Terms

The dining room at two o’clock on a Friday in April had nobody in it. Camille had chosen it for that reason.

It was a long room with eleven tables and a wall of old windows facing west. The lunch cloths had been taken off and the dinner cloths were not on yet, so the tables stood bare. Beyond the glass the lawn ran down to the lake. The sun had gone in again since yesterday. The water was grey, the sky was grey, and the mountains had disappeared.

She took the table by the middle window and sat with her back to the kitchen door. She put the order pad face down in front of her and a pen beside it.

It was a kitchen order pad, the kind she bought by the dozen. Each page was white on top with a yellow copy underneath, and whatever was written on the white came through on the yellow. She used them for the dairy and the produce man, so that nobody could tell her afterward she had ordered something different. Last night, after Tilly was asleep, she had sat at the cottage table with a fresh one. She had written and crossed out for two hours. This morning at five she had copied the result cleanly onto a new page, and it had taken her four minutes.

Her mother had read the page over her shoulder. Lucille had said only, “Eight is a lot of Saturdays.”

“It’s meant to be,” Camille had said.

She had sent the message through Winnie at breakfast, because she was not going to walk down the lawn to the boathouse herself. Dining room, two o’clock. Winnie had carried it without comment, although her eyebrows had had a good deal to say.

He came in from the lobby at one minute to two. He was in a grey sweater and the boots, and there was plaster dust on one sleeve. He looked as though he had slept a little, though not much. He stopped at the end of the table and waited.

“Sit down,” she said.

He sat across from her and put his hands on the bare wood. He did not look at the pad, although she could see what it cost him not to.

“You asked me on Wednesday what gets you a daughter,” she said. “I told you I didn’t know. I know now. I’ve written it down, because I’ve learned that it helps to have things in writing. I’m going to read it to you. It isn’t an opening offer, and I don’t want you to treat it like one.”

“All right.”

“You’re a man who buys hotels. You’ll want to trade. You may ask me what a thing means. You may not ask me to change it.”

“I understand.”

She turned the pad over. Her own handwriting looked up at her, the same blue ballpoint that was on three envelopes in a tin. She put that thought away and read.

“One. You may have Saturday mornings with Tilly. Eight o’clock, on the dock. My mother or I will be there the whole time, every time. It starts next Saturday, the twenty-fourth of April.”

She saw his chest move. He said nothing.

“To her, you’re Gideon. You’re a man who used to teach sailing here, and you’ve offered to teach her. That’s true, so she can check it with Winnie if she likes, and she will. Nobody tells her who you are. You don’t tell her, and neither does my mother or Winnie or anyone who works for you. That holds until you’ve come eight Saturdays in a row and I’ve said so. It needs both of those, so on the eighth Saturday you still wait for me.”

“Eight,” he said. He was working it out. “That runs to the twelfth of June.”

“If you don’t miss one.”

“And if I do?”

“Then the count goes back to one.” She kept her eyes on him. “It doesn’t go back to where you left off, and I don’t knock two off for a good excuse. It starts again at one.”

He was silent for a moment. Outside, a gull walked along the porch rail.

“May I ask what counts as a miss?”

“You’re on the dock at eight or you aren’t.”

“What if I’m ill, or the road’s closed? I’m asking so I know the rule. I’m not looking for a way round it.”

“If you’re ill you can sit on the grass and cough. If the road’s closed you should have come up the night before.” She heard how hard that sounded and did not take it back. “Children don’t have a column for good reasons. She’ll be standing there in a life jacket at eight o’clock, and you’ll have come or you won’t. I know what the second one looks like on her. I’m not going to watch it once a month while you run a company.”

He nodded slowly. “And if she’s the one who can’t come? If she has a fever?”

Camille had not expected that question. She thought about it, and she answered it fairly.

“Then it counts for you, provided you were here. I’ll know whether you were.”

“Thank you.” He looked at the lake for a second and then back at her. “One more. What if she asks me straight out? She asked me on Wednesday why my eye was the same as hers. She’ll ask again. I won’t lie to her. I gather you don’t.”

“No, I don’t.” It mattered to her that he had noticed that. “If she asks you something you can’t answer, you say, ‘That’s a question for your mother.’ She’s heard it before, about other things. She doesn’t like it, but she knows what it means. Then you tell me that she asked, the same day.”

“That’s a question for your mother.”

“In those words.”

“I can do that.”

“Two.” She moved her finger down the page. “No lawyers. No papers. No money. Not until I say.”

This time he did start to speak, and stopped himself.

“Go on,” she said. “Ask me what it means.”

“She’s five years old. I owe five years of—” He stopped again and went at it another way. “What does ‘money’ cover?”

“All of it. There’s no cheque or fund, and no account opened in her name that I find out about later. You don’t fix my car and you don’t pay off the cottage. Nothing arrives in a box.” She laid her hand flat on the pad. “I have a job. She has everything she needs. The day I take a dollar from you, every decision I make about her has your dollar in it. I’m not ready for that. I may never be.”

“And lawyers.”

“Somebody in New York is going to tell you that you have rights. They’ll be correct, and they’ll tell you the sensible thing is to get them on paper, and they’ll call that protecting everybody.” She had lain awake over this one longer than over the other two together. “You have a great deal more of everything than I do, Mr. Hallett. If this turns into envelopes with a law firm’s name in the corner, I lose. I won’t lose her, I don’t think. I’d lose the say. So nothing gets drafted or filed, and nobody ‘just looks into it.’ You have Saturdays or you have lawyers, and you can’t have both.”

He looked at her steadily. She could not read everything in his face, but she could see that he was not angry.

“Saturdays,” he said.

“Three.” Her voice was easier on this one. It was about work, and work had never frightened her. “The inn gets an honest chance. That means you and I and Winnie build one plan, one set of numbers that we all sign off on. I don’t want yours and mine and a memo from New York all saying different things. You take that plan to your board on the twenty-sixth of June. You take the true numbers, whatever they are.”

“Whatever they are,” he repeated.

“If they’re bad, you show them bad. I’d sooner have this place sold on real figures than saved on pretty ones. Pretty ones get found out in a year, and then nineteen people lose their jobs anyway, and they’ll have turned down other work in the meantime.”

“That one I’d have written myself.”

“I know. I wrote it down anyway.”

She turned the pad round and slid it across the table. He read it through. He read slowly, the way he had read her binder, and she watched his eyes go down the page and back up to the top.

“There’s something you need to know before I sign this,” he said. “It touches the first one.”

Her stomach tightened. “What?”

“I telephoned my sister yesterday morning, at six. I told her. Her name’s Bea, she’s twenty-nine, and she’s the only person I’ve told. I did it before I knew you’d have terms, and I’d do it differently now. She wanted to drive up. I said no. She’s promised to tell no one, and she keeps her promises better than I’ve kept mine.”

Camille sat back. She was angry, and it came up fast, and then she made herself look at what he had actually done. He had told her. She would never have found it out. He could have signed the page and kept his sister in his pocket.

“What did she say?” she asked.

“She cried. She said Tilly sounded like our father.” He hesitated. “She also said she thought she liked you. That was after I told her you’d said I don’t get to want things yet.”

Camille did not smile, though it was close.

“She doesn’t come here,” she said. “She doesn’t write and she doesn’t send a toy, until I say.”

“I told her that already.”

“Then tell her again, and tell her it’s on a piece of paper now.” She reached across, took the pen and added a line under the first paragraph in small letters. G.‘s sister knows as of April 15. Nobody else. “Is there anyone else? Your mother? Somebody at your office?”

“No one. I asked my mother about the post, and I didn’t tell her why.”

“Keep it that way.”

“I will.”

He picked up the pad again. He held the pen she had brought over the page without writing.

“I’d like to ask one thing of you,” he said. “It’s about the third one, and it’s the only thing I’ll ask. You can say no.”

“You’re trading.”

“I’m asking. If you say no, I’ll still sign.”

She folded her arms. “Ask.”

“Fill the inn for Memorial Day weekend.”

She stared at him. “I’m the pastry chef.”

“You’re the reason people drive here. Winnie can take a reservation, and she’ll take every one that comes. She can’t make the telephone ring. In five years nobody has given a stranger a reason to turn up this drive except you, and you’ve done it out of a window.” He leaned forward on his elbows. “Paquette says the roof will be tight by the seventh of May. The eight rooms open on Thursday the twenty-seventh. That’s the first weekend in three years this inn will have twenty-two rooms to sell. The board meets four weeks later. I can put a plan in front of them, and they’ll read it as one more forecast from a man who’s fond of the place. Or I can put one weekend in front of them that already happened. Twenty-two rooms out of twenty-two, with a full dining room on the Saturday. They can’t argue with that.”

“And you can’t do that yourself.”

“I can lower a rate. I can buy an advertisement in Boston, and I will. It’ll bring six couples who’d have come anyway.” He shook his head. “You told me four in ten of your window customers come from Burlington. They already love something here. They’ve never been asked to stay the night. I don’t know how to ask them. I think you do.”

She looked past him at the bare tables. There were eleven of them. They could seat fifty-two people at once, and she had not seen fifty-two people in this room since before Tilly could walk.

He was not flattering her, which would have been easy to refuse. He had given her a number and a date and told her plainly that she was better at something than he was. Six summers ago she had liked that about a sailing instructor, and she refused to think about it now.

“The window opens on the first of May,” she said slowly. “That gives me four weekends before the holiday. I’d have eight mornings.”

“Is that enough?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never tried to sell a bed with a croissant.” She was already counting. “I’d want a card in every bag, a proper one, with the rate on it and Winnie’s direct line. I’d want the dining room open that Saturday to people who aren’t staying. And I’d want to know the roof date is real before I promise anyone a room under it.”

“I’ll get you Paquette’s word in writing.”

“On an order pad,” she said, before she could stop herself.

There was a short silence. A corner of his mouth moved, and he looked down at the page.

“On whatever he’s got,” he said.

She took the pad back and wrote one more line at the bottom, under the three. C.B. to fill the inn for Memorial Day weekend, May 28–31. 22 rooms. She did not write will try. She had never written that on an order in her life.

“Sign under that,” she said.

He signed. She watched him do it. He wrote Gideon J. Hallett in a quick upright hand, with the date beside it. She had never seen his real signature before. On the deposit card, Winnie said, it was Rourke, J. in the same slanting capitals. She looked at the new name on her own paper for a moment. Then she signed beneath it, Camille Bouchard, and pressed hard so that it would come through.

She tore the page along the perforation. The white top came away clean. Underneath was the yellow copy, a little fainter, with every word on it and both names. She tore that out too and held it across the table.

“That’s yours. I keep the original.”

He took it by the edges. He read it once more, as though it might say something different on yellow. Then he folded it in half and in half again, carefully, with the writing inside.

He took his wallet out of his back pocket. It was plain black leather and worn at the corners, and it was thinner than she would have guessed. He opened it. On the left side there was a slot with a clear plastic window, the kind made to hold a photograph. There was nothing in it. She could see the pale leather behind the plastic.

He slid the folded yellow paper into it. It fitted exactly. Through the plastic she could read a few words in her own handwriting, back to front. He closed the wallet and put it away.

Neither of them said anything for a moment. She did not ask why a man of thirty-three had nobody’s picture in his wallet. He did not ask whether she had ever kept one of him. He had sat at this very table that summer, at staff supper, with his knee against hers under the cloth. She could tell that he knew it as well as she did. They both looked at the lake.

“Eight o’clock on the twenty-fourth,” he said.

“She’ll be on time. She always is. She’ll expect the same.”

“What should I bring?”

“A life jacket that fits you. She told me about the orange one.”

“She said it counted.”

“She said it was ugly and it counted. She was being generous, so don’t push it.” Camille stood, and he stood too, and this time she let it go. “The water’s far too cold to put a child in a boat. I assume you know that.”

“I took the temperature off the dock this morning. Forty-one. Nobody’s sailing for weeks.” He pushed his chair in. “I thought I’d bring the boat up onto the lawn. She said it was a waste that nobody used it.”

“She says that about a lot of things.”

“She’s usually right, as far as I can tell.”

Camille picked up the pad and the white page and her pen. She had nine rooms in tonight and thirty-one covers booked for dinner, and a pot de crème that would not set itself.

“Winnie and I do the weekly numbers on Saturday nights, after service,” she said. “If we’re building one plan, you’d better be in the office for it, half past nine. Bring your room rates, because I’ll be bringing mine.”

“I’ll be there.”

She walked back across the dining room to the kitchen door. Her legs were steady. She had said every word she had meant to say, and he had not once tried to buy his way round any of them. She did not trust that yet. It was written down now, and she could wait and see what he did with it.

At the door she looked back through the round glass. He was still standing by the middle window with his hand flat against his back pocket.
***