Day Seven I Signed It novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: White Roses

Joan feeds Colin toast and fury, then tells him Gavin visited her in April asking about a woman from his father's past, and that a gray-eyed young man leaves white roses on his father's grave.

My mother opened her door on Wednesday morning with a rolling pin in her hand.

She was not baking.

"I saw the video," Joan said. "Forty-three thousand people have now watched my son carry a laptop."

"Hi, Mom."

"Come in before I hit something."

Her kitchen smelled like coffee and the lemon cleaner she had used my whole childhood.

She put me in the chair by the window, the one with the cracked cushion that she refused to replace, and set a plate of toast in front of me.

Then she sat across from me with her reading glasses on their cord and waited.

I told her all of it.

She got the whole week, in order, and she stopped me only once, to ask who held the money.

I left out nothing except the car at the funeral.

My mother listened with her mouth getting thinner.

When I finished, she picked up her coffee and put it down again without drinking.

"I never liked that girl's laugh," she said. "I put up with it for nine years because you picked her."

"Mom."

"I'm only saying it once. Now it's said."

I almost laughed.

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"I gave myself seven days. If I still want out on Monday, I sign."

"Seven days." She nodded slowly. "That's a decent number. Your father would have said it was a good one."

"Why would he say that?"

She didn't answer right away.

She got up and refilled her coffee, though it was still full.

"He liked a week," she said. "He took a week to decide everything. A car, a job, whether to forgive somebody."

"I never knew that."

"You were a boy. He kept it quiet."

She sat down again and folded her hands on the table, the way she did when she was about to say something I wasn't going to like.

"Colin, tell me about the man in the slippers."

"Gavin? He's one of Margo's friends. He's been around about a year and a half."

"Gavin Roche."

"You know his name?"

"He came to see me in April," Joan said.

I put my toast down.

"He brought a fruit basket and a card. He said he was a friend of yours and Margo's, and he'd never gotten to say how sorry he was about your father."

"That was kind of him."

"It was," my mother agreed. "He stayed an hour and a half, and he asked me about your father's last year. Whether he was in pain, what he said at the end, who visited."

"People ask things like that."

"They do." She looked at the window. "He asked whether your father ever mentioned a woman from before we married."

I frowned.

"What woman?"

"I told him I'd never heard of one," my mother said, and I could not tell whether she was lying.

"Mom, he's probably someone who lost his own dad and wanted to talk about it."

"Maybe."

"He's Margo's friend. He's in my house wearing my slippers because she wanted to win a bet."

"That's what I'd like to believe too."

She was quiet for a while, then reached into her cardigan pocket and took out a small folded square of paper.

"I didn't want to tell you this until I'd thought it through. But you are leaving that house, and I think you should hear it from me."

She unfolded the paper.

It was a note in her tidy school-secretary handwriting.

"I went to the cemetery last month to put flowers on your father's stone," she said. "The groundskeeper knows me. He told me somebody has been leaving white roses there on the first of every month for two years."

"Okay. Someone from his old job?"

"That's what I thought, so I asked."

She turned the paper toward me.

"He said it's a young man. Tall, dark hair, gray eyes. He stands there for an hour and he never brings anyone with him."

I stared at the page.

I did not say anything.

My mother took her glasses off and looked at me.

"Gray eyes," she said again, and said nothing more.

I thought of the sweater, and the slippers, and the way Gavin stood in my hall looking at a photograph.

I told myself it was a coincidence.

I told myself that for a long time after I left her kitchen.

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