Chapter 4: The Supper Club

The supper club on Park Street had red leather booths and a long dark bar.

The Hill Crew had held its back room there every Friday for forty years.

I went because Enid said the hill would look for me, and what the hill didn't see it invented.

She zipped me into a dress of her own from some other decade, dark green wool, a size too wide in the shoulders.

I wore my own boots.

It was a short break between night shifts, and I had no time to be proud.

Bram met us at the door with both arms open.

"There she is. The Holder's new household."

He said it loud enough for the whole bar to hear.

The back room held a long table, and at the table sat the people who made the hill run.

There were bar owners, the owner of the Corner Bakery, two priests' sisters and a man from the funeral home.

They all looked at me.

I knew almost every one of them.

They had signed my mother's sympathy card.

Cormick was already seated at the head in the black coat, with a glass of water he was not drinking.

He did not look up.

I took the chair Bram pulled out for me, three places down on the left.

Bram sat at my elbow and poured me a glass of red wine without asking.

"A toast," he said, rising.

Glasses lifted.

"To the old ways. To a year and a day. And to Cor, who keeps us warm."

They drank.

Cormick lifted his water an inch off the table and set it down again.

I tasted nothing.

I watched the faces, and I saw what Enid had meant.

It wasn't contempt or pity.

It was a long, careful tallying.

Every person in that room was working out what the bond meant, who it had cost, and what they could take from the soft place in it.