Somebody near the back, I never found out who, said, "Good for you, honey," and a few people laughed, but kindly this time.
"The second thing," Hesper said, and her voice got quieter, and she turned toward the front table, toward her mother. "Mrs. Gilchrist was wrong. About the list. I've been thinking about it for five years, and she was wrong. My mom makes lists because she's scared. Not because she doesn't love me. Those aren't the same. I know the difference. I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the job, Mom. I'm sorry I didn't tell you about Dash. I didn't trust you with it. I want to try to, now. That's all."
She sat down. Dashiell, very quietly, took her hand.
I looked at Ottoline. She was sitting in the president's chair with her hands flat on the closed folio, exactly as she'd sat at my kitchen table a week earlier, and her face was doing the opposite of what it had done that morning. It wasn't pale anymore. The color was coming back into it, slowly, from the center outward, like a room when someone opens a curtain.
The board voted three to one, with Ottoline abstaining, to adopt the hardship waiver. Ermengarde Quarrington was the one. On the question of the presidency, Evander Vellacott, the retired pharmacist, cleared his throat and said that in his opinion a person who stood up in public and corrected her own mistake on the record was exactly the kind of person he wanted keeping the records, and that he moved to table the matter until the regular elections in March. The young father from Yarrow seconded so quickly he nearly knocked over his water. Radhika voted yes. Ermengarde, after a long moment, also voted yes, I think because she could count.
So it was tabled. Not resolved. Tabled. Ottoline will have to decide in March whether she wants to run again, and the neighborhood will have to decide whether it wants her, and I genuinely don't know how either of those will go. She has a second interview next week at a hospital system in Dublin, for a compliance job that pays less than her old one. The child support case has a hearing in November. The washer works now. The basement, Hesper tells Dashiell, finally smells like a basement.
There are rules now. Of course there are rules. But Ottoline didn't write them. She asked Hesper to write them, and Hesper wrote them on graph paper, and brought them over one Sunday afternoon, and the four of us sat at my kitchen table, the same table, and went over them line by line like a contract negotiation. Study dates at either house, with a parent home. Walks are fine, but phones on. No more secret debate practices. Curfew at ten on school nights and eleven on weekends. Ottoline would no longer read Hesper's phone, and Hesper would no longer give her a reason to want to. At the bottom of the page, Hesper had written, in small careful letters: This is a list. It is not a list of violations. It is a list of things we agree to because we're trying.