In a Row

Winnie came out onto the kitchen porch at twenty to eight with her reading glasses in her hand, and Camille knew from the way she was holding them that it was about him.

The window had been open forty minutes. Nadia was loading the second oven, and the line ran down past the lilacs. Camille set a tray of kouign-amann on the rack and wiped her hands.

“He rang the desk at seven,” Winnie said, low. “He asked me to say this to you exactly. He’ll be at the end of the dock from eight until nine. He isn’t coming for a lesson and he isn’t asking for one. He’ll come down the far side by the cedars, and he won’t look at the cottage or go near it. He said you’d want to know before you saw it.”

“I told him no dock. I told him not to stand where she’d see him.”

“I said that I expected you had. He said the end of the dock was the furthest place on the property from her window, and that he was telling you and not asking.” Winnie put the glasses in her pocket. “I’m the innkeeper, Camille. I can’t order the owner off his own planks. I can only carry what he says.”

Camille looked down the lawn. It was a still, bright morning, and the dock lay empty on flat water.

She had cancelled the lesson herself, on Monday evening, at the cottage table. She had told Tilly what was so. Gideon and she had written down an agreement in April. He had broken one part of it, and he had told her something that was not true, and so the lessons had stopped. Tilly had asked whether he had missed a Saturday. Camille had said no. Tilly had asked how long the lessons were stopped for, and Camille had said she did not know. The child had taken that to bed with her without another word.

“Nadia,” Camille said through the door. “You have the ovens until nine. Arlo carries.”

She crossed the flagstones.

Her mother was at the stove with the coffee. Tilly was not at the table. She had dragged the chair with the cushion across the kitchen to the window beside the back door, the one that looked all the way down the lawn. She was kneeling on it in her blue dress and her red boots, with her right hand closed in her lap.

“There isn’t a lesson today, my heart. I told you on Monday.”

“I know.” Tilly did not turn round. “Mémé, what time is it?”

“Seven fifty-two,” Lucille said.

Camille stood behind the chair. She could have drawn the curtain, and she thought about it. She had never yet managed her daughter by covering a window, and she left it open.

At four minutes to eight a man came out of the cedars at the north edge of the lawn. He was a long way off. He wore jeans and a white shirt, and he had the navy life jacket buckled over it. He walked down to the shore with his face turned to the lake the whole way.

“He has the blue one on,” Tilly reported. “He’s on the dock. He’s at my board.” She pressed nearer the glass. “He’s past it. He’s past the seventh. Maman, he’s going to the end.”

He went to the end. He sat down on the new timber with his back to the inn and his feet over the water, and he put his hands on his knees.

“Eight,” said Lucille, from the stove.

Camille looked along the lawn. Sixty people stood in her bakery line, and most of them had turned their heads. Emmett had stopped at the terrace wall with a flat of seedlings. There were guests at the porch tables. Arlo stood at the kitchen rail with a tray held against his chest. Every one of them could see the owner of the place sitting alone at the end of an empty dock in a life jacket, where a child in yellow had been beside him every other Saturday.

Nobody went down to him, and he did not look round.

She had been angry for five days, and she found she was still angry. He had no business being there. She had told him so in words that could not be read another way. But he had sent word ahead through Winnie, as she had told him to send everything. He had come by the far side, and he had kept his back to her house.

The file was on the table behind her, in its brown envelope. Winnie had brought it across on Tuesday morning with a face like a shut door. Camille had read it standing up, and again on Thursday night, sitting down.

She could not find anything in it to be angry at, and she resented that. It held eleven pages from a lawyer’s office and one in his hand. The lawyer’s own note was on top. Advised client to tell her, soon and himself. Client says he knows the difference. I am not sure he does. He had sent her that. He could have left it out, and she would never have known it existed.

His page had no excuses in it at all. It said the matter was closed. Nothing had been filed in any court and nothing would be, unless she filed it. He would sign whatever she put in front of him about Tilly, with any lawyer of hers or none, and if she put nothing in front of him he would sign nothing. He had read the three letters and would bring them back when she said where. He was telling his mother and his sister that same day, all of it, his own part included, because Pike meant to tell it on the twenty-sixth. No one would write to her or come to her. He was at a motel in Vergennes, so that she would not have to look at the lamp.

She had looked for the lamp anyway. For five nights she had opened the back door and seen the boathouse window dark. She had hated the dark, and she had hated more that she was looking.

So a woman in New York with twenty shares now knew her daughter’s name. He had told her without leave, and he had written that he was doing it on the same day. Camille had turned that over a good many times. She could not decide whether it was one more thing done over her head or the first thing he had refused to do in the dark.

“He isn’t doing anything,” Tilly said. “He’s just sitting.”

“Yes.”

“I stood up, when it was me. He’s allowed to sit, because he’s at the end. It’s further.” She was quiet for a moment. “I don’t go to the end.”

“I know you don’t.”

“Mémé?”

“Eight twenty,” said Lucille.

Camille sat down at the table and put her hand on the brown envelope. Her mother set a cup in front of her and a plate with bread and butter on it, and stood there until she had taken a bite.

The hour went slowly. Tilly asked the time eleven more times. A motorboat went up the lake and its wake reached the dock and broke white on the posts. He did not move his feet. At a quarter to nine Arlo crossed the flagstones with a tray of something, looked in at the back window, saw the small face against the glass and went away again without knocking.

“Nine,” Lucille said.

He stood up. He walked the eighty feet back to the shore at an ordinary pace. He went into the boat bay for a moment, and when he came out he turned north along the water and went up by the cedars, the way he had come. A minute later Camille heard a car start on the far side of the inn and go down the drive.

Tilly climbed off the chair. She went into her bedroom, and Camille got up and followed as far as the door.

The jar stood on the windowsill with three greens in it. The four old ones lay beside it in their dusted line. Tilly unscrewed the blue lid. She opened her right hand. There was a piece of green glass in it, the size of the others, and a red mark on her palm where she had held it for an hour. She dropped it in. It rang against the three.

“That’s four,” she said.

“Matilda.” Camille kept her voice even. “I stopped the lessons. You know that.”

“It wasn’t a lesson. It’s the count.” Tilly screwed the lid on. “He came. You said in a row. You didn’t say I had to be there.”

“I said—”

She stopped. She had been asked that very question across a bare table in April. What if she’s the one who can’t come? She had thought about it and answered it fairly. Then it counts for you, provided you were here. It was not on the paper. It did not need to be, because she had said it, and the man who asked had remembered.

“The thing he broke,” Tilly said. “Is it still broke?”

“Yes.”

“Was it eight o’clock?”

“No. It was a different part.”

“Then that part’s on your paper. I haven’t got a paper. I’ve got one rule, and it’s if he misses.” She looked up with those clear grey eyes, perfectly reasonable. “He didn’t miss. I watched the whole time. He was there at eight and he stayed till nine. He even had a jacket on, and he can swim.”

Camille looked at her daughter and had nothing to say. She had drawn up terms and run a kitchen and sent a man with a green pen out of it. She could not find one honest word to put against this.

“You can be cross at him on your paper,” Tilly said kindly. “I’m not telling you to stop.” She set the jar back in its place and squared it. “May I have my milk in the kitchen? Arlo has the heel.”

“Go on. Stay on the flagstones.”

The red boots went down the step. Through the back window Camille watched her cross the sixty yards and knock at a door that was never locked.

When she turned round, Winnie was coming in at the front with her braid over her shoulder.

“I’ve left Doreen on the desk,” Winnie said. “I have minded my own business since Monday, and that’s the longest I’ve done it in forty years. I’m finished. Sit down, Camille, and tell me what that man in the charcoal suit brought into my inn.”

Lucille pulled out a chair and sat in it. That was unusual enough to settle the matter.

Camille told them. She stood at the counter with her arms crossed and said it in order, quickly, because there was no slow way.

“The green writing on my letters is Desmond Pike’s. He was at the house that autumn for the father’s estate. He took them out of the post and sent them back. He told me so himself on Monday, in my kitchen. Gideon never saw them, and neither did his mother.”

Winnie’s face went red and then white. “I handed you those,” she said. “I handed you every one across my desk. And that long streak of misery walked through my lobby and asked me about my repeat rate.”

“He offered me two million dollars to keep quiet about it. I pushed it back at him with a bench knife.”

“Good,” said Lucille. It was the first word she had spoken.

“That isn’t all of it. I showed Gideon the tin a week ago Tuesday. He knew the hand the moment he saw it. I asked him if he did, and he said no. He kept that up for six days. And on the night he drove to New York and broke the count, he rang a lawyer from the car and had papers drawn. There was a trust for her, and a petition to a court to be named her father.” She touched the envelope. “He’d signed that there’d be no lawyers. He had it in his wallet while he did it. Pike got hold of a copy and brought it to me. That’s why there’s no lesson.”

Nobody spoke. The refrigerator hummed, with its top bare where the tin had been.

“And what’s in that?” Winnie nodded at the envelope.

“The lawyer’s whole file. He sent it without being asked. Nothing was ever filed. He had the drafts destroyed. There’s a page from him that says he’ll sign whatever I put in front of him, or nothing.” Her voice roughened. “It’s a very good page. I’ve read it twice, and I can’t pick a hole in it. He still lied to my face in this room, Winnie. He decided what I could stand to know. That’s exactly what Pike did.”

Winnie sat down slowly on the chair with the cushion, which nobody but Tilly ever sat on.

“It’s the same sin,” she said. “I won’t argue that. He should have told you that night, and he should never have picked up that telephone. Blame him for both of those. They’re his, and he’s said so.” She laid her hand flat on the table. “But listen to me. I watched you walk to my mailbox for ten weeks. You blamed the wrong man for those envelopes for almost six years. Be sure you’re blaming this one for the right things. He’s done two things to you. He hasn’t done five.”

“Two is enough.”

“It may be. I’m only asking you to count them properly. You count everything else.”

Camille looked at her mother. Lucille was turning her coffee cup a quarter turn on its saucer and then back.

“Say it, Maman.”

“I’ve known one man who left,” Lucille said. “When your father was in the wrong he got into a car. He never once stood anywhere he could be looked at. He telephoned if he had to, or he sent a cheque, and after a while he stopped doing either.” She raised her eyes. “A man who leaves is one thing. A man who sits where everyone can watch him being refused is another. There were sixty people in your line this morning, and the whole staff. I don’t say take him back. I say don’t mistake him for your father. I let you do that for a long time, and I shouldn’t have.”

It went into her like a splinter. She had been nine years old on a front step, and she had made a rule. For twenty-two years she had laid that rule over every man like a ruler. She had laid it over this one in April. It had not fitted him then and it did not fit him now. He had done something else, and it was his own doing.

“I’m not ready,” she said. Her throat hurt. “I don’t know that I will be. I can’t sit across a table from him and have the old Saturday nights. I can’t hear him say my name.”

“Nobody asked you to,” Winnie said.

“No.”

She turned and looked out of the back window. Arlo had come out onto the kitchen porch with a crate. Past him she could see Josie at the till and Nadia’s square back at the rack. Upstairs in the north wing a window was open, and Shelley Gebo was shaking a pillowcase out of it. There were two unopened envelopes in Winnie’s drawer with the roof invoices. In seven days eight people from New York would sit down in the dining room. One of them had a green pen in his pocket and one was her daughter’s grandmother.

She knew what Pike would say. He had said it to her already, in other words, over her own bench. The plan was a forecast made by a man with a reason to make it. Every kitchen line in the board book was true, and every one would be read aloud by Gideon Hallett, with Desmond Pike at the same table knowing exactly why Gideon’s voice might shake.

Bea Hallett had sat on that porch with her shoes off and said it plainly. The numbers I’m voting with had better be yours, Chef.

“Winnie,” Camille said. “The carton of board books is under my bench. He left it on my floor on Monday and I haven’t sent it on. Have Emmett take it to the motel. I’m keeping one copy.”

“All right.”

“Then ring him. Tell him the kitchen pages come out of his part of the meeting. The window, the wholesale, the weddings, the cost lines and the baker. I’ll present those to the board myself, on my feet, and I’ll take questions from anybody with a share. He can do the rooms and the roof. You do the bookings. He isn’t to speak for my kitchen and he isn’t to speak for me.”

Winnie’s eyebrows had gone up. “He’ll say yes before I’ve finished the sentence.”

“I don’t care what he says. I’m not asking him. I’m telling him, through you.” She uncrossed her arms. “And this isn’t for him. I want that understood by both of you. If I never say another word to him, those numbers are still mine. I built that line out of a window. I told nineteen people at a table that they’d hear the answer from me. I won’t let Desmond Pike hand this place to Alder Shore because he’s ashamed of himself. I won’t let it go because I’m hurt, either. I’m doing it for the nineteen.”

“I didn’t suppose anything else,” Winnie said. She got up off the cushion and straightened her cardigan. At the door she paused. “Eleven o’clock on the twenty-sixth. You’ve a wedding at four.”

“I’ve a cake in four tiers and a hundred and twenty for dinner. I’ll manage an hour for the board.”

“Hm,” said Winnie, and this time it was the good one. She went out.

Lucille rinsed her cup and stood it on the rack. She touched Camille’s cheek with the backs of her fingers as she passed.

“You’ll want the blue binder,” she said. “It’s under the bread box. And finish that bread.”

Camille finished it. She fetched the binder and opened it on the pine table beside the brown envelope, at the tab for the window. She had a pencil behind her ear and a week to make every line stand up alone.

The back door opened. Tilly came in with a milk moustache and the blue saucer, and stopped at her mother’s elbow to see what the page was.

“Is that for the New York people?”

“It is. I’m going to read it to them.”

“Good. You do the numbers better.” She set the saucer in the sink, on tiptoe. “Next Saturday is five, Maman. That’s the same day they decide.”
***