The Tutor and the Senator's Widow novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Invoice

Sam refuses to bill the night, sets her one rule about pay, and Lowell Fitzhugh names a deadline that threatens 212 retirees.

Eleanor kissed me.

It was slow at first, her mouth barely touching mine, and then her hand slid into my hair and I stopped thinking.

I had kissed people before, mostly at parties, mostly clumsily.

I had never been kissed by somebody who knew exactly what she wanted and took her time getting it.

My back found the wall of her hallway.

My glasses went crooked, and she straightened them with one finger, gravely, and kissed me again.

When she finally pulled away, we were both breathing hard.

"That," Eleanor said, "was not in the syllabus."

"No," I said. My voice cracked. "It really wasn't."

She laughed, low and surprised.

Then she stepped back and the laugh went out of her face.

"You should go home," she said. "I'm not going to make that choice for you, but I think you should."

"Is that what you want?"

"No."

"Then why say it?"

"Because I'm forty-one years old and you are twenty-two," Eleanor said. "And I pay you."

That was the first true thing anyone had said about it, and it landed.

I picked my backpack up off the floor.

"I'll be here Thursday at seven," I said. "For math."

"Sam."

"For math, Eleanor."

I walked out into the warm September night and stood on her front steps until my hands stopped shaking.

Wednesday morning I woke up at six and stared at the ceiling of my apartment.

My roommate was making coffee on a hot plate, because our kitchen had been a closet before it was a kitchen.

"You look like you got hit by a bus," she said.

"A very nice bus."

"Is the bus a man?"

"No comment."

I spent the whole day in the stats lab not looking at my phone.

At four o'clock it buzzed.

It was Eleanor, and it said, "I'll send an invoice for Tuesday. Please add the evening."

I read it twice.

I typed, "No."

Then I typed, "I'm not billing you for the evening. I'm billing you for the two hours of math before the doorbell rang."

She answered a minute later.

"Those were wonderful hours of math."

"You wrote down every word I said."

"I wrote down every word I could understand."

I put the phone face down on the desk and grinned at nothing.

On Thursday I rang her bell at seven sharp with my textbook held up.

She opened the door in a green sweater instead of the grey cardigan.

She had left her hair down.

I forgot every word of the lesson I had planned.

"Come in," she said. "Before the neighbors start composing sentences."

At the dining table she slid an envelope across to me.

It held three hundred and twenty dollars in cash, which was eight hours.

"That's too much," I said.

"It's the last month of Tuesdays and Thursdays, in advance."

"I'll take one session at a time." I counted out eighty and pushed the rest back. "Two hours, forty an hour. That's the deal."

"Why?"

"Because if you pay me in advance, I'll feel owned. And if you pay me for tonight's version of Tuesday, I'll feel bought."

Eleanor looked at me for a long moment.

"You are the most expensive person I have ever hired," she said, "and you charge the least."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"It was an observation."

We were two pages into confidence intervals when the doorbell rang again.

It was eight o'clock, and she did not even flinch.

"Stay," she said, and went.

This time it was a man I did not know.

He was big, maybe forty-three, with sandy thinning hair and a navy suit and a small flag pin, and he came into the dining room.

He kissed Eleanor on the cheek.

She went stiff.

"Mother Eleanor," he said, smiling. "You look tired."

"Lowell."

"I thought I'd bring the release myself, since Dad's old chief of staff seemed to upset you last night."

He looked at me, at my hoodie, at my pencil.

"And this is the help," he said.

"This is Sam," Eleanor said. "She's a graduate student."

"Of course she is."

Lowell sat down in the chair at the head of the table, which was her late husband's chair.

He opened the folder and set a pen on top of it.

"Here's the situation," he said kindly. "The plan's annual certificate is due October thirty-first. Without all three trustees signed off, the bank freezes the account. And there are two hundred and twelve retirees whose checks come out of that account."

Eleanor said nothing.

"Dad's old foremen, Eleanor. Women who worked the line for thirty years. You wouldn't want them waiting on a signature because you wanted to take a class."

He smiled at me.

"Everybody who loves her has to watch her," he said. "You understand."

I understood one thing.

He had not once asked what the release said.

He had only asked her to sign it.

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