Chapter 3 : The knock came at 9:20.
Odessa had expected it — not the knock exactly, but the thing the knock was standing in for. Somebody in that family was going to show up tonight. The only question was which one, and what they would be carrying.
She got up from the chair by the window and crossed the new pale oak floor and put her hand flat on the door and looked through the peephole, and the answer was: Bianca Ashford, in a winter coat over the burgundy dress she had been wearing all afternoon, her steel-grey curls still pinned, her triple strand of amber beads still at her throat, and, behind her, half in shadow, in the hallway, the unmistakable cropped profile of Julian Ashford.
They had brought their own keys. They did not need to be let in.
Odessa stepped back and opened the door.
Bianca looked past her, into the apartment, the way you look past a maid. Her eyes went over the new floors, over the copper pots in their arc, over the dining table and the low marble coffee table with the crystal tray, and then they came back to Odessa, and they took their time, and they settled on the manila folder in Odessa's right hand.
"Well," Bianca said.
Odessa stepped aside to let them in.
Julian came in last and closed the door behind himself with his heel, hands still in his pockets, and stood just inside the entry like a man inspecting a property somebody else had rented out to the wrong tenants.
"You were supposed to be cleaning," he said.
"I was supposed to be here by seven," Odessa said. "It's 9:20."
"You were supposed to be cleaning."
Bianca had walked into the living room and turned to face the water, arms crossed lightly over her chest, her face reflected in the big window as a pale doubled thing, older, thinner, cold. "The floors," she said, to the window, not to Odessa. "You walked on them in outside shoes."
"I did."
"You didn't take the folder off the counter either," Bianca said.
"No."
Bianca turned around. Julian stayed by the door.
"What's in the folder," Julian said. Not a question with a question mark in it. A sentence with an order inside, like everything he had ever said to her in front of his mother.
Odessa looked at him, then at Bianca, and felt the same small door opening in her chest that had opened in the marble foyer four hours ago.
She had rehearsed a version of this in the car. She had rehearsed a version on the walk from the parking meter. She had rehearsed a version sitting in the chair by the window, watching the water go black, and in every version she had told them everything, and in every version they had left the apartment humiliated and she had stood in the doorway with the keys and felt the win land.
That version was not this version.
She had learned something on the drive over that she had not expected to learn, and the thing she had learned was this: the ending she wanted was not the one where Bianca lost. The ending she wanted was the one where Bianca had to invite her in.
So she held the folder up, flat, against her chest.
"It's a list," she said. "Of the contents. Your mother had it in the kitchen drawer, under the recipes."
Bianca's face did not move.
"Replacement value," Odessa said. "Every piece in the apartment, itemized. She kept a list."
For a moment, all three of them stood in the living room of an apartment that had, that morning, changed hands, in front of a window that looked out at grey water going navy, and nobody said anything.
Then Bianca laughed.
It was not the small laugh into the teacup. It was a real one, from the chest, and it lasted three seconds, and when it stopped, she looked at Odessa with an expression that had something in it Odessa had never seen on that face before — patience, amusement, and the beginnings of a decision.
"You went through my things," Bianca said.
"I went through your drawers," Odessa said. "Which is different."
"You think I don't know what I'm holding," Bianca said. She uncrossed her arms and walked slowly past Odessa toward the kitchen, and Odessa let her go, and Julian stayed by the door with his jaw working and his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the folder.
Odessa turned and followed Bianca to the kitchen.
Bianca stopped at the counter. She looked at the coat and tote Odessa had set down there earlier — the first time in three years, though Bianca did not know that — and she looked at the open drawer behind the counter, and she looked at the manila folder in Odessa's hand, and then she pulled out the stool on the far side of the counter and sat down on it like it was her kitchen.
Because it was.
Because, as far as Bianca Ashford knew, every object in this apartment had a small quiet orbit around her.
Odessa opened the folder on the counter between them, took out the third page — the list — and slid it across. Bianca looked at it and did not pick it up.
"I wrote this two years ago," Bianca said. "Before the floors."
"Yes."
"The watch box is in the second drawer."
"Watches," Odessa said. "Yes."
Bianca's eyes came up. "You opened it."
"I didn't."
A pause. Bianca's face did something complicated — annoyance, interest, and something Odessa had never seen before, which was surprise. A woman who had spent six years arranging her world into a specific set of orders had just been told that someone in the room had followed most of them and one of them had stopped her.
"Why not," Bianca said.
Odessa shrugged one shoulder. Her chin was level. Her coat was folded over the arm of the narrow chair next to the counter where she had set it down when she came in. "Because I expected to have time," she said.
Bianca looked at her for a beat.
"Your husband thinks you've been very quiet for a very long time," she said.
"He does."
"And you have."
"Yes."
"Why."
Odessa leaned her hip against the counter and looked past Bianca, past the copper pots, out at the black water through the window and the magenta bougainvillea off the rail.
"Because I was waiting," she said. "I'm not waiting anymore."
Bianca's expression shifted, then settled, then did the thing Bianca's expression always did when things were going as she thought they were going — it went back to serene. She picked up the list and folded it neatly along the crease and slid it into the pocket of her winter coat, and she stood up off the stool, and she straightened her burgundy dress with both hands like a person tidying up a room they have already decided to leave.
"Julian," she said, to the doorway. "Come here."
Julian came. He always came when his mother called, and Odessa had never in three years seen him walk into a room the same way she had just watched him walk into this one — careful, aware of the floors, conscious of being one of two adults instead of the only adult in the room.
"Your wife has been very thorough," Bianca said.
Julian's jaw worked. "She was supposed to clean."
"She was."
Bianca turned and looked at Odessa and put her hand out, palm up, on the counter.
"The keys," she said.
Odessa did not move.
"The keys," Bianca said again.
Odessa looked at the hand. The nails were done, the ring, the loose skin of the wrist, the cuff of the winter coat, the amber beads at the throat, all of it arranged in exactly the frame Bianca had spent sixty-eight years building, and for the first time in three years Odessa could see how much work it was, how much holding up every single day this woman did, and how much of it was going to fall down in the next eight weeks, and she felt something she had not expected to feel, which was, oddly, almost tenderness.
She reached into her own pocket and brought out the ring of keys and put it in Bianca's open palm.
The keys were still warm from earlier.
Bianca closed her fingers around them and put them in her own coat pocket without looking down, the way you pocket a tip, and she turned and walked back toward the front door with her winter coat swishing.
Julian stayed where he was, in the middle of the kitchen.
"Your coat," he said. Pointing at the narrow chair. "You left your coat."
"I did."
He looked at her. He looked at the coat, and the tote, and the manila folder on the counter, and the water out the window, and his mother's back receding to the door.
"You were going to bed here," he said.
"No."
"Then why are you still here."
Odessa picked up her coat and her tote and she walked past him into the living room and stood at the window for three seconds, longer than she needed to, because she wanted him to see her polite, unhurried way of taking up a little more time than his mother had given her.
Then she walked to the door, past Bianca, who held it open, and past Julian, who put out a hand — a small, uncertain, entirely useless hand — that she walked through without touching.
In the hallway, she stopped.
"Your mother's apartment is very beautiful," she said, to both of them, to the closed faces in the door frame, in her level voice. "I'll be back. There's still quite a lot of paperwork."
Then she walked to the elevator, and the elevator doors closed, and in the last second before they met, she saw Bianca's face, and Bianca's face was not serene anymore, and something in Odessa's chest, which had been closed for three years, opened all the way.
Advertisement
All 8 chapters
- 1The silence came too fast.
- 2The lawyer's name was Marisol Vega, and she had a voice that did not enjoy delivering good news in increments.
- 3The knock came at 9:20.
- 4She took a cab home because her hands were unreliable and she did not want to be in a car by herself on the harbor road with the water on one side and the lights on the other. The cab driver had a small brass Buddha on the dash and a pack
- 5The deed recorded at 9:00 a.m. on a Wednesday.
- 6Thanksgiving at the villa was set for one o'clock, and Odessa arrived at 12:48 in the ivory crepe dress — the same dress, because that was its own statement and she had decided to make it — with a green bean casserole she had not made her
- 7The first call came at 7:04 in the morning.
- 8The eight weeks passed like weather.