Prologue — The Glove

Eight years earlier. Portland, Maine.

By the time the casseroles arrived, Emory Wolcott had counted eleven people who told him he was the man of the house now.

He kept the tally the way he kept every tally, quietly, in the back of his head, where numbers stayed put even when everything else was sliding around. Eleven. Four of them had squeezed his shoulder while they said it. Two had said it to the top of his head, which was a thing grown-ups did to fifteen-year-olds who had recently shot past five-ten and hadn’t yet decided what to do with the extra height. One of them, Mr. Pruitt from his father’s insurance office, had said it twice, as though the first time might not have taken.

The basement of First Parish smelled like scorched coffee, lemon cleaner, and wet wool. It had rained since Sunday. The funeral itself had been that morning, upstairs, under a ceiling so high that the organ seemed to be playing from somewhere in the next county, and Emory had sat in the front pew in a suit that belonged to his father and was two sizes wrong everywhere that mattered. The sleeves came down over his knuckles. His mother had pinned the waist of the trousers with a safety pin and then stood in the hallway with her hands flat against the wall for a full minute, not crying, just breathing in a controlled, clinical way, like a woman counting backward from a hundred.

Philippa Wolcott did not cry in front of people. She was an anesthesiologist. She had spent twenty years being the calmest person in rooms where other people’s worst days were happening. She had done the same thing for four days now, in the kitchen, on the phone with the funeral home, in the car — gone calm, and kept going, and gotten grayer and grayer around the mouth, until she looked like a photograph of herself that had been left in a window.

Heart, the doctors had said. Forty-six years old, in the parking lot of Hadley’s Hardware on a Tuesday afternoon, with a paper sack of washers on the passenger seat and the radio on. A man at the next car over had called 911 and then sat on the curb beside him, and that was how Emory knew his father had not been alone, and he had spent four days trying to find a way to be grateful to a stranger named Ron.

He was standing by the coat rack now, because from the coat rack he could see both doors and the stairs. He didn’t know why that mattered. It did. In a room full of people being kind to him, it was the one spot where he could watch them coming.

“Emory.” Mrs. Abbott from next door, with a paper plate. “You have to eat something, honey. You’re the man of the house now, and the man of the house needs his strength.”

Twelve.

He took the plate. He said thank you. He had been saying thank you for four days in exactly the same voice, and it had stopped sounding like his.

Across the room, his mother stood near the dessert table receiving people like a surgeon receiving a family in a corridor: spine straight, hands folded, eyes steady, nodding at each word. The line to her was long. Every so often someone would put a hand on her arm and she would let them, and he would see her go a little further away behind her own face.

That was where he first noticed the woman in the black coat.

She was standing at the edge of the line, not in it, with a paper cup of tea cradled in both hands. Emory knew who she was in the way you know the faces in old photographs: Corinne. Mom’s friend from the Allston years, the one who’d babysat him when he was three in a drafty attic apartment. He had no memory of it except a blue blanket and a voice reading something aloud about a frog and a toad. After that she had been a name. Birthday cards with a book store gift certificate tucked inside. A wedding where she’d worn green and laughed at something his father said. Three times in his whole life, if he counted generously.

She was thirty, thereabouts. Brown hair coming out of its clip in the damp. A man stood beside her in a camel overcoat that had never been rained on, glancing at his phone every minute or so with the expression of someone being patient in a way he wanted noticed. The woman did not look at the man. She was looking at the room. Not at the casseroles or the flowers, at the room, the way you read a page for the line that doesn’t fit.

At some point she looked at the coat rack.

At him.

He expected the face. He’d seen it eleven times, twelve with Mrs. Abbott: the soft eyebrows, the tilted head, the mouth shaped around oh, sweetheart. He braced for it.

She didn’t make it. She watched him for a few more seconds, with an expression that looked, if anything, like attention. Then she said something to the man in the camel coat, who nodded without lifting his eyes from his screen. She set her tea down on a stack of folded chairs and crossed the basement.

Fourteen steps. He’d count them later, from the memory. Fourteen from the chairs to him.

She didn’t stop at arm’s length like the others. She got down on one knee on the linoleum, in her good black coat, so that her face was level with his instead of over it, and Emory had the odd, slightly dizzying feeling of being, for the first time that day, looked at rather than looked down at.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Corinne. You probably don’t remember me. You were about this tall and extremely opinionated about bananas.”

“I don’t remember,” he said.

“That’s fair. You had other priorities.” Her voice was low and a little rough, as if she’d been talking all day, or hadn’t been talking at all. “I’m told I’m supposed to say something about your father.”

“Everyone has.”

“I know. I’ve been listening from over there. They’ve been saying some lovely things.” She tilted her head. “I was going to say something different, if that’s all right. You can tell me to go away.”

He thought about it. It seemed important to think about it. “Okay.”

“Okay, I can say it, or okay, go away?”

“The first one.”

“Good.” She let out a breath. “I’ve been standing over there counting how many people have told you to be strong.”

Emory’s whole body went still. “Twelve,” he said.

Her eyebrows went up. “You counted?”

“I count things.”

“Twelve.” She nodded slowly, as if he had told her something that required real consideration. “Okay. Then here’s thirteen, and you’re allowed to ignore it. You don’t have to be okay. Not today. Maybe not for a long time. You’re allowed to be exactly as not-okay as you are, and anyone who tells you different is mostly trying to make themselves feel better.”

The basement went on around them, murmuring, clinking. Somewhere a baby fussed. Emory stood very still with a paper plate of ham and potato salad going cold in his hand and felt something go through him that he had no word for. It was too large to be relief and too quiet to be anything else.

“Is that true,” he said, “or is it just a nice thing to say?”

She didn’t flinch. That was what he’d remember. Everyone else had flinched a little at that sort of question, from a kid, at a funeral. She just looked at him with her whole face.

“It’s true,” she said. “It’s also nice. Usually those two don’t overlap much. Today they do.” The corner of her mouth moved. “I’m a translator. I do words for a living. When your entire job is making sure a sentence means exactly what it says, you lose the knack for the other kind. I’m a terrible liar. Ask your mother.”

“You’re not lying,” Emory said. It was not a question. He knew what lying looked like; he’d been watching it for four days.

“No.”

He nodded. His throat had done something strange. He looked at his own hands, holding the plate, and found they were the color of skim milk, with the knuckles bluish, because the church basement was cold and he had not noticed.

“Your hands are freezing,” she said.

“I’m fine.”

“I know you’re not.” But she said it gently, without making it a fight. She reached into her coat pocket and drew out a glove, a gray wool one, plain, a little worn at the fingertips, with a single small green leaf embroidered at the wrist, slightly crooked, the kind of stitch you only got from a person making something by hand, for herself, and not caring if it was perfect.

She took the plate out of his hand and set it on the floor beside her knee, and then she folded the glove into his bare palm and closed his fingers around it with both of hers. Her hands were warm. He felt every one of her fingers.

“It’s only one,” he said, absurdly.

“I’ve got the other in my pocket. We’ll be a set. Keep that one warm for me.” She said it lightly, a little joke between two people with no reason to have jokes. “I’ll want it back at some point.”

She squeezed his hand once, firmly. Then she stood up, and her knee cracked, and she said ow, thirty, under her breath, and he almost smiled.

“Corinne.” The man in the camel coat, calling across the room, not loudly. “We should get ahead of the traffic.”

“Coming.” She didn’t turn. She was still looking at Emory. “You’ve got my number from your mom, if you ever want to tell someone that you’re not okay. Even at four in the morning. Especially at four in the morning. Okay?”

“Okay.”

She laid her hand on his shoulder, just for a moment. Of all the shoulders that had been squeezed that day, hers was the only touch that didn’t feel like a pat. It felt like being picked up and set down more securely, on a surface that held.

Then she walked back across the basement toward his mother. Fourteen steps. He watched every one of them. At the end, Philippa Wolcott, who had not let anyone hold her all week, turned and put her whole forehead against Corinne’s collarbone, and Corinne wrapped both arms around her and said something into her hair, and his mother’s shoulders began, finally, silently, to shake.

Emory remembered the smell of her, which had come to him in the instant she knelt down: chamomile and rain.

* * *

That night the house on Beech Street was so quiet that he could hear the refrigerator thinking.

His father’s boots were still by the back door where he’d stepped out of them on Tuesday morning, laces still tied in the double knot he’d taught Emory when he was four. His mother’s bedroom door was closed, with a line of lamplight under it. Her voice came faintly, once, in the middle of the night, saying Des, over and over, as if she were checking a connection. He had stood in the hall and listened and not gone in. He did not know how to be useful in there.

He sat on the floor of his bedroom with his back against the bed and the glove in his lap.

It was a small thing. Gray wool, soft with wear, slightly stretched at the thumb. It still held the shape of someone’s hand. The leaf at the wrist was embroidered in dark green thread, slightly off-center, stitched by someone who had been in a hurry or a good mood, he couldn’t tell which. When he held it to his face it smelled like tea and wet coats and a hand lotion with something like almond in it.

I’ll want it back at some point.

Emory was a boy who remembered things. It wasn’t a talent, exactly. It was closer to a condition. Smells, numbers, the exact order of events, what everyone had been wearing, which stair creaked: all of it stuck, whether he wanted it or not. His mother said he’d come out of the womb taking notes. He had learned early that the world was a loose, slippery place, and that the only way to make any part of it hold still was to write it down.

He got up, found the green composition book under the bed where he kept his boat sketches, and turned to a clean page. For a long time he sat with the pencil above the paper.

Then he wrote a title across the top, in neat block capitals:

THINGS CORINNE LIKES

And underneath it, because it was the only thing in the whole day that had made sense:

1. Chamomile tea. Two spoons of honey. (She added the second one when she thought no one was looking.)

2. People who tell the truth.

3. Kneeling down to look at people.

4. Fixing things by hand. (The leaf is crooked on purpose. I think.)

5. She says “okay” like a question and then waits for the answer.

He stopped. He read the list over. It was a strange list, and it wasn’t finished, and for the first time since Tuesday his hands were warm.

Everyone else had lied to him today, in small, kind, necessary ways. He’s in a better place. You’re the man of the house. You’ll be strong for your mother. He understood why. He didn’t hold it against them. But he had watched a whole room full of people hand him comfortable sentences, and then one woman had knelt on a dirty linoleum floor in a good coat and told him he was allowed to be exactly as broken as he was, and had meant it, and hadn’t asked anything in return.

In his experience, the truth was the rarest thing a grown-up could give a boy.

He did not intend to lose it.

He slept that night with the glove in his fist, and the next morning he put it in the top drawer of his desk, under the sketches, where it would be safe.

He kept it for eight years. He would give it back when it was time