V.
Nathaniel ate dinner that night at his mother's house in St. Albans, because it was Tuesday, and he had eaten at his mother's house on Tuesdays for eleven years, since his father died — through a hip replacement, two market crashes, and more closings than he could count. Celia came when the hospital allowed. Jonah, seventeen and drowning in college essays, came when he could be bribed. Tonight it was Nathaniel and Eunice, smothered chicken, and the little kitchen television on mute.
His mother was eighty-one and did the crossword in ink on paper she bought every morning from the same newsstand on Linden Boulevard. She had retired from Brandt Whitlock in 2005 with a sheet cake, a framed certificate, and a pension she still described, with grim satisfaction, as "less than they spent on Christmas flowers." She had since spent fifteen years at her church's tax clinic doing returns for neighbors, and knew the code better than two of the accountants Nathaniel employed.
"So," she said, when he had told her about the closing and the meeting. "You sat in it."
"I sat in it."
"How'd it feel?"
He considered lying, and remembered he had never once gotten away with it in this kitchen. "Like a chair," he said. "A nice chair. I don't know what I expected."
"You expected it to feel like something." She buttered a roll. "I used to think that too. All those years setting it up, I'd think, those chairs must feel like something, the way those men lower themselves into them." She shook her head. "A chair's a chair. It's who pulls it out for you."
He told her about the woman in blue. He hadn't meant to. He told it plainly, and his mother listened with her fork still, and when he got to Kyra's waiting in reception she closed her eyes for a moment — not the way the woman had, but the way you set down a bag you've carried up too many stairs.
"What's her name?" Eunice said.
"Corrigan. Lindsay Corrigan. She runs client relations."