Found what he was looking for. I could tell by the way he stilled.
He stood there for a moment, just looking at it.
“Is that the one you're giving Hall?” I asked.
He looked up at me.
“You said you were going to fix it,” I said. “Hall's the only way to fix it.”
Something crossed his face that I didn't have a name for. Not surprise — he'd stopped being surprised by what I knew somewhere around the third month. Something else. Something that looked almost like relief, which didn't make sense, except that maybe it did. Maybe it was easier when someone else said the true thing out loud.
“Yes,” he said.
I nodded.
He closed the ledger. Held it with both hands, flat against his chest, the green cover facing out. He looked at me across the worktable with the lamp between us and the steel cabinets behind him and all that old paper going back to his grandfather on the shelves.
“It's not going to be clean,” he said. “What comes after.”
“I know.”
“It's going to be bad for a while. For both of us.”
“I know that too.”
He looked at me. Long enough that I had to decide what to do with it — hold it or look away. I held it.
“Okay,” he said.
It wasn't nothing, that word. The way he said it. Like something had been handed over and received, no ceremony, just the fact of it.
I looked around the cellar one more time. The shelves. The boxes. The stone walls doing their patient work.
“It's cold down here,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Come up when you're done.”
I went back up the stairs and then drifted toward the kitchen where the morning light was coming in through the window over the sink. The coffee was still warm in the pot and outside the magnolia at the east corner was doing absolutely nothing because it was a tree and trees didn't care about any of this.
I poured two cups and waited.
He came up six minutes later with the green ledger under his arm and dust on his knees. I handed him the coffee without saying anything and he took it, and we stood at the counter in the thin October morning and didn't talk about what came next.
We had a little time still.
Not much. But a little.
He went to Hall on a Tuesday morning while I was still in bed.
I heard the Mustang’s tires fighting the gravel at seven. I didn't get up. I lay there and looked at the ceiling and listened to the engine as the car disappeared down the drive. My mind went to the green ledger and its fraying edges, then to the man whowould receive it and his linen jacket. And the pen I had never gotten back from him.
I wanted to think all would go well. I knew it wouldn’t be easy — trust me, Iknew, but I had hope that it would gowell.
Judah was home by nine.
He didn't tell me how it went. I didn't ask. He made eggs and put a plate in front of me and sat across the table with his coffee and the paper and that was how we knew — both of us, without saying it — that it was done.
