The Settlement

They went home. The drive was nine hours with the children asleep in the back and nobody speaking, and when they turned up the Ashford road at dusk the porch light was on and the truck was in the drive and Gil Arden was sitting on the steps in his shirtsleeves with a glass in his hand, which was not like him.

The second button of his shirt was undone and the collar had gone grey at the fold, and he had not shaved, and he was standing on the top step in his shirtsleeves at seven in the evening with a glass in his hand, which was not like him. Faye was in the house with the blinds down and would not come out; from the drive they could hear her moving a chair back and forth across the floor above the kitchen, and the sound of it went on for a long time. Petra had been to the market and had heard it from a woman at the egg stall. Tessa had put up a post about the orchard that had been shared ninety times, and took it down herself on the Tuesday, and nobody in that house ever mentioned it.

Hollis got out of the van and stood in the drive with her bag, and Gil said, before she had said anything at all, "The Spy is three weeks late and the windfalls are down, and I have not been able to make myself care about either one." Then he moved along the step to make room, and she sat down beside him with her knees against the concrete and the cold of it coming through her jeans, and the two of them sat in the dark for ten minutes without saying anything else. It was the first time in her life she had sat next to her father and not been funny.

Gil said, "I have written to White Plains."

"I know."

"He will be here by the end of the month. He will want an inventory." Gil drank. "I have been thinking about the inventory."

They sat on the steps until it was dark. He said, once: "I should have taken you all to the city and sold the place in ninety-eight when the offer came. I kept it because my father kept it and my father kept it because his father kept it, and now my girls will be turned out of it by a man who sells annuities because his father wanted to win an argument across a boundary fence." He said, "I have failed at the only thing I was ever asked to do." And then, after a while: "Your sister wrote me a note. She says he is very kind to her and they are to be married in Atlantic City next week. She says it in a postscript."

Ten days of it. Ten days of the telephone and the blinds and Faye's voice going up through the floorboards at three in the morning, and ten days, also, of letters.

Roman Ashcroft wrote every day. He wrote what he had done: that Cray had left the motel on the Thursday and had been found on the eleventh in Newark, where he was working the desk at a gym and living in a room above a laundromat; that he had been told, and had agreed to talk, and had asked for money; that he was asking a great deal of money and would settle for less; that Marcus Ellery was handling it, and Marcus Ellery was a lawyer, and Marcus Ellery had put in front of Dex Cray, in one hour, the two notes he had signed in Poughkeepsie, the sum he owed in Albany, and what the Guard would do with a man who had not reported for eleven days; that they wanted a number from Dex Cray and would have it by the weekend.

Then: that Dex Cray had named a figure — four thousand dollars, and his debts in Poughkeepsie, which came to eleven hundred — and that Roman Ashcroft had paid both, and that Cray had signed, and that the wedding would be on the twenty-second at the county clerk's office in Newark.

And then a letter that was different from the others, in which he said that the money was not his to talk about and that he did not want her to think about the money, and that Marcus had been told to say nothing and would say nothing, and that if she ever asked him directly he would lie to her about it for the rest of his life.

Hollis read that letter in the orchard with the rows going down to the creek and the apples still hard on the trees, and she cried, and it was the first time she had cried since the step in the lake house, and she cried for about the money and about the lie and about the fact that a man who had been told she despised him had gone to Newark and found a man in a room above a laundromat and bought her sister's life.

The wedding was on the twenty-second. Gil went. He drove to Newark and stood in a room with a flag and a clerk and watched his youngest daughter marry a man she had known for eleven weeks, and came home at nine o'clock and went straight to the barn and stayed there until midnight.

Nothing was ever said about it in that house again. Three weeks went by with the blinds down and Faye not going to the market, and the cider went on without anybody mentioning it, and then Roxy came home in September for a weekend with her husband, buoyant, unashamed, delighted with everything, showing her ring to the woman at the egg stall, and Faye wept over her and made her a cake, and Hollis stood at the kitchen window and thought: the world is not arranged the way I arranged it. The world is not arranged at all.

And Preston Pell did not come. He wrote an email of two thousand words about forgiveness and did not come.