Chapter 72
His mother turned seventy on a Saturday in March and the yard filled in the way it had always filled for important things.
She had said, when asked about the plan: 'Nothing elaborate. People I know, food, the yard.' This translated into forty people, a spread of food that would have fed eighty, and a gathering that lasted until midnight.
She sat in the good chair at the centre of everything, Elise on one side and Joseph on the other, receiving people in the way she had always received people with total attention, without performance, saying exactly what she thought.
Marcus sat beside her at a certain point in the evening, when the gathering had moved into its later, quieter phase.
'Seventy,' he said.
'So people keep saying,' she said. 'As if I'm supposed to be surprised.'
'You don't feel seventy?'
'I feel like myself,' she said. 'Whatever age that is.'
He looked at her. She was smaller than she had been and her hair was white and her hands showed the decades of work in them. But her eyes were exactly as they had always been: direct, clear, seeing things whole.
'You look at people exactly the same way you always have,' he said.
'How do I look at people?'
'Like they're worth seeing properly,' he said. 'You always looked at everyone like they were worth the full attention. Even at nine years old I noticed that.'
She was quiet for a moment.
'That's just manners,' she said.
'No it isn't,' he said. 'Most people manage their attention. You don't. You give it completely or you don't give it at all.'
She looked at him. Then she picked up his hand and held it in both of hers the hands that had ironed for twenty-two years, that had sewn for twenty more, that had written in the notebook from the time she was fourteen.
'You have been the best thing in my life,' she said. 'You know that.'
'I know that now,' he said. 'You made sure I knew it.'
'I tried.'
'You didn't try,' he said. 'You did it. Every Sunday call. Every letter. Every time you told me the true thing.'
She held his hand for a minute. Then she released it and picked up her glass.
'The notebook is almost full,' she said.
'The second one?'
'The fourth,' she said. 'I start a new one every ten years.'
He blinked.
'You've filled four notebooks.'
'Mostly about you,' she said. Then: 'Also about your children. And Nia. And what I think about things.'
He looked at his mother.
'When are you going to give them to me?'
She gave him the look.
'When I'm ready,' she said. 'I haven't gotten to the ending yet.