Chương 12
“I am paying the university directly. It is not a reward.”
“It looks like one.”
“That is your problem.”
He went quiet again.
Eleanor thought the call was over.
Then he said, “I really thought Dad wanted me to have it.”
She closed her eyes.
“I know.”
“Did he?”
“Sometimes.”
Richard laughed without humor.
“That’s cruel.”
“It’s true.”
“What did he say at the end?”
Eleanor had avoided the question for weeks.
Now she answered.
“He told me not to give you the house simply because you wanted it louder than everyone else.”
Silence.
Richard’s breathing stopped for a moment.
“You’re lying.”
“No.”
“He wouldn’t say that.”
“He did.”
“He promised me.”
“Yes.”
“So which one was true?”
Eleanor looked down at her hands.
“Probably both when he said them.”
Richard made a sound Eleanor could not identify.
“You always do this.”
“What?”
“Make him complicated after he’s dead.”
“He was complicated while he was alive.”
“He believed in me.”
“Yes.”
“More than you did.”
Eleanor’s voice became quiet.
“I believed in you enough to keep removing the price of your mistakes.”
Richard said nothing.
“So did he,” she continued. “Maybe that was not belief.”
The line went silent.
She thought he had disconnected.
Then Richard said, “I hate you sometimes.”
Eleanor closed her eyes.
“I know.”
“You’re not supposed to say that.”
“I’m seventy-four. I’m finished pretending mothers cannot hear.”
His breath shook once.
“I’m sorry about the dock.”
Eleanor did not move.
Richard continued quickly, as if the words might close if he stopped.
“I was angry. You made me look like an idiot. I’d told everyone the house was basically mine, and then you corrected me in front of them, and I—”
He stopped.
Eleanor waited.
“I kicked your hand.”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t think you’d drown.”
“I believe that.”
The relief in his exhale angered her.
She continued.
“But you knew I was afraid.”
Silence.
“Yes.”
“You used that.”
Another silence.
“Yes.”
Eleanor’s eyes filled.
She hated it.
She wiped them with two fingers.
Richard’s voice was barely audible.
“I’m sorry.”
This time he did not add for what.
Eleanor let the apology exist.
She did not forgive him.
Not yet.
Perhaps not in the form he wanted.
“I’m glad you said it,” she told him.
“What happens now?”
“I don’t know.”
“With the police.”
“I don’t control that.”
“You could tell them you don’t want anything done.”
“I could tell them many things.”
“Will you?”
“No.”
His breathing changed again.
“Okay.”
It was the first time in the conversation he accepted an answer without pushing.
Eleanor almost thanked him.
That would have been absurd.
So she said nothing.
Before they hung up, Richard asked, “Are you selling the house?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“Can I come there?”
“Not now.”
“How long is not now?”
“I don’t know.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Yes.”
“It’s annoying.”
Eleanor smiled despite herself.
“Goodbye, Richard.”
“Bye, Mom.”
The prosecutor’s office contacted Eleanor a month after the incident.
There would be consequences.
The exact shape of them developed through lawyers, interviews and procedures Eleanor disliked because they reduced the worst minute of her summer into statements, files and questions about intent.
Richard’s attorney did not deny the video.
That helped.
He did not claim Eleanor was confused.
That helped more.
The matter did not become a public spectacle. Madison never posted the footage. Connor kept his copy private. Leah gave a statement and then returned to college, where she and Tyler broke up two months later for reasons that had little to do with Eleanor and much to do with being twenty-one.
This disappointed Eleanor in an oddly selfish way.
She had liked Leah.
“You cannot keep people because they behaved well during an emergency,” Daniel told her.
“Why not?”
“Terrible basis for marriage.”
“I wasn’t marrying her.”
“You were planning grandchildren.”
“I was planning nothing.”
Daniel looked at her.
Eleanor stirred sugar into her coffee.
“Fine. One child.”
Richard eventually accepted responsibility through a negotiated resolution that required court supervision, counseling and compliance with conditions his lawyer explained in language Eleanor had no desire to memorize.
He did not go to prison.
Some relatives thought that meant nothing had happened.
Others thought Eleanor should have demanded harsher punishment, as if she personally controlled a machine with a dial marked CONSEQUENCE.
She stopped taking those calls.
The business consequences were less orderly.
Whitmore Development shrank to eight employees.
Richard sold his house in suburban Chicago and moved into a rented condominium.
The private investment group sued over the deposit.
Richard settled months later by selling remaining company assets and agreeing to a repayment schedule.
Eleanor did not pay it.
That fact spread through the family faster than the dock video ever did.
An aunt in Florida told Caroline she could not understand how a mother with Eleanor’s resources could “watch her son collapse.”
Caroline replied, “He is fifty-three.”
The aunt said, “He is still her child.”
Caroline said, “Exactly.”
Eleanor was not certain what her daughter meant.
She liked it anyway.
Tyler returned to college.
Eleanor paid tuition directly and made him send her his grades because she could not resist becoming mildly unreasonable when financing education.
“You said there were no conditions,” he complained.
“I lied.”
“Grandma.”
“I want evidence you attend.”
Madison started seeing a therapist and did not tell Eleanor details, which Eleanor considered healthy.
She also stopped filming family events for several months.
At Thanksgiving, when Caroline asked her to take a photograph, Madison handed the phone to Tyler.
“Nope.”
Everyone laughed.
Then Richard entered the room.
The laughter stopped too quickly.
That was the new problem.
He had been invited.
Eleanor had invited him herself.
He stood in the foyer holding a grocery-store pie and wearing a brown jacket Eleanor had never seen.
For years Richard had entered family gatherings as if arriving late to a meeting he chaired.
That evening he waited beside the door.
“Hi.”
Caroline was in the kitchen.
May you like
She did not come out.
Tyler crossed the room first.
