by Robyn Carr
Hi Gabby. Don. Are we on for tomorrow night? Dinner? It’s your birthday so you pick the time and place. Call my girl at the office and give her the message. I’m thinking around seven...maybe Christopher’s? I’ll meet you. Oh, and if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, do you think you could pick up my shirts on your way? And remember the briefcase you took to the shoe repair for me? Think that’ll be ready yet?
He hadn’t gotten much better at letting her pick the time and place, Elly thought. You could hardly blame Don, she reminded herself, if Gabby allowed him to take advantage of her. Gabby would argue that she was most willing, under the circumstances. The circumstances being that Gabby shamelessly manipulated Don into taking care of any financial need she had. Gabby had told the group that she planned to hit Don up for a new transmission at her birthday dinner, and predicted that Don would say, “You can just take it to my guy.” Don had a girl for this, a guy for that, a lot of people to do things for him.
One of the police detectives was suddenly beside Eleanor. She glanced at him.
Well, I should have known you were out. Gabby’s mother. Why else would you forget to even call me on what you know is the most difficult day of the year for me? I would have expected more from you. Don’t call me now—it’s too late. I’m going to the club with Martin and pretend that nothing is wrong.
This would be pitiful and heartrending if Ceola weren’t so comically self-absorbed. They laughed with Gabby out of respect. Ceola had lost her fourth husband, the one she claimed to have loved the most, the day before Gabby’s sixteenth birthday. So long ago. Likely, it was the same date on which Gabby had died. Ceola would typically wait until very late on the fifteenth of April for Gabby to call to console her on her annual day of grieving, something she was keeping secret from Martin, her seventh or eighth husband. Sometime in June, Ceola would remember that Gabby had had a birthday and send her a fifty-dollar check.
Mom? Are you there? Sarah, tearful. Well, it’s probably better that you’re out—I was just going to dump on you anyway and I really shouldn’t the day before your birthday. You must be so sick of me! But, anyway, don’t call me back tonight—it’s already eleven and I’m going to try to get some sleep. Justin’s been out all night and I’m so mad I could kill him. But I won’t kill him until after I talk to you. Love you, Mom. Talk to you tomorrow.
Sarah had dropped out of college and married a grease monkey when she was nineteen, the chief reason for her estrangement from her father. Justin and Sarah had had their first child, despite their financial woes, six months ago. To add misfortune to misery, the baby had Down’s syndrome. The marriage, Gabby had reported, became continually more strained.
No more messages. The detective unplugged the machine and took it with him. A little late, in Elly’s opinion.
“Do you know the people on that recording?” he asked Eleanor.
“Her ex-husband, her mother and her daughter.”
“Her ex-husband?”
“Yes.”
“He was taking her out to dinner for her birthday? And he wanted her to pick up his laundry?”
“Gabby was a remarkable woman,” Eleanor said.
“I’ll say,” the detective replied. “You have a key for this front door?”
“That’s how I got in,” Eleanor said, weary of this man’s stupidity.
“Okay, then let’s lock her up.”
She peered at him over the top of her glasses. “And the dog?” she asked.
“Oh yeah. Can you take the dog?”
Elly shook her head and walked away from him, the power having returned to her step. The heels of her flat brown shoes hit the floor with their usual purposefulness. “Thank God she wasn’t murdered,” she muttered. “Come on, Daisy,” she called, heading for the door.
Daisy rose tiredly, reluctantly, her collar and tags jingling as she followed Eleanor. They exited and waited for the detectives so the door could be locked. Beth and Barbara hugged each other in the street, saying goodbye. Sable stood by her car, the groceries returned to the trunk.
Elly didn’t have anything more to say, certainly no more goodbyes. She walked to Sable’s Mercedes and opened the door to the backseat. “Come on, Daisy,” she called. The dog walked lazily across the lawn and then bounded into the backseat beside Dorothy. Dorothy made a face of utter disgust and slid as far away from the dog as she could. Her eyes behind her wire-rimmed glasses widened to saucers and her little bit of a chin withdrew even more. She must cook and clean like a dream for Sable to put up with this shit, Elly thought. Sable had fired people for forgetting to sharpen the pencils. But if anyone could match nasty scowl for nasty scowl with Dorothy, it was Eleanor. She leaned into the car before getting in and glowered at the housekeeper. “Everything all right?” she inquired in a tone that clearly forbade reply. The housekeeper backed her chin yet farther into her skull. “Good,” Elly confirmed, positioning herself in the front seat and closing the door.
Sable backed out of the driveway. Just as they were about to drive past the house and away, Elly touched Sable’s cashmere sleeve. She said nothing, but Sable brought the car to a stop in front of Gabby’s house.
They all lived in a wide circle around Gabby and had always met here. Gabby had lived in this house for twenty-five years. She’d raised her children here. Gabby and Don had built the house on Olive Street when the children were babies. After the divorce, Gabby began having guests, writer friends from all around the country, and she slowly began to realize that she’d turned her home into a sort of writers’ retreat. To Elly, Sable, Barbara Ann and Beth, this house had become a second home. A refuge. In good weather they gathered on the covered redwood deck. The backyard was dense with trees and the Sierra Nevadas rose in the east. When the weather was inclement, they met in the kitchen, spread around the large antique oak table. On winter evenings they would light a fire and recline in Gabby’s overstuffed chairs or against large pillows in the family room. But it was always here. This house and Gabby had welcomed them, embraced and encouraged them, celebrated with them, commiserated with them. And some to-die-for gossip had been traded here.
They’d tried meeting in other places, but it hadn’t worked. The women were uncomfortable in Sable’s plush, white manse, being served off a tray by the kitchen witch; it made them feel rigid and starched. Elly’s little house, as if designed for an old maid schoolteacher, was piled with the indulgence of thirty years of books and papers. Barbara Ann couldn’t tame her wild beasts long enough for them to talk, much less read their works in progress. Her husband invariably blustered into the kitchen, bearlike, dirty from a hard day and growling sweetly, “What’s for dinner, darlin’?” even though it was obvious no one was hovering over the stove. And with Beth it wasn’t the size of her town house, per se, though it was uncomfortably small. It was more that one never knew when her commercial airline pilot husband would be in residence. If Jack Mahoney was home, Beth waited on him like a geisha, and seemed nervous the whole time, as if the presence of her friends might disturb him.
Gabby’s house was the kind you could drop into anytime. There were very few rules: you shouldn’t wake her too early, never leave the toilet-paper roller empty, and if you want something special to eat or drink, you had to bring it. Otherwise, she wanted people around her. Sarah and David still called them Aunt Elly and Aunt Sable—Barbara Ann and Beth having come along too late to become aunts. Even holidays, from the Fourth of July to Christmas, found the place a haven for family and friends. Since Beth’s husband traveled often and both Elly and Sable were unmarried, it was only Barbara Ann who was booked for all family occasions. Gabby’s had become a writers’ house, a women’s house. They had somehow managed to keep each other pumped up and productive despite the fact that no two of them wrote in the same genre...or perhaps it was that very diversity that kept them stimulated and interested in one anothers’ work. And their mutual support had gone far beyond
their works; they shored each other up through every personal crisis of their daily lives.
The house on Olive Street, Elly assumed, would be sold. And the friends, altogether too different to be close friends in the first place, would scatter without Gabby to hold them together.
“I don’t even want to think what all we’re losing today,” Elly said.
“Looks like you’re stuck with me,” Sable consoled.
Elly peered at her over the top of her glasses. “But look at what you’re stuck with.”
Copyright © 1999 by Robyn Carr
ISBN-13: 9781488098727
The View from Alameda Island
Copyright © 2019 by Robyn Carr
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