Chapter 13: The Word He Gave Me

By six on Saturday morning I had listened to forty minutes of Edgar, and I hadn't cried once.

I sat at Willem's kitchen table with the laptop and his work headphones, the big yellow kind that block out saws.

He sat across from me and didn't talk.

He had made coffee in the only pot he owned, and he'd set a mug at my elbow and left it there.

The first file was from year five, and it started with traffic.

Mallory's voice came first, close to the microphone, saying a date and a street corner.

"Recording," she said, in a small flat voice, like she was reading a label.

Then Edgar, laughing, from about three feet away.

"You don't have to say it like a deposition, Mal."

"Say what you came to say."

"Friday. That's all I'm asking. One Friday, and then we figure out Gin."

I knew that voice.

It was the one he used on my mother.

"She'll be hurt for a month," he said. "Then she'll thank us. She always comes around."

"No," Mallory said.

"You say that every Monday."

"And every Monday you ask."

I took the headphones off and set them down.

"We can stop," Willem said.

"Play the next one."

The second file began with a sound I knew before I knew the words.

It was the fan over the stove in the apartment, and the refrigerator with the door that never shut right.

Behind it, a hair dryer was running in the bathroom.

It was mine.

"She's in there for ten minutes," Edgar said, low. "Say yes, Mal."

"I'm standing in her kitchen holding her birthday cake."

"So put it down and say yes."