"This is Colette Beaumont-Clark. I imagine you know why I'm calling."
"To confirm dinner?"
She doesn't laugh. I didn't expect her to.
"I'll be brief. My daughter has a life in Chicago. A career. A future she built over thirty years and dismantled in one summer under your roof." A pause. "I'm prepared to make this simple. Name a figure for your half of the property. My lawyer can have papers drafted by the end of the week. Iris comes home, this—episode—ends, and everyone recovers what they've lost."
I look at the dough on my hands.
"You're trying to buy the farm," I say.
"I'm trying to buy my daughter's life back. The farm is incidental." Her voice doesn't rise at all, which is somehow the frightening part. "Everyone has a number, Miss Aldridge. Your mother certainly did. She lived on my mother's charity for years—and charity has a long memory in this family."
And there it is. The wordparasite,wearing gloves.
"Madame," I say, "I've cooked for people like you my whole career. Back tables. Private rooms. People who believe everything in the world is for sale—and they're mostly right, and it makes them miserable in ways they can't even locate." I take a breath. "There's no number. There was never going to be a number. And you've just told me everything I need to know about what happened between you and your mother, because you're doing it again—to your daughter, in real time."
The silence goes on so long I think she's hung up.
"I'll see you at two o'clock," she says at last, and is gone.
I tell Iris the moment she's through the door—sweaty, still catching her breath—because secrets are how this family lost thirty years, and I'm not donating another one.
She goes white. Then a colour I have no name for.
"She calledyou." Not a question. "She went around me."
"She tested the cheap way in first. It's what I'd do, if I were her and awful."
"What did she offer?"
"Whatever I asked."
"And you said?"
"That there's no number." I shrug, and it doesn't come off half as light as I want it to. "Also several other things. I may have mentioned back tables."
Iris stares at me for a long moment. Then she crosses the kitchen, takes my face in both hands, and kisses me, flour and all.
"Two o'clock," she says grimly, when she lets me go. "I'll alphabetise."
Thursday morning I find her at the kitchen table at half five, in the dark, making a list.
"What's that one?"
"Things she might say." She doesn't look up. "And what I'll say back."
I read over her shoulder. It's in two columns. It's alphabetised.
"You've written counter-arguments."
"Yes."
"To a woman who isn't here."
"Yes."
I take the pen out of her hand, put a coffee in it instead, and start cracking eggs — because there's nothing else I can do for her, and if I don't do something with my hands I'll lose my mind.
