October 3, 2007
I did not call Leah that evening. I washed the breakfast dishes, although it was nearly suppertime, and moved the telephone to the other end of the counter so I could clean beneath it.
In the morning Peter arrived with coffee and a newspaper folded to a story he had not finished. Chicago had been talking about the Family Secrets trial for months. We had heard pieces of it from customers, from the radio, from people who seemed to know everyone named in it until someone asked how.
“That's a family goodbye for you,” Peter said, setting the paper down.
I disliked the joke, partly because I had nearly made it myself.
At the old office computer, I found an FBI account dated the day before yesterday. I read it while Peter worked through the list of equipment. The article described a letter sent to the Bureau's Chicago office in 1998 by the son of Frank Calabrese Sr. The son, imprisoned alongside his father at the time, had offered to cooperate.
I stopped at that point and read it again. A son could write something about a father that the father would never want written. That much I could understand without pretending to understand either man.
The account went on to describe recorded conversations, the later cooperation of Nicholas Calabrese, and years spent checking information against other evidence. It was not the quick story I had absorbed from the talk around the shop. A letter had not become a verdict by itself. People had worked, waited, compared, and checked.
Peter came to the office door. “Are you looking for something?”
“Trying to understand what happened.”
He read the screen over my shoulder. “I wouldn't know how you live after turning on your own father.”
“I don't know how you live with what comes before it.”
Neither of us spoke for a few seconds.
“I'm talking about them,” he said.
“So am I.”
But I was also thinking about the phrase turning on. In our family it covered a wide assortment of acts. Correcting Dad in front of a customer. Telling someone that a deadline could not be met. Asking why a daughter was expected to help for free while a son's time belonged to a wage sheet.
None of that made our father a criminal. Nothing in that article gave me permission to borrow another family's suffering as evidence about my own. Still, I had begun to notice the work our familiar phrases did. They could end a discussion before anyone had named what was wrong.
Peter placed his list beside the keyboard.
“I can't keep the shop open while you examine every piece of paper.”
“I didn't ask you to.”
“You saved the box. Tomorrow there'll be another box. Then you'll want the cabinets, and Sam will wonder whether we're actually selling anything.”
He had marked the buyer's collection date in red. Beside it were measurements, loading times, and the name of the man bringing a truck. Peter had made the future fit on one sheet. Mine was still spreading over every available surface.
“Give me until the twelfth for an inventory,” I said. “After that, I'll know what needs moving.”
“Know, or have decided?”
“Both.”
He looked at the calendar. “And nothing stays in a cabinet Sam's buying.”
“Agreed.”
He drew a line across October twelfth and wrote Miriam: paper out. The words irritated me until I understood that he had given my work a place on his list.
After he left, I called Leah at her studio. She answered with her full name, briskly enough that I pictured her holding a ruler against the receiver.
“There's an old poster here,” I began. “The winter one.”
“There were several winter ones.”
“The window made from a book.”
She waited.
“We're making a display. I wanted to ask about it.”
“What does the label say?”
I looked at the proof lying beside the telephone. I could have said that was what we were discussing. It would have been true in a narrow, useful way.
“It credits your grandfather.”
“Then you don't need me to tell you about it.”
“Leah, I'd like to fix that.”
There was a small sound at her end, something laid down on a hard table.
“I'll come Saturday,” she said. “Don't put anything else of mine in the display before then.”
I wrote her condition under Peter's deadline. For once, the list contained something I was not allowed to do.