by Sarah Hogle
I’m now at the age my mom was when I thought she was a letdown and it’s terrifying to still be in this stage, bewildered, guessing my way through life on shaky baby-deer legs. No soul mate husband, no down-for-a-good-time best friend. Too many failures to speak of. So much of living is struggling instead of enjoying. And where’s the utopia I thought society would have leveled up to by now? Somebody sold me a bridge.
To prove that I’m capable of parting with material possessions if I want to, I make sure Wesley watches me throw away two whole bags. The bags are actually filled with other bags, but he doesn’t have to know that. When I catch his eye, I get that pang again. That oof right to the chest, when, for a split second, before the scowls and the curt responses, Jack McBride could be real. I miss knowing somebody out there cared if I didn’t text for a couple days. My daydream world floats nearby like a lifeboat, ready and waiting for me to drift away, but I’m a masochist today. I want that pang again. I want to hold his gaze for just a little bit longer and pretend he’s someone who cares. I am a sad, pitiful lady.
“When did she paint the house gray?” I ask.
Wesley frowns (it’s his default expression, but he has the standard I hate everything frown and the deliberate I hate you personally frown that he goes back and forth between). “What do you mean?” Glances at the house. “It’s always been gray.”
He turns around, already moving beyond the conversation. How can he not be as lonely as I am? How can he not be starved for human attention?
“It was pink when I was a kid,” I insist, unwilling to let him go.
The permanent frown doesn’t abate but there’s a subtle shift, agitation crossing into confusion. “How’s that possible? I’ve seen pictures from ten, twenty, thirty, forty years ago—it’s gray in all of them.”
“It was definitely pink when I was ten.”
The corners of his mouth turn down, hardening in place. He doesn’t believe me. He thinks I’m off my rocker.
“That one isn’t so bad,” he says, eyes cutting to the pool of red sequined fabric in my hands. I didn’t notice I’d drawn it out of the box. I glance down, and when I glance back up he’s vanishing into the house.
“He doesn’t want to talk,” I say quietly to the dress, tilting its sequins this way and that to catch the light. “That’s okay. We don’t have to get along.” It emerges sounding like a question, a common theme for me, so I say it again with confidence. “We don’t have to get along.”
I hate this gnawing sensation, that I am more alone than I’ve ever been. This is the first full day of Maybell’s Fresh Start, so you’d think I’d be at the top of my game. I’ve inherited a (dilapidated) manor and two hundred and ninety-four acres of (completely wild) land with a view of the mountains, but I feel nothing. I haven’t had a proper cry over Aunt Violet’s death, either, which means there must be something wrong with me.
My absence from work today has been noted by Christine, who’s sending increasingly threatening texts: You’d better be in the hospital. Gemma, too, who wants to know if I’m sick, and reminds me that if so, I’m already running out of sick leave, which isn’t information she’d know. Paul definitely ghostwrote that text. I’m an hour away from that place, never to return again, so I’m free to give them a middle-finger emoji and block all their numbers from my phone. I don’t know why I can’t. I type out several responses but delete them all. Leaving all their messages ignored is probably the more chaotic choice—soon I’ll be receiving “official warnings” sent to my company email that I won’t check.
Next, I do what I always do and yet always regret doing whenever I’m spinning in lonely circles.
She answers her phone after six rings. “Hey, you.”
“Hey, Mom.” I put on my cheery, everything-is-fine smile even though she can’t see me.
“You must be psychic, because I was about to call. I just listened to your voicemail.” Her tone is a touch superior. “Too bad.”
“Yeah, it’s so sad.” I realize I’m holding a box of White Diamonds perfume, and it’s a mistake. My vision blurs. I’m in the kitchen with Aunt Violet, sifting powdered sugar over fudge brownie donuts, making a terrific mess, while she assures and reassures me how well I’m doing. Maybe I’ll finally cry, and it’ll be cathartic, and I’ll be able to appreciate Falling Stars. Maybe it will all sink in.
“Well.” Mom’s cold detachment brings me back to earth. “She was old.”
I swallow. “Still sad, though.”
“So you’ve moved in already, huh? You find a job there yet?”
I’m abruptly reminded of why I don’t call Mom often. “No.”
“Oh, honey, that’s not good.”
“I only just got here. I’ll find something soon.” Hopefully. I don’t want to think about applications right now, not when my employment history qualifies me to be a housekeeper and basically nothing else. “How’ve you been?”
“It’s kind of an insult that Violet gave you the house, don’t you think?”
The left-field question catches me cold. “How so?”
“The fact that it’s trashed. Which! Hah!” Mom snorts loudly. “She thought we were trash. You and I.” She’s speaking faster; I can picture her on the terrace, half in the sun, one of her knees bouncing. “If I were you, I would have walked away. We’re not the type of people to accept pity presents. That isn’t how I raised you.”
I don’t know what to say.
“You couldn’t pay me to live in that mausoleum,” she continues haughtily. “No offense. I’m happy for you if you like it, but that could never be me. Never. And all the work she’s just dumped on your plate? Inconsiderate. What an awful old lady.”
“She wasn’t awful.”
“She nearly killed you.”
“I was fine.”
She blows cigarette smoke into the speaker. “That phone call still gives me nightmares.”
Me too, because it signified being taken away. Aunt Violet felt it was her duty to let Mom know about the minor car accident—it wasn’t her fault, the roads around here are loopier than a Slinky and neither of us saw the other car coming. The teeniest of swerves. The barest of guardrail bumps. We were okay! The other car was okay! Violet’s trusty, clunky car absorbed the impact and we were fine, if a little rattled. Some light bruising from our seat belts and a few tears, but those were close-call tears. Happy-we-were-okay tears.
Mom raced straight to the Falling Stars, used the situation to try to extort money out of Violet, and it all went to hell. Each of them said the other was unfit to parent, but Mom was the one with legal rights.
“So damned irresponsible, driving when her eyesight was getting bad. And she really thought you’d be better off in her custody! Imagine.”
I have. Vividly.
“You’d have turned out a mess.” I hear a cigarette lighter click. “So. Totally trashed, then.”
“Yeah. Can’t hold out my arms on either side of me without knocking into stuff.”
A peculiar pause. “What kind of stuff?”
I get that bad-faith awareness, the one that grips me every time we talk and makes my stomach churn—the one I forget about after we hang up because my brain is in perpetual repair mode and wants desperately to believe the best of people. “Vines, I mean. Just a bunch of vines. They’ve destroyed the windows and floors.”
“Oh?”
I can see her wheels turning. She’s considering driving out here. “The mold is wall to wall. And there’re about a thousand rats.”
“Eww. God.” I envision the face my rat-phobic mother is making and can’t help a slight smile. “You’re the only one named in the will, then?”
My smile slides off.
“Ahh . . .” The part of my cognizance that registers Wesley and screams OH MY GOD IT’S JACK can’t stop cataloging his movements, and my gaze tracks irresistibly to
where his army-green Wellington boots are chafing a path through the yard. Back and forth he goes, house to dumpster, to house to dumpster, pitching armfuls of maybe, maybe-not junk. Not even discriminating. Could be throwing away antique buttons worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but what does he care? “Mainly,” I reply at length. I’m not getting into the two-inheritors mess—she’ll suggest I take him to court, which Violet wouldn’t have wanted.
“I’m assuming I didn’t get anything, huh?” She tries to mask her hope with flippancy, but we grew up together. I can read Julie better than anyone.
“No. Sorry.”
“Sorry? Ha! Don’t be sorry for me. Bless your heart.” Her voice picks up speed, antsier. “It was always a dump, anyway. If Violet had left me the house, there’s no way I’d want anything to do with it. No thanks.”
There’s so much I want to say in reply to this. If it was such a dump, then why’d she leave me there for a summer? Also, it was definitely not a dump. I know I didn’t invent how beautiful and clean it once was. Also, I haven’t forgotten that Mom begged to live there, too, back when I was ten and she dropped me off. Violet wouldn’t let her inside the house because Mom had tended to fill her pockets whenever she visited as a preteen.
“No offense, but the city’s better,” Mom’s saying. “There’s nothing out there in . . . what is the name of that dingy town? You need to come live here. I can help you find an apartment! We’ll go apartment-hunting and shop till we drop, on Alessandro’s Mastercard, of course.” She rolls the R in Alessandro.
“Maybe I’ll visit.”
The ten seconds of dead air that follow are confirmation that this call is like every other call, in which she gushes about how much she wants to see me but stops short of solidifying real plans.
“I gotta go,” she whispers. “Alessandro’s home.”
There’s yelling in the background, and she ends the call without hearing goodbye.
I’ve never met Alessandro in person. She usually doesn’t answer my calls if he’s home because he doesn’t like kids, even adult ones. It’s why she hid the fact that she had a daughter from him for months—I’m a relic of her old life, which she’s worked so hard to shed, and even though she does love me, she has been, from the start, bent on outgrowing her maternal role as quickly as possible.
It isn’t that we never had any good times, it’s that the good times, in retrospect, are kind of sad. Adolescent Maybell held tight to trivial, evanescent mother-daughter moments that made her feel warm, giving their memories a loving glow when anyone else would’ve found them depressing. It’s rough when you have a nature that begs you to avoid heartache at all costs but also makes you wear your heart on your sleeve.
The jangling of drawers bursting apart in the dumpster jolts me to attention, and I fixate on Wesley. Sharing a house with a stranger who doesn’t like me is a punch to the stomach: either I cooperate with him or I end up homeless. Again. At least I’m not embarrassing myself fawning all over him, since the Jack debacle left a bad taste in my mouth that, whether Wesley deserves it or not, extends to anyone resembling Jack. I don’t look at him and hear angels plucking harp strings. I don’t feel a hot surge of anything like love—I look at him and want to sock him in the throat. It’s a nice surprise, personal-growth-wise.
“How are we going to live together?” I call out.
Wesley jerks. “What?”
“How does this work?” I take another stab at Authoritative Maybell and put my hands on my hips. “I get the first floor, you get the second?”
I’m not being serious, or at least I don’t think I am, but he shrugs. “Sure.”
“Who gets the third floor?” It’s more of an attic, and largely unfinished, but still valuable real estate to stake a claim for.
Another shrug. “The ghosts?”
And off he goes again. I can’t pin him to one place for the life of me. Fine! This is fine. I can get the ball rolling on my new life without him—it’s not like I need his opinion or help. I’ve never had very much of anything, but I have resilience, and I have this. I have memories of Falling Stars being beautiful. I can make it beautiful again.
It occurs to me that I forgot to tell Wesley thank you for letting me stay with him in the cabin. Or maybe I have every right to stay with him, since I own half of everything. That’s an entitled attitude to have, I warn myself.
As I open my mouth to express my gratitude, he says, unprompted: “The house has always been gray.”
My mouth closes. Purses. I fade from his notice once more, no more interesting than a piece of furniture waiting to be sorted into keep, donate, or throw away.
Stalking past him, I huff, “I did not make up that it was pink. I did not make that up.” I stalk right into the foyer, where the path has been gradually widened (mostly thanks to him, I’ll admit, since I’ve been preoccupied with expanding my wardrobe on the lawn), hoist a broken microwave into my arms, and stalk right back out.
Wesley shakes his head. Mutters something.
I ignore him, and it’s empowering. We don’t have to be friends. We’re only going to be living together, not like that means anything. We don’t have to be friends.
Wesley’s muttering grows loud enough to form a distinguishable word. “Stop.”
I do stop, but only because he’s caught me by surprise. “What?”
He glares. Thrusts a . . . helmet? At me?
“Uhhh . . .” I look up at him, and he looks away, like he can’t bear to make eye contact with me. From his perspective, I’m the usurper of a dream come true, a bigger inconvenience than all the water damage, broken windows, and split floorboards combined. “I don’t have a bike.” Maybe there’s one in the house. You know, I’m not giving Violet enough credit here. There’s got to be at least ten bikes in that house.
“If you’re going to be in there”—he points to the house, eyebrows clinching together, jaw hard—“you need protection. It’s dangerous.”
“You’re not wearing a helmet.”
He glares some more. Throws a shattered vanity mirror into the dumpster with unnecessary force, which might not have been intended as a threat but is for sure being interpreted as one.
“Fine, fine.” I hold my hands up. Strap the helmet on. And I think: it really is a shame that we don’t have to be friends.
Chapter 6
FOR SOMEONE WHO HATES having me around, Wesley sure loves getting in my way.
It’s April sixth and I’m exhausted, heartstrings stretched until I’ve lost all emotional elasticity from the highs and lows of discovery and loss as I clear out Falling Stars. I am a sparking, smoking jumble of raw wires.
But I still haven’t cried.
Why haven’t I cried? I won’t feel like I deserve this gift from my aunt until I’ve grieved the way a loved one is supposed to grieve.
So this is what it’s come to: me sitting cross-legged in a circle of Hannobar mementos, immersing myself in Aunt Violet–ness, begging my heart to pick up any station other than the numb detachment I’ve been tuned in to.
Wesley’s footsteps are getting stompier. I can tell he wants to say Do you have to sit right THERE, but he swallows the words. He presses his lips together to keep them from falling out as he grunts and sighs from heavy lifting, dismantling the living room furniture around me.
I do have to sit right here, in point of fact. This is the part of the house where I feel closest to Violet. My favorite hours on this earth were all spent in this living room, side by side with her, chatting about anything and everything. Violet was one of a kind. She didn’t talk down to me, but she also didn’t treat me like I was a grown adult. Mom went back and forth between extremes: one minute she’d snap at me that I needed to do whatever she said because I was a little kid who didn’t know anything; the next minute she’d tell me too many details about one of her dates and if I made a face, I’d hear Oh,
grow up.
“Oh, Violet,” I say mournfully, since maybe a theatrical performance will bring the tears. “I wish I’d been able to say goodbye.”
I can’t help a glance at Wesley, whose expression is incredulous until he realizes I’m watching him. Then it smooths over, impassive. He’s judging me.
“I wanted to call,” I sniff. “It’s complicated.”
He says nothing. He gives up on trying to remove an unmovable floor-to-ceiling wardrobe that has stubbornly decided to fuse to the wall. It’s an antique, white with a long oval mirror on the front. He shoots the bulky piece of furniture a glare and I have to admire its tenacity for winning that battle.
Wesley crouches in front of a table, beginning to do something to it with a screwdriver. I’d help, but 1) I don’t think he wants me to, and 2) my back, legs, and arms are jelly from lifting and carrying so much junk these past few days. I’m used to hard work, but clearing out a house as big as this is a merciless beast. And we’ve only got about 3 percent of it cleared away. I’m so daunted by all we have left to do that I wouldn’t mind screaming into a decorative pillow if they weren’t all so musty. However, I am a Maybell Parrish, and Maybell Parrishes do not give up.
I’m sorting through papers, which are a rabbit hole of Victor and Violet Hannobar history. Deeds and documents, court papers and letters. So many letters.
My mouth curves into a smile when I select one, skimming the top line. It’s so old that the paper is nearly transparent. When I hold it up I can see the writing on the back bleed through the front, rendering it all illegible.
“Did she tell you about how she and Victor got together?” I ask casually.
No response.
I glance up to make sure he hasn’t left the room, which he hasn’t. I frown, lowering the paper. “Are you going to ignore me forever?”
Sweat rolls from his hairline, down his forehead. His gaze lifts briefly to mine, impatient and piercing, before he continues focusing on his task.