Chapter 7 - The Auction on the River
By the second week of December, the frost had settled into the ground like iron.
The riverfront project in Richmond—the one Daniel had called The Horizon Development in three glossy brochures with four-color renderings of glass balconies and imported Italian limestone—went to the auction block on a Tuesday morning at ten o'clock.
I did not go.
I sat in the library at Hollis Manor with a heating pad pressed against the small of my back and a copy of the Richmond Times-Dispatch spread out across my knees.
The baby was thirty-five weeks now, dropping so low that every step I took felt like carrying a sack of wet river gravel in my pelvis.
Rosemary had gone to town with Arthur Vance. She had worn her black wool coat with the Persian lamb collar that Harold had given her for their fortieth anniversary, her leather gloves, and her silver-headed walking stick.
The front page of the business section had a photograph of Daniel standing on the steps of the municipal building in Richmond.
He was wearing his camel-hair coat—the one he had bought in Washington two winters ago—but the collar was turned up against the sleet, and his hands were stuffed deep into his pockets. He looked thin. The smooth, well-fed fullness of his jaw had collapsed into sharp, gray angles that made him look like his uncle Charles, who had died of the dropsy in seventy-eight after losing the sawmills to the bank.
Beside him in the photograph was a small, three-paragraph article:
HOLLIS DEVELOPMENT PARTNERS LIQUIDATES ASSETS UNDER CHAPTER 7.
Unsecured creditors claim $3.2 million in defaulted notes on James River parcel. Vantage Equity Partners withdraws development agreement citing title irregularities.
Vantage Equity Partners withdraws.
I looked at the words for a long time.
Jade’s firm had not just withdrawn; they had filed an emergency cross-claim against Daniel personally for eighty-five thousand dollars in preliminary architectural and legal fees, alleging fraudulent misrepresentation of authority.
The phone on the library desk rang once, loud and brassy in the cold room.
I reached over, lifting the heavy black receiver that had been on that desk since the telephone company brought the lines out to the ridge in fifty-four.
“Maggie?”
It was Daniel.
His voice didn't sound like the developer. It didn't sound like the husband who had kissed my cheek at four twenty-two on Thanksgiving afternoon. It sounded like a recording from a radio station that was losing its signal thirty miles out in the woods.
“Daniel,” I said.
“They took the office, Maggie,” he said. The background noise was the wet hiss of trucks on Broad Street and the sound of someone dropping a metal roll-up door in an alley. “The sheriff was there at eight o'clock. They put a chain on the glass. They wouldn't even let me go in to get my grandfather’s transit level from the closet.”
“Your grandfather’s transit level is in the tack room, Daniel,” I told him, looking out through the warped glass of the library window toward the carriage house where the roof was white with frost. “Harold brought it home the week before he died. He said you’d probably leave it in a trailer somewhere and let the lenses get mildewed.”
He let out a short, wet sob that sounded like water choking in a narrow drain.
“I’m at the bus station, Maggie.”
“I know,” I said.
“My credit cards don't work. The bank canceled the debit facility at noon. I have forty-eight dollars in my pocket and a bag with three shirts in it.”
“Arthur Vance left an envelope for you at the ticket window,” I said, looking down at my hands where the platinum ring was finally loose enough to turn around my finger. “There’s a ticket to Charlotte in it. And eight hundred dollars in cash.”
“Charlotte?” he cried, his voice cracking into that high, child-like shriek that had haunted the house for three weeks. “What am I going to do in Charlotte? I don't know anybody in Charlotte!”
“Your cousin Billy has the aggregate yard down there, Daniel,” I said. “He told Arthur he needs someone to weigh the dump trucks on the platform and write down the tonnage in the ledger. It pays eighteen dollars an hour, and there’s a trailer behind the maintenance shed with a kerosene heater and a stove that works.”
“You want me to weigh gravel?” he whispered.
“I don't want you to do anything, Daniel,” I said, feeling the baby turn inside me—a hard, solid shift that brought a sharp gasp of air into my throat. “I don't have any wants left where you're concerned. But the trust won't let Harold’s son freeze in an alley in Richmond, and your mother won't let you sleep in a mission. That’s the ticket, Daniel. You can take the bus south, or you can stay on Broad Street and see what the sheriff does when the sun goes down.”
There was a long silence on the line.
Through the earpiece, I could hear the automated voice of the Greyhound announcer calling the eleven-fifteen departure for Greensboro, Charlotte, and Atlanta.
“Maggie,” he whispered.
“Yes, Daniel?”
“Did you ever love me?”
I looked at the fireplace where the hickory logs were waiting for the evening match. I thought of the eleven years. I thought of the small apartment in Charlottesville when we were twenty-five and he had spent three hours trying to fix the disposal with a butter knife because he was too proud to call the landlord. I thought of the way he used to laugh before he learned the word synergy.
“I loved the man your father thought you were going to be, Daniel,” I said softly. “It took me eleven years to realize that man was just another story Harold told to keep from being lonely in this big house.”
I hung up the receiver.
May you like
I didn't wait for the click on the other end.
I stood up, walked to the window, and watched the sleet turn into big, soft flakes of white snow that fell through the bare branches of the maples, covering the stone, the pastures, and the carriage house in a clean, cold sheet of silence.
