Chapter 6 : Thanksgiving 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
Nine people. Bianca, Julian, Julian's sister and her husband, two cousins, an uncle, the uncle's companion, and Odessa. The great room had been rearranged since the merlot: the tufted stone sectional was still at the right, but the ottoman had been pushed against the wall and the dark-wood wine table had been cleared of the second bottle and the little vase of white blooms and covered instead with a cream linen runner and a china turkey platter. The marble floor had been mopped and polish-restored. Nobody, looking at it now, would ever have known a full glass of merlot had shattered across a wife's cheek there nine days ago. That was the Ashford house special: how quickly everything reverted to the shape people wanted it to have.
Odessa walked in with her coat folded over her arm — she had decided that too — and she greeted Julian's sister, and his aunt, and the cousins, and the uncle, and when Bianca came to the kitchen door in a chocolate-brown dress with a gold choker this time and her steel-grey curls repinned and her expression under complete control, Odessa said, "The apartment looks exquisite. You must be so proud of it," and watched Bianca's face do something small and complicated behind the smile.
Julian poured the wine. He poured merlot. He poured it into stemmed crystal glasses, and Odessa watched him do it and watched the wine turn in the glass, and then she looked away and took her seat at the long table with the others.
Dinner went the way Ashford dinners always went. Bianca presided from the head of the table. The uncle talked about a golf course. The cousins talked about a vacation. Julian refilled his mother's glass twice and Odessa's once, and Odessa laid her hand flat next to her plate and let the conversation move around her, and every time Bianca looked at her, Odessa met it with the same small, unreadable smile she had given Julian in this very room nine days ago, and every time Bianca's expression flickered for a half-second and then reset.
The conversation turned, eventually, the way it had been engineered to turn, at the dessert course.
"You know, mother," Julian's sister said, "you never told us what you're doing with the apartment. Are you renting it? Are you selling?"
Bianca laid her dessert fork down.
"I'm thinking about it," she said.
Odessa ate her pie.
"I've had it six years," Bianca said. "Six years and change. And honestly, the building fees have gotten absurd, and I don't need the square footage anymore."
"You could sell in this market," the uncle said.
"Could."
"You'd clear," the uncle said, "a very nice number."
Odessa ate her pie.
Julian, at the other head of the table, said, "We're not selling the apartment."
The table went quiet, just slightly, the way a table does when it becomes aware of a pressure word.
Bianca looked at her son. It was a long look, longer than anyone at the table could read. Odessa read it. She had been reading it for three years.
Then Bianca said, with her chin lifted and her voice set at a small, considered volume, "It's my apartment, Julian."
And Julian said, without looking at his mother, without looking at anyone, "It's the family's apartment."
"A very nice arrangement," Odessa said.
Every head at the table turned to her.
She said it in a perfectly even voice, with her fork set down and her hands folded on the tablecloth and her eyes on no one in particular. She said it the way you would say that the weather had turned, or that a picture had been hung a little crooked.
"I'm sorry," Bianca said. Her voice had gone pink around the edges.
"I said it's a very nice arrangement," Odessa said. "The apartment, the title, the arrangement. Families in this county have stranger arrangements. You'd be surprised what comes up on a title search."
"Odessa," Julian said, sharp.
"I'm agreeing with Bianca," Odessa said, evenly. "It's a beautiful apartment. I've said so."
The table did not know where to go. Nobody had raised their voice. Nobody had said anything untrue. Odessa watched the cousins glance at each other and Bianca's cheek go a shade darker and Julian's jaw work once, twice, three times, and Odessa watched her own hands, flat on the tablecloth, and she thought: there. There it is. The first time in three years.
The rest of Thanksgiving went fine. That was the most important part. It went fine — the pie, the coffee, the uncle's golf story, the two cousins leaving early, the long goodbye in the marble foyer where Odessa once again stood with her coat folded over her arm and did not, at any point, set it down. She shook the sister's hand. She said good night to Bianca. She said, "Thank you for having me," the way a person says it to a woman whose house she has actually visited.
Bianca said nothing back, which, in Bianca's language, was saying quite a lot.
In the car, before she started the engine, Odessa took out her phone and looked at the email from Marisol that she had still not opened.
She opened it.
The subject line said: RECORDED.
There was one PDF attached, four pages, and she read all of it in the passenger seat of her own car in her in-laws' driveway with her coat over her lap and the villa's tall windows glowing behind her.
The deed. Free and clear. Recorded 9:00 a.m. Wednesday. Her name, in fourteen-point type, on the first page, in the field that says GRANTEE.
She closed the PDF. She put the phone in the cup holder. She looked up at the villa. In the tall windows on the upper floor, one light was on, and Odessa knew which room it was, because she had been at every dinner, and she knew that was Bianca's study — the small room with the writing desk and the photograph of her late husband and a corkboard on the wall that held, in a neat grid, every document Julian had ever handed his mother in her life.
Odessa started the engine and backed out of the driveway, and on the drive home she thought about that corkboard, and about all the things Bianca believed were pinned to it, and about how the county record for the apartment had just updated twenty-four hours ago, and about how Bianca Ashford, who was the kind of woman who kept a folder titled The Apartment, would be searching that record tonight, after Thanksgiving, when the house was quiet, and she would find out that the apartment was gone.
She would not know who the buyer was. Marisol had promised eight weeks of anonymity through the trust.
She would only know that the property she had been sitting on for six years and claiming as hers and treating as a family asset and describing to every dinner guest in excruciating detail had, on Wednesday morning, at exactly 9:00 a.m., been sold.
Odessa pulled into her own parking space at 10:11 and sat in the car for a moment with the engine off and the parking-lot lights on the hood and her hands on the wheel.
Somewhere behind her, ten minutes up the harbor road, in a room with a corkboard on the wall, an older woman was about to open a browser.
Odessa went upstairs. She did not turn on her phone. She went to bed and slept all the way through the night, which was the first night in three years that she had done that.
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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.