Two Questions

Nadia Brisson could laminate, and by noon on Monday Camille had stopped watching her hands.

She was forty, square and unhurried, with a grey streak in her hair and forearms like a rower’s. She had asked three questions about the old sheeter and one about the new one. She had put her boots on the mat without being told. At twelve she had turned out a block with twenty-seven clean layers, and Camille had cut it and held it to the window and found nothing to say.

“You can do tomorrow’s twenty dozen,” Camille told her. “I’ll shape. I’ve never said that to anyone in this kitchen.”

“I’ll try not to make you sorry,” said Nadia.

It was a good morning. Tilly had gone off on the bus at twenty past seven, still talking about tacking. Gideon had left at noon for Burlington, to sign for the wedding tent and collect the board books from the printer. He had put his head in at the porch door to say he would be back at four. He had still been quiet. She had told him to bring her a pound of the good coffee from the Daily Round, and he had said, “Yes, Chef,” and that had been the most like himself he had sounded in three days.

At one o’clock the swinging door from the dining room opened.

She thought it was Winnie. Then she saw the charcoal suit and the white hair, and the long stooped body coming in sideways with a flat leather case under one arm.

“Chef Bouchard,” Desmond Pike said. “Forgive me. Mrs. Ostrander was on the telephone and I didn’t wait. I should be glad of ten minutes.”

“Mr. Hallett’s in Burlington.”

“Until four, I’m told. It’s you I came to see.” He glanced at Nadia. “Privately, if it can be managed.”

Camille’s skin had gone cold under her jacket. She knew of no reason why this man should drive five hours to talk to her alone, and she could think of several bad ones.

“Nadia, take your lunch. Arlo has soup in the staff room. Half an hour.”

Nadia looked from one of them to the other, wiped her hands and went.

Pike walked to the bench. He did not stop where the tile changed colour. He came all the way to the steel in his street shoes and opened the leather case.

“I shall lay out three things,” he said, “and then I shall tell you what they are. I’d ask you to hear all of it before you answer. After that you may say whatever you like to me. I expect I’ve earned it.”

He put down a document, perhaps six pages, clipped at the corner. He put down a second, shorter one, beside it. Then he took the fat dark-green fountain pen out of his breast pocket and laid it on the bench between the two, parallel with the edge.

Camille looked at the second paper first, because it was nearest. It was typed. At the bottom of the last page were two lines for signatures. Under the right-hand one somebody had printed a name by hand, to show where she was to sign.

C. BOUCHARD.

It was in square capitals, every stroke the same weight, and the ink was green.

She did not hear the compressor or the radio in the breakfast kitchen. She knew that hand as she knew her own. It had been in a tin on top of her refrigerator for five and a half years, laid over her handwriting three times. She had never described it to anybody.

“You,” she said.

“Yes.” He stood with his hands at his sides. “In the autumn of 2021 I was the executor of Conrad Hallett’s estate. I sat in the front hall of his house every morning and went through the post. Three letters came from this inn for a Mr. Jamie Rourke. I knew who that was. I wrote on each of them and sent it back. Gideon never saw them, and neither did his mother. I want you to have that from me, because it’s true, and it’s to his credit.”

Her hands were flat on the steel. She pressed down until the bones showed.

“You didn’t open them.”

“I did not. I thought I knew what they were. I thought a young woman at a summer inn had found out what the family was worth. I was wrong, and I learned how wrong in your lobby on the twenty-first of May, when your daughter looked up at me.” His voice was level and dry. “I don’t ask you to forgive it. I’ve no way to make it good. I only tell you that I didn’t know.”

“You pressed hardest on the third.”

He looked down. “So I’ve been told.”

“Who told you?”

“Gideon did, on Thursday. He came to my office with a photograph of three envelopes on a pine table.” Pike raised his eyes. “He had no need to ask me whose writing it was. He learned his figures from me, at fourteen. He would have known that hand the instant he saw it, wherever and whenever that was.”

She knew where and when. It had been in her kitchen on Tuesday night, by the small light over the stove. She had been wearing his shirt. She had stood close and watched his face and asked him whether he recognised it.

No. But I’ll find out.

And on Saturday, at the end of the dock, he had told her he was working on it.

She did not sway. She would not, in front of this man. She moved her eyes to the other document.

“And that?”

“That is a copy of a draft prepared by Farr and Associates, who have been the Hallett family’s lawyers for forty years. The cover page will tell you it was instructed by telephone by G. J. Hallett at a quarter past nine on the evening of Friday, the twenty-first of May. There are two instruments. One is a trust of five million dollars for the benefit of Matilda Bouchard, a minor. The other is a petition to the Vermont court to establish his parentage of her.” He let a second go by. “There was also a form of acknowledgment, which the mother signs with the father. A petition is what’s filed when she won’t.”

Camille drew the pages toward her by one corner. Her daughter’s name was on the first of them, in type, between two lines of Latin. In re: Matilda Bouchard, born March 27, 2022. Somebody in an office in New York had spelled it out and checked it.

It was dated Friday, the twenty-first of May, at a quarter past nine. He had stood on her kitchen porch at half past seven that evening and told her he was leaving. He had not asked her to change the count. An hour and three-quarters later he had been on a telephone with a lawyer.

No lawyers. No papers. No money. Not until I say. She had read it to him across a bare table. He had said, “Saturdays,” and signed, and put the copy in his wallet where a photograph should go.

“It’s marked as a draft,” Pike said. “Nothing was filed. I should also tell you that he ordered every copy destroyed on Thursday afternoon, after he had learned that I knew of them. The firm complied. This one had reached me earlier, as the estate’s executor, and so it wasn’t in their hands to destroy.”

“And he doesn’t know you’ve got it.”

“He knows I have the notice. I doubt he knows I asked for the text.”

She turned the petition face down. She found that she could still think, and that surprised her. She did it the way she costed a dish, one line at a time.

“Now the other one,” she said. “The one with my name on it in your pen.”

“It’s an agreement between you and me. The company isn’t a party and neither is Gideon. I pay you two million dollars, from my own funds, within five days of signing. In return you make no claim of your own, now or later, on the Hallett family, the estate or the company. And you say nothing, to anyone, of the three letters or of who returned them.”

“And Tilly?”

“The child’s standing is a matter for her father and the law. I can’t buy it, and I haven’t tried to. Read clause four.” He touched the page. “Two million dollars would buy a bakery in any town in this state, and the building it stood in, and a house beside it. You’d owe nothing to anyone called Hallett. I thought that might be worth something to you, this week in particular.”

She read clause four. She read the figure, which was written out in words and then in numerals. She had thirty-eight thousand five hundred dollars in a savings account in Vergennes, and it had taken her twelve years.

Then she looked up at him.

“You’ve come for two things,” she said. “You want to buy my silence about yourself. There’s a vote in twelve days, and a woman with twenty shares who thinks you’ve never lied to her. And you want to tell on him. You could have posted me that petition. You brought it by hand so you could watch me read it.”

Something moved behind the rimless glasses. It might have been respect.

“I wanted you informed,” Pike said. “You’ve been dealt with in the dark for six years, by me first and now by him. I thought you should see the whole table once. What you do about it is your own affair.”

“It’s convenient for you, though, what I’m likely to do.”

“I’ve never claimed to be disinterested. I think the inn should be sold. I think he’ll fight less hard for it if he has less reason to. That doesn’t make one word of what I’ve told you untrue.”

“No,” Camille said. “I don’t suppose it does.”

She picked up her bench knife. He watched her do it without moving. She put the flat of the blade against the green pen and slid it across the steel toward him until it reached the edge. She would not put her fingers on it. Then she turned the agreement round with the knife’s tip and pushed that after the pen.

“I’ve had your ink in my house since the first of September, 2021,” she said. “I’m not writing my name next to it. Take that back to New York. It’s refused. You know what to print on the front.”

He took the pen and clipped it into his pocket. He put the agreement in the leather case. He did not reach for the petition, and she laid her hand on it.

“This stays here.”

“I brought it for you.”

“Then you’ve nothing left to do in my kitchen. You’re past the tile line in outdoor shoes, Mr. Pike. Nobody stands there unless I ask them to. Get out.”

He inclined his head. At the swinging door he stopped, with his back to her.

“For what it’s worth, he was very angry on your account. I’ve known him since he was born and I had never seen it.”

“It’s worth nothing,” she said. “Go.”

The door swung to behind him. A minute later she heard a car on the gravel, going slowly down the drive.

She stood for a while. Her hands were quite steady, which was odd. On the morning he broke the count she had burned twenty-four croissants. She had been frightened then, because she had not known what would happen. Today she knew, and there was nothing left to be frightened of.

Winnie put her head in at twenty past one. “Was that who I think it was? He went through my lobby as if I were a hatstand.”

“It was.”

“What did he want?”

“He wanted me to sign something. I didn’t.” Camille folded the petition in half, with the type inside. “I can’t tell you the rest today, Winnie. Don’t ask me.”

Winnie looked at her face for a long moment. She did not ask. “I’m at the desk,” she said, and went.

Nadia came back at half past. Camille shaped twenty dozen croissants with her, one after another, and every one of them was right. She showed her how the proofer ran warm on its left side. She answered a question about egg wash. At three she walked across the flagstones to the empty cottage and stood on her toes and reached past the fire extinguisher. She carried the tin back under her arm.

At a quarter to four she sent Nadia home and told Arlo to take his break on the front porch and keep everyone out of the back corridor. Arlo opened his mouth, looked at her, and shut it again.

She put the tin on the bench and laid the petition beside it, face up and open at the first page. She stood on her own side of the steel and waited.

The oven clock said 4:00 when the porch door opened.

He had a carton of bound board books on one hip and a paper bag from the Daily Round in his other hand. He set the carton on the floor and took off his boots on the mat. He was halfway across the tile, holding out the coffee, when he saw what was on the bench.

He stopped. The colour went out of his face.

“Pike was here,” he said.

“At one o’clock. He stayed twenty minutes. He told me whose hand it was, and he offered me two million dollars to keep quiet about it. I refused. Then he left me this.” Her voice was level. It was the voice from the first night, and she heard that he knew it. “I have two questions. I want yes or no, and then you can say whatever else you have.”

He put the paper bag down on the floor beside the carton. “Ask.”

“On Tuesday night I gave you the tin in my kitchen. I asked you whether you recognised the writing. You said no. Did you know then that it was his?”

“Yes.”

“That was six days ago.”

“Six days. I knew before I’d read the words. I lied to you. It was the first time since I told you my name was Rourke.”

She had thought it would be easier if he did not twist. It was not easier.

“The second one. This says you telephoned a lawyer at a quarter past nine on the twenty-first of May. That was the night you drove to New York and broke the count. Did you order these papers that night?”

“Yes. From the car, on Route 4.” He did not look away from her. “A logging truck came over a hill on my side of the road. It missed me by a yard. I sat at a farm gate and thought about a will that leaves her nothing and a birth certificate with a blank line. I rang Imogen Farr and told her to draft and hold. I knew what I’d signed. I had your paper in my pocket while I was doing it.”

“You had my telephone number in your pocket too. You had all seven digits. You could have rung the cottage from that gate and said, ‘Camille, I nearly died, I want to make a will.’ I’d have told you to make one.”

“I know.”

“And the hand?”

“I meant to tell you on the twenty-seventh. All of it. I’d have had the vote behind me and Pike out of the company. I had the drafts destroyed on Thursday, so there’d be nothing left that could reach you. You had the oven and the wedding, and nineteen people to hold together. I thought you could do without knowing for sixteen days that the man who’d refused your letters was coming to sit in your dining room.” He stopped, and when he went on his voice was rough. “I told myself I was protecting you. I stood on a street corner in New York and used those words. Forty minutes before, I’d heard him use them, and I’d told him not to.”

“You decided what I could stand to know.”

He said nothing.

“That’s what was done to me in 2021. A man sat in a hall and looked at an envelope and decided what you could stand to read. You had the same teacher, Gideon, and he taught you more than balance sheets.” She put her fingertips on the petition. “I asked you for one thing in that dining room that was harder than turning up. I said that if there were ever envelopes with a law firm’s name on them, I’d lose the say. You said, ‘Saturdays.’ Then you bought the lawyers anyway and kept them in a drawer where I couldn’t see. Something went wrong and you had the papers destroyed, and you told me nothing about that either. All the while you were on my dock every week, getting her to trust you.”

“I wasn’t getting her to do anything. That was real, Camille. Every minute on that dock was real.”

“I believe you. That’s why it’s so bad.” Her throat was tight, and she kept her voice steady in spite of it. “On Saturday night I asked you straight out, at the end of that dock. You looked at the water. I knew that look, and I let it go, because I was happy. Do you know what I was thinking while you sat there holding my hand and lying to me?”

“No.”

“You won’t, now.”

He came one step toward the bench and stopped himself where the tile changed. His hands were open at his sides.

“I love you,” he said. “I have since I was twenty-seven. I should have said it on the breakwater and in the boathouse and at your table. I was waiting until I’d earned it. I’m saying it now, when I’ve earned nothing, because it’s true and you ought to have it.”

It was the thing she had meant to say to him after the vote. For one second it was almost more than she could stand up under.

“You loved me then, too,” Camille said. “Look what it was worth.”

He flinched as though she had struck him. He did not argue.

She picked up the tin. It weighed almost nothing. She held it out across the steel, and after a moment he took it in both hands.

“Read them,” she said. “I told you they’d stay shut until I was ready. I’m ready now. It’s everything I ever had to say to you. I said it three times and it came back, and I haven’t got a fourth.”

“Camille—”

“The Saturdays are over. You gave me your word about lawyers and you broke it the same night you broke the count, so there isn’t a count. There’s no dock at eight o’clock. You don’t come near her. You don’t go to the bus or the cottage, and you don’t stand on the lawn where she’ll see you. I’ll tell her myself, and I’ll tell her nothing that isn’t so.”

“She’ll ask why.”

“She will, and I’ll have to answer her. You’ve left me that as well.”

He stood with the tin against his chest. His eyes were wet, and he did not hide it. She had not hidden hers on the beach two days ago.

“And the inn?” he said.

“The inn is nineteen people. My numbers are in that plan and they’re true. I’ll be in the dining room on the twenty-sixth to say so, and I’ll feed your board and marry Paige Haskell on the lawn. Whatever you need from the kitchen before then, send it through Winnie.” She took her hand off the bench. “Pull the door shut behind you. It sticks.”

He looked at her for a moment longer. Then he bent and picked up his boots. He did not put them on. He went out in his socks, across the porch, with the boots in one hand and the tin under his arm, and the door closed quietly behind him.

Camille stayed where she was. The carton of board books sat on her floor, with the bag of coffee beside it. The petition lay on the steel with her daughter’s name on it.

She had an hour and a half. At half past five the bus would stop at the end of the drive, and Tilly would get down with her school bag and a great deal still to say about tacking.

She folded the petition and put it in her jacket pocket. She washed her hands at the sink, for the full twenty seconds, and dried them. Then she turned Nadia’s croissants a quarter turn on their trays, because the proofer ran warm on its left side.
***