Chapter 59: Fenwick Road
My aunt Renata lives at 61 Fenwick Road.
Aluminum siding, painted the color of oatmeal. A carport. A wind chime made of forks that my uncle made before he died.
I had not been there in seven years.
The last time was two weeks before the crash. There was a birthday cake and I have thought about that afternoon more than I would like.
I took the 14 to Danforth and the 6 to the bottom of Fenwick and walked up, which is eleven minutes and about a hundred feet of hill.
I went on the sixteenth of March, a Saturday, at ten in the morning, because she goes to the dental office where she does reception on weekdays and she does her yard on Saturdays.
I did not call ahead. I am not proud of that and I would do it again.
You do not give people time to arrange their face. That is not a trick. It is the only advantage a person like me has.
The car was in the carport.
Dark blue estate. Faded university parking sticker on the rear window, corner peeled up. Rust freckle on the fuel door.
I stood at the bottom of the driveway and looked at it for a count of five and then I stopped looking at it, because I had come for something else and I know what I am like.
Renata was on the porch with a bag of bulbs and a plastic tray.
She is fifty-eight. She has gone grey at the front and keeps the rest dyed, which makes a stripe.
She had a trowel in her right hand.
It is a narrow bulb trowel with a wooden handle and a black rubber grip, and she held it the way a person holds a pen they are about to sign with.
She did not put it down. Not once, in eleven minutes. I want that noted.
“Cass,” she said.
“Renata.”
She did not say come in. She did not stand up.
I stopped at the bottom step, which put my eyes level with her knees.
“You look thin,” she said.
“I'm the same.”
“You want coffee.”
“No.”
The forks turned on their string. There was no wind, so it was just the string unwinding.
My uncle drilled the holes himself. He died the second year I was inside and I found out by letter, eleven days late.
I had decided on the bus what I was going to say and what I was not going to say, and I wrote both lists on the back of the deposit slip.
The say list had three items on it.
The do-not-say list had one item on it, and the item was: the date.
I had already learned, in eleven law offices, what happens when you lead with the thing you cannot prove.
So I said the first item.
“I'm working. Bail bonds office on Charter.”
She said, “I heard.”
She put a bulb in the tray, pointed end up. I counted eight in the tray and nine still in the bag.
Second item.
“I'm current on restitution. Two hundred a month. I've never missed.”
She said, “That's good,” in the voice you use for a child's drawing.
I said nothing back, which is a thing I can do now for as long as it is necessary to do it.
Then she said, “Bree's expecting.”
I had not asked. I had not come within a mile of asking.
I said, “All right.”
She looked up at me then for the first time, and I understood she had said it to see what my face did.
I have a face that was trained for six years by people who were watching to see what it did. She got nothing and she was annoyed by that, and being annoyed made her careless, which is the only reason the next four minutes happened.
Third item.
I said, “I got a certified copy of my case file. From the clerk.”
The trowel stopped.
Not dropped. Not dramatic. It stopped, at the top of its arc, about eight inches above the tray, and it stayed there while she said the next thing.
She said, “What for?”
I said, “Because it's mine.”
She said, “There's nothing in there, Cass.”
I want to put down exactly what happened in my chest at that moment, which was nothing, and exactly what happened in my head, which was one word.
There.
She said “in there.” She had not asked what was in it. She had not asked what a case file was. She had not asked why a person would want one.
She had told me what was in it.
I said, “Four hundred and twelve pages.”
And Renata Halloway looked at the tray of bulbs and said the thing I came here to write down.
She said, “That's not all of it.”