Chapter 6
The man came to her door on a Tuesday night, in the rain, alone.
No car at the curb that she could see. No broad-shouldered man behind him. He was in a dark coat with rain on the shoulders, and she knew his face instantly and completely — the ballroom, the toe of a black shoe coming down between her hand and those shoes, two words said over her head.
She had never once found out who he was. She had decided, on purpose, not to.
“You,” she said.
“May I come in.”
“No.” She held the door at the width of her own body. “What do you want?”
“To tell you where your brother’s file came from.” He said it without preamble, without softening it. “It didn’t come from the school. And it didn’t come from the woman who came here last month. It came from the Ashford Foundation. They paid a lawyer fifty thousand dollars to ask a court to look at you.”
The blood went out of her face. “How do you know that.”
“I know everything that gets filed in this city.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”
She looked at him for a long moment — at the rain on his collar, at the flat, patient way he stood in a hallway that had a broken light and a smell of old cooking in it, and she felt the cold thing rise in her chest again, the one she had felt on the sofa when the phone rang three times before dawn.
“The night at the hotel,” she said. “You did that. You stood up in front of four hundred people and you made her smaller than she’s ever been in her life. And two days later I lost everything I had. And now you’re standing in my hallway.”
“Yes.”
“So what is this. Are you here to fix it?”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I don’t fix things,” he said. “I take them apart. Those are the only two things I know how to do.”
“Do you know what she’s trying to do to me?”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“She is trying to take your brother,” he said. “Not because she hates him. She has never thought about him. She is doing it because you are the only person she can reach, and because she cannot reach me.”
Delaney’s hand was still flat on the door. Behind her, from the bedroom, Owen called out to ask who was at the door, and she heard herself answer, in an entirely normal voice, “Nobody, sweetheart, go back to sleep,” and she heard how steady it was, and she hated it.
“Why do you care.”
“Because seven years ago,” he said, “I stood in the rain at North Chicago Cemetery next to a grave that had no flowers on it, and a girl in a gas-station raincoat walked up between the rows and put white carnations on my brother’s coffin and paid the gravediggers out of her own pocket so they’d close the ground.”
The hallway was very quiet.
“I had eleven dollars,” he said. “I had been out of prison three days. You gave a man whose name you didn’t know your whole day’s pay, and you never asked for it back, and you wouldn’t remember it now if I described it to you.”
Delaney stared at him.
She remembered the raincoat. She remembered the grave and the two men with shovels and the young man standing there with rain running inside his collar and his arms hanging at his sides, not moving, not speaking, the way a person stands when there’s nothing left in him to spend. She remembered handing over the folded bills and being embarrassed that it wasn’t enough.
She had not thought about that day in years. She had not thought about him in years. She had gone home that night and eaten cold rice standing at the counter and then gone to work in the morning, because that was what you did with a day like that: you put it somewhere and you kept walking.
“You’re him,” she said.
“Yes.”
She let go of the door, and stepped back, and let him into an apartment with a sofa she slept on and a refrigerator with a strawberry magnet on it.
“What do you want,” she said.
“To pay a debt.”
“How.”
“However you want it paid.” He said it with no weight on it at all. “Your lease. Your record at that catering company. The hearing. Your brother’s school. I can have all of it gone by Thursday. Or I can have the Ashford Foundation under a federal audit with its board indicted in front of a grand jury by the end of the season. Say the word and it happens.”
“And what do you get.”
“I get to stop owing you.”
“That’s not the same as it being paid.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
But her mind had already gone ahead of her, the way it always did, moving out into next week. If Owen went into a temporary placement — even for a month — the file would say it. The file would remember it forever. Every hearing for the next ten years would open with the page that said removed from the home.
“Then take her apart,” Delaney said.
May you like
He nodded once, and did not smile, and did not look triumphant.
“Come with me,” he said.
