Grace imagined shrugging over a sandwich and telling Hanna everything she’d done to end up in Jacqueline Zanuso’s basement. Impossible. Hanna had not needed to unravel any lies; she was only filling in blank spaces. Grace had crudely, hurriedly filled in her own blank spaces whenever they appeared, and never with the truth. She was like someone faking a crossword puzzle by socking in random letters so it would look finished from a distance.
Grace started at the buzz of machinery and looked up to see Hanna with the keyboard vacuum. She had taken a break from the sheep to clean the field of wheat in the centerpiece’s summer quarter. She moved the nozzle in tiny circles among the stalks in a trance. Grace had been shaken by Hanna’s confession, but Hanna wasn’t unsettled at all.
When Hanna went out for afternoon coffee, Grace went to the computer and checked the Albemarle Record—just once, quickly, crossing it off for the day—and then her e-mail. She used one address for work and another for her parents. Today there was an unwelcome e-mail from her mother.
Grace,
I saw Riley yesterday. He was at the hardware store with his father buying potting soil. I could hardly believe it, I practically fell on him hugging him, but I don’t think he wanted to see me. I can’t begin to imagine what he’s been through since I saw him.
Here is the Graham’s address in case you want to send a letter.
429 Heathcliff Ave
Garland, TN 37729
As if Grace didn’t know that address better than she knew her own name.
Why did her mother send her these e-mails about Riley? Just to punish her? To gloat that Grace’s other family lay in shambles? Because she suspected that Grace was somehow responsible? Because she’d hoped that Grace and Riley would marry and make Grace’s family Graham-adjacent? Because she was pretending, now that Grace was half a world away, to be a different kind of mother?
Riley was walking around Garland now. She could see him walking by their old college house on Orange Street and knowing that other people lived there now, boys the same age he’d been. She imagined the sun in his eyes, a car’s steering wheel in his hands, the way a grocery store would look when he hadn’t been inside one in so long, the newly sharp smell of the home that hadn’t been his home in years.
? ? ?
When Grace got home that evening, Mme Freindametz was at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of tea and doing a word search in a Polish magazine. Grace smiled quickly and put her pot of water on the stove to steam rice and green beans.
“What are you going to put in your nice box?” Mme Freindametz asked.
“My box?”
“Yes, your new box, the silver one.” She smiled approvingly.
At first Grace did not understand. She pointed to the tin breadbox she had bought a few months prior, which was yellow and had a picture of a topiary on it. “That? That box?”
Freindametz shook her head. “No, the one in your bedroom, the new one!”
“You were in my room?”
“Yes,” she said. “The vent was clogged, the vent behind your desk.”
“Why would you—” Grace began, but Freindametz jerked the handle of her teacup so that the tea sloshed against the side. Grace realized that she had raised her voice. “How did you know it was new?” She tried to keep her voice even, to stay calm or to sound calm. “Have you been in there before?”
Freindametz opened her mouth but did not speak.
“How often? Every week, every day?”
Freindametz looked as if Grace had slapped her. “This is my house,” she finally said.
“It’s just a pretty box,” Grace said slowly. “You don’t put anything in it.”
She turned off the stove and emptied the simmering water from the pot into the sink. She set the pot back on the burner, where it hissed, and then she went up to her room and shut the door.
? ? ?
Hanna was working exclusively on the centerpiece, and Grace was to help her whenever Jacqueline didn’t have anything else for her. On Tuesday morning, all there was for Grace to do was fix a botched seam on a clumsy ceramic patch. They were often called upon to redo the shoddy guesswork of new clients who tried to repair their lesser antiques themselves and only worsened the damage. They brought these mutilated things to Zanuso et Filles, as helpless and embarrassed as people who have just tried to cut their own hair for the first time. When the beloved artifact was returned to them, they would run their fingers over the invisible repair, disbelieving. That moment often awoke some dissatisfaction, and they began to notice, in the antiques their families had passed down, flaws they’d lived with for decades. Suddenly, these marks of time were unbearable to them.
But because restoration could hurt the value of some antiques, Hanna, Amaury, and Grace had to be good enough that their work was undetectable to the human eye. Their clients wanted it that way, of course. Grace wouldn’t ruin an Austrian compact with an American hinge, or gum up a two-hundred-year-old music box with an adhesive that had not been invented until 1850. For private collectors, they restored antiques that needed to look perfect only within the safe space of the home; for dealers, they restored antiques that would be sold to the public with little fuss—an old bureau improved from very good to mint. Grace seldom knew exactly where the pieces went after she finished with them. As long as Jacqueline’s clients kept their valuables close, away from carbon dating and fluorescent spectroscopes, no one would be disappointed.
Hanna was telling Grace something about the antique linen she’d found to re-create the shepherdesses’ dresses so they could convincingly herd the woolen sheep in the spring quarter of the centerpiece. Grace hadn’t been paying attention. Jacqueline was on the phone in her office, yelling already, at ten in the morning, and Grace strained to hear her over Hanna. Grace was worried: The little patch job, which had taken her an hour at the most and was now drying, was the only non-centerpiece work she’d had since she finished the birdcage. There had been slow periods before, but usually because pieces were held up in freight or customs—they knew the work was coming. Grace couldn’t think of anything coming.
The trouble at work had started when their most frequent clients, a cluster of four dealers from Clignancourt, had closed their shops after an export tax scandal. Grace didn’t know how Jacqueline would make up the business. Grace had been at Zanuso the shortest time. She would be the first to go.
“Julie, are you listening to me?” Hanna looked over her glasses. “I need you to start on the orchard, in the summer quarter. You have to make the peaches.” She held up a magnifier to one of her photographs. “These peaches are a little whimsical,” she said. “More pink than is natural, and with a deeper groove. There are only two that are salvageable.”
Grace nodded. “You need how many more, nine?”
“Eleven, and in different stages of ripeness.”
Hanna handed Grace the photograph, a close-up of the peaches. Each was no larger than a pea, made from wax and painted in variegated shades of orange, yellow, and a rush of pink. Their stems were green-painted wire.
“Two should be broken, like this.” Hanna said, handing Grace another picture. In this one, the peach had a bite missing, exposing the pit.