What She Inherits

by Diane V. Mulligan

  Now she could only hope that the developer who was flying out here next week would come through and save her, and that someday Casey would forgive her.

  And if Casey didn’t forgive her, Rosetta would have only herself to blame. Before her finances dipped to this crisis level, Rosetta hadn’t realized how wrong she’d been to enable Casey for so long. Rosetta had given her a fairy-tale life instead of helping her develop a life of her own. At first, when she hauled Casey back here from a life of squalor in New York City, Rosetta’s primary fear was that Casey had inherited her mother’s fragile psyche, that her chaotic life was due to mental illness. The best thing she could do, Rosetta had thought, was keep the girl close and figure out what sort of help she needed.

  But as Casey adjusted to her new life on Devil’s Back, Rosetta could see that she wasn’t like Maureen in anything except appearances, though Casey had worked damn hard to change that: The awful tattoo covering her entire arm, the ridiculous flame-red hair dye. Whatever had fueled Casey’s efforts to escape into a haze of painkillers and booze, it wasn’t the mood disorder that had turned Maureen’s life upside down.

  Now, though, Rosetta could see that her methods for helping Casey get back on her feet had had some serious flaws. After Casey stopped resenting Rosetta for saving her life (and Rosetta had no doubt that had she not gone to New York when she did, she would have soon gotten a next-of-kin phone call), Casey started treating Devil’s Back like a life raft. Instead of helping her bring the raft ashore, Rosetta had only fortified it.

  It was Rosetta’s idea to turn Beach Plum cottage, one of her several rental properties, into a café. Casey had been helping at the inn and had started making homemade goodies for the continental breakfast and afternoon tea. Her concoctions were divine, and so Rosetta gave her a café of her own.

  And in doing so, Rosetta had allowed Casey to live as if fairy godmothers did exist. The magic was all over now. The money gone. The future uncertain at best. There’d be no more bailouts from the bank of Rosetta Washburn.

  If only there was a way to keep the café. If only she could keep the café separate from her other businesses; sell off the inn, the tavern, the gallery, some of the cottages, but not the café. Without the other things to worry about, and with some of the money from selling everything else, maybe she could mentor Casey. When Casey was ready to handle the business side on her own, Rosetta could retire.

  The inn might be hopelessly out of date and in need of upgrades she couldn’t afford; the tavern, with its old fashioned Maine seacoast charm, might be far out of fashion for today’s travelers; the gallery, with its displays of work by local artists, might be a total loss because really who wanted another kitschy, ceramic soap holder or amateur oil painting of a lighthouse; but the café—where the bakery cases were full of from-scratch, made-with-love pastries, and the coffee was brewed to rich, smooth perfection—the café was a true twenty-first century business that appealed to everyone from young hipsters who loved nothing more than supporting small local businesses, to nostalgic elderly people who had no patience for trendy gluten-free, ancient grains, sprouted-wheat anything.

  Rosetta’s legacy wasn’t a handful of buildings that would soon belong to someone who was likely to tear them down. Her legacy was her talented niece whose café had become, in a few short years, the best-loved business on the island.

  She hadn’t expected her walk to clear her head so thoroughly, but as she climbed the inn’s front steps that afternoon, she felt as if a burden had been lifted.

  Often she lingered in the hotel lounge in the afternoons. She liked to meet her guests and hear their stories. Most days she brought her tarot cards—reading fortunes was a little hobby she’d acquired in recent years, though her knowledge of tarot was academic and not mystical—it was a great way to get her guests to open up. There was something disarming about offering a glimpse into the future. Today, though, she went straight upstairs to her small office on the second floor to take another look at her accounts. She would keep the café. Somehow, she would find a way.

  Chapter 5

  St. Nabor Island, South Carolina

  On Monday, thanks to Grace’s planning and Molly’s assistance, there was a small, tasteful funeral for Angela’s mother with a mass at the parish Angela had attended her entire life. By then Angela had arrived at a sad but conflicted acceptance of her mother’s death. She had visited her father at his nursing home across the bridge in Palmetto Landing, but the staff there told her they didn’t recommend that she tell him about her mother’s death, so she didn’t.

  Angela knew she could not speak at the funeral, her emotions were too raw, but when she tried to think of who could give the eulogy, she was at a complete loss. For the first time in her life, it occurred to her how few friends her mother had. She had acquaintances from church. She had coworkers. She didn’t really have friends.

  In the end Angela asked Grace, who said she’d be honored to make a few remarks. As she spoke at the funeral, though, it was dry-eyed, and most of her reflection had to do with how hard-working and professional Deb had been. Hers were not the words of a friend. It was more like a letter of recommendation than a eulogy. Angela kept waiting for Grace to at least mention Deb’s commitment to her family and how she balanced her career with motherhood, but Grace never did. Angela felt a little bad about that as she glanced around the nearly empty church. The attendees were coworkers, a couple of neighbors, and some old ladies from church who Angela suspected made a hobby of attending funerals. What must they think, hearing her mother remembered in such an impersonal way?

  Only a few people bothered to follow the funeral procession to the cemetery, and then it was all over. Her mother was in a box in the ground, and she was back at home with Molly and Nicole, numb and exhausted.

  None of them had any idea what to do next. They sat around the kitchen table drinking coffee and staring at the mountains of food people kept dropping off at the house. It seemed that every person who had ever known her mother felt that, whether or not they had been friends, they owed it to her to cook something for her survivors. Angela had no appetite, though. Molly had been sorting things as they arrived, labeling containers, and freezing what could be frozen. Thank God for Molly.

  When they’d been sitting in silence for the better part of an hour, Nicole finally said, “Want to see if there’s anything on TV?”

  This struck Angela as the dumbest question in the world. Of course she didn’t want to watch TV. Besides, doing anything normal felt wrong.

  “What day are y’all going back?” Angela asked. They had not talked about Molly and Nicole’s travel plans.

  Molly and Nicole exchanged a look, and then Molly said, “We fly out Thursday around noon.”

  Angela nodded.

  “And you, too,” Molly added.

  “I think I should withdraw,” Angela said, not looking at either of them. “There’s so much that needs to be done here. I can’t leave.”

  Grace had told Angela she would help her settle her mother’s estate, and in fact she had set up meetings for the two of them with her mother’s lawyer and her accountant. It was unbelievable the number of things that needed to be dealt with, particularly when someone died so unexpectedly. Her mother was, in general, the most prepared person Angela had ever met, and yet, incredibly, she seemed to have left no will. Angela had to make all the decisions.

  The most pressing need was planning for her father’s ongoing care. Now that he’d outlived the doctor’s initial predictions, it was anyone’s guess how long he might live. Five years? Ten years? And she had to figure out how that would all get paid for.

  “I’m sure your professors will understand if you take another week,” Nicole said.

  Angela shook her head. “It’s going to take more than a week to deal with everything. Hell, I have to sell this house.”

  “You don’t need to be here to sell the house. Grace can do it,” Molly said.

  This was true, but still, it
was going to take more than a week before Angela was ready to get back to any semblance of normal. Angela shook her head again. She had already spoken to Grace about the idea of turning the house into a rental, but when they spoke to her mother’s lawyer and executor of her estate, they discovered that the house was mortgaged to the max. There was no way they could bring in enough rental income to pay the bills. Apparently her mother had been using the house like an ATM.

  “So what? You’ll come back in the spring?” Molly asked.

  Angela shrugged. Another of her mother’s secrets was that there had been no college fund for Angela, as Angela had been led to believe. Instead, her mother was financing her education with private loans. Angela had no idea how she’d ever be able to afford to return to St. Kate’s.

  “Maybe now isn’t the best time to talk about this,” Nicole said.

  “There will never be a good time to talk about it,” Angela said.

  “You don’t need to make any big decisions right now. You shouldn’t. You’re grieving and you’re overwhelmed. Give yourself some time,” Nicole said.

  There was no point in arguing, not because Nicole was right, but because in two days Nicole would be back at school, and Angela would be here and could make whatever decision she wanted.

  That night, after they all went to bed, Angela heard it for the first time. Nicole was sound asleep on an air mattress on the floor of Angela’s room. Down the hall, Molly was asleep in the guest room. While one of them could have slept in Angela’s mother’s room, they had settled on the current sleeping arrangement quickly and without much discussion. Angela was glad not to be in her room alone, and she also had a strange sort of reverence for her mother’s room, as if it would be wrong to disturb the space by sleeping in it. Molly took the guest room because she was a light but enthusiastic sleeper who tended to go to bed before everyone else and to sleep later in the morning. Nicole and Angela were the night owls.

  These days Angela was more an insomniac than a night owl. She wondered if she’d ever sleep again. She was wide awake in her dark bedroom, listening to Nicole’s slow breathing when she heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps in the hall. She told herself it was her imagination, but her heart thudded. Someone was out there. Someone had broken into the house. But then the footsteps kept pacing back and forth between her mother’s room and her study, up and down the hall. What kind of burglar paces?

  Reassuring herself that it was Molly, she got up, tiptoed to the door, and peered into the hallway. She couldn’t see anyone. She waited, holding her breath, staying as still as possible, and she heard it again. The creak of the floor. But the hallway was empty. She shut the door and crossed the room to the air mattress and grabbed Nicole’s arm, shaking her awake.

  She came to with a start. Angela hushed her and instructed her to be very still and listen. They waited a few seconds, and when Angela thought the noise wasn’t going to make itself heard again, there it was.

  “Did you hear that?” Angela asked.

  “Hear what?”

  “Footsteps.”

  With a sigh, Nicole threw back the covers and got out of bed. She flung open the door and said, “Come on, boogie man. We’re trying to sleep here.” Then she went back to bed and got back under the covers. “You’ve gotta try to get some sleep. You’re exhausted.”

  Of course I’m exhausted, she thought. “I heard footsteps.”

  “There’s no one out there. It was probably Molly getting up to use the bathroom or something.”

  Angela shook her head, but she slid back down into bed. She agreed—there was no one out there. But there was something out there.

  In the distant reaches of her memory, Angela recalled a time when she was very young—four or five at most—when she’d been playing in the yard, and a friendly teenage boy appeared before her and played with her. When her mother came out on the deck to talk to her, he disappeared. When she told her mother this, her mother told her to stop telling tales and not to talk to strangers. Angela had insisted that she wasn’t lying, but her mother wouldn’t hear it.

  It happened again, several times. She’d be outside playing alone and the boy would appear. Those encounters became the basis of her childhood insistence that her big brother’s ghost was looking out for her. She didn’t have an imaginary friend. She had her big brother’s ghost. She told stories about him at school and invented a whole life for him, found evidence of him in all sorts of everyday experiences. It drove her mother nuts.

  Eventually, she grew out of it, the way kids outgrow their imaginary friends, and while that memory of the boy who appeared in the yard continued to bother her because she was so sure it really happened, she concluded that there were plenty of logical explanations, most obviously that he was a kid who lived in the neighborhood who wandered into the yard sometimes. It was also possible that he really was an imaginary friend, as her mother had insisted. Her memories of him had faded now and had taken on the cloudy, dull film of all her memories from such an early age. It was impossible to say now if what she recalled of those encounters was hazy memory or pure invention, but she hadn’t outgrown her belief in ghosts. She’d never admit as much to her rational, logical friends, though.

  There’s no such thing as ghosts, she told herself now, listening to the regular rhythm of Nicole’s sleeping breath. Ghosts aren’t real. But she kept hearing the footsteps, back and forth and back and forth until the sun came up.

  Chapter 6

  Devil’s Back Island, Maine

  The downside to Casey’s little arrangement with Jason was that he was always around. She understood that his home situation—crashing at his older brother’s house, which meant sleeping on a pull-out couch and being awakened in the wee hours of the night by wailing children—was not ideal for him, but it seemed unfair that he should expect her to shoulder that burden. Now he was staying at her place more than at his brother’s, and she was starting to think he was seeing their whatever-it-was as more than a casual fling.

  That evening, he’d arrived with a six-pack of beer, a box of pizza, and a baggie of pot, and had settled onto the futon beside her as if he owned the place. He kicked off his stinky sneakers and left them under the coffee table, which he littered with the contents of his pockets and his meager dinner offering, and he grabbed the remote control and turned to the Red Sox game without even asking if Casey minded. It was his third night in a row at her place, and as much as she enjoyed his company beneath the sheets, she was getting sick of him.

  “You’re quiet tonight,” he said, during a commercial break.

  How would he even know over the deafening volume of the television, she wondered.

  “Just tell me if I’m, like, in the way,” he said.

  Casey squeezed her eyes shut and did not allow herself to say, “Yes, you are, like, in the way.” When she opened her eyes, the commercial break had ended, and he was once again utterly absorbed in the television.

  She got up and attempted to tidy up the coffee table. She took the leftover pizza to the kitchen, and grabbed his sneakers—holding them as if they were roadkill—and put them on the back porch. Then she went and got in the shower. She was tired and although it was just after eight, she was ready for bed. The downside of running a café: obscenely early wake-up calls.

  She stood under the hot water and tried not to think about the fact that Jason would still be there when she got out, and then, in a turn she probably should have expected, he came into the bathroom, pulled back the shower curtain, and got in with her.

  She felt a surge of annoyance—couldn’t she have five freaking minutes to herself?—but as his hands slid down her soapy skin and his lips came to rest on hers, she felt herself relent.

  He kissed her shoulder, and then left a trail of kisses down her arm, tracing the outline of her tattoo, the intricate vining flowers, birds, and butterflies, which covered her left arm, crept across her shoulder and shoulder blade, and ended at the nape of her neck. She had gotten it when she
was seventeen, when she first moved to New York. She’d briefly shacked up with a tattoo artist who seduced her with the enticing idea that she could reinvent herself with ink. The relationship hadn’t lasted, but the tattoo was forever. Had she dated him for much longer, her entire body might have been made new under his hand. She didn’t exactly regret the tattoo, but sometimes she wished she didn’t wear such a huge reminder of what a screw-up she used to be.

  She stopped thinking about all of that as Jason’s hand slid lower. This was why she put up with his constant intrusions, his Pig-Pen messiness, his remote control dominance. This almost made all of that seem worthwhile.

  Casey tossed and turned that night, crowded to the edge of the bed while Jason sprawled, dead asleep and oblivious beside her. She should have told Rosetta about the letter. Rosetta had the right to know that Maureen had died. Of course, if it weren’t for the letter, Casey would not know, and she could go on living a life where, figuratively and effectively, her mother had been dead to her for twenty years, and Rosetta could, too. If Casey had the choice to remain ignorant, isn’t that what she’d choose?

  Although she had on many occasions said the words, “My mother is dead to me,” Casey had never thought much about her mother’s actual death. When Maureen first kicked her out, she had tried to persuade Maureen to let her back in by suggesting that it would be awful if either of them died and the other didn’t even know, but those were just things she said in her naïveté, her foolish belief that reconciliation was possible. And anyway, she had mostly been thinking of herself, how she was likely to die without a mother to mourn her, and not the other way around, because she could never truly envision a world without her mother in it.