Chapter 7: Terms

Teo's office was over the restaurant, up a narrow staircase behind the kitchen.

I came up it at ten the next morning on four hours of sleep.

Dilly was downstairs eating cannoli with two guards and the cockatiel.

Gran was alive. There were two men outside her door now, and the two from the stairwell were gone.

The office had dark wood, a long desk, and six old men in good suits sitting around the walls.

They stopped talking when I walked in.

"Gentlemen," Teo said from behind the desk. "My fiancée."

One of them, a heavy man with an unlit cigar, looked me up and down.

"The gravedigger," he said.

"Caretaker," I said. "Gravedigging's a machine now. I drive it."

A couple of them chuckled.

"She has terms," Teo said.

That got a real laugh. The man with the cigar slapped his knee.

"Terms. Teo, she has terms."

Teo didn't laugh.

He didn't say anything at all. He just looked at the man with the cigar and waited.

The laughter thinned out and stopped, one man at a time, until the room was so quiet I could hear the dishwasher downstairs.

"Go ahead," Teo said to me.

I took a folded napkin out of my pocket. I'd written them at the gas station in eyeliner.

"One year," I said. "Then we're done, unless we both say otherwise."

"Agreed."

"We petition together. You as her uncle, me as the woman who raised her."

"That's the point."

"I keep my job. I'm still the caretaker. I mow, I dig, I go up that hill every morning."

One of the old men made a noise. Teo didn't look at him.

"Agreed."

"Gran comes with us. She lives where we live. Her own room, on the ground floor, near a bathroom."

"She'll have the garden room. It has French doors. She can yell at my gardener."

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