October 4, 2007
Peter brought sandwiches because he thought an agreement made over food would hold better. We ate at the cutting table with a clean sheet of packing paper beneath our elbows. Without the machinery running, the room felt less like a workplace than a place where work had been interrupted.
“Elena wants a final list next week,” he said. “She's saving the front room for us on November tenth.”
“I'll have one.”
“You keep saying that as if the list is the difficult part.”
I had started three piles: things we could identify, things we should ask about, and things I had merely recognized. Peter kept moving items from the last pile into the first. I kept moving them back.
“I remember that wedding job,” he said, tapping a blue invitation. “Dad worked all night on it.”
“That doesn't tell us who drew the border.”
“Does anybody care?”
I put down my sandwich. He held up a hand.
“All right. Somebody cares.”
Leah called while he was looking for the invoice. I put the telephone on speaker so I could keep both hands on a fragile album. She asked whether the drawers at the back had been emptied. One had contained her personal things when she worked summers at the shop.
“We'll set them aside,” I said.
Peter asked her whether she had followed the trial. “Fourteen of them convicted, wasn't it?”
“I thought five,” Leah said.
“Same crowd.”
The FBI article was still open on the office computer. I went back to it and checked. Its account described fourteen defendants in the indictment, whose scope included eighteen previously unsolved killings. It reported that the five men tried together had been found guilty of racketeering and related crimes on September tenth.
“Fourteen charged isn't fourteen convicted in that trial,” I told Peter. “And it doesn't mean each person did every thing in the indictment.”
He gave me a look I remembered from homework arguments. “I wasn't preparing a legal brief.”
“Neither was I.”
From the speaker, Leah said, “Can I ask something?”
I carried the telephone back to the cutting table.
“The display heading. Does it still say Grandpa was the hand behind every page?”
Peter pushed his sandwich wrapper away.
“It's a tribute,” he said.
“I know what it is.”
I wanted to tell her we were not talking about the same kind of wrong. I wanted to defend the size of our family mistake, to keep it from growing under the shadow of a criminal case. But Leah was not making that comparison. She was asking why I could hear a careless word when Peter used it about strangers and not when I used it about us.
“The heading is still on the proof,” I said. “It won't be on the final display.”
Peter looked at me sharply. I had not told him that.
“What will be?” Leah asked.
“I don't know yet.”
“Then leave the space blank until you do.”
After she rang off, Peter gathered the sandwich wrappers into a tight ball.
“She doesn't have to come if this hurts her.”
“It isn't coming that hurts.”
“You know what I mean.”
I did. We had always offered people a graceful exit from difficult conversations, then used their absence as permission to continue unchanged.
Peter took the proof from the counter and set it between us.
“What do you think he would say if he could see this?”
I studied the photograph we had chosen: Dad at the press, sleeves rolled, his hands resting on the machine as if it were a good horse. I loved those hands. I had held one when there was nothing left to do but hold it.
“He'd ask whether the job was going out on time.”
Peter smiled despite himself.
“And then,” I said, “he'd tell us not to complicate it.”
“There you are.”
I picked up a pencil and drew a light line through every page. The words remained readable beneath it.
“He isn't the only person we owe an answer to.”
Peter did not agree. But he left the proof on my side of the table when he went to answer the door.
I made a fourth pile, smaller than the others. On a card in front of it I wrote: Things I have said that need correcting.
The first item was my own approved proof.