He gave her a pained look. “I’m helping out at Kevin’s shop. Someone can’t come in until one, so I said I’d cover.”
“Kevin was at the funeral, right?” Scott had come with three friends, two girls and a guy, all of them like Scott—wild, waiting for confrontation.
“Uh-huh.” Scott threaded the other shoe but left the laces untied and dangling.
“What kind of shop does he own?”
“Shoes.”
“Oh!” She knew she sounded relieved, but shoes were so … innocuous. “Well. Tell him ‘Hi’ for me.”
He sniffed. “You didn’t even speak to him that day.”
At that, Sylvie shrank. She strode out of the room, found her handbag near the laundry, and walked across the driveway to her own car. She still parked outside, not yet wanting to disrupt the half of the garage that housed James’s jigsaw, lathe, and woodworking rasps. She slammed the car door hard. It felt good. Once belted in, she shut her eyes, listening to the birds and the gentle swishing sounds of the tree branches. She lifted her ring finger to her mouth, cupped her lips around the big yellow stone on the ring James had given her, and sucked.
That first night, when she just thought James wasn’t coming home in retaliation for what she’d brought up the night before, she had taken off this ring and buried it at the bottom of her jewelry box, hating what it meant. Then she’d gone into James’s office and looked carefully around the room. James’s infuriatingly clean desk, the stack of blank computer paper next to the printer, the Lucite plaques on the bookshelf. She’d walked in and touched the bare spot on the bookshelf where she’d found the little box that held the bracelet. A film of pale gray dust stuck to the pad on her finger.
The ring tasted like cold metal. Maybe it was primal, like a child sucking on a pacifier. Because only after Sylvie let the stone click against her teeth and press on her tongue did her pulse begin to settle down.
In no time Sylvie found herself pulling up the hill to Swithin, the school resplendent at the top. The guard at the gate recognized her right away. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Bates-McAllister!” he cried. “So nice to see you!” He waved her right through.
Sylvie loved this drive up the Swithin lane, how the school rose up before her, all stone and brick, with its spires and bell tower and flags and dazzling green fields beyond. There wasn’t a tree branch out of place. The steps, windowsills, and sidewalks were all swept twice a day. One of Sylvie’s earliest memories was of her grandfather bringing her into the library and showing her the rare book collection. “These were almost lost forever,” he told her. And then he wove the tale of the fire; how it had caught in the east-wing classrooms and spread furiously into the gymnasium, burning half the school to the ground before the firefighters even arrived at the scene. When her grandfather surveyed the damage the day after, he sobbed. “It was just so sad,” he told Sylvie. “I felt like the school was calling out to me, Please don’t let me go.” Whenever he got to that part of the story, tears always welled in Sylvie’s eyes.
Since it was the Depression and no one had any money to spare, Charlie Roderick Bates financed rebuilding Swithin with his own money and resources. He used materials from the countless limestone quarries and brick foundries he owned to pour the new foundation and rebrick the walls. Rebuilding the school from scratch provided a lot of jobs, so he was a hero several times over, hiring Polish and Italian crews to do the construction, even providing jobs for people in the black neighborhoods. “But we had to make great sacrifices during that time,” he told Sylvie. “I paid everyone’s wages. I bought all the materials.”
“Did you have to move out of your house, Charlie Roderick?” Sylvie asked—her grandfather got a kick out of her calling him by both his names. He shook his head and told her that no, they were able to remain in the house, but his wife, Sylvie’s grandmother, couldn’t travel to Paris, and Sylvie’s father, who was a young child at the time, wasn’t allowed new riding gear. They didn’t even have their annual Christmas party. “Did you still have a tree?” Sylvie asked. He nodded, patting her head. “Yes, of course. We still had a tree.”