Chapter 190: The Last Page
The morning of the last Saturday, I woke before the alarm and lay listening to the house.
Owen breathing. Water tapping once against the dock.
I made coffee and took it down to the water in my coat, the way my father used to, and sat at the end of the dock.
I was not rehearsing. I was reading the day in advance, page by page, so nothing in it could ambush me.
Tonight a room would close that had witnessed the worst hour of my old life.
The oysters would be the same. The lamp would be the same. The corner table would be the same.
Everything else in the world would be different.
I thought about the woman I was the night of the papers, finishing her oyster while it was still cold, refusing to serve a man her tears as a second course.
She did not know about Vera's ledger, or June's steno pad, or a law review with two initials.
She did not know a man named Owen would read her like his favorite case and wait, patiently, in the margins, until she read him back.
She knew one thing. Read every page.
It had been enough.
The sun came up. The lake turned working gray. My coffee went cold. I drank it anyway.
I went upstairs to dress, and stopped at my desk.
The red pencil lay beside the shoebox with its two-word sheet inside.
My father's red pencil. The one that had marked up trust deeds and, once, a fifteen-year-old's homework, returned with more red than ink and a note. Good. Now check the last page.
I picked it up.
Owen watched from the doorway.
You are taking the pencil, he said.
It has been at every reading that mattered, I said. It does not get to skip the last one.
He nodded and did not smile, because he understood it was not a joke, and not smiling was the joke.
I put the pencil in my handbag, next to the reservation confirmation Owen had printed, because I am me.
We drove into the city as the light went gold.
Owen talked about nothing. Helen's board vote in the new year. A case. A boat he pretended not to want.
Halfway there he squeezed my hand once, eyes on the road.
Steady, he said.
Steady, I said.
Our word since the hearings. It meant, the page is already written; we only have to read it out loud.
We parked a block away and walked, because Owen likes to arrive on foot.
The street was the same street. The windows glowed the way they had glowed for thirty-two years.
For the last time.
Inside, the tables would be full, the candles lit, the staff stretching the arithmetic of a good thing ending.
I stopped on the sidewalk and looked up at the sign.
Owen did not hurry me. He had built a life out of not hurrying me.
Ready? he asked.
I thought about the envelope, the oysters, the woman who ate her dinner instead of crying.
I thought about my father at a podium, a red circle on a kitchen calendar, a letter still only two words long.
Not yet, I thought. Soon.
Let's go read the last page, I said.
Owen offered his arm. I took it.
The door of Bellamar's opened for us, the way it had opened for me in two different lives.
Warm light, music, the low sound of a full room saying goodbye to itself.
And there, under the light at the podium, stood Henri.
He had stood at that podium the night my marriage ended, and had never once, in the years since, mentioned it.
He looked up as we came in and saw me.
The look of a man who has been standing at one end of a story for nearly five years, and has just seen the other end walk through his door.
Mrs. Hale, he said.
And he reached for the reservation book.