Mrs. Saint and the Defectives: A Novel

by Julie Lawson Timmer

  “I have upset you,” Simone said.

  Markie turned back to her. “I just . . . I have a lot of questions. I think I’ve been told a lot of . . . untruths. And I guess it’s fine. None of it was ever any of my business, but—”

  “Such as?” Simone asked.

  “For one,” Markie said, “you said you came here to forgive her. But she told me you came to ask her to forgive you.”

  Simone sighed as she tucked the tissue back into her sleeve. “This was my sister.”

  It wasn’t really an answer. But then again, Markie decided, it sort of was.

  “She also told me she didn’t believe in human forgiveness,” Markie said. “That it was too easy. She said it’s up to God to forgive.”

  Simone took a deep breath in through her nose and let it out slowly through her mouth. “La pauvre. She has been too hard on herself.”

  Markie wanted to ask what that meant, but Simone was weeping now. She pulled the tissue out of her sleeve again, but it was crumpled and damp. Frowning, she tucked it back in her sweater. Markie went to the family room to find a box, and Frédéric, noticing, leaped up and raced to the kitchen.

  “Simone,” he said, and she turned to him and fell against his chest. Their arms went around each other, and they clutched each other, crying, while Markie stood dumbly, holding the tissue box out into space.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Late in the day, Frédéric received the all clear from the fire department to go inside Mrs. Saint’s house. He blinked, said nothing, and handed the phone to Patty, who jumped into action, taking a seat at Markie’s kitchen counter and making notes on the back of one of Lola’s coloring pages. Ronda had spoken to Mrs. Saint’s insurance company earlier about arranging for a smoke-damage restoration company to come, and now Patty called the insurance agent to put that plan in motion and to make arrangements to meet the agent at the house to discuss further repairs.

  Bruce, meanwhile, quietly let himself out of the bungalow, returning later with a small metal box, which he handed to Frédéric, and Simone’s two suitcases, which he left outside on the patio to keep the smell of smoke out of the bungalow.

  “I wanted to bring you some clothes,” he told Frédéric, “but I checked your closet, and the smoke . . .” He shook his head. “Sorry.”

  Simone’s things weren’t wearable, either, despite having been zipped inside the larger of her two suitcases. She asked Bruce to set that case in Markie’s garage—she would go through it the next morning and decide if anything was salvageable—while she carried the smaller one to a corner of the patio and looked through it. Markie and Ronda went out to see her, Markie carrying a spare tote bag she thought Simone might want to transfer the contents of the case into and offering, along with Ronda, to help her sort through her things. Simone accepted the bag, but she asked Markie to leave it outside the door and waved them off before they could get close enough to see inside the case.

  “I couldn’t possibly impose,” Simone told Markie, as though helping to sort through a hatbox-size suitcase was a real chore for a woman who was now hosting, indefinitely, four people from Mrs. Saint’s house in addition to the two she had already taken in. Ronda and Markie exchanged puzzled looks and went back inside.

  By around ten that night, the bungalow’s first floor was mostly cleared out. Bruce and Ronda had left together for the bus stop, Jesse and Angel had retired to the basement, and Patty had taken Lola up to bed. Markie carried an armload of sheets and blankets down from the linen closet and delivered one set on the living room love seat before continuing through the archway to the family room to give the others to Frédéric.

  When she reached the kitchen, she stopped midstep, her jaw dropping, the linens almost falling to the floor. Frédéric and Simone sat shoulder to shoulder on the couch, her head resting against his, his arm tight around her. From the back, it seemed as though she had walked in on an intimate moment between Frédéric and Mrs. Saint, and for a split second, Markie was elated for the old man to finally have a chance to hold his beloved Angeline closely like this.

  The moment passed, though, and her elation turned to dismay. His beloved Angeline was dead. What was he doing, sitting so familiarly with her sister? Why was Simone, a married woman, cuddling like sweethearts with the man who had been living with her twin? Markie felt heat rise to her face with indignation on behalf of her former neighbor.

  She forced her body to relax, though, and told herself not to jump to conclusions. Surely this was nothing more than platonic commiseration between two people who had lost a common loved one. There was no reason for her to be upset. But when she cleared her throat and they both jumped up, Simone taking two large steps in one direction, Frédéric in the other, Markie wasn’t so sure. Why, if they were innocent, were they acting so guilty?

  Frédéric bent quickly to close the lid of his metal box, which, Markie now noticed, sat open on the floor near the couch. Then he reached for the throw blanket, which he tossed over a pile of papers stacked on one of the couch cushions. Markie caught a brief glimpse of the stack before the blanket descended upon it. It appeared to be nothing more than a collection of black-and-white photographs. Why, then, was Frédéric acting like it was a pile of girlie magazines?

  “Markie,” Simone said. “Let me . . .”

  She stepped toward the kitchen, and Markie prepared to hear the older woman say she could explain, it wasn’t what it looked like, here, come sit on the couch with us and we’ll show you what we were looking at. But Simone wore the same closed-off, unapologetic expression Markie had seen so many times in her twin, and when she reached the kitchen, Simone offered no explanation.

  Instead, she held her hands out for the linens and said, “Let me make up the couch for Frédéric. You’ve done enough for all of us for one day.”

  If Simone and Frédéric hadn’t both suffered such a great loss, if Markie hadn’t been too emotionally spent from the day’s trauma, too exhausted from having the bungalow filled to capacity all day by Mrs. Saint’s beloved Defectives and her estranged sister, if she hadn’t been miles past the end of her rope when it came to secrets and lies, she might have told the two older French Canadians where they could stick the linens, along with whatever it was Frédéric was concealing under the blanket. Or, at least, she might have blown an exasperated breath of air out and turned on her heel to stomp out of the kitchen.

  But she could barely stand any longer, or keep her eyes open, or concentrate on how annoyed she was with them. So she handed the sheets and blankets to Simone, told her, “That would be great,” wished them both a good night, and stumbled out of the room to the living room, where she collapsed on the love seat and immediately fell asleep.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Markie sat, reluctantly, with Frédéric and Simone in the wood-paneled law office of Marvin Schanbaum. It was Sunday afternoon, and Frédéric had received a call from the lawyer that morning, asking him and Simone to come immediately. Markie wondered aloud if it weren’t permitted for the two of them to bury their dearest friend and sister before being summoned by her legal counsel, but Frédéric wanted to go, whispering to Markie that it would be good for the others if the meeting happened right away.

  When he requested that she be the one to drive them to the lawyer’s office, she almost told him to ask Patty instead. She felt an increasing need to marshal and preserve the limited patience she had for Frédéric and Simone and their secret photographs and shared confidences and furtive embraces. But then she took in the noisy, overcrowded bungalow and pictured herself reading, alone, in the quiet of the lawyer’s waiting room, and she agreed to take them.

  When they asked her to go with them into Mr. Schanbaum’s inner office rather than wait in the small lobby, she practically fought them off with her fists. She lost. She didn’t know why she was there, she told them all, as Mr. Schanbaum opened a file on his desk and flipped through it, stopping when he located a thick document, stapled at the top. LAST WILL A
ND TESTAMENT OF ANGELINE ST. DENIS, Markie made out from the top line on the first page. It made her even more anxious.

  “I only came because I didn’t want Frédéric or Simone to have to drive,” she told Mr. Schanbaum. “Shouldn’t I be waiting out there?” She pointed through his office door to the small waiting area. “Surely she would have wanted you to discuss her personal affairs in private.”

  “In fact, you are one of the individuals mentioned in her personal affairs,” he said. “This is why I asked Frédéric to bring you along.”

  Markie turned, openmouthed, to Frédéric, who was suddenly too fascinated with the floor to acknowledge her. He sat on the other side of Simone, too far away for Markie to nudge with an elbow, so she moved her questioning gaze to Simone.

  The older woman shrugged. “Do not ask it to me,” she said. “I was hardly the one my sister would have talked to about the contents of her will.”

  Mrs. Saint was the owner of the bungalow.

  She left it to Markie, free and clear, along with more than enough money to maintain it—and a college fund for Jesse.

  Before Markie could get over the shock of her neighbor’s staggering generosity, Mr. Schanbaum read further, to the part where Mrs. Saint’s house went to Frédéric, along with enough money that he could easily rebuild it and still keep Ronda, Bruce, and Patty employed indefinitely.

  And this is where Markie stopped feeling dumbfounded about Mrs. Saint’s generosity and started feeling something different, something far more negative, something in the gray, fuzzy spaces between resentment, confusion, and fury.

  Because keeping Ronda, Bruce, and Patty on staff, and sufficiently occupied and out of trouble, wasn’t something Frédéric could pull off on his own. He was wonderful at helping the others, but he wasn’t inclined to direct them—Mrs. Saint had said it herself during one of her visits to Markie’s patio. And if ever there were a time when he might have been able to muster the energy to truly lead, it wasn’t now. Once upright and vigorous and surefooted, Frédéric now seemed as adrift as the others had always been.

  Mrs. Saint had known, of course, that this was what would happen, that grief would knock the vitality out of him. That given his age and the fact that he had lost the love of his life, unrequited or not, his vigor might never return. That in the event he was left to carry on without her, an occasion she had clearly predicted, he would need someone younger and more capable to assist him. Someone to take over where Mrs. Saint had left off.

  Someone who knew the Defectives already, who cared about them.

  Someone who was located conveniently—and permanently, thanks to Mrs. Saint’s bequest—on the other side of the low wooden fence.

  The bungalow wasn’t a gift, Markie now saw—it was a sentence. It wasn’t born of Mrs. Saint’s generosity but out of her unceasing desire to have things her own way. She wanted her beloved Defectives to stay together. To make that happen, they would need a place to gather, a yard and house that required their constant work and rework. So she had left her house to Frédéric.

  They would need money to keep them from needing to find jobs elsewhere. So she had also left him enough cash to pay them.

  And they would need a firm, capable leader. So she had arranged to have one installed next door, in exchange for the deed to the bungalow.

  Markie almost laughed. She almost asked Mr. Schanbaum to read the part of the will that required her, as a condition of her new home ownership, to attend and supervise the morning meetings on the screened porch. To be sure to ask each of them what their plan was for the day, then offer suggestions for what they should do instead. To make a point of goading Lola into homework and bathing and getting more exercise. To ensure Frédéric drank an approved quantity of water each day and knocked off work precisely at four.

  Surely, too, there must be instructions in the will outlining Markie’s care of the bungalow. A list of approved paint colors she would be permitted to use. Instructions for how often she would be required to have the roof replaced. The woman hadn’t been able to hand over Lola for a single evening without five minutes’ worth of orders about baths and bedtime and teeth brushing. She would never be able to leave a house, forever, without a list one hundred times longer.

  The temptation to laugh passed as the full force of the situation hit Markie. All these months, Mrs. Saint had been trying to get her own way, and Markie had resisted. The Frenchwoman had eventually won the vast majority of the battles: the dog, Jesse spending time with Frédéric and tutoring Lola, Markie’s artwork making it onto the walls, Markie and Jesse eating more vegetables and fewer frozen meals, Markie getting to know Mrs. Saint’s employees.

  On only one matter—Markie taking over Mrs. Saint’s role as leader of the Defectives—had the old woman not been victorious. But had she been happy with her other successes and left that single point to Markie?

  Mais non! Of course not! Instead, the old woman had made the one move she assumed Markie couldn’t counter. Because who could say no to a dead woman? Especially a dead woman bearing the precise gifts a person in Markie’s financial position would never be able to turn down.

  And now Markie saw it all laid out before her clearly, all the timely coincidences and bits of “good luck,” or so she had thought. The bungalow that had been empty because of a “bad market,” leaving the landlord willing to cut a deal, the mysteriously appearing “free cable” that had not been in the lease and only materialized after Mrs. Saint took such a liking to Jesse and learned that “le pauvre” was missing his movie channels.

  More secrecy and lies! There was no forgotten lease term offering free cable. There was no bad market. There was only a meddlesome, bossy, conniving old woman who, knowing her health was deteriorating and her Defectives would have to fend for themselves unless a new leader could be found, had been waiting for just the right person to rope into the job.

  Mrs. Saint had been the spider and Markie the fly.

  Now Markie didn’t want to laugh; she wanted to scream. She wanted to beat her fists against the wooden arms of her chair and yell, “No! Stop right there!” and then lunge across the top of Mr. Schanbaum’s desk, grab one of his pens, and strike through the language in the will that mentioned her and the bungalow and Jesse.

  Only Frédéric’s presence and the way he sat slumped in his chair, despondent over his lost Angeline, kept her silent.

  Once Simone and Frédéric were settled in the car, Markie announced she had left her book in the lawyer’s office and needed to run back for it.

  “I will accompany you,” Frédéric said, as she expected he would.

  “No, no. You’re all buckled in. You stay with Simone. I’ll be back in no time.” She shut the door against further protests and made her way back to Mr. Schanbaum.

  “I only have a minute,” she said, “and I’m sure you have somewhere you want to be. I’d like to set up a time to see you on Tuesday, if you have time available.”

  “You have . . . concerns,” he said. “I sensed this.”

  “I do. Look, she must have updated it quite recently, because I only met her in August. I’m curious: before she changed it, who was to receive the bungalow and the money?”

  He smiled placidly. “It is unfortunately not within my authority to discuss prior drafts of a client’s will.”

  “Tell me this, then,” Markie said. “What would happen if I refused to accept what she’s left me? What would happen to it, then?”

  Mr. Schanbaum’s eyes widened. “Are you saying you want to disclaim your bequest?”

  “Possibly. But first I want to know what would happen to the bungalow and the money if I did.”

  He steepled his hands together and closed his eyes momentarily. “In such an event,” he said, opening them again, “it would pass through her estate as though you had predeceased her. And since she made it clear that everything else was to go to . . .” He looked at the chair in which Frédéric had been sitting, as though trying to recall the name.

/>   “Frédéric,” Markie provided.

  “Yes. She made it clear everything was to go him, except for certain bequests delineated specifically, such as the ones to you and to her sister and certain charities. So the bungalow and sum of money set aside for you would go to him.”

  “In that case,” Markie said, “I’d like to talk to you on Tuesday about . . . what did you call it? Disclaiming my bequest? I’d like to talk about that. Not just talk about it. I’d like to do it.”

  Mr. Schanbaum unsteepled his hands and turned his palms out, facing her. “I suggest we not have such a discussion as early as Tuesday. That is the day after the funeral. I discourage people from making significant proclamations, one way or the other, about these kinds of matters when everything is still so . . . fresh. Give yourself some time to sit with this, to deliberate about it, I urge you. There is no hurry.”

  “I don’t need time. I’d like to come in on Tuesday.”

  He lowered his hands and opened an appointment book on his desk. “As you wish.”

  “But you did not find your book!” Simone said when Markie returned empty-handed to the car.

  Markie climbed in and patted her purse. “Stupid me. I put it in my purse before he called us in. I forgot until I got back in there. I’m certain he thinks I’m crazy.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  After dinner that night, Jesse suggested a board game in the family room, and while everyone debated what to play, Markie motioned for Simone to follow her into the living room. They sat together on the spindle-legged love seat, Simone with her hands clasped between her knees, and Markie couldn’t tell if the other woman was nervous or relieved that it was finally just the two of them, alone.