Epilogue: June Rules

Dess

One year later

On the eighth of June, a Wednesday, at ten past five in the morning, Calder Wexcombe Rourke woke up one year old and announced it to the neighborhood.

He did it from the crib, standing, with both fists wrapped round the rail and his hat, the crooked one, crammed down over one ear. He did it at the top of his lungs. It was not a cry. It was, Dess thought, lying flat on her back in the gray light with her eyes still shut, a proclamation: a long, rolling, rhythmic sequence of syllables that began with "Ba" and ended with a sound like a seal clearing its throat, and which could be translated, without much loss, as Attention. I have been born again. Bring cake.

"I'm up," she said to the ceiling.

"Ba!"

"I'm coming."

"Ba ba ba ba BA!"

"I know. I was there." She sat up. She pushed the hair from her face, and swung her feet to the floor, and was aware, with the faint startled pleasure that had not yet worn off in twelve months, of a body that worked. Her back did not hurt. Her head was clear. She had slept for five hours and forty minutes, with the window open, and the sleep had been deep, and dreamless, and good. She crossed the room in her bare feet and picked him up.

He was heavy. He was warm. He smelled of milk and sleep and Johnson's and something faintly, inexplicably, of cedar. He gripped her hair in both fists and pulled, hard, with tremendous good humor, and said into her ear, with great clarity:

"Mama."

She stood perfectly still.

It was not the first time. He had said it in April, once, on the stairs, as a sort of experiment, and again in May, clearly, to a spoon. But it had never come like this, in the dawn, in a quiet room, directly into her face with those round dark delighted eyes, as though he were reading the word off her forehead and found it correct.

"Say it again," she whispered.

"Mama."

"Again."

"Mama mama mama." He grabbed her nose. "Ba."

"Fine. Don't push it." She kissed his head. She was laughing and wiping her eyes at once, in the doorway of the nursery, in the gray June light, with the sprigged ducks on the wall and a white pine dresser at her hip. "Happy birthday, baby. Happy birthday. You're one."

"Ba."

"You're one, and you can say my name, and you've got a party at noon. Come on. Let's go get your uncle."

…

He was waiting at the foot of the stairs.

He was waiting, she saw, in the posture of a man who has been standing in the same spot for forty minutes: very straight, with his hands behind his back and a clean white shirt and a dark tie, and an expression of tremendous composure that was betrayed at the edges by a pulse in his jaw. He had let himself in. He had a key. He had had a key since the twelfth of September, delivered to him by her own hand in a cereal bowl, with a note that read Term Nineteen: Knock anyway.

"Good morning," said Theron.

"You're up."

"I did not go to bed."

"Theron."

"I wished to be certain nothing went wrong." He glanced at the baby. "He is, I gather, one."

"Since five-ten."

"I felt it. I was at my window. I heard him from across the garden. I thought: that is a young man with something to say." He held out his arms, a little uncertainly. "May I?"

"Ask twice."

"May I? May I?"

"Oh, for God's sake. Take him."

He took him.

He took the child as he had taken him a thousand times in a year, in the crook of one arm, against the chest, with that gravely tender economy of movement that had never once, in all that time, varied; and Cal, who was, by now, a connoisseur, looked up into his uncle's face with an expression of weary affection. He patted his cheek. He took a handful of tie. He said, in the tone of one conferring a title:

"Dada."

The kitchen stopped.

It stopped like a clock. The sound of the refrigerator ceased; a drip in the sink hung, unfallen. Theron stood quite motionless, with his hand on the baby's back and his head bent, and Dess, three feet away, saw all the blood leave his face.

"He said—" His voice was barely a thread. "Dess. Did he—"

"He said dada."

"Is that—"

"It's also what he calls the chicken," said Dess, quickly. "And the vacuum cleaner. And the radiator. He's a year old. He says it to everything with a motor." Her own voice was wobbling. "Don't read anything into it."

"I am not."

"You're crying."

"I am not reading anything into it," said Theron, with enormous dignity, as two fat tears ran down the sides of his nose. "I am merely allowing that it is an excellent word."

"It's a good word."

"It is the finest word in the language."

"Dada," said Cal, to the toaster. "Dada. Dada."

"That," said Dess, "is a toaster."

"I shall not hear a word against him."

…

They went to Newport at eight.

They went in the green Volvo, which was by now officially hers, having been sold to her by Mrs. Ferreira's niece for the sum of one dollar, a lemon, and a small pound cake, in a transaction that Joelle had notarized and Beaudry had pronounced "legally unimpeachable and morally insane." They crossed the bridge in blazing sun. The bay lay below them, blue as a swimming pool, and the baby sat in the back in his new seat and sang to himself, loudly, in a language of his own, a hymn of triumph in which the only recognizable word was ba.

At the end of Halcyon's drive, the gate stood open.

She had not been prepared for it. She had been coming here all year; she had driven this road a hundred times, on Sundays and Tuesdays and the odd Thursday, for suppers and committee meetings and the interminable Wexcombe board retreat at which Admiral Bixby had fallen asleep during a PowerPoint. She had watched the house change by degrees. She had seen the east parlor painted primrose yellow. She had seen a hundred and forty years of dark furniture carried out and a few light pieces carried in. She had watched Constance learn, at eighty-two, to eat a sandwich with her fingers, and lean back in a deck chair with her eyes closed, and say "Oh, how vulgar," in a voice of deep contentment.

But she had never seen it like this.

Every window was open. Every awning was out. The long gravel drive was lined, on both sides, with little flags: white, with a small blue boat on each, the sort one buys by the dozen for a regatta. A banner, hand-lettered on a bedsheet, hung from the porch rail. It read, in wobbling black capitals:

HAPPY 1ST BIRTHDAY CALDER! (HE'S ONE.)

"Oh no," said Dess.

"What?"

"The bedsheet. Who did the bedsheet?"

"I believe," said Theron, "that it was your mother."

"It's crooked."

"It is the finest bedsheet in the state of Rhode Island."

"She spelled 'birthday' with two rs in the first draft. I made her redo it."

"I was told." He pulled up before the steps. His hands, on the wheel, were steady. "Dess. I should like, before we go in, to mention something."

"Okay."

"There will be a number of people."

"I know."

"A number. I have not been given the list. I was told that the list was a surprise. I have been given to understand by Mrs. Ferreira that there will be a pig." He took a breath. "I wish only to say that I am prepared to be surprised."

"By a pig?"

"By anything." He turned his head. "I have found that when I am prepared to be surprised, I am generally not frightened. It is an advance."

"It's a big advance."

"I thought you would say so."

…

The Kittiwake lay at the float, bow to the tide, in the clear bright light of nine in the morning.

She had been in the water for three weeks. She had come out of the boathouse on the twenty-second of May, on a cradle, drawn down the slip by six men and a block and tackle, with Dell at the head with a champagne bottle and Constance in the stern in a pair of white tennis shoes. She had slid into the bay with a long low sigh. She had floated. Everyone had held their breath, and Dell had said, loudly, "She'll do," and a cheer had gone up from the dock that frightened a heron.

Now she lay at the float with her varnish shining and her new sails bent on, white and crisp, and a string of signal flags running from the bow to the masthead and down to the stern. They were the flags that spelled, in the old international code, a word that Dell had worked out at the kitchen table with a pencil. B. I. R. T. H. D. A. Y. They snapped in the wind. And in the cockpit, on a bench cushion, in a straw hat the size of a cartwheel and a flowing coral shirt, sat Constance Wexcombe, with her stick across her knees and a cup of tea in her hand, regarding the water with the benign and distant air of a dowager queen on a barge.

"There you are," she said. "You're late."

"We are seven minutes early."

"In my day that was late." She held out a hand, imperiously. "Give me that child."

Dess gave her the child.

She did it quite without fear now. That was the thing that astonished her, standing on the float with the sun in her eyes: that a year ago she could not have borne to put him into those thin spotted hands, and now she did it as one hands over the salt. Constance took him. She settled him on her lap, in the cartwheel hat's shade, and he regarded her with the fixed attention of a small judge.

"Good morning, Calder."

"Ba."

"Good morning to you. You're a year old." Her blue eyes were dancing. "Do you know what I was doing at a year old?"

"Ba."

"I was being sick on a governess." She nodded gravely. "It was, I'm told, a memorable performance. I have been somewhat less original ever since."

Theron, behind Dess, made a sound that might have been a cough.

"Mother."

"Don't be a prig. It's his birthday." Constance bounced the baby on her knee. She was, Dess saw, not bouncing him with the old stiff dutiful rhythm of a woman performing a rite, but with a sort of swinging lilt, a looseness at the wrist, as if she had been practicing in secret. "Odessa, my dear, I'd like you to observe that I have taught him a new word."

"What word?"

"Say it, Calder. Say Gaga."

"Gaga!" cried Cal.

"Gaga?"

"It is the nearest that I can get to 'Grandmother' that does not make me sound like a bishop. Lydia would have approved." She stopped. Something went across her face, quick and bright, like the shadow of a bird. "I find I have been talking about Lydia rather a lot, lately."

"You have," said Dess softly.

"I find that I like it." She lifted her chin. "I find I like saying her name to people. One would think I'd have done it before. But it seems to me that I have lost seventy percent of my vocabulary by not using it."

"And the other thirty?"

"Is Gaga," said Constance, "and pardon me. I'm eighty-two. One does what one can."

…

The party began at noon, and by half past twelve it was a riot.

It was held on the lawn at Halcyon, under a white marquee, with the sea at the bottom of the grass and the whole sloping green expanse covered in tables, chairs, balloons, hay bales, a bouncy castle in the shape of a whale, and about a hundred and eighty people. She had not seen the list. She had been told to dress in something yellow. She had stood at the top of the drive in her sundress with the baby on her hip and watched them come, in cars and on foot and, in one case, on a motorcycle, and every single one of them had stopped at the foot of the steps, and looked up, and said, in a voice of mild astonishment: "Is that the baby?"

They were all there.

They were all, she thought, there. Gabe was there, in a linen suit, with a tall dark-haired woman in lavender scrubs whom Dess recognized with a start as Denise, from the ultrasound department, and whose hand he held with an air of cautious triumph; they had been engaged since April. Peg was there, retired, tanned, in a straw hat and an enormous caftan, with a husband the size of a bear who proved to be, on closer acquaintance, extremely shy and an authority on wrens. Marvin from Claims was there. Dunmore from Subrogation was there, in a bow tie shaped like a lobster. Hawkes was there, and Richie Torres, and forty men from the yard in their Sunday blazers, standing round a keg of root beer with the stunned respectful look of men who have been told that the boss's boss's grandmother is a very nice lady and are not at all sure they believe it.

Joelle was there, with Jerome and the boys, and a plate piled so high with deviled eggs that it listed.

Mrs. Ferreira was there, in the plum dress, enthroned in a wicker chair beside a roasting pig, with a fan and a Bible and a supply of small hard anise cookies, directing the entire proceedings with a series of imperious sweeps of the hand. Her husband, a silent bald little man in a sailor's cap, sat at her side and smiled at nothing. The Okafors were there, all three, and Chidi had grown two inches and lost a tooth and was explaining to a group of fascinated six-year-olds the exact mechanics of a stern gland.

Dr. Walsh was there. She had come, quietly, in a blue cotton dress, with a bottle of wine and a card, and stood at the edge of the marquee for a while, watching. She had discharged Dess in March. She had said, at the final appointment, "I think you're done, you know," and Dess had said, "Done?" and Dr. Walsh had said, "I think what you have now is a very good life and a good set of tools. That's a different thing from a diagnosis." She was looking at Dess now, across the lawn, over a plastic cup of lemonade, with a small warm private smile.

I'm okay, Dess mouthed at her.

I know, said Dr. Walsh's smile.

Hale was not there.

He had pleaded guilty in March, in a courtroom in Providence, to two counts of insurance fraud and one of falsifying business records, in a gray suit, with Kessler's empty chair beside him; Kessler had been suspended by the Supreme Court in January and had, Beaudry reported with a certain austere relish, taken up a position in a firm that sold boat insurance in the Bahamas. Hale had been sentenced to eighteen months. He was serving them at a federal camp in Maine, where he was said to have organized a bridge club. He had written to Constance twice. She had not opened the letters. She kept them in the drawer of the hall table, unread, tied with a ribbon, and said that one day, when she was ready to be old and forgiving, she would read them aloud to the sundial.

And Hargreaves was there.

…

She had not expected him.

She had asked Theron, at Easter, whether it would be proper to invite him, and Theron had gone gray and quiet, and said, "I do not think he would come." But Constance had written the card herself, in her own hand, a single line. And at a quarter to one, as the pig was carved and the bouncy whale began to deflate, a tall stooped old man in a navy blazer and a Sunday tie came slowly up the lawn on the arm of a plump gray-haired woman in lilac.

He stopped at the edge of the marquee.

He was sixty-nine. He had, she knew, been retired since September, on a pension arranged, to everyone's embarrassment, by Constance. He had testified before the grand jury in November. He had given the Attorney General two thousand pages. He had been offered immunity and refused it, with great politeness, saying only that he would prefer to answer for what he had done. He had been given a suspended sentence of six months. He lived with his sister in Warwick and grew roses. And he stood there on the grass with his hat in his hand and his thin ruined face working, looking not at the people, or the pig, or the marquee, but at a woman in a deck chair under a cartwheel hat, with a baby on her lap.

Constance looked up.

"Hargreaves," she said.

"Madam."

"You're late."

"I was uncertain of my welcome."

"You are always uncertain of your welcome. It is your most tiresome quality." She held out one hand. It was steady. "Come here. Don't stand there like a heron. Come and meet Calder. I've been telling him about you for a month."

He came.

He came across the grass in a long slow slightly stumbling shuffle, with his hat crushed against his chest, and knelt beside the deck chair with a visible effort, on both knees, in the grass. He looked at the child. The child looked at him. Cal considered the old man's long lined face, his sad hooded eyes, his Adam's apple. He put out a hand and took hold of his nose.

"Ow," said Hargreaves.

"He does that."

"I see that he does." His voice was shaking. "He has Mr. Christopher's grip."

"He has Mr. Christopher's everything," said Constance. "I should like you to hold him."

"Madam, I—"

"Hargreaves."

"I am not worthy."

"No," said Constance. "None of us are. That is why one holds babies. Take him."

He took him.

He took him as a man takes a thing he has dropped and been given back. His arms trembled. He bowed his head over the small blue-capped head, and said something under his breath, in a voice too low for anyone to hear, and then, after a moment, in a harsher whisper: "Forgive me." And the baby, who had a great deal of experience of grown men weeping into his hat, patted his face with a firm and capable hand and said:

"Ba."

…

It was a little past two when Lydia's daughter arrived.

She came alone. She came, as Dess learned afterward, from Maine, by bus and train and a rented Corolla, driving the last forty miles with her heart in her mouth and the radio off. She had a name. She had had it all her life, as a name is had by a person who has never been told another: Margaret Anne Pelletier, forty-one, a charge nurse in the emergency department of a hospital in Biddeford, divorced, with two teenage sons and a Labrador and a recurring dream about a big gray house by the sea.

She had found them through a registry. She had been looking for twelve years. She had found, in March, a message from a woman in Newport with a very beautiful signature, and she had written back, a long careful trembling reply that began Dear Mrs. Wexcombe, I think you may be my grandmother, and ended, four pages on, I don't want anything. I just want to know whether she was happy.

Constance had read it at the kitchen table at Halcyon at six in the morning. She had read it twice. She had put it down. And she had gone out to the garden, in her dressing gown, and sat on the stone bench by the sundial for a very long time, and when Dess found her, at seven, she had said, quite calmly, without looking up:

"I have a granddaughter."

"I know."

"I have had a granddaughter for forty-one years and I did not know it." She was holding the letter against her knees. "Lydia would have been sixteen. She would have been so frightened. She told me, you know. She told me, in the summer of 1980. She said, 'Mother, I'm going to have a baby.' And I said—" She stopped. "I said that we would see what her father thought."

"Constance..."

"I should have said, Then we shall have a baby. It is such a small sentence." Her mouth shook. "I have thought of it every day for forty-one years. I have thought of it in the car and in the bath and on the Cape. And I could not say it, because Gerard was in the room."

"You can say it now."

"I am saying it to a sundial," said Constance Wexcombe.

And then she had put her face in her hands.

…

Margaret Pelletier stood at the edge of the marquee.

She was a tall, plain, freckled woman in a green linen dress and sensible flats, with a rope of dark red hair going gray and a pair of enormous gray-blue eyes in a face that was all strong bones and nerves. She held a gift bag in both hands. She stood in the sun with the look of someone who has walked up to a door in the dark and is deciding whether to knock. And Dess, across the lawn, with a paper plate in one hand and a cup in the other, saw Constance see her.

It was a thing she would remember all her life.

She saw the old woman stop. She saw her go quite still in the deck chair, with the hat fallen back and her stick in her lap, and her blue eyes widen, and widen. She saw her lips part. She saw her put out a hand, blindly, to the arm of the chair, and grip it, and rise: straight up, unsupported, without the stick, in one long unfolding movement like a ship coming about.

She stood there. The marquee seemed to hold its breath.

"Margaret?" said Constance.

"Yes, ma'am."

"You have Lydia's chin."

"So I'm told." The woman's voice was low and steady, and trembled at the end like a plucked string. "I've never met her. I've never met anyone who had it."

"I have it," said Constance. "It is a very bad chin. It leads one into arguments."

"I'm a nurse. I've been in a lot of arguments."

"Come here, child."

She went.

She crossed the lawn in the sun, in her green dress, with the gift bag swinging, between the tables and the balloons and the hundred and eighty astonished guests, and stopped three feet from the old woman. They looked at one another. Two women, two chins, forty-one years. And then Constance did something that Dess had never seen her do, not at the funeral, not at the hearing, not in the library at Halcyon: she laughed.

It was a startled, high, breathless sound, like the cry of a girl. It broke out of her like water out of a dam. It shook her thin shoulders, and bent her double, and she put one hand over her mouth and the other on her granddaughter's arm, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm so sorry. I'm not laughing at you. It is only that I have been so frightened for so long, and you are quite ordinary."

"Ma'am?"

"You are a perfectly ordinary woman. In a green dress." She wiped her eyes. "I imagined a ghost. I imagined a tragedy. And you are standing there with a gift bag, looking as though you'd like a glass of water. Oh, my dear. My dear. How wonderful."

"I would like a glass of water."

"Of course you would. Odessa!" She did not look round. She held on to the freckled hand with both of her own. "Odessa, bring this girl some lemonade! And a plate! And find her a chair!"

"I'm on it," said Dess.

"And tell Theron—" The old voice broke, and mended. "Tell him he has a niece."

…

The cake came out at four.

It was a gigantic confection, three tiers high, in the shape of a Beetle Cat, with a sail of white fondant and a hull of blue, and a small gold figure on the transom that spelled, in marzipan, CALDER. Mrs. Ferreira had made it. She had made it over the course of three nights, in the great white kitchen at Ives Street, with the radio on and her husband asleep in a chair, and she had delivered it to the marquee in the back of Dell's truck, wrapped in a quilt, like a patient.

They sang.

They sang in a hundred and eighty voices, under the white canvas, in a sort of enormous, ragged, joyous chorus, with the sea behind them and the gulls overhead and a pig on a spit. They sang "Happy Birthday" in English, and then, at Mrs. Ferreira's insistence, in Portuguese. They sang it in Yoruba, for Chidi's grandmother. They sang it, at Dell's suggestion, to the tune of "Shenandoah," which was a catastrophic idea, and which broke down halfway through the second line when Theron, standing at the head of the table with Cal in his arms, was seen to be unable to continue.

"I am quite well," he said, hoarsely. "I am quite well. I wish to be left alone."

"Take your time, son," said Dell.

"I shall take it."

"Everybody wait for the man."

They waited.

They waited in a vast, warm, patient hush, a hundred and eighty people, while a tall man in a dark tie stood at the head of a table with a one-year-old on his arm and his face turned up to the canvas, breathing, and his lips moved. She saw them move. She knew the words. They were not the words of the song. They were the words he said to himself, in the dark, when he thought she was asleep: Here. Here. I'm here. I am here.

Then he lowered his head.

"Cal," he said.

"Ba."

"It is time for the candle."

"Ba."

"You must blow."

Cal looked at the candle. He looked at the flame, steady, small, golden, trembling a little in the breeze under the canvas. He looked at the man. He looked at the assembled multitude. And then, with a gravity worthy of a prince, he leaned forward, put both fists into the cake, and screamed with joy.

The tent erupted.

It was a roar. It was a shout. It was a hundred and eighty people in a state of unbridled delight, and in the very center of it, in her deck chair, with her granddaughter's hand in hers and her grandson's face smeared with blue fondant, Constance Wexcombe threw back her head and laughed. She laughed as Dess had never heard a human being laugh. She laughed till she wept. She laughed with her eyes shut and her shoulders shaking, and her pearls, the long single strand that had been Gerard's wedding gift in 1959, quivering on her breast; and beside her, quite forgotten, her stick slid off her knee and fell on the grass.

…

He found her at dusk.

She had slipped away from the noise. The marquee still rang with music, a fiddle now, and an accordion, and someone's guitar. The lanterns had been lit. The sun was going down behind the house in a long bar of orange, and the lawn lay in shadow, and the sea beyond it had turned the color of a pearl. She stood at the bottom of the grass, at the low stone wall above the water, with Cal asleep against her shoulder, his sticky face in her neck and his fists curled, and a smear of blue fondant in his hair.

"Dess."

"Hi."

"May I stand here?"

"You may stand anywhere."

He stood beside her. They looked at the sea. A sailboat went by, a long way off, with its sail turned to rose. Gulls floated on the water. The air smelled of salt and cut grass and woodsmoke and lemon. From the marquee came the sound of a hundred and eighty voices singing something rowdy and Irish, in several keys.

"Colleen told me about Walt," she said.

"Did she?"

"This morning. While you were in the shower." She smiled, a little crookedly. "She said she'd been saving it. She said, 'It's June. It's his birthday. It's time you knew how your father proposed.'"

"And how did he?"

"On the Fall River ferry. In a gale." She shook her head. "He was a deckhand. He'd saved for a ring for eleven months, and he got it out of his pocket on the open deck, in the dark, with the rain coming sideways, and the wind took it. It went over the rail. It just went. And he stood there, with his mouth open, in front of a girl in a Blue Bombers jacket, and said, 'Colleen. I just lost forty-one dollars.'"

"And what did she say?"

"She said, 'Walt Rourke, I'd have said yes to the forty-one dollars.'"

He laughed, softly.

"I never knew that," said Dess. "I never knew any of it. I just knew he died. I never knew he was funny."

"It is a gift. To learn it."

"It's the best present I got all day." She leaned her cheek against the baby's head. "Theron."

"Yes."

"I want you to ask me."

He went still.

"I'm sorry?"

"You said June. You said every June." She did not look at him. "It's June. It's the eighth. He's one. We've had the party. I'd like you to ask me now, before I lose my nerve."

"Dess..."

"Don't make a speech."

"I have not prepared one."

"Good." She turned her head, at last. "Ask."

He looked at her.

It was nearly dark. The light had gone from the sky, all but a thin green line at the horizon, and the first star hung over the water. The lanterns in the marquee threw a faint gold glow across his face. It was a thin face, a clever tired beautiful one, marked with the years, with a pair of deep lines at the corners of the mouth that she knew as she knew her own hand. His eyes were gray. They were very bright. And he stood quite still, with his hands, those long ruined hands, hanging open at his sides, empty, palms toward her, as she had once asked him to.

"Odessa," said Theron.

"Yes."

"Will you—" His voice failed. He tried again. "I should like to ask a question. It is not a large one. I do not wish to be married. I do not wish you to be married. I wish only to know whether it is possible that in some future year you might consider calling me, aloud, to someone else, in a sentence, in front of witnesses, by a word that was not 'uncle,' or 'Theron,' or 'the man across the hall.'"

"What word?"

"I had hoped you would tell me."

She laughed. It broke out of her, a single startled breath.

"That's not a question," she said.

"No."

"That's a riddle."

"I am aware." He was smiling. His eyes were wet. "I am not good at the large questions. I can do small ones. Will you have breakfast with me. May I carry the bag. Will you consider letting me hold your hand across a table in a public place where we could be seen. I have found that I can do those." He took a breath. "I have found that I can ask them every day for the rest of my life. But you have told me that there is a larger one. And I wish to know whether I may ask it."

"Which one?"

"Whether you will let me be yours," said Theron. "Officially."

The wind moved in the grass.

She stood on the lawn at Halcyon, in a yellow dress, on the eighth of June, with a sleeping child on her shoulder and the whole of her life behind her in a lit tent, and she thought of a blue notebook in a drawer. She thought of a diner in March. A corridor. A watch. A letter in a boathouse. Be a tree. Float. She thought of a man in a window across a thirty-foot gap, putting his palm on the glass.

She thought: I know the answer.

I know it. It's right there.

And I'm not going to say it yet.

Because that's the whole thing, isn't it? That's the Terms. That's what I wrote on the napkin. The right to end it belongs to the mother. The right to begin it belongs to me.

And I'd like, for once, to make a man wait for something he's earned.

"Not yet," said Dess.

He closed his eyes.

"Not yet," she said again, gently. "I want to. I do. I want you to know that. You are... you're the thing I'd choose, if I had to choose from a catalogue." Her voice shook. "But I'm not done being just me. I'm not done being the woman who has a house and a job and a kid and a key. I'd like another year of that. I'd like to know what it's like when it's not a crisis. I'd like to be normal. Boring. In love. And I'd like you to ask me again."

"When?"

"Next June."

"Next June."

"Every June." She put out her free hand. She found his, and held it. It was warm. It was steady. It did not shake. "That's the June rule. You ask me once a year, on his birthday, in the same spot. And I say 'Not yet.' And one year I'm going to say something else, and you're not going to know which year."

"That is a most unfair procedure."

"It's a great one."

"It will cause me considerable anxiety."

"I know."

"I find that I do not mind." He lifted her hand to his lips. He kissed the knuckles, once, with great gravity. "I shall ask. Every June. In this spot. For as long as I live."

"And in the meantime?"

"In the meantime, I am your companion."

"My what?"

"Your companion. It is in the Terms, I believe, of the original." The corner of his mouth lifted. "I am a person who is permitted to be in the room. I am permitted to come to dinner. I am permitted, on occasion, by agreement, with the door closed, to be rather more than that. But in the eyes of the Commonwealth, and the Wexcombe family, and a hundred and eighty guests, I am merely your companion."

"Your unofficial lover."

"Dess."

"What? It's the technical term."

"I would prefer companion."

"I'm sure you would."

"It has a more dignified sound. It suggests a Victorian invalid and a gentleman of leisure."

"It suggests a man who can't stop making tea."

"It is a character failing," said Theron, "of which I am prepared to be proud."

She laughed. She leaned her head against his shoulder, with the baby between them, and his arm came round her, slowly, carefully, and settled at her waist. They stood together at the bottom of the lawn in the last of the light. Over the water the first lamps had come on along the shore. A bell buoy tolled. In the marquee behind them the fiddle lifted into something quick and wild, and a hundred and eighty people began to stamp.

"Theron," she said.

"Yes."

"You know I didn't answer."

"I know."

"You know I said 'Not yet.'"

"I know it very well."

"You're not going to leave."

"Dess." His voice was low and amused and full of a quiet and unshakeable joy. "You have not answered. But I have not, I note, been thrown out."

She turned her face into his shirt, and laughed until she cried.

…

From the blue ledger.

There isn't one.

But if there were, and if it were a Wednesday in June, and if a woman were sitting at a kitchen table at midnight with a pen and no notebook, and a baby asleep upstairs with cake in his hair, and a light burning in a window fifteen steps across the garden, she would write:

Dess gave: not yet.

Dess received: every June.

Net: —

And she would stop there. And she would leave the line blank. And she would turn off the lamp, and leave the door open, and go up to bed.