The Brightwood Code: Chapters 7-12

“You know that I don’t hold to the idea that all women are natural homemakers. When I let you this room, it was without any specified stipulations for cleanliness. I intentionally didn’t—”
“What time is it?”

Finally, when I reach Sixteenth Street and the end of the restaurant district, things start to quiet again; nobody is throwing late-night celebrations outside of the staid federal buildings that empty out every night at five like clockwork.

When I turn toward the sound, Rose—a slender, mousy girl who has heretofore been mostly silent—is still poised with her hand in the air, fingers now emptied of cutlery.

“But the Equal Justice League is interested in Louisa’s case because it might represent a pattern. An operator in San Francisco took her own life last month. She hadn’t passed the most recent weight examinations and she was told she’d be terminated if she didn’t pass the next one. Are you sure you didn’t know Louisa?”

I wait for his next rejoinder, his next extravagant eye roll.

When he sits again, he assiduously avoids eye contact.

And when he holds my gaze, the eyes that meet mine aren’t the ones full of mirth that I’m accustomed to seeing.

“I was going to be the first man in my family to go to war. My grandfather in the Civil War—he had paid a replacement to go in his stead, and my father avoided the Spanish-American War. I was going to be the hero. So the week before I was supposed to ship out to Northern Africa, my father decided we should have a send-off. Three generations of my family on my grandfather’s estate, hunting pheasants. Up before dawn, racing around in tweed.”

“My plan was to get here first when I knew you’d still be out so that I’d have time to—to—” I search for an explanation that will appease him.

Theo gives a formal bow at the neck, which he must intuit would appeal to my father’s sense of respect and decorum.

His tone is somewhere between rebuking and resigned, as if he’s disappointed in me but didn’t expect to be otherwise.

“Did Edda tell you how she ran off to France? She was never exactly a paragon of responsibility, but we were working to make a plan for after graduation. And then Edda just ran off! Like she was going ice-skating or out for an egg cream, after seeing an advertisement in the Suffragette Daily. We had to cancel her graduation party.”

This is how I learned that policemen were not “les gendarmes,” as I had been taught, but “le flic,” that short trenches were “sausages” and long ones were “beans” and that soldiers didn’t malinger but instead were said to have “nickel feet.”

Bigwigs in the American and French armies were coming to Paris for an important meeting.

She nods; what I’ve just said, for whatever reason, comports with what she knows of her son.