It began with pancakes, because Sundays began with pancakes now, in the way that tides begin with the moon: without discussion. Nora stood at the stove in the kitchen that was no longer a staff kitchen or a fortress kitchen but simply the kitchen, and worked through the batter with the concentration of a woman defusing something delicious, while Maisie, on the stool that was hers by eminent domain, supervised the chocolate chips and ate the casualties. Jack read the comics section aloud in the doorway in the voice of a newsreader, including the weather, including the shipping forecast, which he had decided was about his father's old life and therefore classified.
Marcus came down in a sweater. There had been a time β two years of times β when Marcus Doyle did not own clothing that could be described as a sweater; there were suits, and there were the ghost-clothes of a man who slept in his office. Now there was a sweater, grey, with a darn at the elbow that Mrs. K had done and lied about, and he wore it to his own breakfast table and poured coffee for the room before he poured his own, which remains, in the annals of that house, the single most documented act of the peace.
The chess loss occurred at eleven. It occurred at the kitchen table, because the chess set lived there now between the fruit bowl and a graveyard of crayons, and it occurred honourably: Jack, who had been studying a library book with diagrams, produced a combination of such beauty that his father leaned back in his chair and studied the ceiling for the source of the leak.
"You've been practicing," Marcus said.
"Frankie taught me the opening. Nora taught me the rest."
"What's the rest?"
"Waiting," said Jack, with the serenity of a hangman. "She says everybody tells you what they want if you wait. Even kings."
Frankie arrived at noon with the newspaper and a bag of oranges and no agenda, which the house received as the marvel it was. He inspected the garden like a landlord of it β which, in the matter of the Doyle properties, he now professionally was β and reported the sunflowers at a height requiring, in his judgement, a bigger sky. Then he took Eleanor's garden chair, the wide one under the wall, which nobody had assigned and everybody understood to be his now, and he fell asleep in the spring sun with the newspaper over his face, a retired thunderstorm, snoring gently into the sports section while his niece drew his portrait in crayon at a distance of four feet, tongue out, total commitment.
The sunflowers were Maisie's doing and Maisie's pride: last year's line had gone over the garden wall like a rumour, and this year's stood taller, seeded by a five-year-old and supervised by a six-year-old with the confidence of a ministry. They leaned over the wall into the street's side, gold and shameless, advertising to all of Beacon Hill that the fortress at the corner had defected to the flowers. Passers-by slowed. Some of them β this was new, and it was noted in the household ledger under no heading at all β nodded at the house. Not at the man. At the house: at its windows open, its piano audible, its garden escaped over the wall like a flag.
Lunch was taken in the garden because the day allowed it and because Jack had carried the chairs out at nine in the morning, unasked, which in that house was how votes were cast. There was bread and cheese and the first of Mrs. K's tomatoes, eaten with the ceremony due to royalty, and a wasp was negotiated with at foreign-minister level and bought off with jam. Frankie, awake by then and restored to vertical, held court from Eleanor's chair on the subject of nothing whatsoever, and was happy, and showed it by doing the crossword in pen and getting three answers wrong with total confidence.
In the afternoon Nora taught everyone the words to a song none of them needed. It was an old song, a kitchen song, the kind her mother had sung over dishes in South Boston, with a chorus built for people who couldn't sing and verses built for people who could. She taught it in parts, at the piano, with Maisie conducting from the closed lid and Jack objecting to the second verse on grounds of logic and singing it anyway, louder. Mrs. K, shelling peas at the table with a bowl in her lap, supplied the harmony without looking up, in a voice like a church door, and revealed β under direct questioning from a stunned Frankie, waking β that she had known the song for fifty years and had simply never had, in this house, an occasion shaped like it. Shay, called in for tea and held by the music the way other men are held by weather, stood in the doorway with his cup and hummed the bass line at a frequency felt rather than heard.
Marcus stood on his own front steps at dusk with the day behind him and did an inventory, the way men of his training do, without deciding to. Doors: open, all day, to a garden. Children: loud, fed, unguarded by anything except love and one enormous soccer coach. Brother: asleep in his wife's chair with a child's portrait of him drying on the hall table. The house behind him was audible from the street β he could hear the song restarting, badly, with somebody laughing through the second verse β and he stood there on the steps of the most feared address in Boston and waited for the familiar thing: the tightening, the hand at the centre of the chest, the grief that had kept its hand on him for two years like a man checking a pulse.
It didn't come. His chest did not hurt. The house was loud, and the noise went through him like weather through an open window, and it did not hurt, and he stood in the unremarkable evening with his hands in the pockets of a darned sweater and understood, all at once and without alarm, that this was what the whole war had been for.
"A penny," Nora said from the doorway, where she had come to fetch him for supper, because the house fetched people now; nobody in it was allowed to be missing at a meal.
"Not worth one," he said. "I was just listening."
"To what?"
"My house," said Marcus Doyle. "It's loud."
"Yes," said Nora, and held the door the way you hold a door for family. "It is. Come in before Jack starts the weather again."
Chapter 30: Home