"In a minute," Poppy repeated, holding her sentences like eggs, like a tray of eggs, like a whole breaking armful of them. "Okay. But Mama β the minute has to hurry up."
Chapter 4: The Crash
It began, as all great disasters in that house began, with music. The band, which had been simmering politely under the speeches all evening, put down its drinks and found its purpose; the hall lights lowered by degrees until the room ran on candle-glow and the strings of gold above the terrace doors; and Rosa, at June's elbow, murmured, "Now," in the tone of a woman lighting a fuse she'd packed herself.
The speeches were done. The old, old song had been sung by an uncle with a ruined tenor voice while two hundred people stood with their glasses down and their faces soft. The Don had risen, once, to embrace his son β a public, deliberate embrace, the heir blessed before the whole valley β and Adrian had closed his eyes for one second in his father's arms like a boy, and the hall had loved it, and Poppy, watching from the dessert side, felt the whole room breathe out.
And then she saw the watch again.
It was a small thing. Adrian, at the head table, turned his wrist β not rudely, not obviously β and looked, and June, who was watching her cake and not the heir, missed it. Poppy did not miss it. She knew that look. It was the look her mother gave the oven timer. It was the look of somebody counting down to leaving. She heard him say it, too, across the hush as the room rearranged itself for the presentation: low, warm, apologetic, a son negotiating with a throne. "Papa β after the cake, I have to go. The Meridian people are in the city at eight tomorrow; if I take the mountain road tonight I can stillβ"
"After the cake," said Dominic Serra, and patted his hand.
After the cake. The cake was now. The cake was the last thing standing between Uncle Adrian and the silver car by the east door, and the two nicks, and the long drop by the quarry where nobody counts brake fluid. Poppy stood up so fast her stool went over, and Leo, beside her, squeaked like a stepped-on mouse, and said, "Poppy. Poppy, no. Sit down. Please sitβ"
She didn't have a plan. It must be understood: she was six, and plans are grown-up furniture and there was no time to build any. She had a hall full of two hundred people and a head full of eggs that were about to hatch into a dead man, and her mother was twenty feet away saying in a minute, and the man with the watch was rising β actually rising, napkin down, hand at his father's shoulder β and so Poppy did the only thing her body could think of, which was to run at the problem with her whole self and shout.
"WAIT!" she shouted, at a volume that would have done credit to a fire bell. "WAIT, WAIT, YOU CAN'T GO IN THE CARβ"
She ran. She ran in her good shoes, on the marble, across the full ceremonial width of the great hall, past duchesses of crime and judges and cousins and a cardinal's nephew, with her blue dress flying and both arms out β not to the heir, who was too far, ringed by his own table β but to Leo's Uncle Benny, beaming at the edge of the floor, hand already rising in greeting, because Poppy Lane had misjudged, as runners do, the one thing the whole evening had been built around.
The cake stand.
It stood at the centre of the dessert side on its silver column, five tiers of lemon and almond and chocolate rearing up under sixty lit candles, and June had wheeled it there herself and checked the brake on the trolley twice. What June had not done β what no baker has ever done β was calculate for a six-year-old arriving at full speed, skidding on marble in party shoes, and catching the edge of the trolley with her shoulder, trying heroically to change direction.
The stand rocked. That was the word the valley used for thirty years: it rocked. Once, with majesty. Twice, with intent. Sixty candles leaned like a field of wheat in wind, and two hundred people made one sound, a single drawn breath through two hundred mouths, and June Lane made another sound, small and animal, and started forward with both hands up as if she could catch a building.
She could not. Nobody could. Five tiers of cake β the oven loan, the flour account, the rent, the school shoes, the whole standing-up of Lane & Crumb β tipped in slow, gleaming, unstoppable glory and fell in front of the whole underworld.
It fell beautifully, which somehow made it worse. The top tier went first, somersaulting, candles streaming, landing in a spread of lemon and roses six feet across. The almond followed, then the chocolate base split against the marble like a ship on a rock, shedding its cargo everywhere, and a wave β an actual wave, witnesses insisted, of buttercream and crumb and burning candle β rolled across the floor over the shoes of the front row. Somewhere in the wreck a single candle stayed lit, upright, in a drift of frosting, burning bravely like the last lamp of a sunken city.
Poppy sat down in the middle of it. Not fell β sat, all at once, the way children do when the world finishes happening to them, in a puddle of her mother's whole life's work, with frosting up her arms and a sugar rose in her hair. And the hall was silent. Not quiet β silent, the profound, ringing silence of two hundred dangerous people all having the same thought at once: to look, slowly, away from the child and the ruin, towards the head of the room.
Towards the birthday man. Towards Dominic Serra, who had not moved, who had not flinched at the crash or the screaming of the chandelier glass, whose face was a closed door in a burning house.
Dominic Serra rose from his chair.
He rose slowly, the way mountains do things, and his sons and his brother and his captains rose with him in reflex, half out of their seats, hands hovering in the terrible grammar of men deciding whether this was an insult, an attack, or an omen. The band's last note died up in the rafters. Rosa Delgado crossed herself. Leo, behind the gift table, put both hands over his face.
And in the wreckage of the most expensive birthday in the valley, a six-year-old girl in a frosting-covered blue dress stood up, shaking, crying soundlessly, and pointed one small, sticky finger past the fallen cake, past the captains, past the whole frozen underworld β straight at Adrian Serra, who was standing white-faced at the head table with his napkin still in his hand.