Chapter 30: A Hundred Birthdays
It rained on Thursday, the soft valley kind that made the whole town smell of wet earth and somebody else's baking, and it changed nothing at all, because Thursdays were no longer weather-dependent in the Serra family. Thursdays were law.
June saw him through the bakery glass at five minutes to four, standing under the awning across the street with a newspaper folded over his head like a man half his age, and she put the kettle on without being asked and took the chess set down from the shelf above the counter — the good shelf, Poppy's shelf — where it lived between the wedding photograph and the jar of emergency sprinkles.
The bakery window was full that day, the way it was full most days now: lemon tarts in a bright row, the seeded loaves Leo had finally been persuaded to eat, a whole regiment of éclairs, and in the centre, on the stand June's late husband had made in the first year of the shop, a cake that was not for sale — the Thursday cake, small and white with roses piped on it, which no customer had ever succeeded in buying at any price, though several, early on, had tried.
On the counter, in a silver frame that Dominic had pretended not to buy and June had pretended not to notice him buying, stood the family photograph from the wedding: the Don in his grey suit with his hands folded over his cane, Adrian laughing mid-sentence, June in cream with her chin up, Leo with his mouth full of contraband cake — and in the front, in the exact centre, where the photographer had not put her and where she had put herself, a seven-year-old girl with frosting on her chin and the expression of a person reviewing troops that she owns.
The bell over the door rang at four o'clock precisely, because Dominic Serra had been punctual to other men's funerals and saw no reason to be late to his own pleasures, and he came in out of the rain with his newspaper dripping and his dignity arranged around him like a dry coat.
"Grandpa Dom," said Poppy, from the stool behind the counter where she did her homework and her empire-building, "you're wet."
"I am rained upon," said the most feared man in the state, hanging his coat on the hook by the door that had been, for a year now, his hook. "There is a difference. One is a condition. The other is a weather report."
"You're still wet though."
"I concede the fact," said Dominic, "and dispute the framing." He sat down at the small table by the window — the wobbly one, which June had offered twice to replace and which he had twice refused, on grounds he declined to state, though the truth, known to the whole family, was that Poppy's very first chess lesson had been played at it and the old man was sentimental in direct proportion to how loudly he denied it — and he shook the water off his newspaper and opened it with ceremony while June brought tea and Poppy set out the board with the speed of a croupier.
"You lost last week," Poppy reminded him, arranging the white pieces before herself with the serene dishonesty of a girl who had been allowed the white pieces fifty-one weeks in a row.
"I was defeated," Dominic said, "by a manoeuvre involving a knight that I have since reported to the authorities."
"Leo says you let me win because of the knight went backwards."
"Leo," said Dominic, "is a traitor to his house, and his openings are a disgrace, and he is correct, which is the worst kind of traitor." He moved his pawn with the air of Caesar crossing something. "Play, operative."
They played. The rain made its soft argument against the windows and lost. Customers came and went around them, and nobody in the bakery — not the nurse from the clinic, not the two farmers, not the girl from the Ostrov bakery across the valley who now supplied June's flour at a family discount and called her cousin — nobody thought it strange anymore that Don Dominic Serra spent his Thursday afternoons at the wobbly table losing at chess to a child who narrated her own cheating like a sports commentator, because in a small town a thing that happens fifty-one weeks in a row stops being news and becomes geography. He was simply part of the landscape now, like the church bell. Like the hill.
Between moves, June cut the Thursday cake the way she always cut it — three slices, because Leo would materialise from the bookshop next door at the exact moment the knife came out, a gift he had inherited from his grandfather along with the timing — and the three of them ate cake in the window of a bakery that a frightened man had once tried to burn down, in a town that had once lowered its voice when a Serra car went past, and the talk was of nothing: of school, of a chess opening, of whether the hundred-birthday campaign required, at Dominic's present rate of cake consumption, a restructuring of the birthday schedule.
"Ninety-nine to go," Poppy said, doing the arithmetic on a napkin with a borrowed pen. "We have to be efficient. I'm putting you down for Thursdays forever."
"Forever is a long engagement," Dominic said.
"You said a hundred birthdays. Contract." She folded the napkin with terrible finality and tucked it into his breast pocket, over his heart, where other men of his generation had once carried other things. "No more sad whispers, Grandpa Dom. That was the whole deal."
"It was," he said. "It is." And the old man, who had bent his head a year ago to hear a whisper that saved his son's life, and a year after that to hear one that was only a wish, looked out at the rain washing the quiet street of a town that no longer feared him, and at the window full of cake, and at the photograph on the counter, and at the small general across the chessboard already plotting her next illegal knight — and he was content, in a way that would have frightened his younger self far more than any rival ever had.
In the Serra house, the secrets were only the birthday kind now. There were ninety-nine of those still to come, and Poppy Lane Serra — she had added the name herself, in pencil, on the family photograph's frame, and no one had dared erase it — intended to deliver every single one of them in person, in his ear, like a birthday secret.
The End