254. 🕰️ THE WATCH IN THE RABBIT

Chapter 03 - The Birthday Cards

Hannah was born in January, during a snowstorm that shut down the bridges. Her father did not come to the hospital. That wasn't the first thing I told her about him, but it was the first thing I believed she deserved to know.

I had been widowed for sixteen months. My husband, Peter, died of a heart attack while changing the oil in our driveway. We had been married twelve years and had no children. After his death I took the housekeeper's position at the Romano estate because it paid enough to keep the little Cape Cod house where Peter and I had been happy.

Vittorio Romano was not a lonely man. He was a man who knew how to make other people feel lonely when he entered a room. I was twenty-nine, and I mistook being noticed for being understood. Years later, I would stop making excuses for both of us.

Hannah was his daughter. I told her when she turned eighteen. It took her three days to speak to me again.

Damian sat across from me in the breakfast room and listened to this without touching his eggs. His father had a wife then, a son in elementary school, and a good reputation among people who didn't ask how his money came in.

“Did my mother know?” Damian asked.

“I don't know.”

It was the truth, which was unusual enough in that house to make us both uncomfortable.

He set down his fork. “Why did you stay?”

“I needed the wages. And later I thought leaving would make it easier for people to erase her.”

“And him?”

“I stopped waiting for him to behave like a father.”

Damian's gaze moved toward the garden. “I wish I could say the same.”

He had been twenty-one when Vittorio was killed, or so we believed, in a wreck on the northern parkway. A funeral director prepared the body after a closed-casket viewing for the public. The police said the remains were badly burned. Anthony handled the papers. Nobody questioned the arrangements because the family had money and because everyone wanted to avoid asking what sort of accident could send a heavy sedan over a guardrail on a dry road.

Hannah had been sixteen. She stood in the last pew at the funeral, wearing a navy coat she had borrowed from me. I saw Vittorio's hand inside the coffin before the private viewing ended. A silver watch hung from his fingers. I have turned that moment over in my mind more often than I have ever admitted.

“Tell me about the birthday cards,” Damian said.

“I knew nothing about them until this morning.”

He looked hard at me. “June.”

“I've lied before. I'm not lying now.”

That seemed to reach him more effectively than indignation. He leaned back and pressed the heel of one hand against his eyes.

At noon the house received a telephone call from a clerk at the Saint Agnes Trust, confirming the closing of twenty-eight properties on Friday. Damian put her on speaker. She was brisk and polite. She called the houses “underperforming assets.”

I knew those houses. They had small yards, porch swings, and uneven sidewalks that ruined good shoes. I'd once lived on that street as a girl, before my mother married and moved us away. My friend Bernice still lived in number twelve. She had bought it with her husband after he came home from Vietnam.

“Who owns the trust?” I asked.

Anthony, appearing on the speaker line as though he'd been waiting for the question, answered before Damian could. “A private charitable vehicle your employer's father established. June, this isn't your concern.”

Damian looked at the telephone. “I asked her to stay.”

For the first time that day, Anthony sounded less than pleased.

After the call, Damian told me he had signed a preliminary agreement to sell the land to a development company. The residents were to receive relocation assistance. He used the phrase as if it settled everything.

“Bernice is seventy-eight,” I said. “Her husband's ashes are on the mantel. Where exactly do you relocate that?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it.

I found Mia asleep upstairs in the little guest room nearest the kitchen. Her rabbit lay on the pillow, turned inside out where the seam had given way. She had eaten half a banana and left the rest carefully wrapped in a napkin.

I sat on the edge of the bed and touched her hair. For years I had imagined Hannah's children as some distant possibility, a face in a stroller passing me on a street where she no longer wanted to be found. I had never allowed myself to picture their hands.

Mia woke and smiled. “You came back.”

“I did.”

“Mama said you always do.”

I swallowed. “Did your mama tell you about me?”

“She said you make pancakes shaped like moons. But they always turn into potatoes.”

Hannah used to beg me to make moon pancakes. I had failed at them every Sunday morning for nearly ten years.

“Mia, where was your mama going when she left you?”

“She put on the blue coat and went where the trains are.”

“Did she say who she was meeting?”

Mia held her rabbit by its good ear and considered the question. “The lady with the yellow scarf. The one who cries on Tuesdays.”

I knew one woman who wore a yellow scarf even in summer. Bernice Talbot, my friend on Saint Agnes Row, had been attending city hearings every Tuesday for months, trying to stop the eviction notices.

I asked Rosa to stay with Mia and drove to Bernice's house in the small sedan the Romanos kept for errands. The streets were wet after a brief afternoon rain. There were campaign signs and yard sales, men washing cars, ordinary life going on as though nothing in the world had changed.

Bernice answered in slippers and a cardigan with one pocket hanging loose. She was holding an envelope.

“June,” she said. “I was coming to find you.”

“Has Hannah been here?”

Bernice looked past me at the street. “Twice. She told me not to let the men from the trust inside.”

I stepped into the narrow hall. On the wall hung a photograph of Bernice and her husband on their wedding day, forty-nine years earlier. The envelope shook in her hand.

“Hannah said you'd need this if she didn't call by three.”

Inside was a birthday card with a yellow rose on the front. It was addressed to Hannah on her twenty-seventh birthday, eleven years after Vittorio's funeral. The handwritten message was brief: Forgive a coward his silence. I have not forgiven myself. Dad.

Beneath it was a return address at a retirement home in Maine.

Before I could finish reading, Bernice caught my wrist.

“There's something else, June. The man who brought Hannah here yesterday said he was Damian Romano's father.”