Chapter 10 - The Fourteenth Tile, Forgotten
The second winter in Kildare was warmer than the first. The sheep did not need to be brought down from the high meadows until after the Epiphany, and the gas heater in the cottage parlor only had to be turned on when the wind came straight out of the north across the Irish Sea.
On a Tuesday afternoon in November, fourteen months after Deb had stamped the pink decree in Room 204, I was sitting at the oak table in the Dublin City Library on Pearse Street, waiting for Ellie’s music lesson to finish across the square.
The library was quiet, smelling of old leather bindings, damp umbrellas, and the faint, sweet dust of two hundred thousand books that had never been read by anyone with an address in Delaware County, Ohio.
My laptop was open on the polished oak surface.
Beside my tea mug lay a legal document from the Franklin County Probate Court, forwarded to me through Brenda Vance’s secure portal three days earlier.
IN THE MATTER OF THE ESTATE OF RICHARD ARTHUR BENNETT, DECEASED. FINAL DECREE OF DISTRIBUTION AND INSOLVENCY.
The text was short, dry, written in the same flat, indifferent language that Deb had used for the dissolution:
The court finds that the total claims against the estate, including secured debt held by Fifth Third Bank and unsecured commercial obligations of Bennett Commercial Holdings LLC, exceed the gross assets by four hundred and twelve thousand dollars. The real property situated at 442 Elmwood Avenue has been transferred to the senior lienholder by deed in lieu of foreclosure. The testamentary trusts established under the will of May 12, 2014, are hereby terminated for lack of corpus.
There was no money.
There was no Arthur Bennett to inherit the name.
There was only a six-page listing of auction items from the commercial brokerage: twelve mahogany desks, forty-two swivel chairs with blue fabric seats, two commercial copiers with three hundred thousand impressions on their drums, and a bronze plaque from nineteen-eighty-two that had hung in the lobby on Broad Street, commemorating thirty years of continuous service to the Central Ohio business community.
The plaque had been purchased by a metal scrap dealer from Springfield for eighty-two dollars and forty cents.
Below the PDF of the court decree was an email from Brenda.
Nora, Thought you should have this for your records. Carol has moved into an assisted living apartment in Westerville. Grant is still with the auto parts distributor; I understand he was promoted to night shift supervisor last month, which gives him an extra fifty cents an hour. He hasn't asked for your contact information since March. The child support continues to arrive on the second and fourth Fridays through the state clearinghouse without interruption. He pays on time. April asked me to tell you that she finished her veterinary technician certification last week. She’s moving to Oregon to work at a large animal clinic near Bend. She sent her love to the girls. She said she remembers the paper stars. Don't come back for the final closing on the Elmwood property. There’s nothing there for you. The bank took the rose bushes out on Tuesday to make room for a wider concrete apron for the two-car garage. Yours, Brenda.
I closed the laptop. The screen clicked shut with a soft, clean snap that was completely lost in the vast, quiet space of the reading room.
I looked out the high arched window toward Pearse Street.
The Dublin streetlights were coming on in the November dusk—not the harsh, buzzing orange lights of the Columbus airport tarmac, but soft, yellow globes that reflected in the wet asphalt like drops of honey on a dark table. A double-decker bus rumbled past, its green sides splattered with rain, the passengers inside sitting under warm yellow lights reading their newspapers with their collars turned up against the mist.
Down the steps of the Royal Irish Academy, forty yards away, two girls came through the heavy oak doors.
Ellie was carrying her black leather music case under her arm, walking with her head up, her braids tucked under a dark green woolen beret that Erin had bought for her tenth birthday.
Beside her, holding her hand and skipping every three steps to keep up with the longer strides, was Maddie. Maddie was wearing her red coat now, the one with the brass toggle buttons, and she was carrying Barnaby by his middle, his single ear flopping against her wrist with every skip.
They didn't look at the traffic. They didn't look at the rain.
They were looking across the square toward the library entrance, where they knew I would be standing under the stone portico with three warm ginger biscuits wrapped in a napkin in my coat pocket.
"Mom!" Maddie’s voice was high, clear, cutting through the rattle of the diesel engines and the wet hiss of the tires on the stone.
She didn't run until she reached the crosswalk, where the crossing guard in his yellow reflective vest held up his round white sign to stop two taxis and a delivery van from the bakery.
Then she broke into that wild, uneven sprint that had been her trademark since she was two years old, her small red boots slapping the wet pavement until she hit the stone steps of the library and threw her arms around my knees with a thud that drove the breath from my chest.
"Mr. Kelly said Ellie played the Bach like an angel!" Maddie yelled, her face red from the cold air, her nose running slightly into the fur collar of her coat. "He gave her a gold star on the corner of the music! A real gold star made of shiny paper!"
Ellie came up the steps more slowly, but her brown eyes were shining with that deep, quiet light that doesn't need to shout to be seen from across a room.
She opened the black case, just an inch, so I could see the creamy corner of the sheet music inside.
There, in the upper right margin, beside the printed Latin title of the two-part invention, was a small, five-pointed star made of gold foil. The glue was still slightly wet; it smelled of gum arabic and clean paper.
"It’s for the phrasing," Ellie said, her voice dropping into that modest, serious tone she used when she was trying to sound like her music teacher. "He said my left hand was very steady. He said the left hand is the foundation of the whole piece, Mom. If the left hand doesn't wobble, the right hand can go wherever it needs to go."
I looked down at her. I reached out and tucked a stray curl of honey-brown hair behind her ear, feeling the cool, damp skin of her cheek beneath my knuckles.
"The left hand is the foundation," I agreed.
"Can we go to the tea shop now?" Maddie asked, tugging on my pocket. "The one with the cherries? Ellie said if she got the gold star, she gets the bun with two cherries and I get the bun with one."
"That sounds like an equitable distribution of assets," I said.
Ellie laughed—a clear, bell-like sound that rose into the gray Dublin mist and vanished between the chimney pots of Pearse Street.
We walked down the library steps together, Maddie between us, holding Ellie’s left hand and my right.
As we reached the corner of the square, where the rain was beginning to turn into a soft, steady drizzle that blurred the reflections of the shop windows into ribbons of gold and red, I thought of Room 204.
I tried to remember the oatmeal-colored linoleum.
I tried to remember the fourteen scuffed tiles between my black shoe and the metal trash bin beside Deb’s desk.
I tried to remember the sound of the sixty-cycle buzz from the humming fluorescent fixture, and the smell of the floor wax, and the look of Grant’s linen blazer as he signed away eleven years of our lives in nine seconds with a cheap blue pen.
The memory was there, but it was like a photograph that had been left out in the sun until the faces had faded into gray shadows that looked like anyone, or no one at all.
There were no tiles here.
There was only the wet, dark granite of Pearse Street, the smell of roasted coffee from the shop on the corner, and the weight of my daughters’ hands in mine—warm, solid, and moving forward into the evening with every step we took.
"Look, Mom," Ellie said, pointing her music case toward the opening between two stone buildings where the clouds were breaking toward the river. "The first star is out. Just one."
I looked up through the chimney smoke into the pale, lavender wash of the Irish sky.
May you like
It was there—small, white, sharp as a needle point, hanging over the water like a promise that had been kept before anyone even thought to ask for it.
"I see it, Ellie," I said, squeezing her hand. "Come on. The tea’s getting cold."
