Chapter One
The drive up from the airport had taken the better part of two hours, the interstate giving way eventually to the narrower county roads that wound past dairy farms and covered bridges and the same handful of towns whose names she still knew by heart despite not having lived among them in seventeen years, and somewhere around the second hour Clara had turned the radio off, unwilling to let even a stranger’s voice fill the quiet she needed for whatever this visit was about to be.
Clara had been sitting in the driveway with the engine off for four minutes, long enough that the kitchen window had gone bright, dim, bright again as her mother crossed in front of it, checking without checking. Clara had grown up in this house and still hadn’t decided whether that talent of her mother’s was a comfort or a surveillance system.
She got out before the porch light could do it a third time, leaving her phone face-up on the passenger seat where she could see it light up without checking it, a manuscript still open in her email from a meeting she’d left early to make her flight, a debut novelist’s third revision sitting half-annotated in a document she’d promised herself she wouldn’t think about again until Monday. She’d made herself that promise at the gate in Chicago. She’d already broken it twice, once over the beverage cart and once somewhere over Ohio.
The cold had a smell to it here that Chicago’s cold didn’t bother with, woodsmoke and wet leaves and something mineral underneath that she’d have called snow if there’d been any yet. There wasn’t. The lawn was that flattened, colorless brown that came before winter actually committed to itself, and the Fenwick sign at the end of the road still said TREES, though nobody would need one for another two weeks.
The sign snagged something loose in her before she could stop it. Anna, eleven years old, standing on the hood of their mother’s car in the Fenwick lot because she’d declared the sign needed correcting, dragging a fat marker across the bottom in block letters that took Hal a full season to sand off: AND MISFITS. She’d gotten in trouble for it, real trouble, the kind that came with a phone call to their mother at work, and had considered the whole episode a triumph anyway, recounting it at Christmas dinners for years afterward with the unrepentant pride of someone who’d never once regretted a single consequence in her life. Clara smiled before she’d registered why, standing in her parents’ driveway with her bag still in the car. A beat later, the smile cost her more than she’d expected it to.
The front door opened before she reached it.
“You made good time,” Margaret said, which was what she always said, regardless of the time made. She had flour on one forearm and an oven mitt tucked under the other arm like a clutch bag, and she looked Clara over quickly, checking for weight lost or color drained or anything else a mother cataloged and never mentioned. “Your father’s got the leaf out for the table. He’s decided this is the year we need it.”
“Do we need it?”
“No,” Margaret said. “But he needed to decide something, so.”
The entryway still held the same coat hooks, the same runner rug gone thin in the middle, the same brass dish by the door where car keys had accumulated for as long as Clara could remember. She set her bag down at the foot of the stairs without looking at where she was putting it. Her body knew this house better than she wanted it to. The house smelled like a Thanksgiving that had been building since roughly seven that morning, and under it, fainter, the smell the house always had that Clara couldn’t name and had stopped trying to. Thomas was in the dining room with the table extension leaned against the wall and a screwdriver he clearly didn’t need, and he looked up at her like he’d known she was there before she came in and had simply been waiting for a reasonable moment to acknowledge it.
“Clara.”
“Hi, Dad.”
That was the whole exchange. It always was. He came around the table and hugged her, one arm, a hand flat between her shoulder blades for exactly as long as a hug was supposed to last and not a second longer, and then he went back to the leaf, because affection in this family had a runtime.
She carried her bag up to her old room, which her mother had stopped calling her old room around the time Clara turned thirty and started calling the guest room, though nothing in it had changed. Same bedspread. Same water stain on the ceiling shaped like a state neither of them had ever agreed on. Clara set her phone face-down on the dresser, then picked it up again to check it, because she was already braced for an email that hadn’t come yet, and put it back down, annoyed at herself for both things.
Dinner ran competent and a little too quiet in the gaps, three people arranging themselves around a table built for more, the good china out for an occasion that was really just one of the four or five times a year anyone bothered to use it. Margaret talked. She always talked at dinner, an even, generous stream about the neighbors, about the church roof fund, about a woman from her book club, Carol Ann, who’d gotten engaged at sixty-one to a man she’d met, unbelievably, at a tire shop, both of them there for the same flat, and how the whole club had spent forty minutes on the memoir they were supposed to be discussing and the rest of the two hours on whether a tire shop counted as a meet-cute or just a coincidence with good timing. Clara let it move past her like weather, answering when a question surfaced, laughing when a laugh was clearly wanted, working through a plate of turkey that was, as always, slightly dry in the breast and entirely redeemed by her mother’s gravy, a fact the family had agreed upon without discussion sometime around 1998 and never revisited.
Thomas ate. Occasionally he said something short and dry enough that Clara had to replay it to be sure it had been a joke, and once, when Margaret described the tire-shop fiancé’s proposal in more detail than the story strictly required, down to the exact make of the tire, he said, without looking up from his plate, “I proposed to your mother in a Sears,” and Margaret said, “It was the parking lot of a Sears,” and Thomas said, “It was in the Sears. I’m not doing this again with the geography,” and Clara laughed before she could decide whether she wanted to, a real one, surprised out of her, and for a second the table felt like a table that had always had three people at it instead of four.
It was Margaret who brought her up first, and safely.
“Do you remember the year she did the place cards?”
“God,” Thomas said, into his plate.
“She was nine. She made place cards for Thanksgiving, which nobody asked for, and she did them in some sort of code so that you had to work out which seat was yours.” Margaret was already laughing at it. “She wouldn’t give anyone the key. Your grandmother sat in the wrong chair for the entire meal because she refused to participate on principle.”
“She sat in mine,” Thomas said.
“She sat in yours, and you let her, and you ate your dinner standing at the counter like a man in a bus station rather than make a thing of it.”
“I was comfortable.”
“You were not comfortable, Thomas.”
Clara laughed properly at that, and Margaret was pleased with herself, and for a while it was easy, because that Anna was nine years old and safely twenty years back and could be handled by all three of them without anyone getting hurt. They did another one after it, the summer she’d tried to keep a frog in the downstairs bathroom, and another, the retainer she had lost twice and then, the third time, admitted to having thrown into a lake.
Then Margaret started a sentence, “Well, you remember how Anna used to,” and didn’t finish it, because there wasn’t a version of finishing it that didn’t require everyone to sit inside the sentence for a while, and instead she got up to get the gravy that didn’t need getting. Thomas’s eyes went to the empty fourth side of the table and then back to his plate, quick, practiced, a reflex worn smooth from three years of use. Clara had gotten good at this particular kind of silence herself. She’d had practice in Chicago, at dinners with colleagues who knew and dinners with colleagues who didn’t, and she could feel the shape of the missing sentence the way you could feel a step that wasn’t there on a familiar staircase.
Then Margaret set her fork down with the particular deliberateness of someone about to say something she’d rehearsed. “I talked to a realtor,” she said. “Sandy Okafor’s cousin, does the whole county now. She’s coming by in the spring to look at the place.”
Thomas didn’t stop eating, which told Clara he’d known already.
“The house?” Clara said, unnecessarily.
“It’s too much house for two people,” Margaret said, gentle and final, the tone she used for facts she’d already made peace with and expected other people to catch up to. “I’m not asking anyone’s permission. I just wanted you to hear it from me instead of finding a sign in the yard next time you’re up.”
“Okay,” Clara said, because there wasn’t anything else honest to say yet. This visit already felt different from every other one she’d made in the last three years. Finite in a way it hadn’t been an hour ago.
They didn’t talk about it further. That, too, was a family skill, arguably the family’s best one: the ability to set something enormous on the table, let it sit there in plain view, and go on eating.
After dinner Thomas retreated to the garage to do something to the truck that didn’t need doing, and Margaret recruited Clara to help get the porch decorations down from the attic before the ladder got icy, which was less an attic errand than an announcement that Christmas was now officially permitted to begin existing in this house, a full month early.
The attic smelled like cardboard and cedar and, faintly, mothballs from a coat nobody had worn since the Clinton administration. Margaret went after the porch garland, methodical, sneezing twice, narrating the whole time about which box was which even though none of the boxes were labeled in any way that matched what she said. Clara worked her way along the far wall, where the ornament boxes were stacked three high, soft cardboard gone furred at the corners.
She pulled the top box down to check it wasn’t the porch stuff and the flap gave more than she expected, spilling two ornaments loose across her palm. A glass bell, cracked along one side and kept anyway, the way this family kept everything cracked. And under it, small enough that she almost missed it in the dim attic light, a plain round glass ball, the kind that came a dozen to a box from the drugstore and never got used because they were too ordinary next to the good ones.
Except this one had been opened. Someone had pried the little metal cap loose and pushed something inside before pressing it back down, not quite flush, so that when Clara turned the ornament over, something inside shifted and clicked against the glass.
Clara sat back on her heels with the ornament in her palm for a second before she did anything else, turning it once so the seam in the metal cap caught the bare attic bulb. It was heavier than an empty ornament had any business being. Somebody had wanted this found eventually, not immediately.
She worked the cap free with her thumbnail. A key fell into her palm, small, brass, the kind that belonged to nothing she could immediately picture, an old-fashioned skeleton shape you didn’t see much anymore, the teeth worn soft at the edges like it had been used a long time before it had been hidden. Folded twice around it, so small she nearly missed it too, a strip of paper gone slightly furred at the folds.
She knew the handwriting before she’d finished unfolding it. She’d have known it anywhere, on a grocery list, on the back of a photograph, on anything. Small, slanted hard to the right, the y’s looped like they were in a hurry to get somewhere else.
For when you’re ready. A.
Clara stayed kneeling on the plywood floor longer than the sentence should have taken to read. Somewhere below her Margaret was still talking, something about the garland’s lights being half burned out last year, and the ordinary sound of her mother’s voice kept coming up through the floorboards while Clara sat there with three years of managed distance sitting uselessly in her hands.
“Find the garland?” Margaret called from the other side of the attic, muffled by a stack of boxes.
Clara closed her hand around the key until the teeth of it pressed a line into her palm. “Not yet,” she said, and her voice came out steadier than she’d have guessed it could. “Still looking.”
She put the ornament in her coat pocket, key and note and all, and did not put it back in the box.
The house went quiet by ten, Thomas’s footsteps on the stairs, the particular creak of the third-from-top step that nobody had ever fixed because everybody had stopped noticing it decades ago, the furnace ticking on and off somewhere below. Clara lay on top of the guest-room bedspread in her clothes and turned the key over in the lamplight until she’d memorized the exact worn place on its teeth, the exact weight of it, without getting any closer to knowing what it opened.
She tried the obvious things first, because trying the obvious things was easier than sitting still with the note. The dresser drawers, all four, though none of them had ever locked in her lifetime. The lockbox of her own, back in Chicago, that held her passport and a savings bond from her grandmother, though that key lived on her own ring and always had. She held it up to the lamp again and read the note a fourth time, a fifth, as if a sixth reading might change what it said, or when it had been written, or why it had taken this long to find her.
For when you’re ready.
Ready for what. She had been home four hours.
At some point past midnight she gave up pretending she was going to fall asleep and lay there instead listening to the furnace and turning the small brass shape over and over between her fingers, worn teeth, worn teeth, worn teeth, until the repetition stopped meaning anything at all and simply became a thing her hands were doing while the rest of her stayed wide awake in the dark.
Chapter Two
Priya called on Friday morning while Clara was walking the back property with a mug of coffee she didn’t actually want, mostly to get a signal strong enough to hold a call and mostly, if she was honest, to get some air that didn’t have four other people’s breathing in it.
“I’m not going to pretend this isn’t terrible timing,” Priya said, which was how Priya opened most conversations that were about to be good news wrapped around something that would cost Clara sleep. “The board approved the imprint. They want an editorial director in place by spring, and they want it in Chicago, in the building, not the two-days-a-month arrangement you’ve got now. I fought for you to be the first call. I’m making it.”
Clara stopped walking. Ahead of her, past the sagging half of the split-rail fence nobody had gotten around to fixing since she was in high school, the old equipment shed still had a row of Fenwick’s paper tree tags nailed along its back wall, going back God knew how many years, faded orange and curled at the corners, a different color for each season the girls had come home with a tree from the farm up the county road. She hadn’t looked at that wall in a decade. She was looking at it now.
“That’s an incredible offer,” Clara said, and meant it, and also felt a real vertigo at meaning something completely while another part of her was doing arithmetic it hadn’t asked to do.
“It’s a real one. Relocation package, real title, real budget, your name on the list going forward instead of somebody else’s initials in the corner of it.” Priya’s voice had gone warm, and she actually cared about the answer, not just the org chart. “I know you’ve got the hybrid thing going with the Kowalczyk list and it’s working, and I know I’m the one who set that up for you in the first place. This isn’t that. Ownership wants a director who’s actually in the building three, four days a week, at least for the first year while the imprint finds its feet. I can’t spin that into something it isn’t.”
“No, I get it,” Clara said, and did. “When do they want an answer?”
“Officially, end of January. Unofficially, the longer you sit on it, the more it looks like hesitation to people who don’t know you, and I’d rather that not happen to you.” A pause, papers shifting somewhere on Priya’s end, the sound of an office Clara could picture down to the light fixtures. “You don’t have to say anything today. I just didn’t want you finding out from an all-staff email over turkey.”
“I’m literally at my parents’ for Thanksgiving right now.”
“Then I definitely didn’t want you finding out over turkey.” Priya’s laugh was quick and real. “Go be with your family, Bennett. This’ll keep for a few weeks. It’s not going anywhere and neither, I hope, are you.”
Clara thanked her, said the right things, hung up, and stood there long enough that the coffee went from too hot to not worth finishing. Behind her the house sat squat and lit and thoroughly itself against the gray morning, the same house that, come spring, would have a stranger walking through it with a clipboard, measuring it for a life without her family in it. In front of her, an old shed wall kept a record of every Christmas tree two sisters had ever dragged home, color-coded and curling.
It took her a moment to place why the offer had landed harder than a piece of good news should. Then she had it. This was the same shape as the offer she’d turned down at twenty-eight, almost exactly, a title and a relocation and a version of her career finally catching up to the work she’d already been doing, except that time she hadn’t turned it down so much as let it slip away, quietly, one missed deadline and one skipped interview at a time, while she learned how to manage Eleanor’s medications and translate the specialist’s language back into something the rest of the family could carry. Nobody had asked her to give up the promotion. She had simply run out of hours in which to hold both things, and the promotion, being patient and inanimate, had waited exactly as long as it needed to before going to someone else. Seven years later, here it was again, dressed differently, offered by a different mouth.
She tried, briefly and unsuccessfully, to picture the actual shape of saying yes. An apartment in a different neighborhood than the one she had now, closer to the office, the kind with a doorman who’d learn her name, which her current one hadn’t in six years. A calendar that filled itself in without her input. A version of her life that looked, from the outside, exactly like the thing she’d been working toward since she was twenty-four years old, and that was, she suspected, precisely the problem with trying to picture it standing in her mother’s backyard the day after Thanksgiving. From here it didn’t look like a life. It looked like a very well-organized escape route.
She walked closer to the shed than she meant to, close enough to read the tags, most of them just a year in Anna’s round, careless print or her own tighter one, a couple further back in their mother’s hand from before either of them had been old enough to hold a marker steady. 2011 was there, and 2014, and a run of three consecutive years where the tag just said MISFIT in block capitals with no date at all, which had been the whole point back then, that the date didn’t matter, only that they’d gone. She didn’t remember who’d started calling them that. She remembered that it had been the two of them, every year, arguing good-naturedly over which lopsided, overpriced, unsellable tree deserved to come home with them instead of a proper one, and that their mother had eventually stopped fighting it and just bought a second, better tree for the front window so the misfit one could live wherever the girls decided it belonged that year.
She remembered one year specifically, standing right about where she was standing now, thirteen years old maybe, arguing with a nine-year-old Anna over a tree so crooked it had practically been growing sideways, Anna dead certain it deserved to win because, in her exact words, delivered with the moral authority only a nine-year-old could summon, it’s trying its best and nobody’s going to give it credit for that if we don’t. They’d bought it. Their mother had rolled her eyes the whole drive home and then spent forty-five minutes helping them wire it upright against the living room wall so it wouldn’t tip over, because apparently a tree trying its best deserved that too. Clara hadn’t thought about that sentence in twenty years and had it word for word.
She hadn’t thought about the tags in years. She hadn’t had a reason to stand this close to that wall since Anna died, because there hadn’t been anyone to argue with about which tree deserved it, and going alone had never once occurred to her as a thing a person could do.
She didn’t tell anyone at breakfast. It wasn’t a secret so much as it was a thing that needed somewhere to live in her head first, and her head, this particular week, was already fully booked.
That evening, over leftovers reheated into something that tasted better than the original meal had, Margaret brought the house up again, more carefully this time.
“I know I sprang that on you yesterday,” she said. “I’ve been going back and forth on how to say it for months, and then it just came out sideways at the turkey, which is exactly how your grandmother used to break news, so I suppose it’s genetic.” She refilled Clara’s water without being asked, an old habit. “I don’t want you rushing off after two days like you usually do. I know your work doesn’t stop just because it’s a holiday. But this might be the last one in this house, and I’d like you here for the whole thing, if you can manage it.”
“I can manage it,” Clara said, and was a little surprised to hear herself say it before she’d actually decided.
“You don’t have to say it just to make me feel better,” Margaret said, watching her a little too closely for someone who’d supposedly already accepted the answer.
“I’m not. I’ve got the vacation days. I haven’t used any of them in two years, which my HR department has opinions about.” That much, at least, was entirely true, and saying it out loud made the rest of it easier to mean. “I can work from here if I need to. Nobody at the office cares where the emails come from as long as they come.”
“Well,” Margaret said, and there was something underneath the word, relief maybe, or the satisfaction of a plan that had actually worked, “I’ll take it.”
Thomas, across the table, said nothing, but he got up a moment later and came back from the kitchen with a plate that had clearly been hidden behind the orange juice, a last unclaimed wedge of pie he’d apparently been rationing to himself in installments since Thursday, and set it down in front of Clara without comment, which was as close as her father ever came to saying good, stay.
“Is that the pie you told Mom was gone?” Clara said.
“I told her the pie plate was empty,” Thomas said. “Which it was, once I’d finished with it the first time.”
Margaret swatted him with a dish towel that had clearly performed this exact function many times before, and for a moment the kitchen held something that felt, almost, like the ordinary shape of a family instead of the managed one Clara had been navigating since Thursday.
They lingered at the table longer than usual, the dishes going cold and unwashed for once, Margaret telling a long, meandering story about a dispute at church over whose casserole recipe had been unfairly excluded from the holiday potluck rotation, Thomas interjecting periodic dry commentary that made the story funnier than it had any right to be. Clara laughed more in that single hour than she had in months back in Chicago, where laughter tended to arrive in the efficient, professional register of colleagues being pleasant to each other rather than this looser, sillier version, the kind that came from people who’d known each other’s worst jokes for thirty years and still, somehow, found them funny.
“You should stay up a little,” Margaret said, when they’d finally cleared the table, Clara drying while her mother washed, an old division of labor neither of them had to discuss. “There’s a whole box of old Christmas movies in the den, the actual tapes, if you can believe your father still has a machine that plays them.”
“I threw out the machine twice,” Thomas called from the other room. “She keeps buying a new one.”
“I keep buying a new one because Christmas isn’t Christmas without the version where the dog ruins the tree,” Margaret called back, entirely unbothered, and Clara smiled at the domestic rhythm of it, an argument they’d clearly had a hundred times before, neither of them actually invested in winning it.
She didn’t stay up for the movie, not that first night, too tired from the flight and the day’s accumulated weight to do anything but climb the stairs and fall into a bed that still, somehow, remembered the exact shape of her seventeen-year-old self.
She lay there a while before sleep actually took her, running the numbers on both the month she’d agreed to and the offer she still hadn’t answered, without landing anywhere useful. It wasn’t really a numbers problem, whatever she kept telling herself. The key was still in her coat pocket, hung on the back of the door. She could hear it, faintly, when the coat moved, a small metal sound in an otherwise quiet room, patient, like it could wait as long as it needed to.