Fourth Row Watcher

Chapter 7: Salt on Top

Nathaniel came in out of the dark and the house smelled like butter and old paper.

His father was in the front room with the newspapers, which came every morning and which he read at night, in order, three days behind, as though someone might examine him on them. There was a fire in the grate and the windows shut against the cold and the room too warm the way that room was always too warm.

Claire came through from the kitchen holding the plate in both hands.

She was small and she moved fast. She was his father's second wife, and she had been in this house eleven years. In eleven years she had repainted two rooms and changed the soap in the downstairs bathroom, and that was the list.

"They've got salt on top," she said. "The recipe wanted flaky salt. I couldn't find flaky salt, so it's salt salt."

He took one. It was still warm, too sweet at the front and then the salt at the end. He ate all of it.

"Good," he said.

She stood there with the plate. He took a second one.

"Let the man sit down," his father said, from behind the paper.

"I'm standing," Nathaniel said.

"Mm," said Claire, and went back for the rest.

His father turned a page. "He's been on that one since Tuesday," Claire said from the doorway, and his father turned another page, which was the way he answered her, and she went into the kitchen smiling at nobody.

Nothing had been asked yet, which in this house was the shape of a question being saved.

Dinner was at six. It was made to his taste, the same dinner they had served the last three times he had come down, and he ate it, and Claire asked him about the drive and he said it was fine, and she asked whether the bridge was still down to one lane and he said it was.

His father cut his meat. He ate the way he did everything, in order, without hurry.

"Audrey Sloane is twenty-three," he said.

Nathaniel kept eating.

"Her father mentioned it to me in the fall. I let it sit, because I didn't want to spend the winter on it." He chewed. "He mentioned it again last week, so now I'm spending the winter on it. Saturday. There's a thing at their place Saturday. You'll go down and meet her."

"No."

"Nobody's asking you to marry the girl."

"No."

"You're thirty-one years old."

"I have someone."

"The beta." His father's knife went on working. "I don't care who you keep. I never have. But it's time you had a child."

"He's not —" Nathaniel set his fork down. "Betas don't have children."

"Other people's betas don't."

"Say that again."

"I'll say it slowly if it helps." His father looked up for the first time. His eyes were the pale, washed-out color that had come down on Nathaniel's side of the family, and the rest of him had gone gray around them, and none of it made him smaller. "You think that's a law of nature, or a law about money? The drug exists. It's made for omegas who never finished developing. Nobody writes it for a beta. It costs what it costs, and there's a man in Rye who writes whatever he's paid to write, and I could have him here Thursday."

There was a drug. Nathaniel had heard the name of it once, at a table like this one, from a man who said it the way men said the names of horses.

"He's twenty-nine," his father said. "Two years younger than you, and it gets worse every year he waits. That's not me. Ask the doctors upstate."

Twenty-nine. There had been a summer when Nathaniel put his hand flat on the small of Ellis's back and felt all of it, every knob of it, like something under a coat.

"You're out of your mind," Nathaniel said.

"You want to keep him, keep him. But I want a grandchild out of it, or I want the Sloane girl met, and I don't care which."

"He's not well."

The knife stopped.

"Say that again."

"He can't keep weight on. He gets —" and Nathaniel heard himself, and stopped, because there was nothing after that his father would not weigh and price and enter somewhere.

"Not well." His father set the knife and fork down parallel on the plate, which was a thing he did before he said something he had been saving. "You've gotten soft. What you did to him back then — you think I didn't hear any of it?"

The fire ticked in the other room. Claire cut a piece of her meat, small, and put it in her mouth, and chewed it, and did not look at either of them.

"That was a long time ago," Nathaniel said. "And he didn't listen."

"He didn't listen."

"We're not doing this."

"No," his father agreed. "We're not." He picked his fork back up. "Saturday, or a child. Think about it yourself. Don't make me ask you twice. You won't like it when I step in."

He ate. He was sixty-eight and he ate like a man with forty years left.

Nathaniel sat with his hands on either side of his plate. The roast had a smell to it now, fat and heat, and it came up the back of his throat, and he swallowed twice and it stayed where it was.

Claire said, "There's a pie."

"Claire," his father said.

"I'm asking if he wants pie."

"He doesn't want pie."

"I'll leave it out," she said, to her plate.

Nathaniel pushed his chair back and stood, and his father did not look up, and Claire did, and then she looked at her plate again.

In the hall she caught him at the door. She had a tin in her hands, the good one with the blue on it, and she held it out.

"Take it or it sits here till Christmas and I eat all of it and blame you."

He took it.

"Drive slower than you want to," she said.

The drive back was forty minutes if the traffic was with you, and he did it in thirty-one, and he came through two lights on the yellow and one on the red. Halfway down Route 9 he had to put the window down, because the tin was beside him on the seat and the smell of the cookies was in the car and it was the wrong thing to be smelling.

Ellis was outside the fence line where the hedge broke, squatting on his heels in the gravel with his back to the drive.

The cat had come through a hard winter two years ago weighing nothing and had been eating ever since. It was calico and it was the shape of a pillow with legs, and it sat in front of Ellis with its tail curled and its nose in a can.

Ellis's sweater had ridden up. There was a strip of bare back above his belt, and the spine in it, all the separate knobs of it, and the skin gone tight over them the way it went when he had not eaten enough for a while, and low on the left side, four fingers wide, the bruise. Two nights old. It had gone the color of a plum held up to a light and the edges had yellowed, and it was the width of Nathaniel's hand, which was not a thing he had to measure to know.

The gate light came on. Ellis turned his head.

He got up in stages, one hand on his knee, and he pulled the sweater down, and it went down over the bruise, and the cat leaned on his ankle and he let it.

Nathaniel rolled the window down.

"It's thirty-four degrees," he said.

"He's got a coat on. He's got two."

"Inside."

Ellis picked up the can. The cat followed him four steps and stopped at the hedge and sat down in the gravel and began to wash its paw, and Ellis went up the drive ahead of the car, not hurrying, his hands in his pockets, and the gate swung in.

Twenty-nine this year. His birthday was in December, and after December he would be thirty, and he had met him the summer Ellis was twenty-two and had thought, briefly and without any particular weight, that here was somebody who would be easy to keep.

He put the car in the garage. The tin was on the passenger seat, and he left it there, and it was still warm through the metal when he shut the door on it.