A room away from home
The guest room had a window facing the back of a pharmacy. Each morning a truck came to unload boxes, and Julian woke before it finished because the driver whistled the same two notes between every trip. He had taken rooms for work in stranger places. None had been close enough to home that he could have walked there in twenty minutes and been unwelcome at the door.
He made a list of what he could do. Pay Dev for another worker. Ask Eamon how much delay his trip could bear. Send Iris money for the berth. By the time he read it back, the list sounded like somebody trying to order a replacement for a life.
Iris came to the guest house after meeting Lila, who had given her its name. She carried her bag and an orange. Julian put his list facedown when he saw her. She noticed anyway.
“You look like you have decided to be useful.”
“I thought the yard might need help. Money, if the boat is delayed. I could hire someone with the right skills.”
Iris peeled the orange. “Dev needs a plan and Eamon needs to be told the truth. You can offer Dev a stranger's money; then he'll have to explain why he took it from a man wearing my father's face.”
“I don't need anyone to know where it came from.”
“Please don't.” She divided the orange and set half in front of him. “Dev has enough to answer for.”
He wanted to object. He had paid for sound equipment when a community theater couldn't, and nobody had thought that a moral failure. “I know you don't want me at the yard,” he said.
“I brought you there.”
“To show me what I can't do.”
“Yes.” She ate a piece, her eyes on the list he had turned over.
Dev called while she was speaking. Iris answered and listened. Eamon had come to the yard again. He had asked whether the launch could be ready for the planned trip with his daughter. Dev had told him Iris would call when she returned. He had not offered a date. Iris said she would drive to the coast in the morning and talk to him herself. After she hung up, she sat with the orange peel in her palm and looked at Julian's list.
“Lila asked me a question you left half answered,” she said.
“About the split?”
“About what you knew when you left. I told her to ask you.”
Julian watched a car pull away from the pharmacy through the window. “I was going to tell her.”
“You keep saying that in the past tense.” Iris stood. “She played for me. Not to prove she'd become someone you could be proud of. She wanted to hear how the room felt when she changed the phrase. Go ask her about that before you explain why you weren't there.”
He had watched the video until the pixels of her face blurred. He had not asked Lila what she felt when she played. “How was she with you?”
“Funny. Angry. Good at her instrument. She bought noodles because Nina asked her to.” Iris pulled on her coat. “Ask her.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it. She picked up her bag and stopped at the door. “I'll be leaving for the berth in about two weeks. If I ask you to come when I go, come. If I don't, don't use the bridge to make a point.”
“I'll come if you ask.”
She nodded and left. He did not follow her down the hall.
That evening Nina answered his call while she was putting away the music from rehearsal. He could hear Lila opening a kitchen drawer. He said he had spoken to Iris. Nina asked whether Lila knew what he had done at twenty-one.
“Not all of it.”
“Then you have work that isn't on a list.”
He looked at the folded paper by the guest bed. “I know.”
“I don't want you to call the house just to hear whether we sound normal,” she said. “Lila will tell you when she wants to talk. I will too.” Lila called her from the kitchen; she told Julian she had to go. He believed her. Her day had more in it than a decision about him.
He set down the phone and turned the list over. On the blank side he wrote Ask Lila how it felt to play. It was a smaller task than buying help for a boat. He was less certain how to do it without making her answer carry his apology.