by Sarah Healy
Mom remained still, but her eyes shifted to the letter at the top of the stack. It was printed on paper that was bordered with illustrations of little martini glasses—the sort that Beth Castro might use to send out invitations to Bunco night.
“Mom, who’s sending—”
“I don’t know, Jenna,” she interrupted. Then her face changed, her expression indicating that she hadn’t meant to direct her frustration at me. “It could be one person. It could be a whole group.”
“You need to go to the police, Mom.”
“Absolutely not! How would that help anything? Getting the authorities involved?”
I thought about it, about whether calling the police would further escalate a situation that my mother had probably already escalated tonight. “We need to do something.”
“We are doing something,” she said. “We’re doing exactly what they want. We’re fixing up this house.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Cal Harper
1968
C al Harper’s face drew into a smile and he leaned back onto the heels of his feet, his hands stuck in the pockets of his slacks. “I’m a judge,” he said, the words oozing out like syrup, his accent thick and slow.
“How are you going to judge a beauty contest?” teased Priscilla’s father as he hauled his golf clubs into the back of his car.
“It’s a problem, I know,” said Mr. Harper. “I’ll want ’em all to win.” He pulled out a handkerchief and blotted the sweat from his forehead. “But I must do my civic duty, Lee.”
Silla’s father let out one of his laughs—a pulsing of air through his nose. Silla, who had been standing by the passenger door, saw Mr. Harper glance at her. “You know, Silla could enter this year.” As Lee turned to close the trunk, Mr. Harper gave Silla a wink that was so fast she thought she might have been seeing things. “She’s old enough now.”
Lee scratched the back of his head and studied the pavement. “Well . . . ,” he began, intending for that to be his only answer.
But Cal Harper knew Lee’s sweet spot. “There’s good money in it,” he said, folding the handkerchief back up, square into square, putting it back into his pocket. “If she wins.” When he looked back at Lee, he could see that he now had his attention.
“How good?” asked Lee.
Mr. Harper just smiled. “Priscilla,” he said, taking his time to turn to her. “How’d you like to be in a beauty contest?” His gaze moved quickly and casually from her feet up to her face, taking it all in, but not lingering on any one part. There’d be time for that.
Silla had worn her white tennis dress to the club, and though she loved how it felt on the court, loved how she could look down and see the muscles in her legs, loved how freely she could move in it, she suddenly regretted that it was so very short. “Well, I . . . ,” she started. “I never thought about it, I guess.” In truth, once she had become aware of her looks, she viewed them as a liability, the opposite of camouflage. Especially while living with Hattie.
Mr. Harper turned back to Lee. “It’s good for ’em, I think,” he said. “Teaches ’em poise.” From the rolling green golf course, there came the hollow crack of a club meeting the ball, and Mr. Harper’s eyes were drawn toward the sound. “And the higher up they go in these things, the bigger the pageants they compete in, the better the prizes.” He followed the arc of the ball until it began its descent. “They can really turn it into a nice little career.”
“Is it too late to register?” asked Lee, feigning disinterest.
Though Mr. Harper was still facing the course, Silla saw his face form a victorious grin. “I’m sure we can pull some strings,” he said, just as Hattie was walking out from the clubhouse. Sunglasses covered her eyes and her solid sheet of blond hair had been teased and then smoothed into a chin-length helmet. As soon as she was within earshot, Cal said, “There she is,” as if he had been waiting all this time just to catch a glimpse of her. “You’re surrounded by beautiful women, Lee.”
Hattie’s raspberry lips curved into a closed-lipped smile. “Cal Harper,” she said, leaning in, letting him kiss her cheek. “Your wife just gave me the most delicious-sounding recipe for steak Diane.”
“Oh, Lord,” he said. “I hope she’s not telling you to ruin a perfectly good steak by covering it in black pepper and mushrooms.”
Hattie swatted him playfully. “You are just terrible, Cal,” she said.
“Well,” he said with his sly smile, “guilty as charged, I suppose.” He began sauntering back toward the clubhouse, his hands back in his pockets. “Call me about that contest, Lee.” As he passed Silla, he gave her another wink. “I think you could have a winner on your hands.”
It would be years later, while reading his obituary, that Priscilla would learn that Cal Harper had made all his money in horses, that he had advised wealthy owners on new purchases, on what animals he thought had potential. It may not seem lucrative, but Cal Harper always got paid, one way or another.
Hattie made for the passenger door without acknowledging Silla, and Silla instinctively stepped aside. As the car glided away from the country club, Hattie lifted her sunglasses and pulled out a compact to check her face. “What was that about a contest?” she asked her husband.
“Cal thinks Silla’s got a chance in that Miss Harris County contest,” he said.
Hattie froze, and Silla watched as the gaze reflected in the compact mirror moved from her own face to Silla’s.
That night, after they got home, after Lee slipped into the den and a Tom Collins, Silla was waiting for the ham loaf to finish heating and was thinking about what Mr. Harper had said. They can really turn it into a nice little career. A nice little career was more than she had hoped for, but now she thought about it. About what it might be like to have some money of her own. Maybe she could get her own apartment. Maybe she could have a bedroom with white lace curtains and a vanity with a little vase of yellow flowers. That’s what she was thinking when Hattie came into the room. Silla’s head snapped up, as if she had been awakened from a dream. She turned to see a small but steady stream of smoke piping from the vent of the oven.
“Oh!” she gasped as Hattie pulled on oven mitts with the stern look of a military medic. As smoke billowed out of the open oven door, Hattie lifted out the baking sheet and dropped it on the cooktop with a clatter.
“Silla, what were you doing?” she demanded, her face sharp and hard as she inspected the burned ham loaf, a ring of char circling it in the pan.
“I . . . ,” started Silla. “I didn’t realize.”
Hattie’s beautiful jaw shut tight and she looked at Silla, letting the weight of the silence achieve its full impact before she spoke. “I swear,” she said, the words coming out slowly, as if they had a flavor she wanted to savor. “Sometimes I think you’re going to end up just like your mama.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Oysters
A s I dressed, I could hear Rose in the family room, showing the babysitter her toy collection, explaining that her Barbie dresses actually fit on her barn animals and that sometimes the cows liked to pretend that green Legos were grass. I had asked the sitter to come early so that she and Rose could spend some time getting acquainted, since Rose had only rarely been left with someone.
“A girl named Kimmy is coming over to play with you tonight,” I’d said.
Rose had looked at me, her chin raised inquisitively. “A big girl or a little girl?” she’d asked.
Kimmy was a senior in high school. “A medium-sized girl,” I’d said.
Taking one last look at myself in the full-length mirror in my room, I flipped off the lights.
“Hey, Kimmy,” I called, as I stepped into the bright warmth of the family room. She looked up, already smiling. “Does this look okay?” I asked tentatively, gesturing to my outfit. From his dog bed, Gordo lifted his head, looked at me, then groaned and ro
lled over on his side.
Kimmy nodded with a teenager’s cool enthusiasm. “Totally,” she said. “It looks awesome. I love that dress with those boots.”
“Yeah,” said Rose, positioning herself next to Kimmy and adopting her assessing posture. “You look really pretty.”
“Thank you, guys,” I said. I perched on the edge of the couch beside Gordo’s bed. Watching Kimmy and Rose play, I slowly rubbed one of Gordo’s velvety ears, my thoughts drifting back to Royal Court, as they had more and more often recently.
I think Warren likes that Mehta girl down the street, my mother used to say hopefully. Paru Mehta had moved onto Royal Court when we were in high school, and Warren had seemed intrigued by her. With her melodic voice and elegant nose, we were all intrigued by her. The Mehtas’ house smells like curry! kids used to whisper on the bus, as if that were somehow salacious and shameful. I remembered the way Warren would look at them as they snickered, his head cocked to the side as it so often was, as if he had to look at the world from a different angle in order to see it properly. I didn’t know what had happened to Paru Mehta or her family, only that they had moved out of Royal Court about seven years ago, having sold their home to Beth and Rob Castro.
Headlights turned from the main road into our driveway. I waited to see if they would veer in the direction of the Pritchards’, but they held steady, and I hooked my hands around my knees. The doorbell rang and Gordo barked, lumbering back to his feet.
“I’ll get it,” I said, smiling at Kimmy as I stood.
I put my hand on the cold brass knob and turned. Bobby smiled as he stood on the cracked concrete of my front step, my brass porch light valiantly trying to illuminate the night.
“Hey,” he said, before his balance was nearly disturbed by Gordo’s greeting. He chuckled and bent slightly forward to attend to Gordo, finding the sweet spot behind his ears. “Oh, there you go, buddy.”
Stepping aside, I waved Bobby into the house. “Come,” I said. “Come on in.”
Rose, suddenly interested in our visitor, piped right up. “Hey, Gabby’s daddy,” she began, “where’s Gabby?”
Bobby squatted down so that he and Rose were eye to eye. “She’s home with her nonna,” said Bobby, his forearm resting on his knee. “Is it okay if I take your mom out tonight?”
Rose thought about it for a moment. “Yeah,” she said with a shrug. “I’ll just play with Kimmy.”
I kissed Rose on her cheek, and quickly ran over the bedtime routine again for Kimmy. “There’s a sheet in the kitchen with everything you need to know,” I said, referring to the page I had typed up with cell phone and doctors’ numbers and a list of Rose’s favorite stories. Then I waved good-bye and stepped out the door for my evening that was not a date with a man whom I knew very well yet not at all.
Freedom, I mouthed to Bobby as the door clicked shut behind us.
The gravel crunched under our feet as we walked side by side down the path to the driveway, the cold night feeling bright and electric around us. As we approached his car, Bobby stepped ahead of me and reached to open my door, the hinges of his old Jeep groaning with effort.
I thanked him as I slid in, then watched him hurry across the front of the car, his keys in hand. He got in and closed the door, and we looked at each other for a moment before both laughing quietly, simultaneously, and without any clear reason. “I’m glad we’re doing this,” he said, as he turned the key in the ignition.
“Me, too,” I said, recalling the last time I’d been out with a man, how different it had felt. When I had tried to date after Rose was born, I had always felt the weight of the past, of all the explanations it required. I would have to tell a new man about Duncan, and about Rose, of course. Eventually, I’d have to tell him about Warren and my mother, about my father and Lydia. Bobby already knew it all.
“I was thinking,” he said, as he cranked the stubborn old gearshift into reverse and glanced over his shoulder, “that we could go to Orto. Have you ever been?”
“No,” I said. “That sounds great.” Orto was known as an eccentric little gem of a restaurant with a garden tended by the chef’s first-generation Italian mother. Duncan always used to speak highly of it, though we had never eaten there together.
As we drove, we wove out of West Hills, where Rose and I lived, into one of the more elegant neighboring areas, talking about Bobby’s work at the hospital, about why he had decided to become a doctor. “I had always wanted to go into medicine but had talked myself out of it,” he said. “After a few years doing the corporate thing, none of my reasons—the debt, the hours—seemed good enough anymore.” And I talked about Wonderlux, about how I got to go to work with my best friend and pick my daughter up from school and design beautiful things.
“And what made you leave New York?” he asked. Duncan and I had lived in the city together for eight years. I’d tried to stay after he left, but the financial reality was too daunting.
“Money,” I said with a sad chuckle. “Maggie and I were both new moms starting a business and we couldn’t afford the city. Her uncle owns the building that our office is in and he gave us a great deal on rent. So coming back to Jersey was sort of a no-brainer.”
“Yeah,” he said, lifting his chin as we approached what looked like an old white farmhouse. “I went to med school at NYU. But to raise kids in the city is brutally expensive.”
He turned the wheel. “This is it,” he said, as we pulled into Orto. It was located on a dark stretch of road and identified with a simple but elegant sign, flooded with light. Navigating around to the back, we came to a parking lot and he slid into a spot.
“I used to live out here,” he said, as we walked through the cold night toward the sanctuary of the restaurant. “Before Gabby and I moved back with my parents.” It was a subtle reference to his life with Mia.
Bobby opened the glossy black door into what felt like someone’s home. The hostess stand was set up next to the staircase and from it, you could see into four dining rooms, each of which held five or six tables. The walls were nearly bare, the lights very low, and they were playing the sort of jazz that nearly everyone I knew had “discovered” in some smoky dorm room. It was an unassuming little restaurant that didn’t seem to pay much attention to trends, but found itself on the right side of many of them.
We were brought to a small table near a window and ordered drinks that I’d never had before. They came in thick lowball glasses and smelled like herbs. I took a sip and felt the liquid slide down my throat, settling snugly in my stomach and warming me from the inside out. A beautiful older woman with caramel-colored skin and Sophia Loren glasses came out, and without a word, she set down a single plate. “Some pickled beets from the kitchen,” she said in a heavy Italian accent; then she winked at me. “For sharing.”
Bobby and I smiled at each other, and with his fork, he cut one of the beet slices in half. Stabbing it with the tines, he swirled it in the little puddle of magenta brine at the bottom of the plate, and then handed the fork to me, watching me as I took a bite. Mr. Vanni used to be like that, a man who loved to indulge people, loved to watch them enjoy themselves. I smiled and covered my mouth with my hand. “Delicious,” I said, handing Bobby back his fork.
“Gabby loves beets,” he said, a bite about to enter his lips. “We planted some this summer, but the rabbits got ’em.”
Our waiter returned, prompting us to pick up our menus, which we hadn’t yet given so much as a glance. “Do you like oysters?” asked Bobby. I did.
They came, carefully laid in a circle on a bed of pristine ice, still wet with seawater. I brought one to my lips and breathed in the ocean, tipping the shell back and rolling the flavor back and forth on my tongue. Looking at the empty shell, a small opalescent cup, I turned it over and ran my fingers over the oyster’s rough, plain exterior. And I decided I liked things like that: things that kept their beauty hidden. Whe
n I looked up, Bobby’s gaze was on me. “Sorry,” I said, laughing at myself for fondling an oyster shell. I set it back down on the ice. “It’s just kind of gorgeous . . . don’t you think?”
Without hesitation, he answered, “I do.” And for a moment, neither of us looked away, until our waiter came back to fill our water glasses.
“Thank you,” I said, as I shifted in my chair, my ankle brushing against Bobby’s. Reflexively, I went to move it. Then I stopped myself, settling into the feeling of a small patch of my body touching a small patch of his. And Bobby smiled.
“How’s your family doing?” he asked, as he took a sip of his drink.
“Can I tell you something?”
Bobby straightened up, became alert and attentive, like the Dr. Vanni who rushed around the beds in the ER. And so I told him about the Castros. I told him about the notes.
“So she’s been sending these for a while?” asked Bobby, his head inclined, his forearms resting on the table.
“We don’t know it was Beth Castro. But yeah. For a few months, at least.”
Bobby was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m hoping it can all get sorted out.” I spread my hand over the smooth white tablecloth. “I’m going to go try to talk to the Castros.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
And though I insisted that no, it was fine, that I didn’t want to involve any more residents of King’s Knoll than were absolutely necessary, I took solace in his offer, and in the readiness with which he made it. “I just feel really bad for my mom,” I said. “I know her house isn’t in the best condition.” It was an admission that I found difficult to make, if only for its obviousness. “But she’s been living in that neighborhood for almost thirty years. You’d think this all could have been handled differently.” Taking a sip of my drink, I spoke through its afterburn. “And she’s trying to clean things up. We’re painting the columns. And she got some quotes on painting the exterior in the spring.”