Chapter 8: Eat Something

Eat Something

Adrian didn’t ask.

He got out of the car and came up the drive behind him, and Milo heard all of it — the door, the gravel, the longer stride. Years of watching other people decide things had left him with a very fine ear for the moment somebody decided to say something to him, and Adrian Hale had decided. Milo could feel it coming up the drive. Ten feet back. Six. Four.

He didn’t slow down, and he didn’t turn around. If Adrian was going to ask about the car, he was going to ask it here, on the steps, in front of the house, and Milo would have to stand there and hand it over — the song, the face he’d made under the song, the whole humiliating twenty minutes of it — and he had no idea what his voice would do when he tried.

Adrian came even with him.

For a while it was the two of them and the gravel. Milo kept his eyes on the front steps. At the edge of his vision he had Adrian’s hands, both of them at his sides, and the line of his jaw, gone tight. His mouth moved. Nothing came out of it. Then his brows pulled in the way they did over a page he didn’t like, and stayed that way, and he said nothing at all, and the two of them walked the rest of the drive like men who had happened to arrive at the same address.

Milo filed the face away with the others. That made two things Adrian Hale had decided not to say to him today. Fine. He knew that face on anybody. He’d spent four years of school reading it off teachers and coaches and other people’s fathers. It meant not now, not here, and under that, quieter, not with you. Whatever Adrian had wanted to say on the drive, he had looked at Milo and priced it and put it back.

Which was fair. Entirely fair, and Milo would have said so out loud if anybody had asked him, because he had known what he was buying. He had taken this marriage the way you take a coat off a hook in a dark room — fast, before anybody could tell you it wasn’t yours — and he had gotten exactly what came with it. A name on a piece of paper. A door he was technically allowed to walk through.

He walked through it.

The door stood open. That meant nothing about who was welcome in this house; it meant Walter had seen the car on the drive. Milo had come through this door thousands of times, from fourteen on, in school shoes and in clothes the house had bought him, and the door had opened the same way every time. Four weeks ago he had come through it in a new suit, and the door had opened the same way.

The ceiling was higher than he remembered. That was the kind of thing a month away did to a house — not the house, which never changed, but the distance between the floor and everything above it. His shoes made a sound on the tile they never made on the apartment floor. In the glass of the inner door he caught himself: a dark coat, a small shape, and behind him the drive warped long and thin.

He was measuring. He knew he was standing in the doorway measuring, and that men who had a right to a room did not stand in a doorway doing arithmetic about it.

“Adrian. You’re late.”

The voice came from the middle of the hall. It belonged to a woman in a sweater the color of good wine, and she was already moving, and she did not stop in front of her son.

She stopped in front of Milo.

Vivian Hale stood in a way that made a room arrange itself around her. Milo had watched her do it for years and had never found the trick of it. She took his hand out of the air before he had decided to offer it. Her grip was warm and much firmer than it needed to be.

“Look at you,” she said. “Has he been good to you? Don’t answer, you’d say yes.” She turned his hand over. “You’re thinner than you were at the party. He isn’t feeding you.”

“He — I’m fine. Thank you, Mrs. Hale.”

“Mrs. Hale.” Her eyebrows went up, amused, and she kept hold of his hand. “You’ve been calling me that for a month. In this house, honey, I’m Mom.”

And there it was.

He had known it was coming. He had known since the car, since the gate, since the day he signed a paper and understood that the paper came with a family attached and no instructions for what to call anybody. He had thought he had more time.

He turned his head and looked for Adrian the way you look for a wall when the floor moves. Adrian was unbuttoning his coat. He did not look back. He did not see him.

He doesn’t mind. Adrian stood three feet away and let his mother do whatever she liked with this. That was the answer, then.

Something in Vivian’s face changed while Milo was looking at it. It went small and sorry, and her voice came down with it.

“But it’s all right if you’re not ready. I’m rushing you. I do that — ask Adrian. I’ve always done that.”

“No,” Milo said, too fast, and heard himself do it, and had no idea how to get it back. “No, of course I—“ He heard the little stumble in the middle of his own sentence, the word arriving wrong and then arriving right. “Thank you. Mom.”

Vivian smiled at him. Then she let go of his hand and said, “Come and eat, both of you,” and led the way, and the hall came back into focus around Milo all at once: the dark paper on the walls, the flowers, the smell of something roasting, and near the dining room door Walter with his hands behind his back, doing nothing and missing nothing.

Nobody at that table knew why Adrian had changed his mind about this lunch. He was not going to tell them.

The dining room had eighteen chairs and today it was using about a dozen.

Milo did the arithmetic on the way in, because he did it in every room he entered: the long table, the sideboard with the covered dishes, the windows on the far wall with the light coming through them wrong for lunch, too bright and too flat. He counted the chairs on his side. He counted the faces, quit at seven, and let the rest stay a row of people with expressions.

Every one of them turned to look when he came in.

At the head of the table a man stood up.

Arthur Hale was eighty-one years old and stood up without appearing to spend anything on it — one hand flat on the table, a forearm under the sleeve of his jacket that had once been considerable. He was smiling. He was smiling at Milo.

“There he is.” His voice filled the room without effort. It had been built for rooms like this. “Milo. You came. With him?”

“Hello, sir.” His own voice sounded thin in the room, and he heard it, and there was nothing to be done about it. “He drove.”

“He drove.” Arthur repeated it, delighted, as if it were a story he meant to tell at other tables. “I have been waiting on this day. An old man doesn’t get many things left to wait for. Sit, both of you. Sit.”

“Dad.” Douglas Hale, from the far end, did not raise his voice. “Sit down and eat. Anything worth saying will still be worth saying in an hour.” And then, without turning his head, to Adrian, in exactly the same register: “This house has four empty rooms in it. You could think about that sometime before the year is over.”

Adrian pulled out a chair. Not Arthur’s, not his mother’s. The one to his own right.

Milo sat in it.

The plate in front of him was white and large and empty, with a thin line of gold around the rim that was probably real gold. He was aware of his hands, which he put in his lap, and then on the table, and then back in his lap. He was aware of how many forks there were, and he chose the outside one and was relieved, briefly and completely, that there was no way to get lunch wrong.

Then people began to eat, and talk started up the table and down it and did not include him, and that was the best thing that had happened all day.

He took the beans. They were the closest dish by about a foot, and he took one spoonful and looked at his plate for a while and took another one, and after that he stopped. He didn’t take the potatoes. He didn’t take the chicken, or the bread at his elbow, or the roast on the platter near the middle of the table. He did not ask for anything. Asking meant reaching, and reaching meant the table noticing, and the point of sitting at this table at all was to be a shape in a chair that nobody had to think about.

Somebody said something about a game. Somebody else said something about a wedding.

Three seats down, a woman with a diamond on her hand laughed into her glass and said, “So we get Mrs. Hale at Sunday lunch now.”

It took Milo a second to understand that she meant him, and another second to hear which word she had used. Then it sat where it had landed, in the middle of a table full of Hales, and two or three people laughed — not at him, at the joke, at the sound of it — and the woman went back to her glass, pleased with herself.

Vivian did not stop smiling. She picked up the bread basket and set it down again in front of Milo, closer than it had been. “He’s Milo,” she said. “And this is his table.”

Then she turned the conversation and it went somewhere else, and the woman with the diamond went pink and drank, and Milo sat in the middle of it with his ears going hot and his hands in his lap.

They’re testing whether I’ll cry about it.

He would not. He had gotten very good at not.

He wouldn’t have said anything to you anyway. He didn’t even look at you in the hall.

He would not think about that either. He drank some water, which was cold enough to hurt his teeth, and set the glass down and looked at his plate, which was nearly empty. Two spoons of beans and a glass of water. That was the whole of his lunch.

Across the table, Arthur’s fork stopped in the air.

Adrian reached over with his own fork.

He didn’t pick up a serving fork and he didn’t pass the platter and he didn’t ask anybody for anything. He reached across — one arm, the sleeve of a very good shirt, past the potatoes and the bread basket — took a piece of the roast off the dish in the middle, and put it on Milo’s plate, on the bare white part beside the beans.

Then he moved his fork back and set it down wrong, on the rim of Milo’s plate, where a fork does not go.

“Eat something,” he said.

Three words, flat, and nothing after them. And under them, small enough that Milo could have been wrong about it, something rough — a word that had been in his mouth longer than he had meant to keep it there.

Then Adrian turned back to his plate and started eating again.

Vivian had been watching the two of them since they walked in.

She had watched her son come up the drive behind Milo without saying whatever he had gone to the trouble of not saying. She had watched him stand in the hall unbuttoning his coat while his mother held on to a hand that had gone stiff in hers. A dozen people at this table, and she had watched each of them arrive at an opinion about it.

Now she watched her son reach across two serving dishes and put meat on a plate that was not his own.

The woman with the diamond had her glass halfway to her mouth and left it there. Somebody at the far end said something short and got a short laugh for it, and then thought better of the laugh. The roast sat on its platter with a wedge cut out of it. The gravy at the edge of the middle dish had begun to stiffen.

Finally, she thought. She had asked him. Not once — every week since it was done, in the car, in the kitchen, on the phone at ten at night: bring him. Bring him to lunch, bring him to anything. She had gotten a month of silence out of it, and she had stopped asking her son what had changed in him; he had never once answered a question like that in his life. She only knew what she had just watched him do, in front of Arthur and Douglas and that woman, with a fork he then set down wrong, like a man who had not thought about where a fork goes since he was eight years old.

“Well,” she said, into the room, brightly, before anybody else could. “He cooks, you know. Somebody in this family should.”

Milo looked at the meat.

A piece of roast, cut wrong, with a good crust down one side and a string of fat along the other. There was nothing about it that meant anything. It was food, and he was hungry, which he had not let himself notice until about four seconds ago, and there was a man beside him who had put it there in front of the whole table and had not explained himself once.

It’s for show.

It had to be for show. That was the only shape that fit. Arthur had spent the entire meal beaming at the two of them the way he beamed at a deal coming together, and this was the part where the grandson performed, and Milo was the plate the performance got served on. In ten minutes Adrian Hale would be in his car and would not remember which dish he had reached across.

If it were real, he would have looked at me.

He did look at me, Milo thought, and hated himself for it immediately, because looking was not the same thing, and he of all people knew the difference.

Eat it and say nothing. It’s the only thing you’re good at in this house.

He ate it.

He cut it small and chewed slowly with his head down, and it was good — better than the beans, better than anything he had eaten in weeks that somebody had not handed him in a paper bag — and he kept his eyes on his plate the whole time.

After that, the room went on.

Vivian started talking about a wedding, and the table took it up before the pause could finish. Gravy cooled at the edge of Milo’s plate. The woman with the diamond said something to her husband and did not look down this end of the table again.

Adrian had gone back to his food. His fork was still lying on the rim of Milo’s plate, where he had put it down, in the wrong place, and nobody had moved it.

Milo chewed. He didn’t look at him. He didn’t look at anybody, and nobody looked at him, and he finished every scrap of the meat and set his own fork down on the cloth beside the plate, and did not once, the whole time, let himself turn his head four inches to the left.