Chapter 14: The List, Kept

Caleb said it again, slowly, with his mouth against my sweater.

"Grandma gave us money to go away. Daddy has to pay it back. Then you go away, and we stay."

He said it in exactly the same words, every one in the same place.

"Thank you," I told him.

Harrison stood in the open doorway with the phone hanging from his hand.

I did not know how long he had been there.

He crossed the room and knelt on the floorboards beside us, and he spoke to his son and not to me.

"Nobody is paying anybody back, Caleb. You're staying with me. So is the baby."

Caleb studied him with a frown.

"Mommy said you would say that."

Harrison's face did something I had never seen it do.

"I know she did," he said. "I'm going to keep saying it until you believe me."

Caleb thought about it and then went back to the stegosaurus.

At eleven, Harrison carried him down the stairs, and at the bottom he looked up at my landing.

"The fifteenth," he said. "You said in the room. I'd like you in it."

"I'll sit at the back."

"Anywhere you want."

Three weeks later I sat in the back row of the Rutherford Foundation boardroom, in a gray dress, on a chair that was too hard for my spine.

Fourteen directors sat around a long table under the portraits.

Harriet was at the far end with her cane hooked on the arm of her chair and her silver hair pinned up.

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