December 3: What Your Father Signed

ASSIGNMENT OF LEASEHOLD INTEREST.

The words are at the top in that heavy legal font that always looks like it's yelling. You read them three times before they mean anything.

Assignor: Calvin A. Weatherby, d/b/a Weatherby's Christmas House. Assignee: Oakhurst Development Group, LLC. Premises: 14 Main Street, Eastbrook, Vermont.

Dated: August 14.

August. You were in this stockroom in August, unpacking the first shipment of Tilda's glass. Your father was upstairs, you thought, napping.

You turn the page with fingers that don't feel like yours. There's a number. It's large. It's larger than any number you've ever seen next to your family's name. There's a clause about the tenant's right to remain until December 31. There's a schedule.

Site clearance and demolition: November 15.

Someone has struck that date out in blue ink. Beside it, in neat, precise capitals you recognize from the Weatherby's card he wrote Ardith's number on: POSTPONED. C.J.

Then November 29. Struck out. POSTPONED. C.J.

Then December 8. Struck out. POSTPONED. C.J.

And at the bottom, typed on a fresh line, as if someone had gotten tired of the blue ink: December 27. FINAL. G. Cobb.

You sit down on a box of tinsel because your knees decide to.

The building is gone. The building has been gone since August. Every morning you've flipped the sign, every ornament you've sold, every name you've lettered, you were doing it in somebody else's building, and you didn't know.

She doesn't know. Not yet.

You take the portfolio and you go upstairs.

Your father is in his armchair with the TV on and no sound, and when he sees what's in your hands, he doesn't pretend. That's the worst part. He just closes his eyes.

"Dad."

"I know."

"August."

"I know, kid."

"You sold the shop. You sold Mom's shop, and you let me open the window on the first, and you let me make a bet with him." Your voice cracks in the middle. "Do you know how stupid I looked? I stood in that inn and told him if he still wanted to tear it down on Christmas Eve, I'd sign. There's nothing to sign! He must have laughed all the way back to his room."

"He didn't laugh." Calvin's voice is rough. "He called me after. He said you came to see him. He said he said yes."

"Why would he say yes?"

"I don't know." He opens his eyes and they're wet. "I don't know why that boy does anything, Ava. I only know he's been the one holding it back."

You sit down on the edge of the coffee table, because you're out of strength for standing.

He tells you everything then. It comes out slowly, the way a splinter does. The bills from your mother's last year, the ones insurance fought and then denied. The second mortgage on the house up the hill that he sold anyway. The back taxes on the lease that piled up while he sat in hospital waiting rooms not opening the mail. The bank's letters, the polite ones and then the other ones. A lender out of Hartford that called in June and said they might be buying the note.

"I was going to lose it anyway," he says. "All of it. The lease, the stock, the name. This way there was money. This way the debt's gone and there's enough left that you and Tilda would be all right. I signed in August and I told myself I'd tell you in September. Then October. Then the window was so beautiful." He puts his face in his hands. "I'm a coward. I'm so sorry. Your mother would have told you on day one."

You want to scream at him. You also want to put your arms around him, and you can't do both, so you do neither. You just sit there with the portfolio on your knees until the TV switches itself off.

Then you stand up and get your coat.

"Where are you going?"

"To find out why he said yes."

It's 11:40 when you cross the green. The storm has stopped. Everything is silver and absolutely silent, and the snow comes up past your boots.

Tamsen isn't at the front desk at this hour. Nobody stops you going up the stairs. Room four is at the end of the hall, and there's light under the door.

You knock like a cop.

He opens it in a gray T-shirt and sweatpants, barefoot, hair wrecked, reading glasses pushed up on his head, and he is so beautiful it makes you angrier. Behind him the room is covered in paper. Spreadsheets on the bed, maps on the desk, a laptop glowing on the floor. It looks like a war room.

He sees the portfolio in your hands, and every bit of salesman goes out of his face.

"Ava," he says quietly.

"Is it true?"

"Come in. Please. It's ten degrees."

"Is it true, Chase?"

He looks at you for a long second. He doesn't reach for the portfolio. He doesn't try to explain it away. He just says, "Yes."

The word lands somewhere under your ribs.

"Oakhurst bought your father's lease in August," he says. "And the land underneath it, from the old trust, in July. The building has been ours since then. The shop is a tenant until the thirty-first. That's all true."

"Then what was this?" You hold up the portfolio. "What was yesterday? The apron? The bet? Were you just having fun with the local girl while you waited for the bulldozers?"

"No."

"Then what?"

"The demolition was supposed to be November fifteenth." He says it carefully, like each word costs something. "I pushed it. Then I pushed it again. And again. I invented a permit problem. I invented a utility problem. I told my CEO the town would sue. None of that was true. I've been stalling since the day I signed."

You stare at him. "Why?"

He doesn't answer that. Something closes behind his eyes, a door you can't see.

"Garrison Cobb is done waiting," he says instead. "He gave me until Christmas Eve to give him a reason not to knock it down. One that makes him more money than knocking it down. If I don't have one, he goes ahead without me. So when you walked into that bar and offered me twenty-four days..." He laughs, but it isn't a happy sound. "You offered me exactly what I needed. I'd have been a fool to counter."

"You let me believe I had something to bargain with."

"You did. You do." He finally steps back to let you in, holding the door. "You just didn't know what it was."

You don't go in. You stand in the hallway in your soaked boots and your mother's cardigan, holding the proof that your whole life was sold in August, and you look at the man who bought it.

"What happens if you don't find a reason?"

He doesn't look away. You'll give him that, later. He never once looks away.

"The crew is booked for December twenty-seventh," Chase says. "Unless you and I find a way, your shop has twenty-two days left."