Chapter 88: Bored, Finally
The card rode home in my jacket pocket, next to my father's pen, two small weights from two different lives.
I almost left it in the pocket. Then I thought about Victor's letter, and what hiding had cost, and took it out.
I showed it to Owen that night, at the lake house.
He was making coffee badly, the one domestic skill he had never bothered to acquire.
He read it twice.
G.W., he said. Subtle.
It is just a comment card, I said.
It is a man telling you he sat in your classroom and took notes, Owen said. That is not nothing.
Owen never pretended Grant was a closed file. That was why I could show him the card at all.
He set it down on the counter as if it might be evidence.
Does it bother you? he asked.
I thought about it honestly, the way I had learned to think about everything now.
A year and a half ago, Grant's name in my inbox had been a small explosion.
Six months ago, it had been weather.
Now it was a ticked box and one polite sentence.
I searched myself for the flare, the heat, the old gravity.
Nothing.
No, I said. It does not bother me.
You sound almost disappointed.
I laughed, and it surprised both of us.
It bored me, I said. That is the truth of it. I read it and felt nothing but bored, and it was the best feeling I have had in two years.
Bored is what a scar feels like from the inside.
It is underrated, Owen said.
Vera said that about peace last month, I said. Perhaps you two should start a club.
He said he would bring the coffee. I said the club would disband.
He smiled, carried the terrible coffee to the table, and moved around my kitchen with the ease of someone who had stopped asking whether he belonged there.
Because he did. That had happened slowly and then completely, the way evening happens.
The kitchen had learned him. His mug had a shelf. His keys had a hook by the door.
The second page of my father's letter had said to trust him with everything. Including her.
I had cried over that line, once, the first real tears of the whole long war.
Not for Grant. For being trusted that much, that early.
But the choice, the actual daily choice, had been mine.
I had made it with my eyes open, and it had held, through a gala, a gossip cycle, a recusal, and an ending.
We ate. We argued about the foundation's third office, east side or south. Ordinary life.
We had Chinese food from the place in town. The lake did its slow work against the dock.
I no longer took ordinary for granted. I knew the wholesale price of it now.
He cleared the plates, and then he did not sit back down.
He stood there with his hands on the back of the chair, and I knew that posture.
It was the one he used before hard depositions.
Nora, he said.
You are doing the deposition posture, I said.
I have been rehearsing something, he said. For three weeks. And I have decided that rehearsing it any longer is a conflict of interest with my own life.
He came around the table, slowly, the way a man approaches a witness who might run.
I want to ask you something, he said. And before you answer, I want you to know there is no wrong answer, and no clock on it.
Outside, a boat went by with no lights on, which is illegal, and I remember noticing it anyway.
The kitchen held still before the only sentence in it was spoken.
I set down my coffee.
Ask, I said.