"Then it was a professional engagement," he said, "and I am lucky to have survived it twice." He was quiet a moment. "Last year she whispered to save a life. Do you understand what it means, June, that this year the child had nothing to whisper but a wish? It means the house is clean all the way to the nursery. It means—" He stopped, a man unused to finishing such sentences. "It means she will have to find some other way to frighten me."
"She's six," June said. "She'll think of something."
"God help us all," said Dominic Serra, happily, and went in to his hundred birthdays.
Chapter 28: Benny's Letter
The letter came on a Tuesday, nine days after the birthday, in an envelope with no return address and three changes of handwriting on its journey — forwarded, and forwarded again, through people who knew better than to ask. His man at the gate set it on the study desk and left without a word, the way you leave a room where a man is about to be alone with his brother.
Dominic did not open it at once. He finished the page he was reading — a report on the winery's second clean harvest — signed a paper that needed signing, and poured coffee he did not drink. On the desk, in its unlocked drawer, were the ordinary artefacts of a retired man: reading glasses, a chess problem torn from a newspaper, a list in June's hand of things Leo was to be encouraged to eat. The letter lay beside all of it, patient as a debt.
He had written to Benny exactly once since the exile, through the same careful channels: four lines, no signature, informing him that their mother's grave had been tended and that Leo had won a school chess prize. He had received no answer and had expected none.
He opened it standing up, the way he had opened every dangerous document of his life.
Brother, it began, in Benny's small, impatient hand, which had not changed since they were boys stealing each other's copybooks. I am not writing to ask for anything. Put that down first, because you will be reading for the ask, and there isn't one. A man I used to be would have put an ask in a letter like a knife in a cake. I find I am tired of being that man, which is the politest exile you could have given me, and I hate you a little for knowing it.
Dominic sat down.
The apology to him came first, and it was not a good apology, which is how he knew it was a real one. Benny did not plead the times, or the plan, or fear for the family, though all three were there between the lines like furniture in a dark room. I ordered a car cut because I wanted a war, he wrote, and I wanted the war because your son's road had no place in it for me, and rather than be an old man with no place I thought I would burn the road. You let me live anyway, and I know what that cost you, and I know why you paid it, and it was not for me. It was for a six-year-old with frosting on her hands. Remember that I said I know it.
The apology to Adrian was harder, and shorter, and Dominic read it twice. Tell my nephew his uncle said the word plainly: sorry. Not sorry for the losing. Sorry for the choosing. He is a better head of this family than I was a brother to it, and if there is anything left in my share of the family luck, it is his.
For June there was no apology, because Benny, even in exile, understood his accounts too well for that: a woman whose shop had been burned by his own man's panic did not need paper from him. There was only thanks, stripped bare: To the baker — thank her. Not for the cake. For the slice. I think about that slice of practice cake in your study, offered by a child who had every reason in the world, and it is the only meal that has ever shamed me into a better man. Tell her I said so. Or don't. She has better things to do than read me.
And folded into the letter, wrapped in a sheet of the same paper, was the horse.
It was small enough to sit in Dominic's palm: carved from pale wood with a pocketknife's patience, four legs, a head lifted mid-gallop, a tail like a comma. The work of a man with long empty evenings and only his hands for company. On its belly, in letters burned in with the tip of something hot, crooked as a child's: FOR POPPY. WHO SAVED US TWICE.
Under it, the last lines of the letter: This is for the operative. I made it badly and I made it myself, which she will tell you are the same thing, and she will be right. Do not send anything back. A reply would make it a correspondence, and a correspondence would make it a door, and you closed the door, brother, and for once in my life I find I agree with your carpentry.
Dominic read the letter twice at his desk, beginning to end, the way he had once read ledgers full of his brother's sins. Then he folded it carefully along its own folds, put the horse inside it, and opened the drawer at his right hand — the drawer he had locked every night of his adult life, the drawer that had held, in its time, a gun, a list of names, a second set of books — and laid the letter in among the reading glasses and the chess problems, and closed it. He did not turn the key. He noticed that he did not turn the key, and stood with his hand on the drawer a moment, considering what manner of man he had become, that treason and apology could lie together in his desk now, disarmed, in the light.
At dinner that night he said nothing about it. But on Thursday, when Poppy arrived for chess and cake with the inevitability of weather, he took the horse from the drawer and set it on the chessboard, between the armies, before she had even got her coat off.
"What's that?" Poppy said, picking it up. "It's a horse. Grandpa Dom, it says my name. Who made it?"
"A man I know," Dominic said, "who lives far away, and who owes you a thank-you he is not allowed to deliver in person. He carved it himself. He says it is made badly."
Poppy turned the horse over in her hands with the grave attention of an art critic, examined the crooked letters burned into its belly, and delivered her verdict with the certainty of six years old.
"He made it fine," she said. "Badly is just how homemade looks. Mama says so. Can it live on the board?"
"It can live wherever you put it," said the Don.