by Deborah Reed
“Elin…”
“I just need to be out from under it.”
“I don’t know what to say. What a shock.… I’m so sorry.”
There it was again, soary, like something you couldn’t spell in the English language.
“I want the house,” Elin said.
“You can have the house,” he said, quick and generous, but of course the house was nothing compared to what his dealership was worth. He’d owned it for fifteen years and would still own it fifteen years from now, and none of that would be hers and she did not care.
“This is all very civilized,” she said. “Thank you.” Her gratitude was sincere but she didn’t say this. She didn’t tell him she appreciated that he was, and always had been, kind to her. A kind and considerate liar.
“Takes one to know one,” Kate said in Elin’s mind. Said with laughter, cracking herself up inside Elin’s head. Elin dripped sweat onto the porch.
“You can leave me alone now,” Elin said, watching Fluke run laps around the yard. “Go off and be dead.” She didn’t mean that. Christ. She didn’t mean that at all.
She stood and whistled sharply for Fluke and they headed inside so she could be there when the girls woke, to help them dress and get downstairs to Shug’s overstuffed breakfast that had not failed to make their eyes bug. And Shug would not fail to make them smile, and Elin would not fail to take her migraine medication with an eight-ounce glass of water, but she would certainly fail these children in a multitude of ways by the time they crawled back into their beds that night, their trust in her crowded out by their justified doubt and suspicion.
THIRTY-TWO
VIVVIE HAD STRUGGLED TO KEEP Big Boy calm under the icy hose that day, his legs shifting side to side, slick and quivering, a wily, furry bulk wrangling through her arms and through her tears. He was whining, whimpering with terror, a good dog wanting to do the good thing, but he was no more capable of erasing what he’d just seen than she was.
A movement above Vivvie’s shoulder caught her eye. Elin, peering down from the bathroom window. Vivvie shoved the dog against the siding and wiped her eyes in the crook of her arm, but she knew full well it was too late, and she kept her arm to her face for crying, the hose running down her leg into her shoe.
What conclusion could a child that young come to? As a teenager Elin had alluded to what she’d seen that day, her words laced with menace. Of course everything she said as a teenager was laced with menace, with complaint, a constant judgment against Vivvie, but it was clear then as now that the only daughter Vivvie had left in this world was plagued by misery, by a rattling demon that Vivvie herself had infected her with the day Elin saw her through the bathroom window.
Vivvie felt the phantom sting of brushwood tearing the skin off her back, the scent of autumn soil beneath her fingernails from clawing and scrambling for the rifle behind her. It was late morning but if it hadn’t been for Wink honking his horn—a signal meant to get her attention—she might have left the kitchen and gone back to bed, mired in the same thoughts that had kept her awake most of the night. She peered out above the sink.
Wink had dropped the tailgate on his truck, stepped back, and stared into the bed with crossed arms.
“What’s in there?” Vivvie yelled through the screen.
“A Ping-Pong table,” he answered without looking in her direction.
“A Ping-Pong table.”
“Yes, ma’am. A Ping-Pong table. From the flea market.”
“Why?” she asked, but she had a feeling.
“Why not?”
Vivvie went outside and joined him behind his truck.
“Where are you going to put a Ping-Pong table?” she asked.
“Right out under these trees. The sun won’t fade it in the shade, and the rain won’t get at it too hard.” He pointed near the bull’s-eye still taped to the tree, its rings pink, bled nearly clear from the rain.
“The legs will sink into the sand,” Vivvie said. “It’ll be lopsided.”
Wink studied the yard.
Vivvie turned to her driveway and sighed. “You could put it over there at the top of my driveway in the shade. There’s plenty of room for me to park the truck closer to the street.”
“The sun’ll eat the paint off your truck.”
They stared at the dull, salt-eaten hood of the truck. Wink laughed, and then Vivvie did, too, just a little, and for the first time in weeks.
“My granddaughters might enjoy it,” she said, soberly.
“Well. You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Wink scratched the palm of his hand.
“You still got splinters?”
“Nah.”
“You ever finish that whistle?”
Wink nodded. “I painted it red. It’s all set for trying someone’s nerves.”
Vivvie smiled, glanced again at the driveway.
“How’s she doing?” he asked. “Elin. With your granddaughters.”
Vivvie waved a hand as if at a fly. “She claims she’s got everything under control. She’s lying.”
“I see.”
“But I don’t think it would be fair for them to stay here with me either. I’m not young anymore. Far from it.”
“You’re only what, fifty?”
“You write your own stuff or hire someone on the side?”
“You walked right into it.”
“You want me to help you pull that thing on out of your truck?”
“How’s your back?” he asked.
“How’s yours?”
“Well, it was fine until the day I pulled this Ping-Pong table out of my truck.”
“And your neighbor dropped it on your foot,” she said, expecting a grin and could see it had started, but then he stopped and looked directly at her.
“I’m sorry for what you’re going through, Vivvie. I don’t know what else to say.”
She couldn’t look him in the eye. “You’ve said all that needs saying,” she started, but before she could finish he was holding her in his arms. She was holding him, too.
“Why do you always smell like salty popcorn?” she asked, her cheek against his chest, eyelids closed, red against the sun. The red shirt in the tree, red all over the dog—
“I didn’t know I smelled like popcorn.”
“Yes,” she said. “You do.”
“With butter?”
“No.”
Wink had helped Vivvie and the movers Elin hired pack up Kate’s house, get the furniture and kitchenware, along with Kate’s clothes and books, into a storage unit and then stuff the girls’ toys, books, and clothes, as well as Kate’s notebooks and personal papers, into Vivvie’s spare room. When Kate’s house was finally bare, Vivvie had stood at the open door looking in at the nothingness, at what no longer was, a bright light of life extinguished. Gone this cocoon of an unmarred life, a mother and her children so happy in the face of inevitable doom. A tarnished old shame, like metal, like the taste of blood, filled Vivvie’s tongue. She winced, and winced again as Wink swept the front room with such warmhearted care, the crosswind carrying his popcorn smell toward her until she could no longer bear it and walked away.
She stepped back from him now, embarrassed, distrustful of her emotions.
“Well,” he said.
“Well.”
They latched onto the lip of the table and wedged it halfway out. A leg unfolded to the ground near Vivvie’s foot. She peered underneath.
“It’s only got three legs,” she said.
“I know.”
“What good is a three-legged Ping-Pong table?”
“It’s solid wood. They don’t make them like this anymore. All I have to do is nail a two-by-four under there. I already got one here in the truck. Besides, the woman was nearly giving this thing away.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“It was a steal,” Wink said, and Vivvie didn’t stop nodding until she got into her truck and backed it down her driveway.
After tha
t she and Wink heaved the Ping-Pong table free and toted it into the driveway’s shade. Vivvie stepped back. The strangeness of it, like a beached whale at which Vivvie could not help but stare. The view of the yard, the woods beyond it opening up after being blocked for decades by Jackson’s truck.
Wink wedged the two-by-four underneath. “I’ll fasten it in a minute,” he said, and wiped his hands on his pants. He glanced at Vivvie.
“You sure about this?” He scratched his chin. “We can always put it somewhere else.”
“You want to put it somewhere else?”
“No. No I don’t. Right here is fine.”
“I think Elin is keeping them away from me,” Vivvie said, as unexpectedly as a Ping-Pong table arriving in the driveway.
“Your granddaughters?”
“She doesn’t want me to see them. She hasn’t said so, but she keeps making excuses, like they have appointments or they’re in the middle of dinner or reading a book or whatever else she can come up with every time I call. ‘They’re trying to recover,’ she keeps saying.”
“But they would be, wouldn’t they?”
“I guess. Sure. But that’s not my point.”
The conversation had nowhere to go. What she didn’t say was that she feared an ugly pattern coming over her right after Kate died. Vivvie had pulled away from her granddaughters, the hurt in their eyes too familiar, the past too close to her skin. She’d taken a step back, filled the hours by following the paper trail of Kate’s life, phone calls and errands, anything that would force her out of the same room as her granddaughters. As her daughter.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have started in on that.”
“No need to apologize.”
“Yeah, there is.”
Wink pulled two paddles from his back pocket and a small white ball from his front. “Let’s see what you got,” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Come on. Be a sport.”
Vivvie hesitated, could hear the phone ringing in the kitchen through the open window, but the thought of answering exhausted her whole body. She did not want to listen to the news on the other end.
Wink tipped his head toward the table. “Two out of three. Loser makes lunch.”
THIRTY-THREE
AIRPORT SECURITY HAD THE FEEL of a much larger inspection, a deeper examination of Neal’s trustworthiness, of seeing what he, quite literally, had up his sleeve. Profuse sweating was the first sign of a liar, of someone with something to hide. Was he a man with corrupt intentions? A TSA agent asked him to step to the side while he felt up and down Neal’s legs, back, and underarms with rubber-gloved hands. A wand was drawn over every inch of his body and Neal could not help but feel the man would find something, a pocketknife, a box cutter he never used but had somehow placed in his jeans by mistake. When the agent finally released him with a wave toward the gates and a look of regret that said he knew that Neal was hiding something, was getting away with that which he did not deserve, Neal nodded as if in agreement. “Thank you,” he said, and fumbled into his shoes.
He was two hours early and found a quiet corner to cool down and pull out his cell phone. Someone ought to be aware that he was on his way. He didn’t know where to find his daughters. He called his cousin but she didn’t know anything, and why would she?
Vivvie wasn’t answering her phone.
He didn’t know how to find Elin. He wasn’t sure he was ready to start looking. Since getting the mail yesterday things had been coming to him in doses. It seemed that under the circumstances he would quite naturally be confused or numb. He ought to be in shock. But as he made his way to the gate, and then sat down by the giant glass windows and waited to board, he did not feel any of those things. It was like being caught in a warm trance. A quiet, sun-drenched man in a rust-colored airport, his head filling with visions of his daughters in need—tiny little things asking after him for years, the hardship caused by his absence, the despair of Kate’s decline. He had not been there, he had not been anywhere at all, and he pressed his fingers into his eyes to still the weeping.
Maybe the weeping was the shock.
He was flying first class. He’d never flown first class but it was all that was available on short notice, and now he felt uneasy at the thought of being fussed over. He did not want the attention. He needed to process all the ways in which Kate had lied to him, her elaborate scheme woven over a long period of time. He needed to process the overriding anger that surged through him at intervals, zapping like a Taser throughout the night. He had been such a self-loathing idiot, buying into everything she accused him of without question. “You are ruining me,” she’d said, “ruining your own children. I have never been more miserable in my life than I am here with you, and in turn you are denying your own daughters the mother they deserve, the one I’m trying so hard to be.” Then she’d used his feelings for her sister against him, a truth he could not deny, her words tearing him apart like a serrated knife, scattering him into so many pieces across the country that it had been impossible to make a full repair. All these years later he still felt like Frankenstein, half monster, half man, now sitting in a clamoring crowd, hand covering his eyes, forcing himself to appear as if he were normal. He feared he just might blurt the whole story to the first person who showed him the smallest kindness.
The plane was starting to board when Vivvie finally answered her phone.
THIRTY-FOUR
ELIN DECIDED THAT TALKING WHILE driving was easier. She didn’t have to look her nieces in the eye, and they didn’t have to look at her. They could say what they wanted to say. She could do the same.
“But where did she go?” Quincy asked for what felt like the hundredth time.
“I don’t know,” Elin answered. “Heaven, I guess. I hope. I don’t know.”
“But why can’t I talk to her?”
“Because she’s gone.”
“Can’t you ask her to come back?”
“Quincy,” Averlee said. “Stop.”
Elin glanced in her mirror. Averlee shook her head at the window. Quincy stared into her lap.
“Let’s get some lunch,” Elin said. “I’m hungry. Aren’t you two hungry?”
They stopped at the Brandywine Sandwich Shoppe on Park Avenue. Elin wasn’t hungry, and from the looks of things, neither were her nieces. But who cared? They could get up and walk away from grilled cheese sandwiches and cookies if they felt like it. They could stroll the sidewalks and shop all day, too. They could stay in bed and watch TV and eat candy for breakfast. There were no rules, no routines, no blueprints for how this was supposed to go, and anyway, it just didn’t seem to matter.
Her mother’s days were different. As executor of Kate’s will—an odd fact that had Elin wondering if Kate had foreseen how such a responsibility would take over their mother’s life with goals and lists, have her marching toward every challenge, a new problem with every new day as a way of keeping her busy. The electric company refused to shut off the power without a signature from Kate. The credit union where Kate’s accounts were held was perplexed over what a power of attorney actually allowed when it came to Kate’s money. Same with the credit card companies. Everyone wanted something her mother couldn’t get, or had yet to get. There was always more for her to do. Answers and signatures, and where was the father of the children? Elin could hear the complicated weariness in her mother’s voice on the phone, but she could hear an arrogance, too, a pride of ownership for the messy occupation that was hers and hers alone.
Elin made excuses. A flicker of panic rose every time her mother asked to see Averlee and Quincy, which wasn’t as often as one would expect. Over the last couple of weeks her mother went from hands-on caring to nearly vanishing after Kate’s death. It was too familiar. Grief ought to be debilitating, ought to bring the living, the loved, together in their sorrow. For Elin, to talk to her nieces meant taking their hand, to leave them alone in a room meant she had to first touch a shoulder, the top
of a head, a knee. If her mother had cried Elin didn’t see it, and the only hugs she gave the girls appeared stiff and brief, a quick pat on the back at the door. Old habits die hard, emotional triggers like stubborn weeds, profoundly twisted and entrenched, rising to the surface. Elin’s own insides knotted every time she heard her mother’s voice, every time her mother averted her eyes from those two little girls.
They picked at their food in silence.
Averlee held her blue water bottle to the window, and the sun shone through the curve of the glass. “We can wash the label off and put it in the kitchen window. We can put some of Mrs. Pearl’s flowers in it.”
Elin felt her eyes go wide. She struggled to keep a straight face. Did Averlee believe they would return to the house they’d been living in? Of course she did. Elin hadn’t told her any different. What had she told them? “It’s like a short vacation at the pretty B and B. You’ll see. It’ll be nice.” She did not know how to be straight with children or if being straight with children was what one needed to be.
“Where do you live again?” Averlee asked.
“Oregon.”
“Where’s that?”
“I need to show you on a map so you’ll remember. It’s on the west coast of the United States. Right above California.”
Averlee studied her blue bottle in the sun.
“Have you two ever been there?” Elin asked.
Each shook her head.
“What about California?”
“Our mom took us to Melbourne Beach once,” Quincy said.
“We’ve never been out of the state,” Averlee said. “What do you do in Oregon?”
“I work. A lot.”
“Do you have a husband?” Quincy asked.
Elin cupped her left hand inside her right, massaging her finger where the ring used to be. “I did. I do. I won’t for much longer.”
The girls glanced at one another.
“You did or you do?” Averlee asked.
“How about we head across the street and check out the bookstore?” Elin said.
“What’s your husband’s name?” Averlee asked.
“Rudi. Rudiger.”