Chapter 29

Quinn come through the door much thinner than he had been in spring. Maria had made an involuntary cry when she saw him in the kitchen doorway. She crossed the room and held him for longer than usual. Quinn stood in it with his arms around her, smelling the garlic, the simmering stock, and the warmth of a room.

Home.

He went up to his room showered, came down and reverently ate what Maria put in front of him.

Then the Colonel's office. Sullivan was there as well. Quinn sat in the chair across from the Colonel desk and told his summer.

He told it the way he'd been trained to tell things -- not chronologically but structurally, the significant events and their meaning, the skills acquired and their current level, the mistakes and what they had cost and what they had taught him. He had organized it during the plane ride home, doing his best to be accurate and honest. The failures given weight because the failures were the point of the summer.

He told about the paddling and the portages, about Taylor's instruction and what it had included. The compass work, the plant knowledge, the water reading, the fire building. He described the solo sections with the precision that the Colonel had taught him to report.

He told about the grizzly.

Sullivan went still when Quinn described the charge. Quinn told it plainly -- the thirty feet, the cub, the spray, the sound she made, the cloud of spray and the result. He said, at the end: "I was pretty scared. My hands were shaking when I deployed the spray."

"You held your ground," the Colonel said.

The Colonel looked at him for a couple of beats. Then said, "Continue."

He told about the illness, his carelessness sorting the mushrooms before cooking, then the symptoms, the decisions, the two days in camp, Taylor arriving, and his assessment.

The Colonel said nothing, but both he and Sullivan exchanged looks.

Then he recounted his mistakes. There were many; poorly chosen portage routes that had cost him hours retracing his steps, camps made in a bad locations and the times he had gotten got lost.

He talked about the country, about what all those hundreds miles of north woods felt like. Trying to find the words to explain the boreal forest, the silence, which was not silence, but something else.

He stopped before telling about the weird no-time.

The Colonel looked at him.

"What else?" the Colonel asked.

Quinn looked at him. He thought about the no-time coming and going.

"There were times," he said carefully, "when the distinction between thinking about the forest and being in it went away. I was... just completely there." He stopped. "I don't have the right language for it."

The Colonel looked at him for a moment. Then he stood, went to the bookshelf, found what he was looking for, and brought it back, setting it on the desk in front of Quinn.

Emerson. Nature and Selected Essays.

"Read the first essay," the Colonel said. "Then the essay called 'Self-Reliance.' Then come back to me, and we'll talk some more about this."

Quinn looked at the book.

"He found language for it," the Colonel said. "Or closer to language than most." He sat back down. "It won't be his exact experience or your exact experience, but it will be recognizable."

Then the Colonel said, "That was well done."

Quinn was not prepared for it.

He sat with it for a moment and felt the armor do what it had been doing since the holidays, a cracking letting the warmth through.

"Thank you," he said.

Sullivan said, from the chair by the window. "Smith said something I'm going to pass along."

Quinn looked at him.

"They said they'd go to war with you," Sullivan said.

The room was quiet.

Quinn understood what this meant. He understood that this was not a casual statement.

He sat with it.

"Tell them thank you," he said finally. "When you see them."

Sullivan nodded once. "I will."

The next morning, he went to talk to Maria.

She was always in the kitchen at this hour. She looked up when Quinn came in and smiled her usual good morning greeting.

He stood at the kitchen counter, trying to organize what he wanted to say.

"Abuela, I want to ask a favor," he said.

"Sit down first," she said. "You're too tall to have conversations with when you're standing."

He sat.

She poured some coffee without asking.

He wrapped his hands around the cup and thought about the summer and what it had done to the way he understood food. He wanted to explain it right because she was the person who would understand what he meant best.

"In the north," he said, "food was fuel."

She sat across from him with her own tea and listened.

"The MREs, fish, the plants that Taylor taught me to eat: they all were just fuel. It kept me going." He paused. " I got to thinking about you and your kitchen and never stopped."

Maria held her tea and didn't say anything.

"I'd be paddling or portaging or hiking through the country, and I'd think about things: your tortilla soup, the way you fixed roast beef, or made scrambled eggs with the peppers. I understood something out there that I think I'd known for a while without knowing that I knew it."

"Tell me."

"That the food you cook for us, it's like you're putting something more into it when you cook. Some quality of attention or care or..." He stopped, finding the word. "Love. Maybe that's the word. You cook with love, and we receive it. That's the whole thing. That's what I was thinking about up in Canada."

Maria was quiet.She set her teacup down and looked at him with glimmering eyes.

"Thank you. That's exactly right."

"I want to learn to cook," he said.

"That's what you came to ask?"

"Yes." He paused. "If you're willing to teach me."

"You came home from Canada," she said, "and the first thing you did after seeing Himself was come ask me to teach you to cook."

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

"My Mama taught me to cook," she said. "Our kitchen was about the size of this table. Mama, she cooked for seven people every night, and she never...She never once cooked without love. I didn't have a word for it when I was learning. I just watched her hands, copied what her hands did.

"What you said," she continued, "about the food carrying something. My Mama would have said that in different words and meant the same thing." She looked at him with the eyes that had gone bright. "She would have loved you."

He held the coffee and had to concentrate to keep from letting the warmth of her words crack him.

"When do we start?" he said.

She laughed. The full laugh, the kitchen-filling laugh, the one that was unchanged from the first morning.

"Tomorrow morning," she said. "We do the bread first. Everything starts with bread."

"Why bread?"

"Because," she said, "bread is the basic thing. It has four ingredients. If you're patient, it works. If you rush it, it flops."

"Okay," he said. "Bread first."

She patted his hand once, firmly.

"You'll probably make a mess of it. Flour everywhere. Don't be embarrassed by it."

"I don't get embarrassed by being bad at things I'm learning," he said.

She looked at him. "Yes, that's why you're so good at learning things."

The next morning at five, he was at the kitchen counter. She was already there with the flour, the yeast, the salt, and the water, organized on the counter. Everything in its place before the work began.

She showed him the yeast first. The temperature of the water, the foam that meant the yeast was alive and ready.

"Water too hot and you kill it," she said. "Too cold and it won't wake up. You're looking for warm. Warm like--" She held his hand briefly under the tap. "Like that."

He measured the water and checked the temperature with his wrist the way she showed him.

"Good," she said.

The flour was next. The measuring, which she did precisely.

"Baking is chemistry. All about precision."

"Don't pack it," she said. "Scoop gently and level with a knife. Packed flour is too much flour, and too much flour makes the bread like a brick."

He scooped gently and leveled.

"Never let the salt touch the yeast directly before they're mixed into the flour. The salt kills it. They need to be introduced gradually."

Later, as he was kneading the dough, she said, "There, you feel that?"

"Yes," he said.

"That's the gluten forming. That's the structure." She watched his hands. "Keep going. Ten minutes. Your hands will tell you when it's ready."

"How will I know?"

"It will feel like something alive," she said. "It will push back against you like it wants you to stop."

He kneaded for ten minutes, and at seven minutes and thirty seconds, the dough did exactly what she described -- developed elasticity and pushed back against his hands.

"Oh," he said.

"Yes," she said. "That."

She covered it and set it to rise, and they sat at the kitchen counter with coffee while it proved, and she talked about her Mama's kitchen in the Bronx.

At two hours, the dough had doubled, and she showed him the punch-down. The dough deflated under his fist. She shaped it with him, showing the fold and the tension-building, the way you created the surface that would hold the structure through the bake.

As they waited for the second rise, she told him more stories about her mother and her sisters.

Forty-five minutes later, it was into the oven. The smell began before long, the smell of bread baking. Quinn stood in the kitchen and breathed it in and felt the no-time arrive: the full presence, the everything-at-once and Maria in her kitchen and the smell and the morning light.

At forty minutes, he pulled the bread from the oven.

The crust was toasty brown and sounded properly hollow when he knocked on it.

He turned it out on the rack, and they looked at it together.

"You made bread," she said.

"We made bread," he said.

She shook her head. "I showed you. You made it."

The kitchen was very quiet.

After thirty minutes, Maria gave him a nod. He cut the bread and ate a slice, so warm butter was melting. He tasted it fully, It tasted like bread and something else...

Home.

Chapter 30

Quinn had formed the plan one dawn morning while he was paddling on one of the solitary treks. The lake was coming alive around him. Water mirror-smooth, rose-colored with the sun rise. The scene was so unspeakably, beautiful that a profound loneliness came over him without warning. A longing ache to share this with the girls. He couldn't describe the yearning, so he called it loneliness.

His mind had gone to memory of Sheila saying that someday she'd like to visit New York city. The theaters especially. Katherine saying that she been to central park once and it was overwhelming and fascinating in equal measure. Keiko who had been visited the city often told stories of play and restaurants that had fascinated the other two girls.

So, that week, the plan had assembled itself. He filled his notebook with logistics--the hotel, the permissions, the finances and travel.

He laughed to himself, what a rich kid thing to do.

He was home now and ready to put his plan in motion.

The girls' fathers were the potential roadblocks to his plan.

The mothers would, he suspected, be easier--not because they were less protective, but because they would read the gesture differently than a father would regarding his sixteen-year-old daughter alone with a boy in a hotel suite in New York. The fathers required a direct approach, one that anticipated concern and addressed it before it was voiced.

He decided to go beard them each in their own territory.

Richard Gallagher first.

He called the Gallagher house on a Wednesday evening and asked for Mr. Gallagher directly.

Richard Gallagher had a voice that communicated his professional life--assured, direct, confident.

"Hello, Quinn, what's up?" he said.

"I'd like to meet with you if you have time," Quinn said. "There is something I want to ask you. I'd rather do it in person."

A pause. "How about my office? Friday at noon?"

"Yes, sir. I'll be there. Thank you."

Gallagher Capital was on the thirty-fourth floor of a high-rise in San Francisco's financial district. The views communicated the firm's status in the city. Richard Gallagher's office was substantial, but not ostentatious; the furniture for comfort rather than display.

He stood when Quinn came in. They shook hands across the desk.

Quinn sat when invited, looked at Richard Gallagher directly, and began.

"I want to take Katherine, Sheila, and Keiko to New York for a long weekend before school starts," he said. "Flying there on the Colonel's plane. We'll be staying at the Plaza, coming back Monday. Shopping, a play if they want to see one. I'd be in a separate room. I planned it in Canada this summer."

He stopped. He'd decided to front-load the information so that the opinion Richard Gallagher was about to form would be based on accurate facts rather than incomplete ones.

Richard Gallagher looked at him.

The look had the quality Quinn had come to associate with him: the shrewd mind processing, the variables being weighed.

"You planned this in Canada," he said.

"Yes sir, I knew they'd enjoy New York before school. I thought it would be fun to surprise them."

Richard Gallagher was quiet for a moment. Then he laughed.

"Jesus, Quinn, when I was sixteen, I would no more have talked to a girl's father and suggested a weekend getaway in a strange city than I would have imagined sprouting wings and flying."

"Yes, sir. I realize it's a stretch."

"You came into my living room one day, and you've occupied more of my wife's and daughter's conversational real estate than anyone in recent memory." He said. "My wife thinks you're the most interesting young person she's met in years. My daughter has changed this year in ways I think are good, and I think are somehow connected to you."

Quinn held his gaze and said nothing because there was nothing to say to that.

"The suite," Richard said. "Separate room, you said."

"The girls in the suite, me in a separate room on the same floor," Quinn said. "I've made the reservation. I can give you the details."

"You've already made the reservation."

"I wanted to have the suite available when I asked," Quinn said. "Not to present it as a done deal. The reservation can be canceled. I just wanted to be prepared."

Richard Gallagher looked at him for a long moment. Then he laughed again.

"My wife," he said, "when I told her you'd called, said to say yes before you finished asking." He picked up the pen on his desk and set it down again. "She is not wrong as often as I would prefer."

Quinn waited.

"I have two conditions," Richard Gallagher said. "First, you call me every evening from New York. Not to report, not to check in like a child. I don't want that. But I want to hear your voice and know the situation is what you've described it as."

"Yes, sir," Quinn said. "That's reasonable."

"Second condition." He looked at Quinn with the full directness of a man saying the real thing. "Whatever happens to my daughter on that trip -- good, bad, difficult, wonderful -- she comes home like she left. That's your responsibility to take on."

Quinn looked at him. "That goes without saying. That's my intention with everything I do that involves Katherine."

"Okay, send me the details," he said. "And my wife will want to know what play you're considering."

Quinn stood, and they shook hands across the desk.

"Thank you, sir," Quinn said.

Dave Prentiss was a lawyer and an ex-pro baseball pitcher. He still had the physicality of an elite athlete. He and his wife, Janet, had adopted Sheila five years ago with the open-eyed commitment of people who understood what they were getting into and had done it anyway, which was a form of courage that Quinn respected.

Dave Prentiss had agreed to meet at a coffee shop near the public high school where he was a part-time baseball coach. Quinn arrived first and had coffee waiting when he came through the door. The man had humor and directness of someone who has coached teenagers and is comfortable with their company.

When Quinn told him the plan, he listened with the attention of someone who was tracking not just the content but the motives behind the content.

When Quinn finished, he was quiet for a moment, his large hands around his coffee cup.

"New York," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"The Plaza."

"Yes, sir. I wanted to give them a surprise."

Dave looked at him then looked out the window. He seemed like he was struggling to find words. He turned gave Quinn a direct look.

"I know about the Abernethy house. I know what happened there. Sheila told us about that night and what came after."

Quinn stiffened.

Dave Prentiss looked at him steadily. "I want you to know that I know. Not to make it a thing. Just because you deserve to know that there are people who know and who--" He stopped, finding it. "Who think about what it cost and are grateful."

Quinn sat with this. After a minute, he said, "Thank you."

Dave nodded his understanding. "My Sheila girl, she's happy and healthy. Largely, because of you."

He looked at his cup. "So anyway, moving on. New York. The Plaza. You and three girls and a suite."

"And a separate room for me," Quinn said. "Same floor."

Dave looked at him. "I'm going to ask you a direct question, and I want a direct answer."

"Yes, sir."

"Is there anything about this trip that Sheila or her mother or I would not be comfortable with if we knew about it?"

Quinn held the man's gaze. "No, it's exactly what I've described. They're my friends. I want to give them a surprise weekend before school starts."

Dave Prentiss looked at him for five full seconds. Then he put out his hand.

Quinn shook it.

"She'll want to see Hamilton if it's still running," Dave said, getting up. "She's been talking about it forever. If you can get tickets--"

"I'll get tickets," Quinn said.

Dave smiled. "Yeah, I figured you would."

Consul Kenji Yamamoto received him in the diplomatic residence on a Thursday evening. Quinn wore his dark suit. He performed the formal bow and greeting at the door, which the Consul received with one of his own.

They sat in the formal sitting room, which was appointed with the careful combination of Japanese and American elements. Tea was served by a staff member, a quiet woman who moved with trained invisibility.

Mrs. Yamamoto was present as well, something Quinn thought he should have known to expect. It was going to be a more formal meeting than he anticipated with the full weight of the Yamamoto household engaged.

He told them his plan.

In more detail than he'd shared with the others. He sensed the Consul needed precision. He covered the specifics of the arrangement were in full: the dates, the flight, the hotel, the room configuration, and the return. He spoke clearly and without rushing. When he finished, he sat back and waited.

The Consul looked at him with the assessment of a man who had to read people for a living.

"You came to us to ask permission directly," the Consul said.

"Yes, sir. It would not have been appropriate to ask Keiko without asking you first."

"Many boys her age would have simply asked her and relied on her to negotiate with us."

"Yes, sir," Quinn said. "I'm aware that would be one approach."

"You find that approach inadequate?"

"Yes sir, I find it disrespectful," Quinn said carefully. "It puts Keiko in a position of having to manage something that was my responsibility."

The Consul was quiet. He sipped his tea. He set his cup down.

"My concern," he said, "is not your character. I have assessed your character. My concern is the environment. Keiko is a diplomat's daughter, which makes her a target."

"I've thought about that," Quinn said. "I need your guidance there. You understand the risks better than I do."

The Consul looked at him. This, Quinn understood, had been the right thing to say--not because it was strategic but because it was honest, the genuine acknowledgment of a gap in his plan.

"I will arrange security," the Consul said. "Discreet. They will follow at a distance. You won't see them unless something requires them to be visible."

"That's acceptable," Quinn said. "I am glad to know that they will be there."

"You won't know where," the Consul said. "They will be invisible."

"Understood."

The Consul looked at his wife briefly--the exchange of two people who have made decisions together long enough to conduct the exchange in a glance. She returned the look calmly and nodded once.

"There is a restaurant in Midtown," he said. "Keiko has wanted to go since we were posted here. It's a kaiseki restaurant--traditional Japanese multi-course. She has mentioned it four times. If you are taking her to New York--" He paused, with the slightly formal quality of a man offering something he finds slightly difficult to request because it is personal. "Take her there."

Quinn took out his notebook and wrote the name when the Consul gave it.

The Consul watched this. Something moved in his face again.

"Your Japanese," he said.

"Getting better," Quinn said. "Slowly."

"The effort is noted," the Consul said.

Mrs. Yamamoto poured more tea with the graceful, unhurried motion of someone for whom this gesture was also language.

"She is happy here," she said quietly. "Happier than we expected. She was anxious about the transfer." She looked at Quinn. "You and your friends, Sheila and Katherine. You made it so belonging happened quickly."

Quinn thought about the morning at the school steps and Sheila saying begone, wretched man and Keiko's tinkling laugh arriving like something that had been waiting for an occasion.

"They did that," he said. "Sheila and Katherine. I just made the introduction."

Mrs. Yamamoto smiled slightly. "The introduction was the thing."

The Consul stood, which meant the meeting was concluded. They shook hands--the Consul's grip formal and firm, the handshake of a man who takes the gesture seriously.

At the door, Quinn bowed again.

The Consul bowed in return.

Quinn went down the steps of the residence and stood for a moment on the sidewalk, feeling the happy satisfaction of his plan coming together.

He had one more conversation to have.

He found the Colonel in the library.

This was where he was most evenings at this hour. In the leather chair by the fireplace, reading, the room doing its thing with the warm light on the shelved books. Quinn stood in the doorway waiting for the Colonel's acknowledgment.

The Colonel looked up and waved him in.

Quinn told him the plan. Briefly; the Colonel didn't need the extended version, had the capacity to fill in details from a summary. The New York trip, the permissions obtained, the suite, the flight request.

When Quinn finished, the Colonel was quiet for a moment, and then something happened to his expression that Quinn had seen maybe four times in two and a half years -- the thing that came and didn't immediately go, the expression that had found its occasion and was staying for it.

"I'll make the call about the plane," he said. "Consider it arranged." He looked back at his book. Then, without looking up: "It's a good thing to do, Quinn. For them and for yourself."

"I know, it's a rich kid thing," he said.

The Colonel turned a page. "It is," he said. "You are also allowed to be that occasionally when it comes from the right place." He paused. "This comes from the right place."

Then Quinn went to help Maria with dinner.

Chapter 31

Two days later, Quinn picked up the girls and took them to the ice cream place.

He'd been here enough times by now that the woman behind the counter knew his order: one scoop of vanilla. The others took their time ordering. Decision fatigue was not a real thing with these girls.

They sat where they always sat, in the big booth in the back corner. Katherine had two scoops of chocolate with a dollop of salted caramel. Sheila had changed her order twice and landed on a combination that the woman behind the counter had assembled with the patient professionalism of someone who has seen it all. Keiko had a single scoop of black licorice, which she'd been pleased to find available and which the others had looked at with the curiosity of people looking at a freak show--horrified but too interested to tear their eyes away.

Quinn placidly ate his vanilla.

"Where did you go? Another of those weird things like last January when you just disappeared off the face of the earth," Sheila said.

"Canada," he said. This opened the tale of his summer. He told the story differently, much more colorful than the Colonel's debrief. This version told of what he had seen and what it had felt like. He could see they equated the Canadian wilderness with the depths of the Amazon jungle: remote and scary.

He told about the canoeing, learning it wrong, and then learning it right. He told about Taylor and all his lessons on plants. He explained the portages with an account of how brutal some of the portages had been. He told about hunger and about thinking of Maria's kitchen, her tortilla soup appearing in his mind in full sensory detail during the seventh day of consecutive MRE's.

Keiko listened with the focused attention she brought to things she was genuinely interested in. She'd spent her summer in Tokyo and was processing the isolation of his summer side by side.

"You got poisoned?" Sheila shrieked when he got to that.

"Yeah, for two days I was hoping I would die. My own fault; I ate a poisonous mushroom. From now on, no mushrooms for this boy."

He told about Taylor arriving and feeding him soup and salted water.

Katherine looked at him like she was trying to understand him.

Then he got to the bear.

He had thought about how to tell the bear story on the drive over, not because he wanted to manage their response to it, but because there was a version of the story that was the operational version, the plain accurate account he'd given the Colonel.

He told the version he'd decided on during the plane trip home: walking along the trail, spotting the bear, then the cub.

The three were listening with open mouths, absolutely caught up in the scary drama of the story.

He told about the bear spray and how he had been training with it, then the movement to his hip.

Then he paused.

"Before I ruined her day with the spray," he said, "I thought, what would Sheila do, I asked myself."

Keiko looked up from her ice cream.

"I said, in my most authoritative voice, 'BEGONE, BEAR!' Surprisingly, she did not obey; in fact, it really pissed her off. So I had to use the bear spray. Thankfully, it worked."

The table was very still for a beat.

Then Sheila made a sound that was a laugh arriving faster than she could manage it, the real laugh, the full one, and it came out in a burst that caused the woman behind the counter to look over with the mild interest of someone who has heard a lot of things in this shop and still notes the genuinely funny ones.

Katherine had both hands over her mouth, snorting and laughing and snorting some more.

Keiko's tinkling laugh arrived layered over everything, bright and genuine, her composure entirely gone in the lovely way it went when something surprised it out of her.

"BEGONE, BEAR," Sheila said, in the voice, the full theatrical authority of the character she'd been inhabiting since the school play, then dissolved again.

He waited for the laughter to run its course, which took a while. Katherine got there first, her composure returning in stages, and she looked at him with bright eyes wet from laughing. "Was there really a grizzly bear?"

"There was really a grizzly bear."

Quinn ate his vanilla ice cream and basked in the enjoyment of the telling a funny story to people who laughed at exactly the right place..

He waited for them to finish the last of their ice cream, waited for the right moment when the conversation had come to a natural pause, the comfortable quiet of four people who have been talking for an hour and are in the warm aftermath of it.

Then he said, casually:

"I'm going to New York City for some school shopping before fall term starts. Taking the Colonel's jet."

The statement landed with a thump. He'd hit it perfectly, like it was information, no big deal. He watched them receive it out of the corner of his eye while he enjoyed his ice cream.

Katherine looked up. "When?"

"Next Thursday. Back Monday."

"Where are you going to stay?"

"I was thinking the Plaza."

"You're going to New York on Thursday, and you're staying at The Plaza." This from Sheila, who couldn't hide her envy.

"Yup," he said.

But Sheila caught something. She was staring at him intently, her pattern recognition running; sensing that something was off.

Keiko was looking at her ice cream spoon with the expression of someone who was also listening with more than half their attention.

"You're going by yourself?" Katherine asked. "That'll kinda suck; you'll have nobody to share it with."

He waited one beat.

"Well, no, I won't be by myself. I've arranged for you guys to come with me. That's assuming you guys want to go."

They all went still.

He watched his words land with delight. The initial stillness, their faces moving through reception and understanding, and the arrival of genuine pleasure, all three of them at slightly different speeds.

Sheila went still. Her eyes locked on his. Then she yelled, "YOU'RE SHITTING ME, NEW YORK?"

"Yup."

Katherine's excitement came and went as quickly as it arrived.

"Our parents will never agree," Katherine said with the flat certainty of someone who knows the reality of things.

"My father would not either," Keiko said.

Sheila looked at him with her reading happening full on.

"Quinn, what did you do?"

He held the pause for exactly one more second.

"I already got permission from your families," he said.

The booth was very still again. Then all three of them started talking simultaneously.

Katherine said, "My father said yes?"

Keiko said, more quietly, "You spoke to my father."

Sheila said, "You went to our parents." And then, more slowly. "You went to our parents first. Before you told us."

"Yup," Quinn said with more than a little smugness. He was having so much fun.

"My dad said yes," Katherine said again. She was working through it. "My dad said yes to New York."

"He had conditions," Quinn said. "I'll tell you what they are. They're reasonable."

"What did you say to him?" she asked.

"The truth," Quinn said. "The whole plan, the room arrangement, the flight. Everything exactly as planned."

Katherine looked at him. "And that was enough?"

"Your father is a smart guy," Quinn said. "I told him the truth."

She was quiet for a moment. Something moved in her face that was the expression she had when she was receiving something with many layers and deciding which layer to address first. She addressed the practical one.

"We're staying at The Plaza for reals?" Shiela said.

"Yup. A suite for the three of you. Separate room for me on the same floor."

"Hamilton," Sheila said, "I wonder if Hamilton is still--"

"I might have found four tickets in my sock drawer."

"You found Hamilton tickets in your sock drawer?" she said.

"Yup. Your dad mentioned it," Quinn said. "Said you might be interested. Of course if you don't want to go, I figure I could scalp them for some serious coin at the entrance."

"Asshole." She slapped his arm. She looked at him, the nine-year-old and sixteen-year-old all there in the same gaze and said, very quietly, "Thank you."

"Welcome," Quinn said.

She nodded once. She picked up her spoon and looked at the last of her ice cream and didn't say anything further, which was a most un-Sheila-like response.

Keiko had been quiet during this, the processing running in the careful, layered way of hers. She looked at Quinn now with the contained, genuine expression she had when she was going to say the real thing.

"You went to my father," she said. "At the residence."

"Yes."

"Formally."

"Yes."

He looked at her. "How did you know I did that?"

"Because you would have," she said, with simple certainty. "And he would have been impressed," she said. "That you knew to come to him directly."

"Seemed the thing to do," Quinn said.

She paused. "He thinks that you are the kind of person worth knowing."

The booth was quiet.

The ice cream shop continued its business around them--the woman behind the counter, the other customers. None of them were aware of the weight of delight in the corner booth.

"So Thursday?" Katherine said, eventually. Her voice had the quality of someone who has processed the information, arrived at the practical implications, and is ready to begin planning.

"Thursday morning," Quinn said. "Six-forty-five."

"I have nothing to wear to Hamilton," Sheila said, suddenly.

"Duh, shopping, girl," Katherine said. "We're going to New York."

Keiko's tinkling laugh arrived.

Quinn ate the last of his vanilla.

He had not told them about the loneliness. But Sheila sensed something. She looked at him and gave him a warm, shared look of understanding. Then she picked up her bag and announced in a full theatrical voice to the ice cream shop at large:

"New York awaits. Let us be off."

They went out into the late August afternoon, his Jeep at the curb, and they got in--Sheila got the front because she'd called it, Katherine and Keiko in the back. All three immediately resumed the conversation of people who have a weekend to plan and only four days to plan it in.

Quinn drove, his hands at nine and three.

Look at your life, dude.