Coming at her head-on down the lawn he could see all the ways in which Meredith Fox was like her mother, not so much the facial features, which were softer, less sharp, but the upright posture, the way she laid her hands on the armrests of the chair, the set of her squared shoulders. She smiled at him, squinting against the sun, and rose to shake his hand.
“Sit,” she said, not in that familiar peremptory way but as though they had known each other a long time.
“This is where Nadine found her,” Meredith said, looking out over the pond. “I can only imagine the scene. Nadine says she called Dr. Benjamin right away, but I’m assuming she yelled at her for a while to get her to get up.”
“People say it was a stroke.”
Meredith shrugged and smoothed her hair back from the deep V at the center of her forehead. “I suppose. It doesn’t really mean much to me, one way or another. She was eighty years old, and she’d outlived everyone she loved. Her father, her brother, her best friend. She still had all her faculties. I never had to try to discuss a retirement home with her. Actually I never would have dared to try to discuss a retirement home with her. And she seemed happier these last few months than she had been in ages.”
“I feel really bad. I was so mad about what happened, the police and Faith and all the other stuff. I wouldn’t talk to her the last time I saw her. I blamed her for everything.”
“I used to do that, too, but I got over it,” Meredith said. “Don’t torture yourself. You brought her a lot of happiness. And she probably understood how you felt better than you did yourself. No one understood righteous indignation better than Mother. She was in a temper the entire time I knew her. If it wasn’t a broken storm window, it was a blown fuse in the garage. And of course she was always outraged that a person painted the house, and then twenty years later you had to paint it again. I couldn’t get over how you persuaded her to fix the roof of the barn.”
“I didn’t have to do much.”
“She liked you.”
“I don’t know. I think she liked keeping the place up.”
“No, she liked you. You got her out of herself for the first time in years. Since her friend Jess died, I think. She liked you, and she liked Nadine’s daughter. Is it all over town, what she did for that girl?”
“Pretty much.”
“She was furious that Nadine wanted to keep her here in Mount Mason. She said the girl wanted to be a doctor, and that her mother was standing in her way, trying to keep her prisoner here in town. I suppose one of the primary obstacles was money. So Mother left Jennifer the money to go to medical school. Mother told me about it last year. I couldn’t figure out whether it was a gesture designed to provide a better life for that young woman, or whether she just wanted to spite Nadine.”
“I think maybe it was a little bit of both. She sure succeeded on the Nadine front.”
“Nadine cried at the funeral. Sometimes it’s difficult to figure people out, isn’t it.” She sighed. “I’m so sorry about your baby,” she added, patting Skip’s hand.
“I’m so sorry about your mother.”
“She was sorry about you, too, about what happened. She called to tell me and I’ve never heard her so regretful. And my mother scarcely ever expressed regret. I’m still not certain why she seemed to have gotten such a kick out of that baby. I’ve never known her to show the slightest affinity for babies.”
“I think it just made a change, you know? She sort of liked the drama. We had to keep it a secret, from Nadine, and I think she liked that. And from you, too, for as long as we could. Sorry about that.”
“It’s all right. Of course you didn’t succeed on either count. Nadine knew almost from the beginning. She used to call me all the time. She said she knew about the baby in the beginning because when you carried her around strapped to your chest you looked just like she’d looked when she carried Jennifer around her village when Jennifer was born. I suppose it wasn’t popular to get pregnant by an American soldier, so she tried to hide her child in the beginning, until apparently she decided she just didn’t give a damn.”
“Whoa. Whoa. We thought we’d fooled her the whole time. Jennifer did, too. Whoa. That is so strange.”
“No, she knew. And she heard you on the baby monitor one day when my mother left it on by her bed. Some people like to keep secrets. My mother was one of them. Speaking of which, did Mr. Patton call you?”
Skip shook his head. Mrs. Fox smiled. “Well, then, here’s a nice surprise. She left you a life interest in the garage.”
“The garage?”
“I know, it’s crazy, isn’t it? She left you all its contents and the right to live there for the rest of your life. She had Lester Patton work out the language a couple of weeks ago.” She looked over at him with her eyebrows raised. “I have to admit, it’s going to make it good and hard to sell this place.”
“You’re not going to keep it?”
“For what?”
“For you. For the family.”
Meredith Fox looked back over the pond. “The family is gone. I’m the last,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that. I remember now that she told us you didn’t have any children.”
“I’m sure she did,” she said with a tight smile, and then he saw her mother in her face, and in her eyes, blue marbles with a rim of steel gray. Then she shrugged and grinned and that look was gone. “My husband and I had dogs and horses and it seemed to be enough. And we have a place in Virginia that is perfectly situated for both the dogs and the horses. I don’t want to live here. It doesn’t feel right to me. I remember my grandfather with this place. The whole enterprise had an air of unreality, and of failure, somehow. He bought cows. What in the world did he know about cows? Or the corn he had somebody plant one summer? I was only a child when he died, and I went away to school when I was young. I don’t think I spent more than a month at a time here after that. I can’t imagine who will want a place this large. There are eight bedrooms, and the furnace must be fifty years old. Maybe someone who wants to open a bed-and-breakfast, who will be haunted by my mother for putting samplers and stencils in the kitchen. Maybe someone like my grandfather, who wants to come out from the city on weekends and play gentleman farmer. Or a big family that likes privacy. I suppose I would like someone to be happy here.”
“I was happy here.”
“That’s wonderful. And still will be, I hope.”
“I don’t think I’m going to want to live in the garage for the rest of my life.”
“Don’t forget its contents. You’re the heir to a rider mower, twenty shovels, a rototiller, a Cadillac, and about fifty boxes of junk that are in the attic.”
“I can have the Cadillac?”
She laughed then, a deep belly laugh of the sort that he’d never heard from Mrs. Blessing and didn’t imagine anyone ever had, that made him think that her father must have been a different sort of man than he looked in the picture of him in his uniform in the living room, with his soft mouth and weak chin. “No wonder she liked you,” she said. “The car is yours. The mower, too. If you’re amenable, we’ll pay you to clean out the garage and work out a lump sum for your life share in the rental.”
“You can just have it.”
“Oh, no. Mother would haunt me forever. She’ll haunt me in any event, but it would be a double haunting if I took your garage away from you.”
Meredith cared about the old house more than she thought she did, as Skip had discovered people often do. There had been a box of linen baby clothes, as creased as Mrs. Blessing’s face had been, and a tattered collection of old children’s picture books that he had carried over to the big house from the garage. She had put labels on those boxes so they would be sent to her home in Virginia, and packed up with them most of the photographs from the living room and the chenille spread that had been on Mrs. Blessing’s bed. When she wasn’t sitting by the pond he had seen her through the windows of the house, moving from room to room with a pad of
paper and a sheet of stickers, putting a yellow circle on a dresser here, a chair there, so that the movers could ship some things to her and send the others to the auction house in New York City she had told him about. Midday Jennifer had come with a big bag, and he had seen the light on in the side porch and known that the two of them were having lunch together, talking across the table as each of them had once done with Mrs. Blessing. There was an oil painting over the fireplace in the library of dark and tangled trees hanging low over swampy ground beneath a threatening yellow sky. Mrs. Blessing had left that to Jennifer, along with the small desk at which she had always sat to do her correspondence and enough certificates of deposit to pay for college and medical school.
“So you’re finally going away to college,” Skip said when Jennifer came out to put the big painting in its gilt frame into the back of her little car.
She shook her head. “Not until next year. I’ll finish this year at the community college, then probably transfer to State and finish my pre-med credits. I’ll be around. I’ll buy you lunch. I guess everyone figures I can afford it now. Is everyone talking about me?”
“Yep.”
“I’m used to it. Besides, I think that was the point, to stir the pot.”
“I think the point was to let you do what you want.” Skip thought for a moment. “And probably to stir the pot, too.”
“So can I take you to lunch?”
“Maybe,” Skip said.
“It would be weird without her,” Jennifer said, and almost as fast as a baby’s smile she had started to sob. Skip put his arms around her and patted her shoulder and that reminded her, too, so that for a moment she cried harder. When she pulled back she was smiling. “I guess when we say ‘her’ now we mean both hers, don’t we?”
“I guess so,” he said.
“Do you miss her?”
“Which one?”
Jennifer Foster wiped her eyes. “It was a stupid question, anyway. Never ask a question that you already know the answer to.”
“How are your parents taking all this?” Skip said.
“What did I just say? Never ask a question that you already know the answer to.”
Did he miss her? That wasn’t how it felt, not like something fine and fond, edged in gold like those plates Mrs. Blessing had that made the high ringing sound. Sometimes the sound of the car engine, or the dying drone of the crickets beneath the deepening carpet of leaves, or just the no-sleep buzz in his brain, lulled him into a sense that nothing had changed. Morning meant grinding coffee and filling bottles. Noon meant the flash of binoculars from the big house and the long nap in the crib over the garage. One benefit of an ordered life was that the order took on a life of its own, so that he could almost imagine things remained the same, governed not by happenstance or even fate but by the regular movement of the hands of his old alarm clock.
But there were also the mornings when he woke up in the apartment over Foster’s garage to the sensation of confusion, the sensation that he had imagined something so terrible that it could not be true. And then the swaddling of sleep was swept aside, and there was a sharp ugly thing that took shape in seconds under his breastbone, so that he felt all the time as though he’d been stabbed. No food would pass it, and it was all he could do to breathe. There were pale blue shadows beneath his eyes, and his walk had become stooped without his knowing it. He was not even certain which loss he was feeling, or whether it was the two together that made him feel as though he were swimming through sludge in his sleep, dreaming through the daylight hours, half-alive.
He hadn’t imagined, over those long slow satisfying summer days, that he would ever thank God that he wouldn’t be coming to Blessings ever again. But he felt it now, coming down the drive, making the turn, taking the steps into the apartment, looking out over the curled confetti of browned black walnut leaves on the grass by the pond. Someone needed to rake those, but it wouldn’t be him. All he had left to do was to go through the things in the garage attic and decide what he wanted to keep. “The garage and its contents.” He figured it would wind up meaning mainly the tools and the car and that old upholstered chair that had gotten to know the contours of his body.
But once he got into the attic he realized he was heir to a treasure trove of old suits, broken chairs, water-stained books, and dozens of boxes. He was going to have to go through everything and decide what Mrs. Fox might want to keep, what could be given away, and what was still good enough to be sold in New York. The apartment already had the dusty air of a place where no one lives. Before he’d even arrived someone had put the crib away and left the small folded blankets on the chest of drawers in the back bedroom. He could picture Nadine banging around and shaking her head, her black hair bouncing with indignation. “You don’t want to be anywhere near my house,” Craig Foster had said grimly. Skip was working long hours and Craig was working them, too, working every night until eight or nine, trying to keep from stepping in between two stubborn pissed-off women set at odds by a third, now dead.
Skip put pieces of masking tape on the few things he thought he could get down the stairs of the garage and up the stairs to the apartment over Foster’s auto body shop. Maybe he could rent one of those storage places for the long oak table that would be good in a kitchen, if he ever had a kitchen. The boxes by the window he figured he would bring down for Mrs. Fox. He could see by the few that were opened that they were filled with old things that ought to stay with her, family photographs and knickknacks and some clothes that looked as though they’d been folded away in another lifetime.
The big stack of sealed boxes were in shadow against one of the long sloping windowless walls. They had those old-fashioned mailing labels, pretty really, with curved corners and frames of red faded now to pink. “Simpson’s Fine Textiles,” the labels said in script. He took a box cutter and split the center join of one. There was a thick bolt of some pale purple material with gold flowers. The next box had white fabric with pin dots of pale blue. Then there was dark green velvet, and some stuff that he’d seen before but didn’t know the name of with streaks all through it like water had run up and down the length. He picked that up and looked beneath.
“Holy shit,” he said aloud.
There were seventeen boxes, and when he was done going through them all he found that he had seventeen bolts of assorted fabrics and what seemed, on first count, to be something in the neighborhood of seventy thousand dollars in old twenty-dollar bills. The strange thing was that only two of the boxes had been opened before, and none of them appeared to have been touched. He went downstairs and had a soda and a tuna sandwich he’d brought from the lunch place on Main Street, counted again, ate a package of Sno Balls, counted again, and changed the oil in the rider mower.
“Holy shit,” he said, sitting in the mower with one foot on the garage floor to steady him. It occurred to him that Mrs. Blessing would have been appalled at how much swearing she’d occasioned, and then that maybe she would have been amused without ever admitting it. “What the hell was she thinking?”
He sounded just like Jennifer’s father. Skip had taken the old Cadillac to Craig Foster’s garage first thing in the morning, figuring he could work on the Caddy during his lunch hour, maybe trade in his truck. “I still can’t figure out what she was thinking,” Craig had said, first thing, when Skip drove in. “I never would have believed it in a million years.”
“That she left me the Cadillac?”
“You know what I’m talking about. I never would have believed it.” He’d said it at least twenty times during the course of the first workday after the will was filed for probate.
“How come?” Skip had said.
“How come? How come? Do you know how much money she left that child? Do you know what it costs to go to a private college and a medical school? That’s a hell of a lot of money. Excuse my French, but that’s a whole hell of a lot of money. You seem to have gotten on with the woman better than anyone except Jenny. What the hell do you thi
nk she was thinking?”
Craig Foster was a deacon of the Presbyterian church, a man who drank lemonade at picnics and called women “ma’am” and once fired a guy who hung a girlie calendar in his car-repair shop, even though car-repair shops were more or less the official home of girlie calendars. He’d said hell more in that day than in the last five years put together.
“I think she really liked Jennifer.”
“I like you. I gave you a job and a place to live at a decent rent. I didn’t give you a small fortune.”
“Maybe she didn’t think it was a small fortune. She had a lot of money.”
“Son, excuse me, but the woman was as tight as a tick, as my grannie used to say. The reason I didn’t work on that car of hers is because the one time I did, I charged her a hundred forty-four dollars for a battery, which as you know is the cost to me. She said I was gouging her. Now she’s left the girl enough to buy a battery company, except that she can’t spend it on anything except her education. You know what people in town are saying about that? They’re saying Nadine exerted undue influence. Undue influence.”
And at that Skip had started to laugh. He laughed and laughed and couldn’t stop, and when he’d try to get ahold of himself he would have a mental picture of Mrs. Blessing sitting straight as a stick in the wing chair and Nadine fuming and the two of them talking to each other as though they’d been the leading edge of a full-fledged family feud for fifty years. Every time Mr. Foster repeated the words undue influence he would start to laugh some more, until he found tears running down his face. He was glad Mr. Foster was there because he knew that if he had been alone he would have finally given way, and his broken heart would have spilled out, down his face, into his scarred and greasy hands, where he would have had to really look at it for the first time. He couldn’t stand to do that yet, couldn’t stand to glance at a baby in the grocery or see one on the television or remember for even an instant how Faith had smelled and the way she wrapped her little fingers around his big one as he fed her. He’d had a lifetime of little bad things, but a big bad one felt entirely different, worse than he could let himself feel all at once. And he’d had two big bad things right on top of each other, because when he thought of Faith he thought of that old woman, too, and the way she held her head up in a way that had convinced him, just for a while, that dignity was not only possible but simple. He’d loved them both.