Chapter 20: The Cup Dinner

The Cup dinner is held on the Tuesday after the race.

That is when the purses are paid, and the guests who stay for the sales are still on the farm.

The Queen sits at the head of the table.

It had been my mother's chair three times, and Renata had hidden it in a storeroom the year she married.

Abel had found it that morning under a tarp.

He had polished the arms himself.

At seven o'clock, sixty guests stood in the front hall of Redmond Hill with glasses in their hands.

It was the same hall where I had stood at nineteen with a plate of ham.

The same staircase rose behind them, and the same chandelier lit the marble.

I wore my mother's crown, and a plain black dress, and my own hair.

Jude stood at my left.

Abel stood at my right, in his good coat.

On the porch, through the open door, I could see two state police cars and a trooper with his hat under his arm.

Renata stood by the dining room doors in a dove-gray dress, with the emerald on her hand.

Beside her was a small man in a navy suit with a leather folio.

He was the developer's lawyer, and he looked at everyone's shoes.

She had not tried to stop the evening.

She had greeted every guest by name, as she did every year.

The hall had gone quiet when my father came down the upper landing.

He wore a black suit and no tie.

He walked slowly, one hand on the banister, and the guests drew back from the foot of the stairs as they had nine years ago.

He stopped on the fourth step from the top, the one he had stood on to say it the first time.

"I asked to speak," he said.

"My daughter has let me."

His voice was not the farmer's voice.

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