Chapter 8 : The eight weeks passed like weather.
Odessa went to Christmas. She went to the family's New Year's lunch. She sat at the villa's long table four times with her coat folded on the chair behind her and her hands flat on the linen and Bianca's eyes on her every time, sharp now, alert, testing. Bianca had started asking her small, casual questions over dinner — What are you working on this month, what kind of clients, where is Marisol Vega's office again, is she the one representing you, do you still keep that account on Bay Street — and Odessa had answered each of them with the same even voice she used to describe tile samples, and each time Bianca's interest had flickered out and gone back under.
Julian barely spoke to her at family dinners. He called her twice a week to keep the shape of a marriage, and they slept in different rooms now, by mutual silence, and Odessa had started to notice how much of her day was peaceful, which she had not had in three years, and she had begun, quietly, on the nights she could not sleep, to make lists in a legal pad of her own.
She was going to need them. She was going to need them exactly once.
On the fifty-fifth day after the deed recorded — a Tuesday — Marisol called her at 8:40 in the morning and said, without preamble, "The trust name is coming off the file on Friday."
"Friday."
"Friday at noon, my office, fifth-floor conference room. I've sent letters to both of them. Registered mail. I signed them myself this morning. Julian Ashford and Bianca Ashford, in care of their attorney, request the pleasure."
"Did they respond."
"They will."
"How."
"The letter says the buyer is prepared to discuss the property. Their attorney called at 8:12. They'll be here."
Odessa stood at her kitchen counter with the coffee she had not poured and looked out the window at her own city and said, quietly, "Okay."
"Odessa," Marisol said. "One last thing. You asked me on the phone eight weeks ago if you had to choose between keeping the apartment and giving it back. You told me there was a third option. You said, let the record tell them, then let them find out it was me, in your office, in chairs, with you there."
"Yes."
"Have you decided what you want to say in that room."
"Yes."
"Then I'll see you Friday at noon."
Friday at noon, the fifth-floor conference room of Marisol Vega's office had one long walnut table, six leather chairs, a window looking up the harbor, and a glass carafe of water. Odessa arrived at 11:52. Marisol had the folder in front of her and a yellow legal pad and a pen with a cap. At 12:03, footsteps came down the hall. At 12:04, the door opened.
Julian entered first — charcoal overcoat over his charcoal suit, clean-shaven, steel watch, cropped black hair; then Bianca, in a black wool coat and a black dress with a small gold pin at the collar and her steel-grey curls pinned and the amber beads not on. She looked older than she had eight weeks ago. The floor guy and the building fees and the not knowing had taken something out of her, and Odessa felt, as she had in the marble foyer on the third time, that strange tenderness toward the woman who had spent sixty-eight years holding walls up, and let it pass through her without acting on it.
Their attorney came in last, a tall man in glasses Odessa did not know — Ashford family counsel, presumably, the one with the folder of Ashford family documentation going back to Bianca's husband. He sat down at the far end of the table. Julian and Bianca sat across from Marisol and Odessa.
Bianca did not look at Odessa at first. She looked at Marisol.
"You're the buyer's attorney," Bianca said.
"I am."
"Then who is the buyer."
Marisol opened the folder and slid a single page across the table — the deed, redacted except for the field that was no longer redacted, the GRANTEE field, in fourteen-point type.
Bianca's hand went out. She picked up the page. She read it once. She read it again.
Her face went through something Odessa had never seen on it, not once, not in three years. It went, in order: confusion; then re-reading; then disbelief; then a small, sharp movement of the jaw; then a stillness that was worse than any of them.
She put the page down on the table and turned and looked at Odessa, finally, and it took her a very long time.
"Odessa Marchetti," she said.
"Yes," Odessa said.
"You bought my apartment."
"I did."
Julian had picked up the page. He was reading it. His mouth was open. He did not look up.
"When," Bianca said.
"Nine months ago," Odessa said. "I put the money in the trust in April. The payoff cleared on a Wednesday in October. That was the day I was told to clean it, or file for divorce. I was in your foyer with a glass of merlot on my cheek when the county recorded it. I was standing in front of you, with my coat still on, and you told me to clean it."
Bianca did not speak.
Julian finally looked up. His face had lost some of its color. He set the page down on the table and did not push it away and did not pick it up again.
"Are you insane," he said.
"That's not a useful question," Marisol said. "Let's keep to the file."
"You bought my mother's apartment," Julian said, to Odessa. "You bought my mother's apartment."
"I bought the apartment," Odessa said. "It was for sale. Bianca hadn't listed it, but she had a mortgage, and I had money, and I called a lawyer, and I bought it. Nothing about it was ever hidden from a title search. It was on the record for eight weeks."
"You knew," Julian said. He was not asking Odessa. He was asking his mother, or the table, or himself. "You knew. You knew at Thanksgiving. That was the thing at Thanksgiving. You knew when you said—when you said the thing about the arrangement—"
"There was no arrangement," Odessa said, still calm, still level. "There was a mortgage in your mother's name and a loan I paid off. There was a deed. There was a county record. Everything else is a family story."
Bianca's hand was flat on the tabletop. She had not moved since she had put the page down. She was looking at Odessa's face with an expression that was not humiliation and not anger and not, strangely, defeat, though any of those would have been fair. It was the expression Odessa had seen once, three years ago, when Odessa had, at her first dinner in this family, pronounced a name correctly and Bianca had not.
It was the expression of a woman recognizing a peer.
"Why," Bianca said. Just that one word.
"Because it was the third time," Odessa said.
Bianca blinked. "The third time."
"The third time I was going to be humiliated in that house. The first time was at the dinner with your relatives, when you corrected my pronunciation. The second was the powder room after Julian told me to be grateful. The third was the merlot on my cheek in the marble foyer, when you sat on the sofa and sipped your tea and laughed into the cup. I was in the hallway with my coat on and I understood that day that there would be a fourth and a fifth and a tenth. So I bought the thing that all three of you built yourself around," Odessa said, "and I waited for the day one of you would hand me the keys."
Bianca's face was white now.
"What do you want," she said.
Odessa reached into her tote and brought out the manila folder she had carried out of the apartment on the first night and had kept in the second drawer of her own desk, under her old tax returns, in the way you hide a thing you intend to find again.
She opened it and laid three documents on the table between them.
The mortgage statement. The insurance rider. And the single page — Bianca's own list, folded along the crease, worth item by item.
She turned it over.
Julian's handwriting looked back at them. If she ever sells, we take it. Dated eleven months ago.
Julian's jaw worked. He did not pick it up.
"Where did you get that," he said.
"Your mother's kitchen drawer," Odessa said. "Under the recipes."
Bianca looked at the page. Then she looked at her son, and for the first time in Odessa's memory, Bianca Ashford looked at her son the way she looked at her own husband's photograph in her study — as a thing that had turned out differently than she'd expected. Bianca did not say anything. She did not have to. Julian could read the look.
Odessa folded the page again and slid it back into the manila folder.
"Here's what I want," she said, and she turned to Marisol, who slid a second copy of the deed across the table, a single sheet, side by side with a second, shorter sheet, unsigned.
"The apartment is mine," Odessa said. "It has been mine since October. That doesn't change. What changes is the lease at the top floor of the building — Unit 5B — which I am offering to Bianca Ashford for a fair market rate for as long as she wants it, provided Bianca Ashford agrees to two things in writing: that the apartment belongs to me, and that no member of this family, which includes Julian Ashford, will ever have any claim to it, in a will, in a trust, in a conversation, or on the back of a piece of paper."
Bianca looked at the second sheet on the table.
Julian said, "You can't. You can't put my mother out."
"She's not out," Odessa said. "She's on a lease."
Julian looked at his mother. His mother did not look at him.
Bianca picked up the second sheet. She read it. Her reading took a long time. When she finished, she set it down and put both of her hands flat on the tabletop, wrists together, in the posture she used at the dinner table at home, and she looked at Odessa, and there was nothing left on her face to read except an old decision, quietly turning over.
"One alteration," Bianca said.
Odessa said, "Say it."
"The lease names me as the seated tenant of record, not Julian," Bianca said. "If I'm going to be on the paper, I'm on the paper." She looked at her son when she said the second sentence, and Julian understood it, and his face did the thing his face did only in this house, which was to go small.
Odessa looked at Marisol. Marisol made a small note on the yellow legal pad.
"That's acceptable," Odessa said.
Bianca picked up the pen. She read the second page a second time, and then she signed it in the looping script Odessa had first learned to recognize on birthday cards and Christmas tags and a small taped card at the service entrance of a grey stone building on Calloway Street. Then she set the pen down and folded her hands again and said the last thing that was said in the room that mattered, in her flat, ordinary, sixty-eight-year-old voice.
"Odessa Marchetti," she said. "May I ask you one thing."
"You may."
"When are you going to tell your husband."
Odessa said, "He's in the room."
"I know," Bianca said. "I meant, when are you going to tell him that he isn't."
Julian stood up. He stood up out of his chair and looked at his mother and looked at his wife and did not say anything, and his face had gone past anger now, into a land none of them had ever seen him visit, and he picked up his overcoat off the back of the chair, and he walked out of the room without closing the door.
The door stood open on the hallway. Marisol wrote one more line on her legal pad and capped her pen. Bianca looked down at her own hands, still flat on the table, still where she had put them.
At the head of the table, Odessa leaned forward and picked up the folder and slid it back into her tote and stood up. She put her coat on — the grey wool coat, folded over her arm for three full years, and she put it on, because she was done walking into this room with it still in her arms.
Then she walked to the door and stopped, because there was one more thing to do, and it was small and it was important and she did not want to skip it.
She turned around and looked at Bianca.
"Thanksgiving is at my apartment this year," Odessa said. "You're welcome to come."
Bianca looked up. Her eyes were dry. Her hands had not moved.
"Where will I sit," she said.
Odessa considered the question.
"On the sofa," she said, "where I used to sit. With your tea. And you can watch me hold the whole thing up."
She did not wait for the answer. She walked out, and she closed the door softly behind her, and in the elevator she let the smile come all the way onto her face for the first time since October, and it was not a grin, and it was not revenge, and it was not the wrong smile from the marble foyer.
It was just the smile of a woman who was about to walk into her own apartment, sit down in her own chair, and put her keys on the table.
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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.