“I—I’m sorry” I whispered. “About everything. But especially about—about Mr. Marcus dying.” I hadn’t planned to say that. It just came out. “I sent you a card. I just didn’t write my name in it. I couldn’t.”
“That was you?” Mrs. Marcus said.
I thought how strange it must have seemed for Mrs. Marcus to get four cards addressed in the same hand, one unsigned.
“Britt here wrote out my card for me too,” Mrs. Stuldy said. “She’s been the best helper in the neighborhood this summer.”
I could tell Mrs. Stuldy was trying to help me, but her voice boomed out so heartily that both Mrs. Marcus and I winced.
“Oh,” Mrs. Marcus said stiffly, looking down at her tea.
I swallowed a lump in my throat.
“When Mrs. Stuldy showed me the obituary for Mr. Marcus, I felt really bad for you and your family,” I said. “I saw some of your family pictures, and I could tell that you all loved each other a lot.” Something caught in my throat, but I forced myself to keep talking. “And I felt sorry for myself, because I really did believe that Mr. Marcus was my grandfather. And that you were my grandmother.”
Mrs. Stuldy must have been more shocked than anybody to hear that, but she didn’t even blink. “And why was that, child?” she asked softly.
I didn’t answer her right away. I appealed directly to Mrs. Marcus.
“I know now that I was wrong about being your granddaughter. I—I wish I were. But I know it must have really upset you to hear me say things like that. And to find Mom and Bran and me living in your house. I’m really sorry.”
Mrs. Marcus accepted my apology with an impatient nod.
“I told you Britt was a good kid,” Mrs. Stuldy said, a hint of triumph in her voice.
Mrs. Marcus didn’t look convinced.
“So maybe you were misled,” she said. “But surely your parents knew—”
“It’s just my mother,” I said softly. “And she didn’t know anything about this. She thought Mr. Marcus really did hire Bran to house-sit, that we were protecting your house from thieves. Not—” I looked down. “Not breaking the law ourselves.”
“But you were breaking the law,” Mrs. Marcus exploded. ‘All of you. Maybe the yard boy—Brian? Bran? whatever his name is—maybe he really was so good at his frauds and hoaxes that he tricked his own family. So what? It’s still criminal, what he did. And after what I’ve suffered already, I feel entirely justified insisting that they be prosecuted to the full extent of the law—” Mrs. Marcus seemed to be arguing with Mrs. Stuldy, not me. But I interrupted.
“Won’t you let me explain?” I asked.
And then I told them everything. I started off with Mom eloping with Dad and being disowned, and then never wanting to talk about her parents. Both Mrs. Marcus and Mrs. Stuldy listened intently. But by the time I got around to us moving into the Marcuses’ house, Mrs. Marcus started interrupting with skeptical questions.
“You can’t tell me your mother didn’t recognize the name!” she said. “If your grandparents were Marcuses too.”
“Bran, well, he tried to make it so she didn’t suspect—he said stuff like you’d just lived in New York and Florida, not Ohio first. And he told her your name was pronounced a little differently—Mar-kees, not Marcus—and spelled differently, M-A-R-Q-U-I-S, and he hid everything that had your name spelled correctly. . . .”
“How stupid can your mother be?” Mrs. Marcus asked.
“Not stupid,” I said. “Just. . . trusting. And—and I think she wanted to believe Bran. She wanted to believe this miraculous job had just fallen into his lap, had solved all our problems.”
I told about how Mom wanted to be a doctor so badly, and how many obstacles she’d faced. And I told about myself too, how I’d found out Bran’s secret but hadn’t known what to do about it. I finished with Mrs. Marcus coming to the house that morning, and Mom being shocked and horrified and confused.
“I guess she was kind of rude to you,” I said. “But that was just because she was so certain she was right and you were wrong. She’d never doubted Bran about anything before.”
I fiddled with a teaspoon that was lying on the table in front of me. Nobody spoke. Then I looked directly at Mrs. Marcus.
“So, please, can you forgive us for what happened? I’m really sorry, and I know Mom and Bran are too. If you already called the police, can you tell them—”
“She didn’t call the police,” Mrs. Stuldy said.
Hearing that was like having a monster lifted off my back. I felt so light all of a sudden that I could have floated right up to the ceiling. But Mrs. Marcus was still frowning.
“She wouldn’t let me,” Mrs. Marcus said, inclining her head toward Mrs. Stuldy. “Said I needed a cooling-off period. She said there had to be more to the story than what I thought. And we could watch out the window and see you weren’t carrying off any of my valuables. Or—not any that you hadn’t already stolen.”
“We haven’t stolen anything!” I said heatedly. “Bran wouldn’t even let us use your silverware!”
Mrs. Stuldy and Mrs. Marcus exchanged glances again.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mrs. Marcus said. She looked more tired than ever. “My son didn’t think I was even up to coming down here to put the house on the market. And now this . . . this girl acts like she really believes what she’s saying, but what if she’s just acting? Or what if her brother has really got her fooled? Why don’t I just go ahead and call the police and let them sort everything out?”
Mrs. Stuldy cleared her throat.
“My son got picked up for shoplifting when he was thirteen,” she said. “And we had all those ‘get tough on crime’ judges. They threw the book at him. His first offense. And after that it was like everyone thought of Sam as a criminal. So he became one. He was too weak to do anything different.”
In my wildest dreams I couldn’t imagine Bran turning into someone who robbed a bank and murdered someone and spent the rest of his life in prison. But I understood Mrs. Stuldy’s point. It gave me chills.
Mrs. Marcus sighed.
“Go get your mother and brother,” she said. “I want to talk to them.”
What Mrs. Marcus did then was pretty smart, I thought. She made Mom and Bran tell the whole story over again, separately. She interviewed both of them in Mrs. Stuldy’s kitchen, while the rest of us sat waiting on all the extra furniture in the living room.
Finally Mrs. Marcus walked heavily out of the kitchen, with a pale-faced Bran following her. Mrs. Marcus leaned against the back of one of the couches.
“Maybe you three are the best liars I’ve ever met. Or maybe you’re a good family with a horrible history and one huge mistake.” She narrowed her eyes a little, staring at Bran. His face turned red and he lowered his head in shame.
“I couldn’t say for sure what you are,” Mrs. Marcus continued. “But I know this is the biggest decision I’ve had to make since I started having to decide things on my own. I can ask myself what John would do, but I don’t even know what that would be—this is too weird. But I guess—I guess if I’m going to make a mistake, I want it to be on the side of giving someone the benefit of the doubt. So as long as there’s nothing missing from my house, I’m not going to call the police.”
“Well, hot dang and good for you!” Mrs. Stuldy cheered, beaming. The rest of us were too numb to say a word.
But Mrs. Marcus wasn’t done.
“I just want to say, I want all your things out of there today,” she went on. “I want to sleep in my own house tonight.”
Mom and Bran and I all looked at one another. We could hardly complain that Mrs. Marcus was being unfair, but where would we go? Even if we had the money for it, we couldn’t move anywhere that quickly. And we didn’t have any money. I remembered telling Bran we could always live in our car if we had to, but what would we do with our furniture?
Mom swallowed hard. I could tell she was thinking about dropping out of school and going bac
k to work as a waitress, of being a waitress for the rest of her life.
“I understand,” she said softly. I’d never felt so sorry for her in all my life. She looked like a whipped dog, too humiliated even to look Mrs. Marcus straight in the eye. “We—”
Mrs. Stuldy interrupted.
“You know, I’ve been thinking,” she said, so casually you’d have thought we were just sitting around shooting the breeze, passing the time on a lazy summer day. “I’ve been thinking for the past week or so that I ought to rent me one of those storage units.”
“Storage units?” I repeated. I thought Mrs. Stuldy had gone crazy with all the excitement.
“You know, one of those places you can store furniture you don’t need right at the present time,” Mrs. Stuldy said. “I doubt I have enough to fill a whole unit, so you’uns can put some of your things in with mine. That is, if you’re not too proud to let your possessions go sharing space with a convict’s.”
We all stared at her like none of us understood English. Then as soon as I figured out what she was talking about, I said, “Oh, we’re not. We’re not too proud for that.”
Mrs. Stuldy saved us, I thought. If our furniture’s in storage, we can live in the car after all.
But she still had more to say.
“If I remember correctly after all this time, this house is right spacious when there’s not a lot of extra furniture sitting around,” she said. “Roy and me have two bedrooms we never use at all. Why don’t the three of you just move on in with us?”
We lived at the Stuldys’ for the rest of the summer. And it was such a relief—like walking into air-conditioning on a hot summer day, like sinking into a cozy bed when you’re dead tired, like eating one of Mrs. Stuldy’s cinnamon jumbles when you’re starving.
That’s what it felt like to live someplace people wanted us, after months of breathing stolen air.
Mom was all awkward and uncomfortable about it at first, She said it was only for one night, maybe two. Just until we found an apartment. Just until she found a job.
But then she and Mrs. Stuldy had a couple of late-night talks at the kitchen table. One night they were still there talking when I got up for breakfast. I don’t know what all they said, but after that Mrs. Stuldy called Mom “child,” just like she called me. And Mom didn’t say anything else about moving out right away or dropping out of school.
Bran and Mom and I did all the work moving our furniture and Sam Stuldy’s furniture into the storage unit. (Mrs. Stuldy was right: Her house did have a lot of space once all that furniture was gone.) Then Bran worked out a deal with Mrs. Marcus to make up for the cost of the utilities we’d used since May. He and I packed up all her things and loaded them onto a truck so a moving company could drive them back to New York for her.
Mrs. Marcus stood over us the whole time, watching us with narrowed eyes. She complained about fingerprints on the pictures, about tiny nicks in the paint on the living room walls—nicks that had probably been there long before Mom and Bran and I even saw the house. But she couldn’t find anything missing.
“How can you stand her acting like that, all snotty and mean?” I asked Bran late one evening, after we’d worked for six hours straight and she hadn’t even offered us a drink of water.
“It’s what I deserve, Britt,” Bran said. “I’m lucky it isn’t worse.”
And this was a totally new Bran, humbled and not nearly so sure of himself. I didn’t know what to make of him.
I didn’t know how to deal with Mrs. Marcus, either. I’d spent too much time staring at pictures, longing for her to love me. I had trouble even looking at her now, and I was glad when she finally flew back to New York, leaving behind a huge FOR SALE sign in the yard.
Bran cut her grass for free the rest of the summer. He mowed the Stuldys’ grass too and worked with Mr. Stuldy around the house. They rewired the front porch lighting together; they fixed a leaky faucet in the bathroom; they painted the Stuldys’ kitchen. When they opened the first can of paint, Mrs. Stuldy decided she had to start going to the senior center once again to get away from all the home improvement projects.
“It doesn’t bother you anymore to go there?” I asked as I helped her pack up a box of applesauce cookies.
“Nope,” she said. “Just because they talk, I don’t have to listen.” She grinned. “And if any of them start bragging about their grandchildren, I can always tell about how great you and Bran are.”
I didn’t feel like we were all that great anymore, but at least we hadn’t murdered anyone. I glanced out toward the living room, which seemed almost empty without her son’s furniture.
“Mrs. Stuldy,” I said slowly, “it’s not like you traded Sam for us, is it? You still love him, don’t you?”
“Of course,” she said. “I wouldn’t be worth much if I couldn’t love more than one person at a time, would I?”
“I guess not,” I said.
She followed my gaze.
“Honey,” she said. “That furniture wasn’t doing Sam one bit of good sitting there. It was just making me sad. And now it’s still waiting for him, and I’m still waiting for him, but I’m getting on with my life too. I didn’t know how bad that furniture was making me feel until you told me.”
“I did?” I said.
“Well, not in so many words. But every time you came in here, you looked at that living room like you felt sorry for me.”
“Oh,” I said.
I had other questions I wanted to ask her, but the senior center bus arrived for her then.
In August an official-looking letter arrived for Mom from Gulfstone University. Mrs. Stuldy kept it on the counter until Mom got home, and then we all clustered around her while she opened it. I felt like we were watching one of those awards shows, where a presenter pulls a slip of paper out of an envelope and announces, “And the Oscar goes to . . .”
Mom fumbled with the envelope and unfolded the letter with trembling hands. I could see her eyes moving, reading it. But she didn’t say anything.
“Well?” Bran prompted her. “Is it about the scholarship?”
“I—” Mom couldn’t seem to go on. Her eyes filled with tears.
“Didn’t you get it?” Bran asked in disbelief.
Mom shook her head. “I never had a chance,” she whispered. “They’ve canceled the whole program.”
We all stared at her in shock.
“Oh, child,” Mrs. Stuldy murmured. “After all your hard work. . . ”
Mom brushed away her tears. “I never should have gotten my hopes up,” she said. “I knew they were making budget cuts. I was just fool enough to think I had another year. I thought this summer had bought me enough time to get through before they shut it all down.” She grimaced. It hurt to watch the pain sweep over her face.
“This is like a sign, isn’t it?” She choked out. “A sign that maybe I’m not supposed to be a doctor. Maybe I’m not even supposed to be a college graduate.” She crumpled the letter and let it fall to the floor. “Everything about this summer was wrong. Even if I’d gotten the scholarship, it would have been tainted—tainted by Bran’s lies and us living in the Marcuses’ house illegally—I’m sorry, Bran, but it’s true. Even if I’d gotten the scholarship, it probably would have been wrong to take it.”
Bran looked like Mom had slapped him. Hearing Mom talk like that was probably worse punishment than every single one of Mrs. Marcus’s nasty looks and heavy boxes.
I wanted to tell Mom that plenty of good things had happened this summer. Yes, Bran had lied, but I’d met Mrs. Stuldy, too. Yes, we’d made a big mistake moving into the Marcuses’ house, but Mrs. Marcus had forgiven us. That ought to count for something. The Stuldys letting us move in with them ought to count for something too.
I couldn’t bring myself to say any of that to Mom when she looked so wild and disappointed. I bent down and picked up the Gulfstone University letter.
“Now, Becky, child,” Mrs. Stuldy said. “You shouldn’t tal
k like that. If nobody ever built anything good on top of bad, the world would be a really sorry place. That letter’s not a sign that you should quit. It’s just another obstacle you’ve got to climb past.”
I smoothed out the letter and looked at it. It started out, We regret to inform you. . . But I kept reading. The very last paragraph began, However, due to your superior academic achievement, we can offer you . . .
“Mom!” I shrieked. “Mom! Did you read the whole letter? They can’t give you the single-mothers scholarship, but you qualify for a different one just because you’re smart! It’s—look!”
“What?” Mom said. She took the letter I held out to her. But she didn’t start screaming and cheering. She just stood there in a daze.
What if she thought this scholarship was tainted too? What if she turned it down?
“Mom,” I said. “You’ve got to take this scholarship. You didn’t get it because of Bran lying. You got it because you worked hard and Bran believed in you and the Stuldys helped us and Mrs. Marcus forgave us. And you have to forgive Bran too for what he did. Don’t be like your parents. Be like Mrs. Stuldy, who bakes cookies for the women who talk mean about her. Look what she built on top of her son’s crime. She could have said we were criminals too and she wanted nothing to do with us. But she didn’t. She took us in.” The words came out so fast I felt like they were tripping off my tongue. Everyone was staring at me. But I didn’t need to look to Bran or Mrs. Stuldy or anyone else to make sure I was saying the right thing.
I kept talking.
“It’s like—remember how you said pigs and goats and humans all look the same when they’re embryos? Well, you’re sort of the embryo version of a doctor. And you can go ahead and become one or you can give up. And that’s what would be wrong. Giving up.”
I wasn’t sure Mom understood what I meant. But then she smiled and drew me into a hug.
“Of course I’ll accept this scholarship,” she said over the top of my head. “But thank you, Britt. Thank you for making everything so clear.”
Mom reached out and hugged Bran, too, and it was like she was forgiving him, right then.
The House on the Gulf Page 16