Chapter 10 - The Empty Room at Ridgewood
Christmas Day broke with that cold, blinding brightness that only comes after twenty-four inches of heavy snow has scrubbed every particle of dust out of the northern sky.
The sun came up over the Palisades like a fresh-turned brass kettle, throwing six-foot blue shadows across the drifts on Lincoln Avenue. By noon, the temperature had dropped to eighteen degrees, and the air smelled of clean chimney wood, roasted fat, and the salt that the county trucks were finally dropping on the intersections.
In our bungalow, the windows were steamed solid.
You couldn't see the street; you could only see the white, crystalline ferns of frost that had grown four inches high on the inside of the glass, melting from the bottom up where the heat from twenty people and forty-eight hours of continuous roasting had turned the five rooms into a moist, sweet greenhouse.
The table ran from the front coat hooks all the way to the upright piano.
There were nineteen chairs.
We had two mahogany dining chairs from my mother’s apartment, four yellow chrome dinette chairs from Pete’s kitchen that smelled faintly of PB Blaster, six folding wooden chairs from the Glen Rock American Legion post that Uncle Pete had borrowed without asking the commander, and three milk crates with sofa cushions lashed to the top with duct tape where Leo and his brother Martin Jr. were sitting, their knees nearly touching their chins.
Nobody was looking at the wainscoting.
At the head of the oak trestle, Marilyn was on her second glass of dry ginger ale with a splash of Pete’s rye. She was wearing her pearl necklace—the one Dad had given her when Garrett passed the bar—and she had her horn-handled knife resting across her bread plate, exactly where Caleb had laid it.
"He didn't salt the turnips, Wesley," she announced down the thirty-foot board, her voice cutting through the clatter of twenty-two forks against stoneware with that old, iron authority that hadn't been heard in our family since nineteen-ninety-eight. "Your father always told you: you salt the water *before* the root goes in. If you salt it after, it just tastes like salt on a turnip."
"I salted them, Mom," I said from the sideboard where I was carving the second capon, the clear, golden juice running down the channels of the carving board into the well.
"Not enough," she said, but she took another three tablespoons of the gratin from the dish Leo was passing her, her small hand steady on the silver spoon. "And the cream needs more pepper. Nadia, where’d you get this cheese? It doesn't taste like the stuff from the Grand Union."
"It’s from Switzerland, Marilyn," Nadia said, setting down a bowl of buttered leeks that sent up a cloud of white, bacon-scented steam between Aunt Clara and Pete. "The cows eat the wild garlic in the spring."
"It's good," the old woman said, and she didn't look at the window once. "It's better than those little birds that girl had last year. You couldn't even find the liver in those things. It was like eating an umbrella."
At the far end of the room, near the front door, Arthur had his hearing aid turned all the way to the maximum whistle, nodding happily while Martin explained the difference between a commercial ground lease and an easement on Route 17, neither one of them listening to the other, both of them working their way through three-inch slices of the Creekstone prime rib that was so tender you could separate the meat with the back of an ordinary tablespoon.
Caleb was sitting between Pete and his cousin Leo.
He had his napkin tucked into his collar—the way Pete did—and he was watching Leo demonstrate how to construct a small fortification out of mashed potatoes that could hold three ounces of gravy without breaching the embankment.
"You gotta tamp the sides, kid," Leo said, his mouth full of cardamom roll. "If the gravy finds a fissure, the whole wall goes into the peas."
"Like the dam in Boonton," Caleb said.
"Exactly like the dam in Boonton," Leo said. "Now pour. Slow. Don't rush the head."
Pete looked across the table at me, his one eye squinted against the smoke from his second highball. He didn't raise his glass. He just picked up his horn-handled fork, tapped the side of his water tumbler once—*clink*—and gave me that slow, three-millimeter nod that men from the docks give each other when the cable holds and the load clears the hatch.
***
Eight miles north, in the carriage-house district of Ridgewood, the sun hit the front lawn of the colonial on North Van Dien with the same cold, blinding glare.
The driveway had been scraped down to the black asphalt by a commercial plow service at six in the morning—a three-hundred-dollar emergency run that Susette had ordered by phone while the driver was still doing the bank lot in Ho-Ho-Kus. The three-foot snowbanks on either side of the drive were as smooth and vertical as marble walls, trimmed with a flat-edged shovel until they looked like the entrance to an embassy.
In the center of the front lawn, the six-foot ice angel stood on its wooden pallet.
The sun was directly behind its shoulders, and because the temperature had climbed to twenty-two degrees under the clear sky, the fine detail of the feathers on the left wing had begun to soften, rounding off into slick, wet knobs of clear ice that dripped steadily onto the frozen grass below—*drip... drip... drip*—a small, liquid count that marked the passing of the afternoon.
Inside the formal dining room, the heat was set to seventy-two.
The mahogany table, twelve feet long with the two leaves inserted, had been polished with beeswax until the grain looked like dark water three feet deep.
Fourteen settings.
Fourteen gold-toned chargers, each carrying an eight-inch Rosenthal porcelain plate with a narrow band of twenty-four-karat gold around the rim. Fourteen sets of heavy Christofle silver, three forks on the left, three knives and two spoons on the right, each piece laid exactly two inches from the bevel of the table edge, aligned with an architect’s steel rule.
Fourteen crystal water goblets, fourteen red wine glasses, fourteen champagne flutes.
At the head of the table, facing the wide double windows that looked out over the terrace and the melting ice angel, sat Susette.
She was wearing her dress—the hunter green velvet with the square neckline and the seed pearls sewn into the cuffs that had been altered twice by the seamstress in Englewood so the hem would clear the carpet by half an inch. Her hair was pinned into an intricate, architectural crown of braids that had taken an hour and forty minutes with the hairdresser in Midland Park before the snow started on Christmas Eve.
Her hands were resting flat on the mahogany, on either side of her charger.
She wasn't eating.
On the sideboard behind her, the two silver chafing dishes were still burning, their small blue Sterno cans hissing quietly beneath five pounds of artisanal wild-rice pilaf and sixteen roasted quail that had been stuffed with dried cherries and brioche crumbs. The birds had been out of the oven since one-fifteen; their skin, once crisp and dark brown from the pomegranate glaze, had begun to wrinkle, shrinking back from the tiny breastbones until the white rib-ends showed through the meat like the teeth of a comb.
Across from her, six chairs away, sat Garrett.
He hadn't put on his wool trousers. He was wearing the corduroys he used for cleaning the gutters in October, a gray fleece vest with the logo of his law firm embroidered in small navy letters over the pocket, and a pair of sheepskin slippers that had the stitching coming undone at the heel.
His glass was empty.
Beside his right elbow was an open bottle of single-malt Scotch—the eighty-dollar stuff he kept in the credenza for when the senior partners came by to talk about the municipal bond accounts. The bottle was down to the label.
"Garrett," she said.
Her voice didn't carry across the room. It fell into the deep pile of the oriental rug and died three feet from her chair.
Garrett didn't move his head. He was watching the ice angel through the window. A large section of the left wing—about four pounds of carved ice—had just sheared off under the midday sun, dropping onto the pallet with a dull, wet *thwack* that threw up a small spray of slush against the boxwood hedge.
"Garrett," she said again. "The Sterno is going out under the pilaf."
"Let it go out," he said.
His voice was thick, dry, completely devoid of the sharp, legalistic cadence that usually governed his throat. He looked down at his own place card—*GARRETT VAN BUREN, ESQ.*—written in Susette’s perfect, looping copperplate script on the heavy ivory cardstock that had been imported from Florence.
He reached out with his thumb, caught the edge of the card, and flipped it over.
The back was white, blank, and cold.
"We have sixteen pounds of the tenderloin in the secondary cooler," she said, her eyes fixed on the empty chair at the far end of the room where Marilyn was supposed to have sat. "I can freeze the portions. If I wrap them in the freezer paper with the wax lining, they’ll keep until the committee meeting in February. We can have the committee here. We can do the small plates with the horseradish cream."
"Nobody’s coming in February, Susette," Garrett said.
He picked up his empty glass, looked into the bottom where three drops of amber liquid had dried into a sticky ring, then set it down again on the bare mahogany, leaving a faint, circular white smudge on the beeswax.
Susette’s left eye twitched—a tiny, involuntary spasm that pulled the corner of her brow down toward her nose.
"Your mother will call," she said, her fingers tightening against the table edge until her knuckles were as white as the Rosenthal porcelain. "She won't stay down there with that woman. She can't stand the smell of garlic. She told me two years ago that Nadia’s kitchen smells like an immigrant boarding house. She told me that, Garrett."
"She’s not calling, Susette."
"She will call," she insisted, her voice rising an octave, regaining that sharp, whistling edge that sounded like a tea kettle coming to the boil on an empty burner. "She has her clothes at the cleaners. I have the claim check in my bag. She can't get her coat without the check."
Garrett finally turned his head to look at her.
His eyes were red-rimmed, his cheeks gray beneath a three-day stubble that was speckled with white hairs he usually plucked before he went to the courthouse.
"Wesley went to Hackensack, Susette," he said.
She stopped. Her mouth remained open half an inch, her small, sharp tongue visible against the back of her upper teeth.
"What?"
"The surrogate’s office," Garrett said, his hand dropping from the glass into his lap. "He pulled the docket on Dad’s estate four months ago. He gave her the discharge papers on Thursday. He had Joey drive her down to the National Standard Bank yesterday morning before the branches closed for the storm."
The room went so quiet that the hiss of the dying Sterno under the quail sounded like a locomotive five miles away.
Susette looked from Garrett to the empty chair at the head of the table, then down at the two rows of seven matching plates, seven matching goblets, seven matching linen napkins folded into the shape of bishop’s miters, each with a small sprig of fresh rosemary tucked into the cuff.
"He couldn't," she whispered. "That was... that was Garrett Van Buren and Associates. That was an internal firm account."
"He did," Garrett said. "The balance was zeroed out at eleven-fifteen yesterday. She took eighty-four thousand dollars in a cashier's check and had the teller put the rest into a passbook account with Nadia's name on the signature card."
He stood up.
His corduroys were bagged at the knees, his slippers making a soft, scraping sound against the wool rug as he walked to the French doors that opened onto the unheated sunroom.
He pushed the door open.
The cold air hit him immediately—that clean, dry, eighteen-degree northern draft that smelled of frozen hemlock and the asphalt from the highway.
The sunroom was empty.
The four wicker chairs were stacked in the corner under a green plastic tarp. The space heater—the one that had blown on the ficus tree while Caleb sat in his parka—was unplugged, its cord coiled neatly around its handle, its gray metal casing covered in a thin, undisturbed layer of December dust.
Garrett looked down at the flagstone floor where, three years ago, Nadia had sat on a wooden folding stool with Lily wrapped in two wool sweaters, feeding the baby small spoonfuls of broth out of an insulated thermos she had carried in her purse because there hadn't been an extra bowl in the kitchen.
"You should have put the chairs out, Susette," he said.
He didn't yell. It was the quietest thing he had said in twelve years of marriage.
"I had an aesthetic," she whispered behind him, her voice trembling now, the velvet shoulders of her dress beginning to shake with the first, dry, soundless gasps of a rage that had nowhere left to go. "I had a standard for this house. I was trying to make something that looked like... like the people who belong here."
Garrett stepped through the French doors into the unheated room, letting the door swing shut behind him, leaving her alone with the fourteen plates, the cold quail, and the forty-foot table that was set for a family that didn't exist.
***
Back on Lincoln Avenue, dusk was coming down fast.
The blue shadows on the snow had turned to deep purple, and the children from three houses down had come out with their sleds, their shouts echoing off the frozen street as they dragged their Flexible Flyers up the small hill toward the boulevard.
Inside our kitchen, the sink was full of suds.
Uncle Pete was standing at the wash-basin with his flannel shirt-sleeves rolled up past his tattoos, his massive, gray-haired forearms covered in Palmolive bubbles as he scrubbed the fifty-pound roasting pan that had held the beef.
"Wesley!" he yelled over the sound of the hot water running from the brass tap. "Tell your mother to stop hiding the pie! She’s got three slices of the mince behind the flour bin like she’s living in an orphanage!"
"I'm not hiding it, Peter!" Marilyn snapped from the kitchen table where she was drinking tea out of Nadia’s chipped brown mug, her small feet resting comfortably on an old milk crate near the stove. "I'm saving it for Arthur! Arthur can’t have his sugar until five o'clock or his water pills don't work!"
In the front room, the noise had reached that third, mellow stage of a holiday dinner where the forks have stopped moving and people have begun to spread out into the corners.
Martin was asleep on the three-cushion sofa with a copy of the *Bergen Record* over his face, his mouth open, snoring with a steady, rhythmic whistle that matched the tea kettle on the range. His boys were on the floor by the piano, teaching Lily how to build a log cabin out of matchsticks they’d taken from the mantle, while Aunt Clara sat in the rocking chair by the Christmas tree, her shoes kicked off, showing Brenda the knitting pattern for an afghan she hadn't touched since the pandemic.
Caleb was at the piano.
He wasn't playing scales now.
He was using both hands, his small fingers finding the chords to "O Come, All Ye Faithful" that Nadia had marked for him in the red hymn book with yellow highlighter tape. He hit the bass notes with that same deliberate, unhurried weight—Middle C, then the low G, then the chord that resolves back into the hearth.
Nadia came up behind me as I was wiping down the last of the wooden boards with a towel dipped in vinegar water.
She leaned her hip against the counter, her white skullcap off now, her dark hair falling loose around her neck, smelling of steam, browned butter, and the cedar needles Caleb had brought into the house.
She didn't say anything. She just reached down and took my hand—the one with the fresh burn from the capon pan on the side of the thumb—and laced her fingers through mine, her grip hard, dry, and familiar.
Outside on the porch, the heavy iron knocker fell against the wood.
*Thump.*
It wasn't Uncle Pete’s kick. It wasn't the mailman’s double tap.
It was a slow, hesitant stroke, followed by the sound of boots shuffling in the drift by the railing—boots that didn't know which way the threshold opened.
The room didn't go completely quiet, but Caleb's fingers stopped on the keys, the string inside the upright piano vibrating for two, three, four seconds against the sounding board before the wood went still.
Marilyn set her tea mug down on the saucer with a small, sharp *clink*.
May you like
Uncle Pete turned off the hot water tap, the big cast-iron roasting pan resting dripping wet against his apron, his eyes moving slowly from the sink to the hallway door.
Through the frosted glass of the front door, beneath the yellow glow of the sixty-watt porch bulb, stood a single, dark shape—a tall figure with its shoulders hunched against the northern wind, holding something heavy in both hands against its chest, waiting in the snow to see if there was still an empty chair.
