the stairs than he'd been at Christmas, and I matched his pace without commenting on it, and when we got to his room he sat on the bed and exhaled with the relief of a man who had been holding himself upright on willpower for the last hour.
"She's remarkable," he said, while I helped him with his jacket.
"I know."
"No." He looked up at me. "I don't think you know yet. I think you're beginning to." He settled back against the pillows and looked at me with the particular clear-eyed attention he brought to things that mattered to him. "Open the top drawer."
I did. Inside was a red velvet box that I didn't recognize. I brought it to him and he opened it and turned it toward me, and inside on a bed of dark velvet was a necklace, a rose worked in gold with a small diamond at its center, matching the one my mother had worn for as long as I could remember.
"When I had your mother's made I had a second one made for your wife," he said.
"I always knew there would be one." He closed the box and held it out to me.
"Everyone who sees her wearing this will know she is a Venosa.
That she is welcome and she is protected and she belongs.
" He looked at me steadily. "Make sure she knows the same thing. "
I took the box and held it and thought about what it meant that he had carried this in his drawer for forty-one years waiting for this night. "Thank you, Pop."
"Go to your bride." He waved me toward the door with the imperious ease of a man who had been giving orders his whole life and had no intention of stopping. "And Constantine." I turned. "Be worthy of her."
I left him smiling.
My mother was in the hallway, and she touched my face briefly when she saw me, the gesture she'd been making since I was a boy, her palm against my jaw for just a moment. "Go," she said softly. "I'll look after him."
I kissed her cheek and went.
Cecelia was in the dining room when I came back downstairs, helping the staff clear the table with the same naturalness with which she did everything domestic, talking easily with Maria, who was looking at her with the expression the entire household had been wearing since she arrived, which was the expression of people who had decided something important and were keeping it to themselves.
I stood in the doorway and watched her for a moment and thought that my father was right, that I was only beginning to understand what I had, and that beginning to understand it felt like standing at the edge of something very large.
She looked up and saw me and said something to Maria that made the older woman laugh and then she came toward me, and I held out my hand and she put hers in it without hesitating, the way she'd been doing small things without hesitating since the library last night, and I thought that whatever she said about not being frightened I knew she was and I knew she was choosing not to let it make her decisions, which was one of the bravest things I'd ever watched anyone do.
"I should call Jacob," she said as we walked. "To let him know I'm all right."
"Not yet." I kept my voice gentle because I understood the impulse and hated having to counter it. "If they trace you to a job he becomes another breach." I felt her hand tighten slightly in mine. "I'm sorry."
"No. You're right." She was quiet for a moment.
We turned right at the top of the stairs instead of left, toward our wing of the house, and the hallway was quiet around us, just the sound of our footsteps and the distant settling of the old house around us.
I opened the door to our room and she went in ahead of me and stopped in the middle of it and looked around with the expression she wore when she was taking something in properly.
"It really is like its own apartment," she said.
"The whole wing is ours." I closed the door and the sound of the house behind us softened to nothing. "Three other bedrooms if we need them."
She turned to look at me, and the particular quality of the look told me she had stopped thinking about the room.
The lamp on the nightstand threw warm light across the space between us and she was still in my mother's dress with her hair coming properly loose now, that dark piece along her jaw joined by others, and she was looking at me the way she'd looked at me across the dinner table when she thought I wasn't watching, which was to say with an honesty she hadn't quite decided to act on yet.
I crossed the room to her and she stayed where she was and watched me come, and when I reached her I brought my hand up to her face and she turned into it slightly, the smallest movement, involuntary, and I thought about five days of careful distance and decided I was done with careful.
I kissed her properly this time. Not the altar version, not even the library version.
This was everything I'd been keeping at the correct operational distance for five days and she felt it immediately and kissed me back with something that matched it, her hands coming up to my chest and then around my neck, and I pulled her closer and thought that my father had made the right call about the necklace because I wasn't going to let this woman leave.
When we finally broke apart she was breathing the way I was breathing and her eyes when she opened them were very dark and very close. "The buttons," she said, a little unsteadily, and turned around.
I took my time with the buttons.