Chapter 18: Wages

I stood in front of the brass plate with my hand over my mouth.

The Brennan Kitchen.

Eleven years old, in a black dress that didn't fit, I had stood in this same basement for my mother's funeral lunch.

The walls had been gray then, and there had been no plate.

"Who put it up?" I asked.

The woman in the hairnet shook her head.

"The Fund redid the kitchen that spring," she said. "Your father's money, I guess. No one told us it was for her."

Amber laughed, a short dry sound, and went up the stairs with the satchel clamped under her arm.

Nobody stopped her.

Rhys put his hand flat between my shoulder blades, and I let it stay.

"Take me to Eleanor's," I said.

The house on Beacon Hill had a black door with a brass knocker, and I knocked with my whole fist.

Eleanor opened it herself.

She had changed into a gray dress, and she looked ten years older than she had on the stage.

"I wondered if you'd come," she said.

"You said the kitchen was a coat."

"I said no such thing."

"Then tell me what it was."

She stepped back and let us in.

The study at the end of the hall had green walls and a long desk.

My father had hung a gray cardigan on the back of that chair every winter.

Eleanor pointed at the mended seam on its left sleeve.

She said she had sewn it herself.

On the desk lay a folder, thick and old.

Eleanor opened it.

Eleven school photographs of me lay in a row, from a gap-toothed girl in a plaid jumper to a fifteen-year-old with a face full of fury.

"He had the school send them," she said. "Every September. He paid the secretary to forward them."

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