Chapter 142: To the Reader of Pages
The emergency, it turned out, was dinner.
Helen stood on my porch with a takeout bag in each hand and the expression of a woman who had been patient for months and was done.
You won, she said. Nobody threw you a party. The foundation threw itself a panel discussion. A panel discussion, Nora.
It had a good turnout, I said.
She pushed past me and started plating food in my kitchen like she owned the deed.
Ruth had sent flowers to the office with a card that said, in full: Noted.
Helen had read the card three times and pronounced it hostile, which made Ruth her favorite person alive.
So that Friday we did it properly. One table. Four chairs. Helen, Vera, Owen, and me.
No announcements. No agendas. Vera brought a cake she had baked herself, lopsided, perfect.
She had paid for the ingredients out of her own budget envelope, and she told us so twice, because the envelope system was her proudest invention.
Helen raised her glass first.
To my sister, she said, who reads contracts for fun and once made a grown man cry with a lease.
He cried because he lied, I said.
He cried because he lied badly, Vera said, and the table laughed, and for one whole hour nobody mentioned the case.
That was the celebration. It was all of it I wanted.
Owen waited until the cake.
He stood, tapped his glass, and checked all three faces before beginning. He had practiced this in his car.
To the reader of pages, he said.
The toast landed without decoration and reached all the way down.
Vera dabbed her eyes with a napkin printed with budget categories.
Helen said, finally, a normal speech from a lawyer, and Owen sat down, and I thought the evening had given me everything it had.
Then he stood up again.
Actually, he said. There is something I have been meaning to ask, but only if tonight still belongs to us afterward.
The room changed shape.
I knew his deposition posture by now. I was looking straight at it.
Nora, he said.
And the front door banged open.
Helen had gone to the car for the bottle she had forgotten, the good one, the one she had been saving.
She took in the scene in half a second. Owen standing. Vera frozen. My face.
She did not leave. Of course she did not leave.
She said, oh no, and tried to back out through the door while still holding the champagne, and hit the frame.
Owen closed his eyes.
Vera lost the battle first. She laughed the way she laughed now, all the way up from her shoes.
Then Helen laughed, and even Owen laughed, standing there holding his unfinished sentence like an exhibit he could not enter.
The moment did not break. It dissolved, warmly, like sugar in hot coffee.
It had been two years since I sat at a table with nothing to win.
I had forgotten the shape of it. Nobody performing. Nobody keeping score.
We ate the cake standing up, all four of us, out of the pan.
Vera fell asleep in the armchair at ten, holding her purse like a lifeguard.
Owen covered her with the good blanket, the one Helen said was too nice for guests, and Vera woke just enough to tell him the trim was crooked, and fell back asleep.
Later, carrying plates to the kitchen, he leaned close.
That question, he said. It keeps.
How long does it keep? I asked.
He smiled the smile he saved for closing arguments.
It has kept for months, he said. One more day will not hurt it.
I watched him run the water, a man entirely unbothered by a postponed question, and I had a sudden, ridiculous thought.
Whatever he meant to ask me, he was not worried about the answer.
And neither, I realized, drying my hands, was I.