Chapter 7 - The Cedar Room
The kitchen smelled of clean linen, burnt toast, and the iodine Amanda had poured into a silver bowl on the table.
She didn't talk while she worked.
She used a pair of long, stainless steel shears to cut the trousers away from the skin, her fingers fast and steady, moving with the cold, unhurried grace of someone who did five abdominal surgeries a week at Johns Hopkins.
"This is going to hurt," she said.
"Do it," I said.
She pulled the black cloth away from the scab in one quick, flat motion.
I didn't scream. I bit down on the rolled cloth napkin Mrs. Gable had put between my teeth until I felt the threads give way under my molars.
"Two inches deep," Amanda murmured, her face six inches from my hip. "It hit the bone on the trochanter. Another quarter-inch and you wouldn't be walking for six months."
She washed the wound with sterile saline, the cold fluid running down my leg and dropping into a plastic bucket on the floor.
"He's still in there," she said, nodding toward the hall.
"I know."
"He asked me at three in the morning why you never married," she said, her voice dropping into a flat, distant tone as she applied the yellow ointment. "He told me he thought it was because you didn't have the... the softness for it."
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him you were too busy saving people who didn't know how to save themselves," she said. She slapped a six-inch gauze pad over the raw skin and secured it with three wide strips of brown medical tape. "And then I told him to go to hell."
I looked at her.
Amanda had always been the good one. The one who went to the right school, married the junior partner from the law firm in Annapolis, and had three children who all played the cello before they were nine years old.
"You said that to Dad?"
"I said it twice," she said, wiping her hands on a towel. "Once for me. Once for you."
She stood up, her silk dress rumpled at the lap, her hair coming down around her ears in thin, dark wisps.
"The uniform's on the chair," she said. "The General's waiting by the gate. He's been standing out there in the rain for twenty minutes."
"He likes the rain," I said. "Reminds him of Korea."
I put on the dress uniform slowly.
The shirt was stiff—Amanda had used too much starch on the collar—and the blue wool jacket felt heavy on my shoulders after forty-eight hours in the light flight suit.
When I reached for the belt, I saw my father in the glass of the kitchen window.
He was standing in the doorway between the hall and the kitchen.
He wasn't wearing his blazer. He was in his shirtsleeves, the white linen wrinkled around the elbows, his silver pocket square tucked carelessly into his trousers pocket like a used tissue.
He looked old.
Not the old of seventy-one, which can be handsome if you have enough money and a good tailor. The old of eighty-five—the skin around his chin loose and yellowish under the yellow lights, his eyes clouded with that thin, grey film that comes when the heart isn't pushing enough blood to the head.
"Evelyn," he said.
His voice didn't have the board-meeting tone anymore. It was thin, dry, like two dry leaves rubbing together in an alley.
"Dad," I said.
I was hooking the small silver chain of the cape across my collar.
"They're... they're saying on the radio that the President is coming," he said. He took one step into the kitchen, his bare feet making no sound on the linoleum. "To Annapolis."
"Yes," I said.
"Are you... are you going to be on the stage?"
"Yes."
He looked down at my boots. I had polished them with Mrs. Gable's black stove-wax while Amanda was getting the iodine. They were shiny now, black as coal, reflecting the yellow light from the stove.
"I didn't know," he said.
"You didn't ask," I said.
He reached out one hand—that long, thin hand with the age spots on the back and the wide gold band on the third finger—as if he wanted to touch the silver oak leaf on my shoulder.
His hand hovered in the air three inches from my sleeve for two seconds.
Then it dropped.
"I built three companies, Evelyn," he whispered to the space between us. "Three. Nobody in this county ever said a word against the family name."
"Nobody's saying a word against it now, Dad," I said, leaning down to pick up my cap from the table. "They're not talking about you at all."
I walked past him into the hall.
May you like
He didn't turn around. He didn't call my name.
When I opened the front door, the sun had finally broken through the cloud deck over the bay—a long, bright bar of orange light that hit the Italian slate in the foyer, making the white stone look like it was on fire.
