Part 29:
Half of them were small. A scheduling software that people hated, a bathroom that had been broken for 3 months in one facility, a shift manager in Scranton who was, according to seven different people, a good man. A shift manager in Albany who was, according to 16 different people, not. Two instances of theft that were nothing like the Rhineck operation and were just opportunistic.
A forklift driver in Poughkeepsie taking home tools. A night shift supervisor in Binghamton stealing small quantities of cold medicine. Those were cleaner to handle. Those were, as Delia said one afternoon, a relief. Celeste read his notebook every Friday afternoon. They would sit in her office, which was on the top floor of the building in Burlington with a view of the lake, and she would read, and he would drink coffee that she had learned by then to have ready for him when he came in.
She read fast. She underlined. She asked questions in the margins in a neat small hand. Sometimes she looked up at him and said something like, “This man in Scranton, the one you say is good, did he get promoted this year?” And Ryan would say, “No.” And she would say, “Why not?” And they would have a conversation about that for an hour, the way two people have a conversation when they are thinking about the same problem from different angles, and they do not want to leave any of it uncovered.
He got home to Birch Street by 7:00 on Fridays. He would pick up Emma from Rosa’s on the way. Emma had dinner ready for him some Fridays, something simple that Rosa had taught her, rice with beans or pasta with butter and cheese. She set the table for two with a little too much ceremony.
She would sit across from him and she would tell him about her week. He listened. He listened in a way he had not listened even a year ago. He had been tired then in a way that had made everything quieter than it should have been. He was less tired now. He was not because his job was easy. His job was not easy. He was less tired because he had stopped caring the thing he had been caring for 4 years, which was the belief, half buried, that he was going to fail Emma.
He had not failed her. He had been given a second chance on a morning he had not expected by a stranger who had seen him, and he had taken it, and now he was doing work that mattered, and his daughter was doing her homework at a desk that he had bought her. It was winter. It was a real Vermont winter, the kind that made the inside of your car windshield fog up the second you got in.
Emma had a cold in January that lasted 3 weeks. Ryan sat with her on the new couch one Saturday afternoon while she dozed under a blanket and watched a cooking competition not unlike the one that had been on the television the day the call had come from the woman with the unknown number. Ryan watched her sleep for a while.
He thought about the fact that he had, almost in an alternate version of the autumn, been in a federal courtroom as a defendant instead of a witness. He thought about the $40. He thought about the small hesitation a man makes in a moment between the thing he knows he should do and the thing he tells himself is wiser.
He thought about how thin the line was that separated the life he was in from the life he almost had. He put his hand on Emma’s forehead. She was warm but not too warm. She stirred in her sleep and turned her face toward his hand and said, without waking up, “Daddy?” He said quietly, “I’m here, kid.” She slept.
Celeste came to Birch Street for the first time in February. It was not a date. That was important to both of them, although neither of them said so out loud. It was a Sunday. It was snowing lightly and she had a binder she needed to go through with him before a Tuesday board meeting. She had called him Saturday night and asked if he would mind her coming by Sunday afternoon and he had said, hesitating for only a moment, “No, come over.
” Emma was at Rosa’s for the afternoon. Rosa had a quilting group. She had been quilting, against everyone’s expectation, since she was 60. Emma had started a quilt with her. They had made two lopsided potholders that Ryan used every day. Celeste arrived at 1:10 in the afternoon. She came up the stairs alone.
Marcus, Ryan noticed from the window, was in a car on the corner doing what Marcus did. Celeste had a canvas bag over her shoulder. She was wearing jeans and a sweater and her hair was in a braid. She looked, for the first time since Ryan had known her, almost the age she actually was. I brought the binder. Come in. She came in. She looked around the apartment.
She did not do the thing Ryan had been half afraid she would do, which was to look at the apartment the way a rich person looks at a small space, which is as a space to be escaped. She looked at it like she was visiting a person’s home. She took off her boots at the door, unprompted. She saw the little rug in the hallway that Marlene had bought at a yard sale years ago, and she stepped carefully around it.
“This is nice,” she said. “It’s okay.” “No, it’s nice. It feels like somebody lives here.” He didn’t know what to say to that. He made tea. She sat at the kitchen table. She opened the binder. They went through it. It took about 2 hours. Around 3:00, they took a break. She got up to stretch her shoulders.
She walked around the living room. She stopped at the shelf by the window where Ryan had a framed photograph of Marlene from a camping trip they had taken the summer before Emma was born. Marlene was laughing in the photograph. Her hair was in her face. Celeste looked at the photograph for a long time. “Ryan?” “Yeah.” “Tell me about the photograph.
” “Nickel Lake, a weekend. It was about 100°. We forgot the tent poles. We slept in the car.” Celeste smiled. “She laughed in the picture because she thought it was funny.” “It was funny.” “Even though you had to sleep in the car?” “Marlene thought everything was funny. It was one of her best qualities. It was also sometimes annoying.
” “I can imagine.” She looked at the photograph a while longer. “Ryan?” “Yeah.” “I want to say something, and I don’t want it to be strange, and I don’t know how to do it without it being strange.” “Say it. You have been for me these last few months. I don’t know quite how to put this.” “Okay.” “The first person in a long time who I don’t have to be the boss with.
” “Okay.” “I don’t mean at work. I mean the rest of it. I mean the parts that aren’t work. I don’t talk to anyone about things that aren’t work, Ryan. I haven’t since I was 24. I I talk to you about things that aren’t work, and I notice I’m doing it, and I don’t mind. Celeste. Let me finish. Okay.
I am not going to do anything about that. I am your boss. That That matters. And your wife is in that photograph, and she has a right to be in that photograph for as long as you need her to be. I am not I am not asking you for anything. Okay. I just wanted you to know. He stood up. He walked over to her, not close, but close enough.
He looked at the photograph. He looked at Marlene’s face. Celeste. Yes. She’d have liked you. You think so? Yeah, she’d have teased you, but she’d have liked you. What would she have teased me about? The reading glasses on the chains. I don’t wear them on chains. Delia does. She’d have teased Delia, too. Poor Delia. Yeah. Celeste smiled.
