Chapter 2: The Estate
The Serra estate sat above the valley like it had been there first and the town had been built afterwards as a courtesy. June drove the bakery van up the long private road on Saturday afternoon with the five tiers boxed and belted behind her like passengers, and every quarter mile the world got quieter and richer: stone walls, cypress trees in a dark green row, vines running in ruled lines down to the river. At the gate a man in a good suit smiled with only his mouth and looked through the van with his eyes, while another checked her name off a list and waved her through like a man defusing something.
"They have a lot of gates for a birthday," Poppy observed from the passenger seat, sitting very straight in her blue dress, hands folded, being invisible.
"Rich people collect gates," June said. "Like you collect buttons."
"I am being invisible about the gates."
The house, when it came, was not a house so much as a small, beautiful country that had learned architecture: pale stone, green shutters, a terrace wide as a street, and everywhere the machinery of a great party being assembled by an army in black and white — tables by the dozen, a stage for the band, strings of lights waiting for dark, and a long gift table sagging under boxes wrapped in paper that cost more than June's good shoes. Two hundred guests, Rosa had said. Judges and cousins, vintners and sheriffs, old men in linen and young men in suits cut close as a warning. They drifted through the garden's late gold light, glasses in hand, and every one of them, June noticed, seemed to know where the centre of the party was, the way iron filings know a magnet.
The centre was on the terrace, in a chair like a throne that nobody would ever call a throne. Dominic Serra at sixty was silver-haired and still as a held breath, his suit the colour of deep water, his hands quiet on his knees. Men approached him one at a time, bent, spoke, were weighed, and were dismissed with a word or a touch on the arm, and the whole garden arranged itself around the spaces he left. June, wheeling the first tier past, Rosa on point, felt his attention pass over her the way weather passes over a field — not unkindly, not kindly, just completely. All her life she had been, if not important, at least visible in a room. Here she was furniture that carried cake. It was, she decided, a relief. Furniture does not get asked questions.
Near the old man, in the shade of the terrace columns, stood his son. Adrian Serra was twenty-eight and had his mother's face from the one portrait June had glimpsed in the hall — the same long bones, the same grave mouth — but where the father's stillness was a wall, the son's was a door he kept having to hold shut. She heard them as she passed with the trolley, not eavesdropping, exactly; a mother pushing forty pounds of lemon cake develops excellent hearing and no conscience about it whatsoever.
"—the port contracts, Papa. Clean paper. Names on documents that can be read aloud in daylight. I'm not asking you to shrink. I'm asking you to build the part that lasts."
"And I'm asking you," the Don said mildly, "to enjoy my birthday." But there was pride under it, banked like coals, and June saw the son see it too, and soften, and shake his head like a man arguing with a mountain he loved.
The third Serra was everywhere at once. Benito — Benny, the Don's younger brother, round-faced and shining, a laugh like a handful of coins — worked the garden the way a priest works a parish: a hand on every shoulder, a name for every waiter, a joke for the old men and a compliment for the young ones and a long, warm, appraising smile for June and the trolley, holding a gate of guests aside to let it pass. "The cake!" he announced to the terrace. "Sixty years, and the best-looking thing here is dessert. Forgive us, signora. My brother has had all the beauty in the family and spent it on vineyards." Everybody laughed. The Don did not, quite, but his mouth moved in what, in another man, would have been a grin.
In the great hall, Rosa supervised the cake's assembly on its silver stand at the dessert side of the room, tier on tier, while June's hands did their familiar magic and her nerves did their familiar riot. When the last rose was piped, Rosa looked at the shining tower, crossed herself, and said, "Now we pray it stands until nine." Then Rosa posted Poppy at her station — a stool just inside the kitchen door, in sight of the hall, the cake, and her mother, where, theoretically, a six-year-old in a blue dress could be invisible for three hours.
The theory lasted eleven minutes. That was when Poppy, swinging her legs and scanning the hall with a spy's thoroughness, registered the boy.
He was six, maybe, in a suit too big for him, with a book held against his chest like a shield, standing behind the long gift table in the one patch of the party nobody was looking at. His expression was that of a small, polite person at the edge of a very deep swimming pool. He had, Poppy would report later, "hiding eyes."
His name was Leo. His mother had been the Don's daughter, and she was in heaven — a fact spoken softly and often at the Serra estate — and Leo lived here now, with his grandfather and his uncles and a rotation of kind women who ironed his shirts. He was shy the way locked doors are shy: not empty behind, just waiting for the right knock.
Poppy knocked by producing, from her dress pocket, one slightly squashed meringue.
"That's from the kitchen," Leo whispered, scandalised. "You're not supposed to—"
"I'm quality," Poppy informed him. "Quality is allowed everywhere. Are you hiding, or are you just standing like that for fun?"
Leo considered the deep end of the pool, and the small brave girl with frosting already on her cuff, and made the decision that would change both their lives and several other people's. "Hiding," he admitted. "I'm the best at it. I know all the places in this whole house where nobody looks. Even the good places. Even the one—" he lowered his voice to a thread "—even the one where you can hear the kitchen talking."
Behind them the band began to tune. The lights came on in strings of gold. In the kitchen June rolled her shoulders and looked at her daughter's empty stool, and then at her daughter, who waved at her — invisibly — from behind the gift table, next to a strange small boy, in a house full of two hundred people, three hours before the cake was due to stand up in front of the most dangerous audience in the state.