Chapter 4 - THE CONFESSION AUNT IDA KEPT FOR 27 YEARS
At ten past three, the radiator ticked. Eli slept on the couch under my quilt with one foot hanging off the edge.
Gabriel had taken his phone into the hallway, where Teddy stood guard on the stairs like a very polite wall. Through the thin door I heard him say low things to people named Ruiz and Counselor.
Ida sat at my kitchen table with her coat still on.
“Tea?” I said.
“Please.”
I filled the kettle. My hands needed something to do. Ida watched me do it the way old women watch young ones, with enormous patience and perfect awareness.
“You’re thin,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
“I didn’t say you weren’t fine. I said you were thin.” She smiled. “Sit. Let the kettle do its own work.”
I sat.
The kettle ticked. A car passed under the window and threw a slow shape of light across the ceiling.
“I was afraid,” Ida said.
She said it to the table. Quietly. As if reading a line from a ledger.
“The night before the fire, Lucia called me. She said, Idie, I found something in the books. I said, what books? She said, the pantry’s. I said, tell Anthony. She laughed. She said, Anthony would kill him and then we’d have a war, and the children would be the ones to bleed.”
I didn’t move.
“She said she’d handle it herself. I told her to be careful. That was all.” Ida’s fingers pressed against the tea towel. “I sent her a casserole dish. Isn’t that absurd? She called about a murder and I sent her a casserole dish.”
“Ida—”
“After the fire I told Anthony. He went white. He said Vincent had been in Milwaukee that night; he’d checked. I believed him, because I wanted to. And then Anthony’s heart gave out, and Gabriel was seventeen, and Vincent was the only man who could keep the peace.” She lifted her eyes. “I told myself that was prudence.”
“It wasn’t?”
“It was fear in a good coat.” A faint, terrible smile. “I let that man weep to me on the telephone about my sister every Saturday for twenty-seven years, and I never once asked him where he was.”
The tea steeped. I set a cup in front of her.
She wrapped both hands around it.
“I’m seventy-two years old,” Ida said. “I’ve outlived two husbands and a sister. I have exactly one thing left to be brave with.”
“What?”
“My mouth.”
I laughed. It surprised both of us.
“Saturday, I’m going to stand up in that ballroom and say what my sister said to me.” Ida lifted her chin. “And if I die of a stroke at the table, I’ll haunt him in the finest dress I own.”
“You won’t die.”
“I might.” She sipped. “But I’ll be speaking when I do.”
The radiator knocked. On the couch, Eli sighed in his sleep.
Ida looked at him over the rim of her cup. Something in her face broke open, very softly.
“Lucia would have loved him,” she said. “She’d have fed him until he begged for vegetables.”
“He begs for potatoes.”
“That’s an early symptom.”
We drank our tea in the dark. Two women at a kitchen table, one very old, one very tired, both of us understanding that something had begun that could not be put back in its box.
At five-thirty the window went from black to the color of dishwater.
Gabriel sat across the worktable from me, his dinner jacket folded over a chair, his sleeves rolled to the elbow. He hadn’t slept. Neither had I. Ida had finally dozed off on the couch beside Eli, and the two of them had arranged themselves into a single heap of quilt.
The green book lay open on my blotter under the magnifier lamp.
“Tell me what you see,” Gabriel said quietly.
“A rebind.” I turned the back board a few degrees under the light. “Somebody replaced the spine after the fire. Badly. The stitching is fine, but the glue is wrong, and the board is too thick.”
“Too thick?”
“There’s something in the cover.”
“I noticed in January. I didn’t open it. If I do it wrong, the paper tears and there’s no undoing it.” I turned my wrist. “Rosa didn’t do this, I don’t think. Whoever did knew how. Kitchen-table binding. Self-taught. Careful.”
“My mother learned from a library book,” Gabriel said slowly. “She mended the pantry’s cookbooks herself.”
I looked at him.
“Then I think she did it.”
He nodded once.
May you like
“Open it.”
My hands were steady. That was the strange thing. In nine years I had never trembled over a repair, and I wasn’t going to start now. I laid a sheet of Gore-Tex across the board. A whisper of moisture. A bone folder in my right hand, thin as a butter knife. The patience of a woman who had spent nine years learning to be invisible.
