by Sofia Grant
She led the way through the house, straightening the antennas of the ancient television and picking up an overturned picture frame.
In the kitchen, there was a faint but unpleasant smell, and a horde of flies buzzed around the sink. All of the surfaces were coated with a thin layer of grayish dust. Curtains embroidered with teakettles hung in the windows, their ruffles flattened and drooping. A yellow box of baking soda sat out on the counter, the only thing that looked like it had been acquired in the last few years. Scarlett picked it up and sighed, then set it back down again.
“Yikes! Well, we’ve got our work cut out for us, huh?” she said.
Katie picked up a hot pad from the counter; it had a faded design of a crab wearing a chef’s hat and the caption “I got crabs at Captain Don’s” printed underneath. Long ago, someone her grandmother knew well enough to be on souvenir terms with had gone to a place called Captain Don’s, had seen the silly hot pad and thought of Margaret—but why? This was a detail that had died along with her grandmother, and for a moment Katie had to resist the urge to press the hot pad to her face, to breathe in the memory of long-ago casseroles, looking for clues, and her eyes pricked with tears.
Probably just the flood of emotions released by her hormones.
Scarlett was already heading up the stairs to the second floor, raising dust from the ancient, threadbare carpet on the treads. “There’s five bedrooms up here,” she called over her shoulder. “You can take your pick.”
One of the rooms was so tiny that Katie wondered if it had been a bedroom at all, the size of a decent walk-in closet. The “master bedroom” held a double bed with a fussy carved headboard and matching nightstands, a visible shallow in the mattress under the candlewick bedspread. It seemed too tiny to have been made by an adult, but Margaret had been shorter than Georgina, and thin and hard-angled in her high-collared dress that day. Katie shuddered, thinking about climbing into that bed, and hoped there was another alternative.
“Look, I need to probably get going,” Scarlett said abruptly. “Let me just . . .” She grabbed the tarnished brass handles of the window sash and jimmied it up, grunting from the effort. The breeze wafted into the room, scented with charcoal and cut grass.
“I can do that,” Katie said. “I’ll open up the house. Give me something to do.”
“The bathroom’s down the hall,” Scarlett said. “There’s just the one up here. The lawyer sent me an email and said he paid the bills so they won’t turn off the water or electric. He said something about hiring a cleaning service, but . . . well, I figured we could do it ourselves and save the money.”
Katie trailed after her back down the stairs. “Heaven knows what-all is in the medicine cabinet,” Scarlett continued. “You’ll probably want to get one of those little travel-size toothpastes ’cause lord knows how long Gomma’s things have been here. Let me show you how to get to the market, and tomorrow I’ll bring you some things when I come.”
“Yeah, I need to get some tampons too.”
“I’ll bring you some!” Scarlett seemed thrilled to be able to help. In the kitchen, she opened the screen door that led to the backyard. “I’ll go out the back way. If you come out here, mind you don’t put your foot through the boards.”
A fat moon was rising up over the tops of the trees, bathing the overgrown yard in a silvery glow. The grass was ankle-high, and the brick path was choked with weeds, but black-eyed Susans and spiky canna and Indian paintbrush lined the flower beds. An overturned watering can next to an old webbed lawn chair made it seem as though Margaret had just gone inside for a glass of lemonade, and would soon be back to finish weeding.
“It’s—it’s amazing,” Katie breathed, a memory dancing at the edges of her mind. There—over there, under the graceful branches of an old willow—there was a tiny pond, with shiny bits of mother-of-pearl inlaid into the concrete. At the end of the ill-fated birthday luncheon, while Georgina insisted on helping Margaret carry the plates to the kitchen, Katie had wandered back here to shut out their angry whispers, and bent down to trail her fingers in the cool water. A silver-green winged dragonfly had settled on her wrist.
“The very best part of the house,” Scarlett agreed. “You should have seen it, back when Gomma could still take care of it.”
“I remember it.”
“You do?”
“From that one time I was here. There was still water in the pond.”
“Oh, I loved that pond. I used to play Barbie deep-sea diving. She’d always have an accident and then Bubble Angel Barbie would have to rescue her.”
“Bubble Angel?”
“Yeah, she had these like bubble wings that I pretended were like a seaplane so she could float.”
Katie laughed. “That’s pretty badass, Scarlett.”
“Can you imagine the fun we could have had here? I always hated being an only child . . . did you? I always wished for a sister.” Scarlett gave a shy little laugh. “Never mind—we’ll have ages to catch up tomorrow. Okay—”
Katie found herself enveloped in a hug that was all elbows and bony shoulders, that left her awkwardly patting her cousin. Katie wasn’t much of a hugger—Georgina showed her affection by shopping, and her in-laws were more of the brisk cheek-kiss type.
Scarlett finally released her and gave a little wave as she disappeared through the vine-draped garden gate. Moments later, Katie heard the monster truck rumbling to life, and then it too was gone, and she was all alone.
She stood in the darkness for a while longer, letting her eyes adjust, gazing at the houses on either side. Lights were on; inside, families went about their business. Had they been friendly with Margaret? Had they pitched in when she got old, brought in her mail, made sure she had groceries, gone to the pharmacy for her? Next door, a pale face appeared in the window, and then a curtain was dropped and it disappeared from view. What must they think of her—the granddaughter who only showed up when it was time to collect her inheritance?
Nearby, there was a rustling in the overgrown brush, and Katie jumped. It could be a cat—or maybe a bird, or more likely rats. Katie went back up the stairs and into the house, and when she closed the door she turned the lock and then slid the dead bolt.
She might be back in Texas—but she was a city girl now, one who didn’t fancy getting robbed twice in one day.
Chapter Twelve
Don’t look at me,” Margaret yelped, slamming the bedroom door.
She stood in front of the scrap-bin mirror Hank had rigged for her almost two months ago, when they’d moved from the bunkhouse to the cottage out past the creek, on land that the rancher had bought when the neighbor died with no sons to take over. The cottage had been empty for several years, so Margaret had spent the first week of her marriage clearing cobwebs and washing windows and scrubbing the old floors until the paint came off in long strips, revealing the old pine boards underneath.
Now she couldn’t bend over without feeling dizzy. Since last week, bilious spells had come on her so fast that she’d had to run to the tiny bathroom and wedge herself under the sink so that she could throw up into the toilet. By her best estimate, she might well have become pregnant that very first night—but no one need ever know, because they’d gone down to the Travis County courthouse four days later and tied the knot.
Margaret had worn the dress she’d bought for the engagement party, a powder-blue chiffon with miles of skirt stitched to a tightly fitted hip yoke, and a wide boatneck that showed off her neck and shoulders. She’d told her mother, in the salon at Neiman Marcus, that the dress made her feel like a princess; when she said her vows in the bare, hot judge’s chambers, she felt like a woman for the first time. Hank had worn a clean shirt and the black eye that Tripp had given him.
“I’ll give you one hit,” Hank had told Tripp when he showed up, drunk, on the front porch of the bunkhouse two days after Margaret left, “so you’d better make it a good one.” Margaret had been expecting Tripp; she knew she couldn’t count on the
old chauffeur to keep her secret forever.
Tripp had taken his hit and Hank had barely flinched, though the blow knocked him against the rail—Margaret was watching from inside with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth and a strange flutter in her heart—but then Hank caught Tripp’s wrist in his hand and twisted it somehow so that the next thing she knew, Tripp was on his knees, howling.
(When Margaret asked Hank that night, still breathless from the things they’d skipped their supper to do in his narrow bed, how he knew to do that, he hadn’t answered. Or rather, he’d answered by kissing her to silence and then doing other things that she’d never known were possible, and she forgot all about her question.)
“You can’t stay shut in there all day,” Hank said patiently from the other side of the door.
“I’m not. I’m only staying here until Mary Beth comes. And you have to be gone by then.”
“Mags, I’ve seen pregnant women before. I know how this stuff works. I changed Helene’s diapers, remember?”
Margaret grimaced, glad he couldn’t see her face. A package from Helene had arrived last week—a pair of inexpensive cut-glass candlesticks with a note in her familiar, careful handwriting, in which she’d congratulated Margaret on her marriage to Hank as though they were perfect strangers. Above her return address, she’d written “Mrs. William Slope.” Margaret had held the candlesticks in her hand, feeling the lightness of them; if she’d married Tripp she’d have had a whole breakfront full of heavy crystal, not to mention silver and china. And she certainly wouldn’t be assembling a maternity wardrobe from her neighbor’s castoffs.
“Well, that will come in handy,” she said lightly, determined to stay cheerful despite the heat of the day, the nausea that chased her all through the mornings. “If we keep you busy, maybe you won’t notice how enormous I’m getting.”
“Listen, Tubby, you can gain a hundred pounds and I’ll still think you’re beautiful.”
“Stop it, Hank, what if I don’t get my figure back after he’s born?” Margaret fretted, slapping at his hands covering the small bulge in her stomach. She had taken her waist measurement every week since discovering that she was carrying a baby, recording the figures in a neat column in her diary, determined not to let herself balloon to grotesque proportions. Mary Beth, who was expecting her third child in a month’s time, complained that each pregnancy caused her breasts to sag and flatten more after the baby came, the pouch of her stomach to droop. She’d already outgrown most of her maternity clothes, which was why she was loaning them to Margaret.
“Well then, I’ll just go to seed too,” Hank said. “I’ll grow a big gut and jowls like a turkey. I’ll be the ugliest mug in town and you’ll have to hide me away from your friends.”
The sound of the doorbell—literally a cowbell that Hank had found in a field and fixed to a hook—made Margaret push him away. “Go entertain Mary Beth while I get dressed. I won’t be a minute.”
But as she buttoned her blouse and struggled to zip up her skirt, the voices she heard in the living room were both male. One of Hank’s clients, then, come to schedule a flyover of the rigs and fields, or to ferry some bigwig from Galveston or Houston to the capital. Margaret dabbed on lipstick, as her mother had done all through her childhood whenever anyone came to call.
She blotted her mouth on a bit of tissue and touched her hair, which had recently grown increasingly lustrous and glossy (Mary Beth said that was evidence of a boy) and swanned out of the bathroom with everything she was worth, because it had been a long time since she’d had anyone to impress but her husband.
But there, sitting on the sofa that Hank had bought secondhand for a few dollars, hat in hand and wearing a look of misery on his face, was her father.
“YOU KNOW YOUR mother,” Hugh Pierson pleaded for the third or fourth time, the refrain to which the conversation kept returning after their initial embrace and Margaret’s tearful joy at seeing him and Hank’s awkward leave-taking, off to see to an engine problem that Margaret was fairly sure he’d invented as an excuse to escape. As a first meeting between the two men since the elopement, Margaret supposed it had gone well enough, but it wasn’t Hank whom her father had come to see.
“Yes, I know my mother well,” Margaret parroted. “I know that she sent you to do her dirty work because she couldn’t be bothered to do it herself.”
“We were worried, pumpkin,” Hugh protested. “And—and you must see how hurtful it was that she had to find out about the baby from a letter.”
“But she didn’t have to, Daddy. Hank invited you both to come visit. I wanted to tell you in person.” Hank had done more than just invite them, actually; he’d offered to fly her home himself, but pride and no small measure of apprehension had held her back.
“Well, but you didn’t invite us until after you were already married. Your mother thought—and I must say I do see her point—that you might have waited to have a proper ceremony. You know how much work your mother put into planning your wedding, and she was looking forward to—”
“—to me spending the rest of my life with a man who bored me to tears? I’d rather die!” Margaret exclaimed, regretting the words as soon as she’d said them. “Oh, Daddy.”
“No, no,” he sighed, not looking at her. “I would never want you to be unhappy.”
“I didn’t mean— Daddy, I’m such an awful pill. I never wanted to hurt Mother. I know I put her in a terrible position.” All those wedding gifts to return, the notes to write, the pained smiles Caroline would have to produce when she ran into her friends—her embarrassment would last for years. In this one reckless act, Margaret had managed to threaten her mother’s established place at the top of the social hierarchy.
But Margaret did not care for the uncomfortable weight of guilt, so she tossed her hair and willed it away. “Think of it this way—with all the money you saved on the wedding, you can finally take Mother to visit New York City. She’ll forget all about me when she sees Fifth Avenue.”
“Margaret,” her father said quietly, and she saw that he was not to be jollied out of his mission. She picked up her glass of iced tea—the glass was one of a pair that she’d found abandoned in a high cupboard in the kitchen, printed with the Pearl beer logo—and then set it down again without drinking.
“I’m sorry, Daddy. I really, truly am.”
“It’s not what you think, though. That’s what I came here to say. It’s not the dresses and the flowers and the band, even though it cost a king’s ransom to cancel all that. Your mother . . . she has a heart. Don’t look at me that way, sweetheart, she does. I know your mother can be . . . difficult, sometimes. But she’s cried every night since you—since it . . . every night.”
Hugh had been staring fixedly at the handkerchief that he was twisting in his hands, but he looked up now with such genuine anguish that Margaret thought immediately of that other time, back in the garage behind their house, when he’d swept the little frame holding the photograph of her dead sister into his pocket. Love, she suddenly realized—this was what her father’s love looked like, all bound up in loss and grief. How desperately sad he must be, and how beastly she was to make it worse. Tentatively, she laid a hand on his arm.
“What can I do?” she asked. “How can I make it up to her?”
“Well.” Her father cleared his throat. “See here—just promise me that you’ll try. That you’ll try your best, Margaret.”
“Daddy, of course I’ll try—what do I have to do?”
“She’s here. In Austin. We’re staying at the Vandeveer Hotel.”
IT WAS DECIDED that Margaret would take her father’s car back to the hotel and have tea with her mother, while her father stayed behind, with a plan to walk over to the barn that Hank was using as a makeshift hangar. Hugh had joked that maybe he’d even pick up a wrench and pitch in, and that had broken Margaret’s heart a little, because how could two men like them ever find common ground—especially when the one thing they had in common, other tha
n her, could never be spoken of?
(The tiny frame in her father’s pocket. The crisscrossed scars on Hank’s hands.)
She changed into her dove-gray sateen, which was much too formal for afternoon but was her only dress that still fit over her growing belly, dabbed on a bit of perfume and tucked an extra handkerchief in her purse, and set off.
Her father had taught her to drive the summer before she went to college, but the automatic transmission in his new Bel Air took some getting used to, especially since its eye-popping turquoise color and miles of chrome trim drew stares and double takes. She crept along the road into town and had to circle the block twice looking for a parking spot that she could navigate, before giving up and pulling up in front of the valet stand. A year ago she wouldn’t have given it a thought, but Hank was so very conscientious about money that she couldn’t help but think about the charge to her parents’ bill, the tip someone was going to have to press into the boy’s gloved hand—and it wouldn’t be her, because she had thirty-eight cents in her pocketbook and she needed it to buy starch and baking powder and milk.
She’d become a housewife with a grocery list—that was the thought that followed her into the grand lobby of the Vandeveer, appointed with thick carpets and marble columns and coffered ceilings that only increased her self-consciousness. The vastness of her own transformation dawned fully upon her in the time it took to pass the gauntlet of bellboys, the haughty concierge behind his grand desk.
“Room two-eleven,” she told the elevator operator sternly, but he leered as he pulled the lever: even he seemed to know she was only playacting now.
Standing in front of the door to her parents’ room, her hand raised to knock, Margaret was hit with a wave of panic. She lowered her hand and closed her eyes, and thought about Hank, coming in from an afternoon of flying, his face ruddy from the wind and his lips tasting of the whiskey he’d stopped for on the way home. Hank, picking her up and spinning her around their tiny living room and making her squeal—his strong hands in her hair at night, his weight on her, his hot breath at her neck forcing her worries away like dandelion silk on a breeze. If only they could be together always, every moment of the day—if she could hide herself in him like a tortoise in his shell. But right now he was miles away and it might as well be an ocean that separated them, because she was feeling dangerously like herself again.