"Answer me something, and don't give me the version for the board." She turned the invitation slightly, so the embossed laurel caught the light. "You've been buying this company for five months. Quiet as a church mouse with a brokerage account. Caleb says the papers are ready when you are, and Caleb is not a boy who guesses. So you'll have it — the factories, the name, the whole ninety years of it. You don't need tomorrow night. There's not a number in that house that isn't already on your pencil sheet." Her voice stayed gentle, which was how you knew it mattered. "So tell me true. Do you want the company — or do you want the room?"
He considered lying, briefly, the way you consider a door you already know is locked. "I want the company," he said. "The factories are good. The people are good. The pension can be made whole and the lines can run another fifty years, and if we don't do it, some fund out of Boston will do it the other way — sell the brand to a licensing house, close Ohio, and call the hole in the pension an act of God." He turned his wine glass a quarter turn, a habit from the years when his hands had needed somewhere to be. "The room is just where I find out what it's really worth. You can read a balance sheet in Atlanta. You can't read a family until you're standing in its dining room watching what it does with its hands."
"And the service entrance?" she asked, very quietly.
The silence did its work. "That," he said at last, "is weather, Naomi. Not the reason."
"Weather can drown a crop, baby."
"I know it. That's why you're coming. You're my forecast." He reached across the island and took her hand, and held it the way you hold something whose value you have long since stopped needing to calculate. "I have run it every way there is to run it. If I walk in there tomorrow wanting the room, I'll make a fool's bargain — I'll pay too much, or I'll say the thing that feels good and costs us the deal. I don't intend either. I intend to eat their dinner, dance with my wife, let George be pleased with himself, and come home. What they see when they look at me is their affair. What I do is mine."
Naomi looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded once, the nod of a woman who has heard the true thing and filed it where true things go. "All right," she said. "Then we go as guests. Not as a verdict."
"As guests," he said. "The verdict keeps."
She picked up the invitation and read it once more, the way she used to read a student's file before a hard meeting — looking for the child inside the paperwork. "A foundation for 'the preservation of American domestic craft,'" she read aloud. "Nineteen fifty-eight, it says. Isaiah, in nineteen fifty-eight that foundation put three hundred girls a year through trade school. I looked it up. Sewing, drafting, bookkeeping — real trades, real wages. My aunt Ernestine applied in sixty-one and didn't get it, and she waited tables for nine years and never said a bitter word about it, which tells you what kind of women raised me." She set the card down gently, as if it were older and frailer than it looked. "Last year the foundation gave one grant. One. To a preservation society for historic ice houses. Ice houses. The girls are still out there, baby. The money just forgot where they lived."
"Then we'll remind it," Isaiah said.
"That's the company talking again," she said, but without any fight in it. "I'm not against the company, Isaiah. I've eaten off the company for twenty-eight years and I've watched you refuse, four separate times I can name, to buy a thing you couldn't look in the eye. I trust the company." She folded her reading glasses and set them on the novel. "It's the room I don't trust. Rooms like that one have a way of telling a man who he is before he's had a chance to decide. I've seen it happen to better men than the Pembertons — I've seen it happen in church. So we go in knowing. That's all I ever ask. We go in knowing."
She was refilling her glass — actually drinking it this time, in honor of a decision made — when his phone lit on the counter, and George Ainsworth's name rose on the screen like a man surfacing from a dive, delighted with himself.
Isaiah put it on speaker. "George."
"Tell me you're coming." George's voice was seventy years old and entirely unrepentant, a banker's voice gone to pasture and enjoying the grass. "Tell me Naomi has the dress and the car is ordered and I have not spent three months of board dinners being mysterious for nothing."
"We're coming."