Chapter 24: Eight-Fifteen

A year later I sat at the head of the same table, in the same room on the top floor of my hotel.

The portrait of my father still hung on the wall behind me.

I wore my mother's brooch on the shoulder of a green dress.

Its clasp had been mended so well that no one could see where it had bent.

There were eight places set.

My lawyer, who had stopped being tired.

Two of the four directors who had never taken a dollar.

The bank officer, and the detective in the grey raincoat, who had said he was only coming for the soup.

Joan.

And one chair at my right hand, still empty.

"Is he late?" Joan asked.

She had brought her soup up in the service elevator in a thermos.

The waiter had looked at it, looked at me, and quietly carried it to the kitchen to be heated.

"He has two minutes," I said.

"He's never late. I know that man."

Joan took the chair opposite the portrait, with her thick tote bag at her feet.

She sat facing my father's face.

For a moment she studied him, and the table went quiet.

"Hello, Frank," she said.

It was the first time anyone had said my father's name at that table since the funeral.

I felt something in my chest come loose.

"He wrote me a good letter, in the end," Joan told me. She turned her wineglass. "Not good enough. But he wrote it."

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