The guard waves me through when he sees the car. I roll the window all the way down and let November in. I haven’t slept enough. I don’t feel it. The edges are where I live.
“Ten minutes,” I tell the driver. “Walk the loop. If anyone parks behind me, call Tiernan, not the desk.”
“Yes, sir.” He doesn’t look in the mirror again. Good man.
Nan’s mansion faces the inlet. When her butler opens the door, I step out into a foyer that smells like polish, lemon, and old books. Somewhere in the distance, I can hear old lullabies playing through a sound system, and it carries like a memory.
I knock on her office door. Three knuckles, not too hard. You don’t pound at Nan’s door. You present yourself and see if she’s interested in letting you into her space.
She opens the door all the way with a smile on her face.
“Cayce.” She says my name like its own sentence and a benediction and, if I’m honest, like a warning. Red hair that despite her age is still a little coppery, silver threaded through, cut blunt just below her ears. Lines at the eyes she earned through years running our family at Pop’s side. Fair skin with the last freckles of summer retreating. She’s in a slate-colored sweater and a poufy skirt that should make her look big. It doesn’t. The pearl studs in her ears aren’t showy. They don’t need to be. Nan exudes power and class the way most people wear a smile.
“Nan.” I bend and kiss her cheek. “You look impossible.”
“And you look like a man who thinks he’s bringing me good news.” She narrows an eye. “Or bringing me trouble and calling it good news.”
“Both things can be true.”
“Come in,love, then, and show me which it is.”
Her place is spare and careful. Shelves. A sideboard with photographs lined in a row. A basket with knitting she pretends she doesn’t need bifocals for. A view that could turn a ship back to harbor.
“Tea or whiskey?” she asks, already moving to the kitchen.
“Both,” I say.
“That’s my boy.”
She pours tea into a white mug and whiskey into two small glasses and carries everything without a tray. She doesn’t spill. She sets the whiskey down by me and keeps the tea.
“Now.” She lowers herself into the chair across. “You asked to see me. You are here on a weekday. You are wearing a face that says the thing you want is already decided. So speak to me, let’s get it out of the way.”
I take the whiskey but don’t drink yet. “I’m getting married.”
“And is she a girl,” Nan says, “or a woman?”
“Woman.” No flinch. “Caterina Moretti.”
“A good name.” She turns it once in her mouth. “Italian. And a saint’s, if you were thinking to mock me with the irony.”
“I’m not mocking you.” I let the corner of my mouth move. Not a smile. “I wouldn’t waste it on you.”
“True enough.” She leans back and studies me the way she studies the sky before weather. “Is she the nun my sources say you defiled on your night of rebellion?”
My fingers go still on the glass. “She was making peace with God in a place with bad lighting and honest air, yes. But it was Halloween, and she was not a nun.”
“And you,” Nan says, “were making peace with your hands.” She tuts. “I taught you better than that.”
“I didn’t take anything that wasn’t offered freely.”
“You took her plans, I’d say. Her future, if what I’m told is true.”
“She changed my everything,” I answer honestly. “The rest is paperwork.”
Nan watches me, and for a second I am back to being a little boy at seven, knees scabbed, having fed bread to a dog that bit me, learning the difference between kind and safe. She taught me that. She taught me the Rosary and the knives, the order of both, and when a boy should shut his mouth and let a woman speak.
“Tell me what you want from me,” she says. “Because you didn’t come for tea or permission.”
