“She sounds angry.”
“Well, sure, but she’s also taking charge. At least, that’s how I see it.”
“I find poetry hard to understand sometimes. Not that I read it all that often. Not since college, anyway.”
“It is hard to understand. And when I can’t figure it out, I just concentrate on how the words make me feel.”
She told him about the tenant at the motel who’d had poetry in her room, and how Sam had been found sitting on her bed reading a volume of T.S. Eliot. Then the motel closed, and Sam didn’t know her name. She had no way of finding out. If she had, they could have gotten together to discuss the greats. It was so hard meeting people who shared your interests.
“Unless your interest is drinking, or watching football,” Timothy said.
“Good point.”
Angie laughed at something. She was joined by the bartender’s girlfriend. The girlfriend slapped herself hard on the knee. The bartender, sitting between the two women, laughed, too.
Poor Eunice, Sam thought. Here she’d gone to the trouble to invite people to make Barry’s birthday a success, and they weren’t talking to him all that much. Why didn’t he have any friends of his own? And why didn’t Eunice?
“You have friends?” she asked Timothy.
“Sure.”
“Lots?”
“I wouldn’t say lots. People I go out with sometimes.”
“Girls?”
“Not really.”
He blushed.
“I was just thinking about this party, and the other guests, and why none of Barry’s friends are here. I mean, that guy he works with doesn’t seem too chummy, if you ask me. Which you didn’t, of course. Just saying,” she said.
Some people had trouble making friends, Timothy said. His own mother was a good example. She got married young. Her life was all about her kids and keeping things going for the family. After she got married again and had time to do what she wanted, she still didn’t make friends. Sam said she must be lonely, then. Timothy said he never had that impression of her. But she’d always been hard to read, so it was entirely possible.
“What about your dad? Are you guys close?” Sam asked.
Timothy took a moment to consider.
“More than we used to be. I didn’t like him much when I was young.”
“Because?”
“He drank all the time and sat on his ass, basically.”
Sam said Timothy’s dad would have gotten on great with her grandparents. Not.
“Hardasses?”
“Rock hard.”
Eunice had entered the living room and was insistently tapping her glass with a fork. Silence fell. Barry was on one side of her, and Meredith on the other.
“I, that is, we, would like to make an announcement,” she said.
Sam and Timothy swung around, so the lake was behind them now. Timothy leaned close to Sam and quietly hummed the wedding march. Sam jabbed him with her elbow.
Eunice gestured to Barry, inviting him to speak.
He rocked onto the balls of his feet a couple of times. He stopped.
“Go on,” Eunice said.
“Okay. Well. First. Thanks for coming to my party. You get to be my age, birthdays don’t mean so much. Except when you can share them, with friends.” He paused. Sam could see his mind go somewhere else. He looked distressed. Then he recovered himself.
“So, now’s a good time to let you all know that I’m giving up The Caboose. Jax, you already know about this. We’ve been talking about it for several weeks,” Barry said.
Jax—the bartender—nodded solemnly.
“I’m looking for a buyer,” Barry said.
“Because you won’t let me have it for fifty K under asking,” Jax said. There was no edge in his voice, but Sam sensed some bad feeling there.
“But you’re in complete charge until that time. All I ask is that you don’t run her into the ground,” Barry said. Jax’s girlfriend looked cross.
“You’re retiring?” Angie asked.
“Moving on to a new venture. Which brings us to announcement number two. Eunice and I are going into business. Starting an elder care service that lets people stay at home longer.”
Angie clapped. No one else did.
“What’s it called?” she asked.
“Lillian’s Angels.”
He talked on. Life is a funny thing, he said. You never knew what doors were going to open. There he was, all settled in this house, and in The Caboose, thinking he’d reached the top, or maybe not the top, but a plateau, a nice comfortable place where he could look back on things with an even perspective. And then you meet someone who changes things for you, only you don’t see at first what those changes are, exactly. You just go with the flow. You have to be open, he said. You have to trust.
As he continued to delve into matters of the heart, Sam watched Eunice listen. She stood, hands clasped, gazing up at him with a soulful expression, especially in her eyes.
Then Meredith was talking. It seemed that she, too, had news to share.
“I’ve agreed to donate a little seed money to Lillian’s Angels.” There followed soft murmurs of approval. “And, out of respect for my mother’s wishes, I’m also going to turn her childhood home into a community center for women wanting to better themselves,” she said.
“Oh, how wonderful!” Angie said. She stood and put her hand on Meredith’s arm.
She and Angie took a seat together on the couch. Barry and Eunice sat, too, signaling that the party might now resume.
“How about you? Any announcements?” Timothy asked Sam.
“I need to use the bathroom.”
“Ground breaking.”
“Earth shattering.”
She asked Eunice where to go, then went down the hall she’d indicated on the far side of the kitchen. The floor was slate. Framed pictures of children, clearly taken decades before, hung on both walls, and Sam was unpleasantly reminded of Lucy’s home and the night she put two of them before Glen in the bathroom.
Assholes.
Come on, be fair.
They were just a couple of fucked-up people, in over their heads.
As she washed her hands and examined her reflection in the large mirror, she wondered if she were capable of love. She’d always believed it of herself, though events with Suki and Lucy now caused her to doubt. She had needed them both, cultivated them, and then become disappointed, which raised another question—could you still care for someone who let you down?
She returned to the party. Timothy looked up immediately, as if he’d been watching for her. Something about him suggested an accustomed anguish, which along with how he’d described his parents meant he might have asked himself the same question.
chapter twenty-five
She ordered herself not to be nervous.
Pull yourself together this instant!
Her stern resolve was fleeting, and gone altogether by the time she reached the genteel brick building on the far side of campus. This was a part of Dunston she’d never been to before, which struck her as strange given how long she had lived there.
He was a therapist, specializing in children and young adults, according to the small brass plaque mounted by the front door. Sam hadn’t known that beforehand. All he said on the telephone was to please come to his office. She realized, as she climbed the short flight of stairs to the door, that he might have thought her a prospective patient when she’d said the matter was urgent and couldn’t wait.
She ente
red the foyer of a converted house. A pair of French doors, lined with fabric, were just to her right. She knocked. When there was no answer, she opened one and stepped inside. There she found a large desk with a computer monitor on it and some papers. Beyond the desk was another door, which is where Sam assumed she’d find him.
What kind of doctor has no one out front?
Her unease grew rapidly. Once again, she gave herself a firm rebuke.
Oh, go on, get in there!
She didn’t have to, though, because he came out to greet her. He was tall. His hair was dark, thick, and streaked with gray. The tweed jacket he wore reminded Sam of some of the people who came to visit at Lindell. His slacks had a sharp crease. The hand that gripped hers was warm and dry. Sam knew hers was damp with anxious perspiration. He ushered her into the room he’d come out of, and gestured to a large leather chair across from an elaborately carved desk.
He waited until she sat, then he took the chair behind the desk.
He watched her calmly for a moment, waiting for her to speak.
“So,” she said.
“Why don’t you tell me what brings you here today?” he asked. He seemed like a nice person. He’d have to be, right? You couldn’t be a therapist and be mean. You’d go out of business in no time. What she couldn’t figure out was why a guy like him would go into that line of work in the first place. Maybe he was working out his own guilt complex.
“You’re my father,” she said.
He leaned back in his chair, as if to take her in from a different perspective.
“Yes, I know,” he said.
“How? You’ve never met me. And I sure as hell have never met you.”
“Because you bear a striking resemblance to my late mother.”
From the top of the bookcase behind him, he removed a leather folder containing two pictures, side by side, of a man in one half and a woman opposite him. He handed the folder to her across the desk. Sam wasn’t sure what decade the picture dated from, but she guessed the 1950s from the woman’s flowered hat and pearl choker. And there she was, Sam in an earlier day, the same broad forehead and long nose. The fleshy lower lip was pretty much exact, too.
“Wow. What was her name?”
“Edith.”
“Edith Delacourt.”
“Edith Langley, before she married.”
She gave the pictures back. She didn’t know what to do next.
“When you called to make the appointment, you sounded angry. Were you?” he asked.
“Sure. Why not? I mean, wouldn’t you be?”
“I suppose so.”
They went on looking at each other. Sam tried to see him being involved with her mother, dating her, making love, telling lies.
“I just want to know why,” Sam said.
“Why …?”
“Why you bailed, why you never tried to find me, why you never did a damn thing for me.”
Again, the long look from the leaned-back chair.
“Are you absolutely sure of your facts?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“One, I didn’t bail. Two, I did ask to see you a number of times. And three, as to not doing anything for you, it was clear that my efforts would be highly unappreciated.”
Sam rubbed her forehead with the tips of her fingers. A dull ache had begun there. Also in her stomach because she’d had no breakfast.
“You’re having trouble knowing what to believe,” he said.
“Something like that.”
“Let me begin at the beginning then.”
They’d been in high school together. They met in the Drama Club, to audition for the roles of George and Emily for that year’s production of Our Town.
“I thought you met in a diner,” Sam said.
“A diner?”
“Where my mother worked.”
Henry shook his head.
Just another fib.
He resumed. Neither of them were chosen, but they continued to attend rehearsals because they each had a friend in the cast. And they liked spending time together. He found Flora lively and full of mischief. Did Sam know that her mother had once coated the seat of a lunchroom chair with glue, at the table where the cheerleaders always sat, and it just so happened that the lead cheerleader chose that particular one to plop herself down in, on a day when she was in uniform, no less? Flora had confessed the prank not long after they met, and he assumed she was trying to prove that she was the kind of girl he should be interested in. She struck him as vulnerable, though at the time, being a boy of eighteen, he wouldn’t have used that word.
It soon became clear to him that she was two people, or to put it in terms that made more sense, she lived two lives—one at school and the other with her family. During the day, she laughed, teased, and spoke of the future optimistically. But on the weekend, when he picked her up for a date, she came out to his car downcast, quiet, and brooding. She never invited him into the house. He never met her parents. He understood, from the few references she made, they were strict, old-fashioned even, suspicious of people.
“She said she was in love with you,” Sam said.
“And I was in love with her.”
He was going away to college. She wasn’t. He said he’d marry her when he’d finished his first year at Yale. She said that if they did marry, he must take her away from Dunston forever. He tried to get to the bottom of it. Something changed in her then. She became defensive, almost irrational. He didn’t bring it up again. When she told him she was pregnant, he offered to marry her then and there. She agreed.
He bought a ring, got the license. He told his family nothing; he assumed she told hers nothing as well. They were to meet at the courthouse. She never came. He called and was told she wouldn’t speak to him. He went to her home, and the father, a mean, angry-looking man came to the door with a baseball bat in his hands and told him never to come back. He assumed that the parents were holding her captive, refusing to let her leave the house.
He consulted a lawyer, a friend of the family who would keep the matter in the strictest confidence. Unless he had good grounds, it would be unwise to go to the police. The lawyer suggested writing a letter, though given their past behavior, it was likely that it would be destroyed before ever reaching Flora’s hands. He wrote anyway, sometimes sending pictures of himself, begging her to contact him. To his immense relief, she did, also by letter, in which it said she had changed her mind about marrying him and to please leave her alone.
“What could I do?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Assert your rights.”
He sat, hands folded on the smooth surface of his elegant desk.
“I thought it would be harmful to you both if I got in the way,” he said.
“Because …?”
“Her parents were capable of doing harm.”
“All the more reason to have saved us!”
“It was a difficult choice. I made the one I felt best.”
He offered money; it was always refused. By the parents, not by Flora. He was pretty sure they had stopped passing on his messages.
“She told them you raped her,” Sam said.
For the first time, his eyes registered a sudden, sharp look of surprise.
“Hoping to protect herself from them, no doubt,” he said.
“Except that they punished her anyway. They treated her like shit.”
He shook his head. Then his gaze left her face.
“What I don’t understand, though, is what her parents made of a presumed rapist wanti
ng to have contact with his victim, and then offering money for the support of the child he fathered,” he said.
“Maybe they thought you were trying to lessen your crime by making amends.”
“Then they didn’t know much about human psychology.”
“All they knew about was cruelty.”
“They were hard on you, too?”
“Of course.”
“Making you pay for your mother’s sins.”
For a moment, he looked truly sad. Sam thought about the kinds of things he must hear in that office. The fear and rage of ordinary people. She bet he hadn’t heard anything quite so strange as what she’d just told him. Her thoughts turned then to Flora, the lie to her parents, Sam herself, Layla Endicott, and her one good friend, Mayva Barns.
“She told me you were dead,” Sam said.
“And you decided to look for me anyway?”
“Just the other day she came clean about not having been raped. When she told me that, I figured the rest of it was crap, too. She admitted you were alive and well, right here in Dunston.”
“I wonder what made her decide to share the truth now, after all this time.”
“She read about your father in the paper. She said you’d probably come into money, and that I should try and get some.”
Now he looked amused.
“You don’t mince words. I wish more of my patients were like you,” he said.
“Is there any?”
“Money? Not much. My father wasn’t a thrifty man. In his youth, yes. But as he aged, and after my mother was gone, he spent freely. Then there were the stupid schemes he invested in—real estate developments that went nowhere, principally. He had this friend from school who talked him into all kinds of nonsense.”
Sam thought he sounded like an idiot, but kept that to herself.
“I invested something for you, though, years ago. In case we ever met,” he said.
“What if I had never looked you up?”
“It’s in my will that you’re to receive it when I die.”
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