Second Piling

Camille told her at seven, in the cottage, because she would not do it across the bench with Arlo listening.

Tilly was dressed already. She had the yellow jacket on over her cardigan, buckled, and she was kneeling on her bed with the green jar open in front of her, choosing. Lucille stood in the bedroom doorway with a hairbrush. She had heard it all at ten o’clock last night and had said very little, which was worse than if she had said a lot.

“My heart, I need to tell you something about this morning.”

“I’m doing five.” Tilly held two pieces up to the window. “This one is more the same.”

“Gideon had to drive to New York last night, for his work. It was a meeting with a bank and he had to be at it this morning. He won’t be on the dock at eight.”

Tilly’s hand stayed in the air. She lowered it slowly.

“He said eight.”

“He did say eight.”

“He said he’d come to all of them. He said even if it was no.”

“I know what he said. He told me before he left, and he was sorry. He still went.” Camille had promised herself she would add nothing kinder, and it was harder to keep to than she had expected. “So there isn’t a lesson today.”

Tilly looked at the glass in her palm. She closed her fingers over it.

“It’s still eight o’clock at eight,” she said. She climbed down off the bed and went to find her boots.

“Matilda.”

“He said eight. I’m going at eight.” She sat on the floor and pulled the red boots on, one and then the other. She did not take the jar. “If he comes, it goes in. I’ll hold it till then.”

Camille looked at her mother. Lucille lifted the folding stool off its hook by the door.

“I’ll sit,” Lucille said. “You have a window.”

She had a window. She had three hundred croissants and a hundred and forty kouign-amann, the most she had ever baked for one morning. By ten to seven the line had already reached the lilacs. She pushed the sash up on the hour, and the woman from Charlotte bought her dozen. Doreen took the stool by the cash box to answer questions, and Josie bagged.

At eight o’clock Camille was carrying a tray out to the rack. She did not look at her watch. She knew the time from the small figure in yellow that walked down the lawn beside the navy fleece and went out onto the dock alone.

Biscuit was up on her fenders on the grass with her mast down. Tilly went past her without turning her head. She walked to the second pair of posts, where the boat had been tied the week before, and stopped. She faced the shore. She put her feet together and her right fist against the front of her life jacket, and stood.

Lucille opened the stool at the foot of the dock and sat down on it.

Camille went back to her oven. She loaded twenty-four croissants on the top deck and set the timer. She turned kouign-amann out of their rings. Through the propped door she could hear Doreen telling somebody that yes, the north wing opened Thursday, and no, there was one room left for the holiday and a man from Albany was thinking about it.

“Where’s the tall fellow?” a man’s voice asked at the window. “The one who knew about the dogs.”

“He’s away today,” Doreen said.

“Shame. He sold my wife a room.”

Camille carried another tray out at a quarter past. The yellow jacket had not moved. There was a light wind off the water, and it was blowing Tilly’s curls across her face, and she was not putting up a hand to push them back, because that hand was full.

She set the tray down and went along the porch and down the lawn in her clogs.

The planks were dry and warm. She walked out to the second piling and crouched so that her face was level with her daughter’s.

“Come in now. Come and have your milk.”

“The lesson’s until nine.”

“There isn’t a lesson, my heart. I told you. He’s in New York.”

“I know where he is.” Tilly was looking past her, up the lawn toward the drive. “He said eight. So I’m here at eight, and it goes till nine. If I go in, then I wasn’t here either.”

Camille had no answer to that. She had written the rule herself, on a kitchen order pad. You’re on the dock at eight or you aren’t. She had never meant it to bind the child as well.

“Your hand will get sore, holding it that tight.”

“It isn’t sore.”

She went back up the lawn. Her mother did not look at her as she passed, and she was grateful.

Arlo went next. He had heard enough through the kitchen wall last night to know what had happened, and at half past eight he left his eggs to Emmett’s granddaughter, who was helping for the holiday, and walked down with the heel of a brioche loaf on the blue saucer. Camille watched from the porch post. He squatted on the dock in his apron and held the saucer out. He talked for two minutes. Then he came back up the grass with the heel untouched.

“She says thank you and she’ll have it at nine,” he said. He would not meet Camille’s eye. “She asked me if my new shoes were still good. I said they were. Chef, I’d like to go to New York and find that man and hold his head in the lake.”

“Go and do your eggs, Arlo.”

Winnie tried at twenty to nine. She came out of the front door in her cardigan and walked the whole lawn, which she did not do lightly at seventy-one, and stood on the dock with her arms folded. She was back in six minutes.

“She told me I only want things,” Winnie said, climbing the porch steps with a hand on the rail. “She said he doesn’t know, and says so, and that’s why she asks him and doesn’t ask me. Then she said would I mind moving because I was in front of the drive.” She sat down heavily on the bench by the door. “I’ve been put in my place by bishops with less trouble.”

Camille stood at the post with a side towel wound round her fist.

She knew that stance. She knew it from the inside, the feet together and the eyes on the road.

She had been nine. It was the September after her father went, and he had telephoned once and said he would come on Saturdays at ten and take her out. She had sat on the front step at 9 Mill Lane with her shoes on. He had come the first Saturday in a car she did not know, and they had gone for a hamburger. He had come the second and been late. On the third she had sat from ten until the noon whistle blew at the fire station. She had done the same on the fourth, and on the fifth. Her mother had never once told her to come in. Lucille had brought a sandwich out on a plate at twelve, every week, and set it down beside her on the step without a word.

She had sat there until the leaves came down. Nobody had told her to stop. She had stopped by herself one morning in November, because she had worked out that the sitting made no difference to whether a car came. She had taken her shoes off again and gone to help with the wash.

She had made a rule that day, and she had lived by it for twenty-two years. She had written eight Saturdays on an order pad so that her own daughter would never stand like that. Her daughter was standing like that now, on a dock, with a piece of green glass getting warm in her fist.

“Chef,” Josie said, behind her. Her voice was strange. “Chef, something’s—”

Then Camille smelled it.

She was through the door before she had decided to move. The timer on the shelf had been ringing, small and steady, for she did not know how long. Smoke was coming in a thin grey line from the top deck of the oven. She pulled the door down and the heat and the bitter smell came out together.

There were twenty-four of them. They had gone past brown into black, shrunken at the edges, and the butter had run out of them and scorched on the pan.

Arlo had stopped with a plate in each hand. He stared at the tray and then, carefully, at the wall.

She had not burned a tray since her first winter in this kitchen. She had burned her own arm since, and she had dropped a wedding cake once in 2024 and wept in the walk-in. She did not burn croissants. It was the one thing in her life that had never gone wrong when everything else did.

“That’s a hundred and fourteen dollars,” she said. Her voice came out thin. “Take it off the count, Josie. Tell them the next ones are eight minutes.”

She carried the tray to the bin herself and tipped it. The croissants rattled going in. She stood with the hot pan in her mitted hands and her eyes stinging from the smoke, and loaded the next twenty-four. She set the timer and stood in front of the oven door until it rang.

At nine o’clock exactly Tilly walked in off the dock.

She came up the lawn beside her grandmother at her ordinary pace. She did not look at the porch or the line. She went up the flagstones and into the cottage, and Camille put her tray in Arlo’s hands and followed.

Tilly had already unbuckled the jacket and hung it on its low hook. She was in her bedroom, at the windowsill. The mayonnaise jar stood there with its four pieces lying in the bottom. She opened her fist. The fifth piece of green had left a red mark in the middle of her palm. She set it down on the painted wood beside the jar, about an inch away.

She had not cried. Her face was pale and set, and her eyes were quite dry.

“You’re not putting it in,” Camille said.

“He didn’t come, so it isn’t five.”

“And the others?”

“The rule is I take them out and start again.” Tilly looked at the jar. “But I don’t know which it is yet. If he comes back, I take them out and it’s one. If he doesn’t come back, there isn’t any count, and they go with my other greens.” She turned round. “Did Gideon go away like my father did?”

Camille sat down on the edge of the small bed, because her knees had gone.

She did not lie to this child about things that could be checked. She did not make promises for other people either. She had learned on a front step what a promise made on someone else’s behalf was worth.

“He went to New York,” she said. “That’s far away. He told me he was going, and why, and he said he would come straight back when the meeting was done.”

“My father is far away.”

“Yes.”

“My father doesn’t know how to find us. Does Gideon know how to find us?”

“He knows exactly how to find us. He knows the road and the drive and which board is the sixth.”

Tilly thought about it. “Then it’s different.”

“It’s a little different. I can’t tell you he’ll come, because I’m not him. I can tell you what he said.”

“He said eight, too.” She said it without heat, as a fact to go with the others. Then she climbed up beside her mother and leaned against her arm, which she did not often do in the daytime. “I’d like my milk now. And the heel. Arlo said he’d keep it.”

“He kept it.”

Camille held the back of the warm curly head, and looked over it at one green on a windowsill and four in a jar.

The window sold out at ten past ten. It had taken $2,265, and she wrote the figure down without feeling anything about it. There were forty-four covers at dinner. She cooked them all and sent them out right, with her whole mind on it, because that was the only way she knew.

At half past nine she sat in the office with Winnie and the binder. The chair on the other side of the rolltop was empty. Winnie had the man from Albany’s deposit, which made twenty-two.

“That’s a full house,” Winnie said. “You did that.”

“I did.”

“He’ll be back, Camille.”

“You don’t know. You only want it.”

Winnie closed the reservations book. “The two of you have got me by heart,” she said, and went up to bed.

It was after ten when Camille crossed the flagstones. Her mother was asleep on the pull-out with one arm over her eyes. Tilly was on her back with her hands above her head. Camille did not put on the lamp. She sat at the kitchen table in the dark with a glass of water. The tin was on top of the refrigerator behind her and the white page of the order pad was in the drawer in front of her. She thought about nothing at all, with some effort.

She had decided what she would say if he came. She would say it on the step and keep the door shut behind her. She would tell him the number and what his daughter had looked like, and then she would tell him to go down to the boathouse and stay there until next Saturday.

At ten past eleven a pair of headlights turned in at the end of the drive.

She knew the engine. It came up slowly past the lilacs, and it did not go on to the boathouse track. It stopped at the edge of the staff lot, forty feet from the cottage. The lights went out. A door opened and shut quietly.

She was on the step with the door pulled to behind her before he had crossed the gravel.

There was enough light from the kitchen porch to see him by. He was in a dark suit with the tie gone and the collar open. He had not shaved. He walked like a man who had sat in a car for ten of the last twenty-seven hours, and he stopped on the flagstones a yard from the step and came no nearer.

She waited for it. She waited for him to say the meeting had run long, or that the loan was safe, or that he had driven straight through without stopping. All of it was probably true. She had her answers ready.

“What did she say?” Gideon asked.

It was not what she had got ready for.

“She said it was still eight o’clock at eight,” Camille said.

He stood and took it.

“She went out on the dock at eight with the fifth piece in her hand. She stood at the second post, where you had the boat tied. She stood there for an hour. I couldn’t bring her in. Arlo couldn’t, and Winnie couldn’t. She said that if she went in, then she wasn’t there either.” Her voice was low and it did not shake. “She didn’t cry. I’d have liked it better if she had. At nine she came up and put the glass on her windowsill, beside the jar. She hasn’t tipped the jar out. She says she can’t tell yet which rule it is.”

“Which rule?”

“Whether you’ve missed one or whether you’ve gone. She asked me whether you went away like her father did.”

His eyes closed. He stood with them shut for a moment in the light from the porch, with his hands open at his sides, and he did not put one out to the step rail to steady himself, though she thought he wanted to.

“What did you tell her?” he said.

“That you’d said you were coming back, and that I wasn’t you.”

“Thank you. That was more than fair.”

“I wasn’t being fair to you. I was being accurate with her.”

“I know.” He opened his eyes. “One,” he said. “Next Saturday is one.”

He did not ask whether it might be five. He did not tell her what he had saved in New York, though she saw the day in his face. She had been braced against an argument, and now that none had come she hardly knew how to stand.

“Did you keep your loan?” she asked, because she had nineteen people.

“They’ll leave it alone until the board. They want the holiday figures the Tuesday after.” He said it shortly and put it aside. “Camille, I’d like to ask you for something. You can say no, and I’ll go down the lawn.”

“Ask.”

“She comes out of that door at half past six. I’d like to be sitting on this step when she does. I don’t want her to have to wonder until somebody tells her. I want to be the first thing she sees.”

“It isn’t a Saturday. It won’t count for anything.”

“I know it won’t.”

“It’s seven hours, and it’s cold.”

“I’ve a coat in the car.”

She looked down at him. She had meant to send him away. She had the words in her mouth. He looked very tired, and he had asked. He had not simply sat down. She thought of a plate with a sandwich on it, set on a step at noon by a woman who had not known how to say anything.

“I’m not asking you in,” she said.

“I’m not asking to come in.”

He fetched the coat. He sat down on the bottom step with his back against the post and his long legs out across the flagstones, facing the door. She went inside and shut it and stood in her dark kitchen with her arms wrapped round herself.

She stood there for perhaps four minutes. Then she went to the linen cupboard and took down the grey wool blanket from the top shelf, the heavy one, and opened the door again.

He looked up. She held the blanket out, and he took it.

“This isn’t from the other account either,” Camille said. “It’s a cold night, and that’s the only reason.”

“Understood.”

She went in. She did not lock the door, and noticed that she had not. From the bedroom window, over the top of the jar and the one green beside it, she could see the shape of him on the step with the blanket round his shoulders. He did not move. She set her alarm for three and lay down in her clothes.
***