"All right."
"All right."
We hang up.
? ? ?
I stand on the porch.
The lake has not changed. The lake has been the lake for eleven thousand years. The lake will be the lake for another eleven thousand. I am, in this moment, a small specific man on a small specific porch in November, having just told my older brother a thing I should have told him eight days ago.
I think, briefly and against my will, of Cormac O'Brien.
Cormac, who has been picking up his phone in the middle of the day for the last few weeks for a woman whose name he’s not yet said to me. The men who do not pick up their phones for women have started picking up their phones for women. Cormac on a Tuesday, half a sentence about ‘the American who keeps calling about my brother,’ which was the closest he’s ever come to admitting that there is a woman in the equation. I had filed the half-sentence and not pressed.
I press it now, in my head, and I think: ‘good for you, Cormac. Pick up the phone.’
Then I go back inside.
Maeve is at the kitchen island.
She’s making coffee. Her back is to me. She’s heard the slider close. She doesn’t turn around.
I cross the kitchen. I stop on the other side of the island. The marble is between us.
"I told him."
She turns around.
"How did he take it?"
"He’s hurt. He’s right to be."
"And?"
"And he wants us home so the family can meet her. Both Nora and you."
She nods, slowly. "Okay."
I take a breath. "Maeve."
"Yes."
"I want to talk about what comes after grand jury."
She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t look away. She’s the woman who walked across a consulate room three years ago and asked a stranger about the music. She’s also the woman who has spent thirty-seven months writing federal briefs alone in a Brookline kitchen with a baby on her hip. The woman in front of me is both of those women and she’s, in front of me, decided which one of them is going to answer me.
"I want it too," she says. "But I have a daughter who has built her life around a single mother in a one-bedroom apartment. I cannot make decisions for the weeks until grand jury that aren't built around her safety and my testimony. After grand jury, we figure it out."
"After grand jury."
"After grand jury."
"All right."
She crosses to my side of the island. She stops in front of me. She puts both of her hands on the front of my shirt, just belowmy sternum. Her hands are warm from the coffee mug she was holding.
She kisses me.
