Page 196 - A Little Life: A Novel

But he doesn’t wake up. Not when Harold comes to check on him in the
next hour and places the back of his hand against his cheek and then drapes
a blanket over him; not when Harold checks on him again, right before

dinner. He sleeps through his phone ringing at midnight and again at six
a.m., and through the house phone ringing at twelve thirty and then at six
thirty, and Harold’s conversations with first Andy and then Willem. He
sleeps into the morning, and through lunch, and only wakes when he feels
Harold’s hand on his shoulder and hears Harold saying his name, telling
him his flight’s leaving in a few hours.
Before he wakes, he dreams of a man standing in a field. He can’t see the

man’s features, but he is tall and thin, and he’s helping another, older man
hitch the hulk of a tractor carapace to the back of a truck. He knows he’s in
Montana from the whitened, curved-bowl vastness of the sky, and from the
particular kind of cold there, which is completely without moisture and
which feels somehow purer than cold he’s felt anywhere else.
He still can’t see the man’s features, but he thinks he knows who he is,

recognizes his long strides and his way of crossing his arms in front of him
as he listens to the other man. “Cody,” he calls out in his dream, and the
man turns, but he’s too far away, and so he can’t quite tell if, under the brim
of the man’s baseball cap, they share the same face.

The fifteenth is a Friday, which he takes off from work. There had been
some talk of a dinner party on Thursday night, but in the end, they settle on
an early lunch the day of the ceremony (as JB calls it). Their court
appointment is at ten, and after it’s over, everyone will come back to the

house to eat.
Harold had wanted to call a caterer, but he insisted he’d cook, and he
spends the remains of Thursday evening in the kitchen. He does the baking
that night—the chocolate-walnut cake Harold likes; the tarte tatin Julia
likes; the sourdough bread they both like—and picks through ten pounds of
crab and mixes the meat with egg and onion and parsley and bread crumbs

and forms them into patties. He cleans the potatoes and gives the carrots a
quick scrub, and chops the ends off the brussels sprouts, so that the next day
all he’ll have to do is toss them in oil and shove them into the oven. He
shakes the cartons of figs into a bowl, which he’ll roast and serve over ice
cream topped with honey and balsamic vinaigrette. They are all of Harold