At what point did she fully accept that all her intuited conviction had been wrong—that she could see her golden son in Cleet’s golden hands and not fear she had both deceived him and conceived their child in that deceit? Whatever day it actually was, she marked it as the day she put Jake into her grandfather’s arms and saw him fingering Jake’s black hair and perfect golden skin, trying to accept that his own blood circulated in the flesh of another race. He stared at Jake for a long, silent time until finally, when Raney thought she would take her baby away and say, “Good-bye! It’s Jake or me,” Grandpa leaned down and kissed Jake’s head. She saw in that kiss what her grandfather must have done twenty-eight years ago when his only daughter put her bastard child in his arms. Maybe it was that kiss Raney’s broken mother remembered when she decided Raney was better left behind.
—
If Raney had loved Cleet incompletely before Jake was born, her love bloomed full-fledged watching him fall in love with his son. Once, in a dream, she bolted awake in a sweaty memory of Bo lighting votive candles down the spine of a broken-hinged trunk, Bo swimming over her, pressing her down into a nest of sleeping bags, Bo’s sweat and skin moving through her, and she had cried out in terror that the bare sail of shoulder rising from the bed next to her was his, not Cleet’s. She lived the next week in shame at the revived memory. Raney now lived the truth that there are all types of love: the kind that hits you like a truck hauling down a highway, the kind that needs as much nurturing as a winter campfire, and the range between. The love she and Cleet depended on was the kind that made life survivable day after day. There was a value in that that might show the tool marks of effort, but for centuries it had put food on tables and kept kids warm and fields planted and doors bolted against the world when a family had nothing but each other for army and justice and church.
As Jake grew he claimed a paler cast of his father’s skin, the bold cut of his mother’s jaw, the independent will of his great-grandfather—Raney even saw the full, pouted mouth she remembered in her mother. His eyes remained a puzzle for months and finally resolved as two unique colors—the left a rich chocolate brown and the right a shade of gray-blue, as if he would not allow either Raney or Cleet to fully claim that feature.
They had all given him his body. But his soul? She knew that boy’s soul had always been his own. His loud energy was enough to overwhelm the small house, and sometimes Raney would ask Cleet two or three times to clear the table or cut up Jake’s meat before she realized he had earplugs in. On Jake’s fourth birthday Cleet bought him his own set of tools—not plastic ones but real metal and wood, sharp enough to put out his own eye, Raney protested. But then she dug out some blocks of foam core and saw Jake sit engrossed in making a fair likeness of a rocking chair, still and centered on one task for longer than she had yet witnessed. Over the next couple of years Raney learned to take Jake’s foam or balsa-wood compositions with her to any school parent conference, so that when the teacher opened with, “So what’s going on with Jake, do you think?” Raney could counter with physical evidence, “This. This and a lot more if you show him a little patience.”
—
One evening after Jake was asleep, Raney stumbled in the middle of balancing the checkbook, looking at the bank numbers three times over before going out to Cleet’s shop. He was leaning over a cabinet door polishing the last uneven surfaces with fine sandpaper, rubbing his hand over the wood to feel what his eyes couldn’t see.
“What’s this?” she asked, pointing to a highlighted line.
He squinted at it and went back to rubbing the wood. “Savings.”
“No—that’s this line here.”
Cleet started hunting around for oil and clean cloth scraps, taking up a task, she was convinced, just so he wouldn’t have to look her in the eye. She almost wondered if this was where the wife figures out there’s another woman, only in Cleet’s case it would have been another woodworking tool. Finally he answered her. “It’s a college account.”
“Okay. College is good.” She turned around to leave, but then it boiled over inside her. “We’re paying eighteen percent interest on that savings, if you count the credit we’re carrying, and I’m not sure he’s going to make it out of elementary school. Maybe he won’t want to go to college. What then?”
Raney had gotten used to reading twice the meaning into every word Cleet said, but she still didn’t see his next thought coming. He set his tin of oil quietly on the bench and rubbed the ache out of his knuckles before he faced her. “He may not. Or he may want to live here in this house, or one like it. Or he may want to buy one of those houses at the end of the bluff. If our son wants to live someplace where people matter—all people—then I intend to give him the means.” That was the first and last time Raney heard Cleet hint that he gave a whit about social status. Any battles he’d fought over his darker skin he’d absorbed into his generally tolerant view of mankind, apparently accepting even Grandpa’s evident prejudice as an unavoidable flaw that should be overlooked, on a par with acne scars or buckteeth.
—
Raney believed they might have eked it out, too, if it hadn’t been for the Chertoff remodel Cleet accepted when Jake was seven. After the acrimony began she would find herself sitting late into the night drawing charcoal sketches of the old house on the bluff, each from a steeper perspective than the last, so that by the end they felt as haunted and sharp-winged as the bats that twisted from the gabled eaves. The irony of how she and Cleet had played with their own dream-future on that same front porch made the seemingly fated trail to their ruin all the more bitter. Like a trap laid for the amusement of indifferent gods.
The house was famous in their end of town, empty for most of the year because the family that had inherited it lived in New York and were either heedless or barely hanging on to it—the paint and the yard and the roof gradually going more and more wild, green life sprouting from its inorganic gutters. Though it was not quite old enough to have existed in the age of whale-oil lamps, it was built after the fashion of the captains’ houses in Port Townsend, tall as a lighthouse with a widow’s walk outside the attic, trim boards cut out like fancy cookies. And such windows—four long panes to a frame that a six-foot man might walk through without so much as a nod. Sitting out on the bluff, an old house like that quickly passes from being weathered and charming to being rough and unwelcoming if it is not pampered, and for three years no one with a legitimate right to open the front door ever stepped through it. They did, though. Cleet and Jake and Raney.
After a late summer evening picnic on the overgrown lawn, Jake spotted a half-starved tabby dragging something under the brush near the cellar windows at the back. He came running to his parents already in tears. The mother cat was transferring a litter of kittens through a broken pane of glass and one had fallen—Jake could see it paddling blindly over the basement floor in the wrong direction. Cleet crouched at the window with Jake and invested a lot of breath trying to convince him that the mother would rescue the kitten; interfering would only drive her away and it was unlawful to break into someone else’s house even to help a lost kitten. But after further father-son consultation Cleet walked back to his toolshed and returned with a crowbar and various screwdrivers.
If they could blame Jake for luring them into the basement, they had no excuse for wandering around the rest of the house. Whoever had built it had spared nothing—all the more sorrow to see it trundling toward decay, Raney said. Cleet squatted in front of the built-in dining room credenza, walnut with cherry inlay, opening and closing one drawer four or five times just to admire the precision of its dovetailed fittings. “Someone cared about this,” he said to himself, with a note of rejuvenated faith in the honor of his craft. “Someone took the time to do it right.”
Jake stayed in the basement naming kittens while Raney and Cleet tiptoed guiltily through the first floor, across loomed floral carpets so thick with dust their true
color only showed in the impressions left by Raney’s bare feet. The doors were all open, which made it easier to pretend they were only looking around one more corner, into one more inviting space: a library filled with the classic titles expected for show, but also plenty of warped paperback mysteries and romances and spy novels; a music room with a grand piano on bow-squatted legs in one corner and an electric Clavinova on the other wall. There was a room that held nothing but stacked-up chairs and end tables and a slashed and stained box spring canted against the wall.
They didn’t move anything. They would never have taken anything. But they went back. Sometimes after a family dinner, a few times when Jake was at school and they were both at home and her painting and his joinery had drained them of creative novelty. They would go out for a walk, and if the walk led them down their road and then to the bluff and the houses, then it also led them—seemingly without intent—to the house’s open window and back inside the empty rooms. What did it mean to them, that house? Dreams for a grand home of their own? A minute or an hour reincarnated to lives they’d missed or already lived and forgotten?
—
The Chertoffs bought the house in late fall, long after the kittens had been weaned and pushed out of the maternal nest. In December the Chertoffs’ Realtor sent Cleet a letter asking if he was available for a custom cabinetry job and did he have any references and did he, by the way, know any construction firm who could begin a small remodeling job within the month?
Raney and Cleet talked it over at the kitchen table after Jake was asleep, a rare bottle of modest wine open and both their cups on the second fill. The letter lay in the middle, between them. Cleet rolled his cup between his palms, shifting right hand forward, then left, right . . . Finally Raney laid her hand over his cup and stopped it so suddenly wine splashed through her fingers onto the tablecloth. “You know that house. You know what it needs. Think of it as a window opening,” she said. “Maybe it isn’t the ideal time, or even the ideal window. But if you don’t jump through it now, it will be gone.”
“People like them—they’re looking for something corporate. They want custom work at a factory price.”
“People like them? They’re just people. Rich or smart or maybe just lucky. They’re just other people. Not so different from us—two legs, two arms, dirty underwear. You should at least consider it. Answer the letter and see where it goes.” Cleet tilted his head to the side once—a gesture she’d come to recognize as hinting a crack in his resolve. “Cleet, we can’t even afford the college savings anymore.”
The project—a new sunporch, bathroom, master suite, and kitchen—took ten months. In that time Cleet bought a new table saw and subcontracted a plumber, an electrician, a drywaller, a painter, and an apprentice carpenter. At the end of the job he handed the Chertoffs’ agent, Todd King, his last bill, equal to one-quarter of the sum plus all the unreimbursed expenses Raney and Cleet had paid up front, the last ten thousand out of their own savings while they scraped by on Raney’s paycheck.
A month later Cleet sent a second letter, and a month after that he telephoned King five times with no returned call. He drove to the county courthouse to file a lien, and then the crushing potency of the Chertoffs’ money was unleashed. Cleet got a certified letter from a lawyer and a hired construction inspector claiming defects and delays totaling $170,000. They offered to settle for $50,000—more than Cleet’s salary for the whole job.
“We’ll hire a lawyer of our own,” Cleet said.
“I talked you into taking this job—it’s my fault we’re in this. These people have more money than God and they are willing to spend more money fighting you than this whole project cost. We have to walk away from it. If you drop the lien and walk away they won’t come after you.”
Cleet wouldn’t look at her. She sat half in hope he was considering her words, and half in fear that he resented her for not rising up in defiance along with him. The sun had dropped below the trees, and the only light in the room shone from the oven window. She couldn’t read his face but would not let go of both his hands until this was seen through. Finally he took in a breath. “My grandparents moved to this country because they believed in the U.S. government. They believed there was a place with justice. For all. If I can get a judge, a court, to hear what I have to say, then we won’t lose this.”
“Cleet, the lawyer charges three hundred dollars an hour. Every hour. What do we have to pay him with?”
“I’ll pay the lawyer after I’m rightfully paid what I’m owed. What I earned.”
They went to the first meeting together. The lawyer was in his late fifties probably, ran his office out of a small house in Port Angeles with one secretary, and tended to ramble on about other cases he’d handled, the paucity of good workmen these days. Later Raney wished she’d had the gumption to clarify that he was billing them the same for time reminiscing as for time arguing their case. The lawyer laid out the probable course: the Chertoffs would be deposing their experts to prove the construction flaws, and they would have to find their own experts to counter them. Cleet gave a small nod now and then. But Raney saw every word flow out in vivid greens and golds—a second mortgage, Jake’s college money, clothing, groceries, electricity, propane. By noon her shoulders and stomach ached from sitting with every muscle tensed. The long drive home was a conspicuous silence that pounded against her eardrums, interspersed with sharp arguments and tears.
Somewhere along the course, sometime over the next endless months, she let go of the battle. Cleet was fighting devils hot and vivid in his memory and his father’s memory and even his grandfather’s, back to some root conviction that the soul of a man was ultimately righteous and just and a righteous fight must result in justice. Why could she not believe that? It worked in the movies.
Cleet didn’t want her to go to the arbitration, but she insisted. “It’s all for show,” he said.
“Of course it is. But if your wife doesn’t look like she believes in you, why should the arbitrator?”
“No. I mean the whole thing. This whole arbitration is just for show. You were right. They won the day they pulled out their checkbook.”
They made Raney sit separated from Cleet, maybe to keep her from kicking his shins so he’d change his answers. Cleet kept his eyes fixed on the opposite wall while the two lawyers took turns asking the experts questions: how they would have run the ductwork or where they would have put the outlets. Should the gap between a counter and a cabinet be an eighth of an inch or a sixteenth? They started at nine and went until five with coffee breaks and stretch breaks and lunch breaks and Raney knew they would be billed for every minute of it. On the second-to-last day the arbitrator looked fed up with the Chertoffs’ lawyer’s endless dissection of every nail pop and paint drip, which she took as a hopeful sign. The arbitrator asked if anyone needed another break, and she said, “No,” too emphatically. It seemed to wake up whatever pinch of humor he had left in his dour soul, and he smiled like it was time to relax and forget this was Cleet against the machine. “You sit still as a sphinx over there,” he said, chuckling. “Don’t you get restless?”
“We’re paying three hundred dollars an hour. That keeps me pretty alert.”
Cleet’s lawyer was in a barely controlled state of livid after that, but when they got home, after Jake was asleep, Cleet pulled her onto his lap and cupped his wide, rough fingers along the curve of her skull, his body soft and wholly connected to hers for the first time since it had begun. “I love you, Raney. This is why we’re a good match, huh? You say what you think and I think what you say.”
—
In his final summary, the prosecuting lawyer said Cleet was skilled and probably well intended, but overestimated his talent, allowed ambition to push his common sense aside. To Raney, that was just another rich man telling the likes of them to stay in their place. But nobody rich ever says that when he’s looking for a good deal, she knew.
<
br /> It took two weeks for the final decision to come in. Raney was in the yard hunting for any tomatoes that had escaped blight; a tremble of bees stirred the lavender and her hand was cupped around the swollen weight of the last fruit—enough joy in one small patch to inspire faith in providence. So when Cleet came to her with the ruling she felt the full ballast of overturned hope.
Cleet’s lawyer acted like they’d won the case, saying they should be thrilled to get a fraction of the Chertoffs’ unpaid bill, given all the construction claims. And Cleet’s lawyer had won. They owed him double the award they got.
• 14 •
charlotte
Two full days had passed since Charlotte sat across from Helen Seras at her sleek glass-and-steel desk and repeated everything Eric knew about Raney Remington’s scar. Still nothing had appeared on the evening news or in the papers; no reporters or detectives had barged into the ICU. Nor had any family member. Helen had instructed Charlotte to keep the story to herself until it could be validated. Validated! One of those hospital euphemisms like “proper channels” or “organizational challenges” that irritated Charlotte—spineless phrases designed to obscure both the problem and the power behind it.
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