Chapter 10: Maybe I Shouldn't Have Asked

He had the keys out before he reached the car.

The footsteps on the gravel had stopped once, halfway across the drive, long enough that he’d assumed whoever it was had thought better of it. Then they started again, quicker, heels on loose stone, and he knew before he turned his head.

“Adrian.”

His mother’s hand landed on his sleeve above the elbow, over the coat, and stayed. The gold band was warm through the wool. She had come out of a house with the whole family still sitting in it and taken hold of her son’s arm in the open, where the windows could see her, and her fingers did not loosen once.

“I know where your office is,” she said. “I know what that drive is on a Sunday. And I am not going to stand out here and ask you to move back into this house, so you can stop waiting for it.”

“Come when you can. That’s all I’m saying. An hour. A Tuesday, even.” Her chin was up, the way it went up when she was being reasonable and hated it. “He asks about you every week. Every week, Adrian. I have run out of things to tell him, and I won’t lie to that man.”

Behind them, up at the house, a woman laughed and a door shut somewhere at the back, and the gravel moved under his mother’s shoes as she shifted her weight.

“And don’t be angry with your grandfather.”

“This is about Milo, too.” Her hand was still on his sleeve, so he couldn’t do anything with his shoulder, or his keys, and she knew it. “I want you to have the whole of it from me. You are going to get some version of it from somebody in this family before the week is out, and whatever you think of me, it should be me who tells you.”

“Mom—“

“I know you didn’t want it.” She kept going. “I knew it better than he did. He was looking at the house and the name and how it would all read in ten years. I was looking at you. And when he sat you down and told you he would not have that surgery unless you agreed to the marriage, I was in the room. In the chair by the door.”

Her fingers moved once on his sleeve and went still again.

“I did not say one word.”

“Neither did—“ he said.

“Neither did you. I know.” She took a breath and let it out through her nose, which was the only thing she ever did with a feeling in public. “I have thought about the sentence I should have said that day about a thousand times since. I still don’t have it. So here is what I have instead.”

“You were smarter than your father and me by the time you were eleven. You have never given me anything to worry about. Not once, in your whole life.” She looked at him, and he looked past her, at the house. “This is the only thing I have ever asked you for.”

“Milo’s parents were the son and daughter-in-law of your grandfather’s oldest friend. They were killed on the highway when Milo was nine. Both of them, the same night, and there was nothing left of that family but an old man and a boy.”

She said the next part the way she said things she had already decided not to cry about.

“Your grandfather’s friend never got over it. He lasted five years and then he was going too, and when he knew it, he asked for one thing — that somebody in this house would look after the child. That is all it was. Milo came here at fourteen because an old man asked, and your grandfather said yes to him. Nobody planned anything for that boy. He’s a good kid, and this family has not been good to him, and I have known it the whole time.”

Somewhere out on the road past the gate a car went by, and neither of them looked at it.

“And then you told us. You sat in the library and you told your father and me the truth about yourself, and you said it wasn’t women, and you said the man you had was not going to be moved along by anybody in this house.”

“Your grandfather heard that and made up his mind that same night. Better this, he said, than the man you had picked out for yourself. Better the boy under this roof. That was the whole of his argument.”

“He did it for you. You can hold it against the rest of us as long as you want to. Not him.”

“Julian Crane.” She said the name the way she said the names of wines she wasn’t going to drink. “He is not good for you.”

He knew how much of it was true. He also knew the part he was never going to hand her, and there was no sentence he could give his mother on this driveway that wouldn’t end with her carrying something she would have nobody to say it to. So he said the other thing.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll come more.”

She waited.

He turned a quarter-turn toward the car. Her hand came off his sleeve a half second after he moved, and he watched her decide not to say anything about it, and she didn’t.

“Milo—“ she said.

He stopped.

“Do you want something for the drive?” she said. “There’s half a chicken in the kitchen and nobody in there is going to eat it.”

“No.”

“All right.”

He got in and shut the door and turned the key. The dash lit, and the vents, and the radio came on at whatever volume it had been left at and he turned it off again. In the mirror his mother had not moved. One hand was closed around the other.

In the living room the coffee had gone cold in the pot and nobody had sent for more.

Douglas had taken his phone into the study. Vivian was somewhere at the back of the house, doing whatever she did with her hands when there was nothing left to run. Walter had carried the last of the plates away, and the room had that Sunday quiet in it, the light coming in low off the lawn and lying in a long shape across the carpet.

Arthur was in the chair by the window, his cup on the table at his elbow, and he watched Milo come in and stand in the doorway, and he let him stand there long enough to make a point of it.

“Sit down,” he said. “You’ve been on your feet since you came in the door.”

Milo sat. He took the edge of the couch and not the middle of it, and put his hands flat on his knees, and waited.

“How is it?” Arthur said. “Living with him.”

“I’m fine, sir. He’s good to me.”

“You’ve lost weight since I saw you last.”

“It’s nothing. My appetite’s been off, that’s all. I’ve been eating less. You don’t need to worry about me.”

Arthur laughed.

It started down in the chest and came up through his shoulders, and he laughed until it turned into a cough and he had to put his hand flat on the arm of the chair and ride it out. When he was done he wiped the side of his eye with his thumb and looked at Milo with his eyebrows up.

“You don’t have to do that in here.”

“Do what, sir?”

“Sit up straight and call me sir and tell me everything is fine.” He waved a hand at the ceiling, at the room, at the whole house above them. “There is nobody in this room but an old man in a chair. So you can put that down while you’re in here.”

Milo kept his hands flat on his knees.

“I’ve seen you a few times now,” Arthur said. “You’re a good kid. I’ve thought so every time.”

“And I know what my grandson is like. I’ve known him longer than you have, and I know exactly what it is to have him walk past you in a hallway and not say a word to you for a week.” He reached over and turned his cup a quarter-turn on the saucer, lining it up with nothing. “I put the two of you in that apartment. I asked you to say yes to it, and you said yes, and I have had every day since to work out whether that was the right thing to ask a boy to do.”

“So maybe I shouldn’t have asked.”

The answer was out of Milo’s mouth before he had finished deciding to give it, which he heard happening and could not stop.

“It wasn’t you. Nobody made me do anything — I said yes because I wanted to say yes.” His hands were still flat on his knees and he looked at the old man while he said it, which took effort he was not going to mention. “You gave me all of this, sir. You know what I came here with. I’m fine. He’s good to me. I’m happy.”

“Good,” Arthur said.

He turned his face to the window and the lawn, and the light came off the glass and onto the side of his face and the arm of the chair.

Twice, though.

Counting today, twice — and Milo went back through the whole of it, the doorways and the years and the car rides, the way you check a pocket, and there was nothing else in there. No other room, no other year, no moment of being looked at that he could find.

A few times, the old man had said.

How many. Which ones. Where was he standing, then, in which doorway, in which year, without one memory of it to hold on to.

The cup came down on the coffee table. China on wood, one flat sound, and then there was nothing in the room but the house.