The swearing-in was set for ten o'clock on a Monday in November, in the old theater on Broad Street where the Supreme Court of Ohio rents the whole house twice a year to turn a few hundred tired people into lawyers. I got there at nine-fifteen because the instructions said nine-thirty and because I had been awake since four, lying in my apartment in Italian Village with my eyes open, listening to the radiator knock and running through the morning the way you rehearse a closing argument. Park in the garage on Front Street. Pick up the credentials at the table in the lobby.
Find Grandmother Claudette before she finds a reason to be disappointed. Find Malcolm Wendt from Ruhl Benning, shake his hand, introduce him to Claudette, let them talk about the Columbus Foundation board for four minutes. Find Dad.
I had planned the order on purpose. I want to be honest about that from the beginning, because the rest of this doesn't make any sense unless you understand that I was a person who planned the order in which the people I loved would be seen.
The lobby is all gilt and red carpet. There were already families in it, mothers in good wool coats, fathers holding phones up at the chandeliers, and the new admittees in dark suits, looking like we had not eaten.
I had bought a new navy suit for the day, which I could not afford, and I had spent forty dollars I did not have on having the sleeves shortened so that a quarter inch of white cuff would show when I raised my right hand to take the oath. Claudette had taught me that, about the cuff. She had taught me a great many things in the eight years since she had come into my life with a cream-colored envelope and a handwritten note that said, I would very much like to know you, if you would allow it.
I had allowed it. I was eighteen, and I was hungry for things I did not have names for.
She arrived at nine-forty, exactly on time for the instructions, which meant ten minutes late by her own standards, and I watched her come through the brass doors the way you watch weather come across a field. Claudette Severance was seventy-four years old and stood very straight. She wore a camel coat and gray kid gloves and a small dragonfly brooch with a sapphire for a body, and her hair was a white helmet set every Saturday for thirty years at the same salon in Upper Arlington. She did not look around for me. She let me come to her.
"Elaine," she said, and offered me her cheek. She was the only person alive who called me Elaine. Everyone else, my whole life, had called me Laney. "You look exactly right."
"So do you."