Part Five: The Gate
I was in the garden when the car stopped.
It was a Tuesday in March, and the climbing rose was doing what it did in March — beginning to put out the first new growth, small and tentative and precisely the shade of green that meant spring was deciding to commit. I was assessing it in the way I assessed it every year at this time, thinking about whether it needed cutting back and concluding, as I always concluded, that I was going to leave it alone because the unmanageability was part of what it was.
The car was a new model, silver, the kind that is chosen for what it communicates rather than what it does. A man got out of the passenger side — suit, briefcase, the specific posture of a professional in professional context. Then the driver’s door opened.
I had not seen Claire in twelve years. I had received no communications from her in twelve years — no cards, no calls, no acknowledgment of the boys’ birthdays or school milestones or any of the ten thousand small events that constitute a childhood. She had driven away on a cold afternoon with the canvas bag empty and she had not looked back, and for twelve years the not-looking-back had been consistent.
She looked well. This was the first thing I registered — not with resentment, simply as information. She was forty years old, and she looked well, and the looking well was the particular looking well of someone who has arranged their life to support it. She was dressed with the same put-together quality I remembered from the afternoon on the doorstep, the quality of someone who pays close attention to presentation.
She did not ask about the boys. She looked at the house for a moment — at the house and, I thought, at the shop sign visible through the gate, the one Marguerite had told me was mentioned in a regional business magazine last spring — and then she looked at me.
“Claudette,” she said. My name, in the tone of someone resuming a conversation that has been paused rather than something that has been abandoned for twelve years.
“Claire,” I said.
The lawyer approached. He handed me an envelope with the specific businesslike quality of someone who wants it understood that he is a professional performing a professional function and that the emotional content of the situation is not his department.
Inside the envelope were custody papers. Not a request for discussion, not a letter, not any of the things that might have preceded a legal filing from a person who had remembered, over twelve years, that she had children. A formal legal filing, fully prepared, asserting her claim to full custody of Hugo and Luc on the grounds that I was seventy years old and that my age constituted an impediment to the proper care of teenagers.
She waited while I read it. When I looked up, she said, pleasantly: “Perhaps we should talk inside.”
I thought about saying no. I thought about saying many things. I said: “All right.”
