I took off my jacket and sat in the chair across from her, listening, startled, as the mild-looking lawyer shared the surprising news.
I was getting an inheritance.
Chapter 4. Junk in the Trunk.
THE STAIRS TO THE BASEMENT WERE STEEP AND NARROW. I descended slowly, lugging a stepladder and a tote filled with trash bags and light bulbs, ready to spend my Saturday attacking the thirty years worth of stuff that my grandma had accumulated while living in the house; the house that she’d now left to me to do with as I pleased.
My grandmother had been wealthier than either my mom or I had suspected. In addition to her home, she’d left me her money, enough money that calling it a fortune wouldn’t be out of line. All the more for me mess it up. Scary.
I’d told my mom that I wanted to live in this house and she’d helped me move over the few things I wanted to keep—my clothes and bedding, my books and pictures. She’d also offered to help me clear out the basement, knowing I’d be prone to dawdling and getting distracting. Claire Auburn had never been distracted from a chore in her life. She’d have cleared the basement in a single afternoon, but I wanted to take my time with my memories.
The basement windows were tiny and placed high on the wall, admitting little light to the gloomy basement. I flipped the light switch at the base of the stairs and only one weak bulb in the far corner of the room came to life. Apparently my grandma hadn’t come down here very often. I pulled the stepladder across the room, replacing several dead light bulbs and bringing light to the cramped rooms.
It was a mess. Surveying the project ahead of me, I tried not to feel overwhelmed. Boxes were stacked everywhere. An easel draped with sheets was leaned against a long-broken vacuum. Rolling garment racks were jam-packed with old clothes and scarves. Had my grandma never thrown anything away? I’d start with the clothes, I decided, and go from there. I pulled a garment rack toward me, and began separating clothes into piles: keep, throw away and charity.
Two hours later, dusty and hungry, I felt I’d earned a lunch break. Making several trips up and down the steep stairs, I hauled out the many bags of clothes that were in good enough condition to donate to charity and finally headed to the kitchen for food.
I made myself a grilled cheese sandwich and as I ate I tried to make up my mind about which part of the basement I should tackle next. I didn’t feel like carting anything heavy, and I was getting bored with the outfits and shoes, so I decided I’d go through old paperwork. Hopefully, it would be less tiring than the clothes.
Armed with a can of Diet Coke, I headed back to the basement and set my sights on an ancient four–drawer filing cabinet. A rickety one-armed office chair was near the base of the stairs, and I rolled it close to the cabinet. Opening the cabinet’s top drawer, I removed a thick file of paperwork and sat down to sort through it.
The first file appeared to be old bank statements and canceled checks. I thumbed through a few of the checks: a record of grocery store visits, utilities, a shoe receipt from 1983 and other uneventful purchases. I placed the statements and checks in a bag I’d set aside for documents to take to my mom’s office for shredding. I lifted another stack from the top drawer. Oh boy, more checks. I sighed and shifted the paperwork on my lap and a picture slid from between the statements and landed on the floor.
I bent to pick up the picture and wiped the dust from its glossy front. There was me as a chubby baby, seated on my grandma’s lap. A man’s hand, presumably my father’s, extended into the frame, reaching toward me as if to steady me. Where was my father now, I wondered. Did he know that his mother had passed away?
My dad had left us when I was still a toddler and I had no memory of him. Neither my mom nor my grandma would discuss him and consequently, I knew next to nothing about him. I knew his name and had searched for him online many times throughout the years, but found nothing. It was as if he didn’t exist at all. And maybe he didn’t. I had no way of knowing. I wondered if he would have loved me, been proud of me, all the typical dad stuff.
I gently placed the picture into my “keep” pile and a thought struck me. Maybe there were more old pictures in the basement; my heart quickened at the prospect. People always saved old pictures in attics or basements, didn’t they? My original goal of basement-cleaning was abandoned. I wanted to find pictures.
As I began to search, it occurred to me that I had never seen a picture of my grandma as a child or a young woman. I thought more about it—no, I’d never seen a picture of her with her parents, or a high school yearbook, or a wedding picture.
Buzzing with renewed energy, I rifled through the cabinet drawers, none of which contained any additional pictures. I moved to the stack on top of the cabinet. No luck there either. I eyed the room quickly, looking for any albums or likely storage places. I noticed a large trunk pushed against one wall. The trunk was large and wooden, ornamented with thick studded metal bands. It looked like an ideal place for storing keepsakes and pictures.
Removing a trio of elderly shoe boxes from the top of the trunk, I kneeled and swung open the trunk’s heavy lid, eager to discover its contents. I peered inside, held my breath, and saw bedding. Just some blankets and a quilt. The quilt looked handmade and was pretty, but still, I was disappointed. I’d been certain I’d find pictures in the trunk, or at least something cool.
As I sighed and lowered the lid, I heard the sound of car tires crunching on my gravel driveway. The window above the trunk looked out toward the driveway, but I wasn’t quite tall enough to see out. Curious to see who’d pulled up, I clambered to stand on top of the trunk and look out the window. Angie’s red coupe was parked in the driveway and she was clacking toward the front door in her high-heeled sandals. A perfect distraction from cleaning, I thought, and with any luck I figured I could rope her into helping me later.
I turned around and was ready to hop off the trunk when I heard a loud crack and lost my balance. I threw my arms against the wall to keep from toppling over. The lid of the trunk had broken and I’d fallen through it, catching my left leg on the ragged cracked lid. Pain shot up from my ankles. I winced and braced myself against the concrete wall and gingerly lifted each leg out of the trunk. I could stand, so I figured I hadn’t been hurt too badly, but a dark spot of blood seeped through my jeans on my left leg. I bent to check my leg more closely and saw that I’d also gotten blood on the corner of one of the quilts in the stack.
“Hellooo Lucy-Puff! I’m coming in. Hope you’re decent,” Angie shouted from the front door.
“I’m downstairs,” I yelled. “One sec, I’m coming up.”
I pulled the bloodied quilt from its stack and dragged it upstairs with me so I could soak it. Hopefully I hadn’t ruined it; it was a beautiful quilt. I wondered why my grandma had never displayed or used it.
I opened the door at the top of the basement stairs and walked into the kitchen to see Angie staring lazily into the open fridge, though I smelled her before I saw her. Sometimes in magazines, perfumes are described as having “a suggestion of violets” or “a hint of vanilla.” Angie’s fragrance would have best been described as “a fistfight of tropical fruits.”
“You have nothing yummy at all in this fridge,” she said, turning to look at me. She eyed the quilt in my hand. “What’s with the blanket?”
“I was cleaning the basement,” I said. “And I sort of accidentally fell through a trunk and got blood on this quilt that was inside, and I need to rinse it.” I held up the quilt to show her. “I need to clean up my leg before gangrene sets in or something, so hang on a minute and I’ll be right back out.”
Angie returned her attention to the fridge. “You are seriously the only chick I know who could get injured cleaning out the basement.”
“It’s not my fault. I can’t be blamed for what is obviously faulty trunk lid engineering.”
I went into the bathroom and pulled off my jeans. I had a gash on my leg, but it didn’t look too deep. I cleaned it and stuck on a bandage, figuri
ng it would be fine. I turned the tap to run some cold water in the tub so I could soak the part of the quilt that had been soiled. As I reached for the edge of the quilt to pull it toward the tub, I heard a small crackling noise. I held the edge close to my face, inspecting it. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. I twisted the fabric slightly and heard it again, a faint crackle. Something was stuffed inside the blanket.
I crossed the hall to my bedroom so I could pull on a clean pair of jeans and went back to the kitchen. Angie had found a soda and a string cheese and was sitting at the kitchen table, snacking and looking bored. I pulled open the junk drawer and began rummaging through the miscellaneous odds and ends.
“What are you looking for Lucy-puff?” Angie asked.
“One of those lethally pointy things you use to cut stitches out of stuff. I can’t remember what they’re called,” I replied.
Angie looked startled. “You need that for your leg?”
“No, no. It’s for the quilt,” I explained. “I went to rinse it out, but it made this crackly-ish noise like there’s something in it. A little bit of paper or something. I want to cut the edge open and look at it, so I need one of those pointy things for the stitches because I don’t want to ruin the quilt.”
“I think you mean a seam ripper,” Angie said. “Did your grandma have a sewing box anywhere?”
“I’m pretty sure I’ve seen one in the living room, now that you mention it,” I said. “Come help me look.” As we hunted through the living room, I told Angie about how I’d found the quilts in the trunk.
“Ooh, this is super exciting, a mysterious quilt.” Angie made a wide-eyed goofy face. “It’s like Nancy Drew and Scooby Doo all in one.” She hesitated, tapping an acrylic nail against her teeth. “Except if this is Scooby Doo, I want to be the hot chick. No, wait…maybe not. Maybe I want to be the smart nerd chick who secretly is smoking hot but you can’t tell until she takes off her glasses and puts on a tighter shirt. ”
“Except that you would never wear glasses or a baggy shirt,” I pointed out.
“True true, my friend, and you’re guilty of both sometimes, so you win the role of crouching nerd girl, hidden hotness.” Angie threw an arm around me.
“Besides,” I added. “I just want to see what’s in there. I don’t think there’s any big important mystery here. ”
“Nope.” Angie shook her head from side to side. “I totally bet you it will be something important.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Because something can’t get caught on the inside of a blanket. If it’s in there, it was sewn in.” Angie’s voice became more serious. “It’s like in those stories you hear.”
“What do you mean?” I found the sewing box on a lower shelf and opened it, removing the seam ripper and a tiny pair of scissors.
“Well, sometimes you hear about refugees or prisoners of war, or holocaust victims…throughout history there are all these stories of women who are in some sort of danger or have to flee for whatever reason, so they take something valuable and sew it inside clothing. A diamond hidden in a seam, that sort of thing.” Angie was looking at me intently. She was usually so flamboyant and silly that it was sometimes easy to forget that she was, in fact, intelligent.
I felt slightly sick. “Those poor women,” I said. I pictured a grieving woman feverishly stitching her wedding ring into the hem of her dress, all she had left to remind her of a captured husband, a missing child. I pictured that woman facing armed soldiers, hoping her secret wouldn’t be found.
Angie saw the look on my face. “Look,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be upsetting. Your grandma wasn’t involved in anything like that as far as you know, right?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Then what we’ll find is something important to her, but that doesn’t mean it will be tragic. Let’s go check it out.”
We returned to the bathroom and lifted the quilt from the floor. It was beautiful—midnight blue with a figure eight pattern swirling across the face in a variety of fabrics. “We can fix it again, once we cut into it?” I asked Angie. She was planning to go to a design school to study fashion and knew a lot about sewing.
“Absolutely, we’ll be super careful and then you’ll just need to re-stitch it up. Well, maybe not you, actually” she said, probably thinking about my lack of general life skills. “But you can take it to a quilter and they can fix it. Or maybe I can help you. Here, you hold it and I’ll cut the seam.”
I held up the section of the quilt where I’d heard the crackle, pulling the fabric taut. Angie deftly ripped through the stitches, quickly unfastening the area we needed.
“I’m still gonna need to make a little hole here,” she said, pointing at a small patch of fabric. “Then I can reach in and pull out whatever’s in there. Hand me some scissors and tweezers, stat.” She snipped a tiny line open and used my eyebrow tweezers to fish inside the hole, carefully digging past the puffy quilt batting. “Um, doctor, it’s bigger than we thought,” she said. “It’s like a whole piece of paper, not just a little note.” She looked at me questioningly and I nodded. She cut a larger slash across the back of the quilt.
“Aha! I rule!” Angie smiled and pulled out a sheet of paper. A large section of the upper corner of the paper was rolled in on itself, likely what had made the noise I’d heard. The rest of the page was flat, with a short note penned in small neat handwriting. Angie handed the paper to me.
It was a letter addressed to “E.” I assumed this was my grandmother, Eleanor. Why would she have hidden this, I wondered. What would be so private? With a flash, I realized what type of letter would obviously be private. A love letter. I suddenly felt protective of my grandmother’s privacy. I would read the letter later.
I pretended to scan the letter quickly. “Nothing too exciting,” I told Angie. “Just a guy saying he loves her, misses her, that sort of thing. Probably something my grandpa sent her years ago. No big mystery.”
Angie looked disappointed but didn’t press the issue. “Problem solved, then. Enough of that, let’s go do something fun. And by something fun, I mean as in getting me some lunch. String cheese isn’t going to cut it.”
LATER THAT EVENING, WITH A STRONG SENSE of relief, I walked inside my home, closing and locking the door. I’d spent the afternoon pretending to be interested in lunch and shopping with Angie. After that we’d met up with Matt and his friend Blake for ice cream. I’d tried even harder to be interested in that, but the morning’s events consumed my thoughts and made it impossible to care about silly chatter.
So many questions surfaced in my mind. Why would my grandma have hidden a letter? And why did I know so little about a woman who’d been so close to me? Had I been selfish enough that I’d never asked her about herself, never questioned her history? I knew almost nothing about what she’d loved, what she’d feared, perhaps what she’d endured. After all, my father was her son. She’d been left, too, when he took off.
Many mysteries in my childhood had been off limits. Asking questions about my dad just made my mom sad and yielded no answers. And so I grew up, always loved and accepted, but discouraged from probing the past.
I microwaved a mug of instant cocoa and retrieved the letter from where I’d left it on the bathroom counter. My eyes felt scratchy so I removed my contacts and put on my glasses, heading to the living room so I could read the letter in comfort. I settled cross-legged into the overstuffed loveseat and began to read.
January 12, 1969
My dear E.,
I love you so much. I wish I could hold you or at least call you—just hearing your voice would make it all better. I thought about what you said at lunch before I left. I’m uneasy as well and it’s best that we don’t talk about anything over the phone. Better safe than sorry.
I’ll be in Savannah by month end—once I’ve finished doing my part here. I think we’re making a difference up here, or at least I hope so. Please don’t worry. We will figure this out and all will be
put right. You are my love, my happiness, my life.
Always,
M.
I set the letter down on the coffee table. What was my grandmother uneasy about? Why couldn’t she speak to M. on the phone? And who was M.? They were clearly in love, no question about that. Was M. my grandfather? I wondered why there would be such cause for secrecy.
I was tired from cleaning and socializing and analyzing the questions tumbling through my mind. I needed to talk with my mom—I knew she didn’t like to discuss the past, but I needed to make some sense of my history and the questions that were surfacing around me.
Chapter 5. Letters.
HAMBY’S CAFÉ WAS FILLED WITH THE SAME CROWD, more or less, that had been eating there on Sunday mornings for years. My mom and I had breakfast together there nearly every Sunday, a tradition we’d agreed to continue even once I’d moved out. The customary scent of bacon and powdered sugar invited me inside.
My mom was sitting in a corner booth, reading a paper. In her white blouse with her blond hair pulled back in a twist, she was as polished as ever. I felt my usual stab of guilt at not having dressed up a bit more—I was wearing one of the many paint-marked hoodies I wore to work—but still my heart lifted at the sight of my mom. I hadn’t realized how much I missed her. I felt vaguely ashamed; surely other eighteen year olds didn’t still miss their moms after one week alone, right?
I slid into the cracked brown vinyl seat across from her. “Hey, what’s up?” I said, pulling the paper place mat closer to me and turning the chipped mug right side up so I could pour a cup of coffee.
“Oh, hi sweetie, just another week come and gone,” she said. “And how was week one of being a homeowner?”
“Pretty cool, I guess. It’s going to take eons to get everything put away. I spent yesterday morning going through some old stuff in the basement, but I didn’t get very far.”
Tarot's Kiss (Tarot Chronicles) Page 2