by Sofia Grant
By the time Caroline finished, Margaret was crying again. So much pain . . . so much grief.
“I don’t—I don’t even know how you and Daddy survived,” she whispered. “If I lost Georgina—”
“But wait,” Caroline said. “I’m not quite done.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Seven days after she arrived in Texas, and ten minutes before the garage sale was officially supposed to start, Katie called J.B. Already there was a horde of early-rising lookie-loos checking out the goods, many of them with shopping bags over their arms, one older lady with an honest-to-God change maker fastened to her belt, ready to haggle.
“Today’s the day, huh?” J.B. said.
“Yes. I’m upstairs in Margaret’s bedroom, looking down at them—I swear it’s like a scene from The Walking Dead.”
“It’s not a good garage sale unless a fight breaks out,” J.B. cautioned. “So, any word from our girl?”
“No,” Katie said glumly. “She won’t return my calls, but she did text to tell me she hopes it goes well today.”
“That sucks.”
“I’ve been wondering, J.B.—do you think this whole thing was just Margaret’s way of trying to get me to help Scarlett? You know, to force her to confront a bad relationship?”
“I don’t know,” J.B. said dubiously. “I mean, that’s a lot of moving parts right there.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“Well, good luck today. I hope you make piles and piles of cash, and then on Monday you can come in and we’ll get the final numbers and have you guys sign everything. You headed back to Boston right after?”
“Actually, I’m going to go visit my mom in Dallas for a while. I—I’m between jobs, so I thought I’d take a little time.”
“Awesome. Okay, I won’t keep you from your customers.”
“Thanks for everything, J.B.”
Katie hung up and took a last look around the empty room. Yesterday, Jam had come over with a couple of friends to move all of the furniture into the driveway while Katie set out the racks of clothes and boxes of dishes and folding tables piled with china and crystal and knickknacks. Afterward, they’d had pizza and beer and told stories from their high school years that embarrassed Jam no end, until he finally told them it was time to go and he’d kick their ass if they didn’t.
“I like this one,” one of the guys said as he was leaving.
“Don’t fuck this up, Jam,” the other added.
Jam locked the door behind them.
He’d had to go to Kilgore for the day, to give a training session for the Sheriff’s Department K-9 unit. Katie was almost relieved: there was no way she’d be able to concentrate on making change and haggling with Jam standing around distracting her.
She was almost out the front door before she realized that she didn’t have a cash box. She raced to the back door, out through the backyard to the garage. She’d emptied half a dozen cigar boxes in the last week, and they were all still up in the apartment, awaiting the cleaning crew she’d scheduled for next week, a last gift to Scarlett before she had to deal with selling Margaret’s house.
Katie stepped into the apartment and slowly turned around, forgetting for a moment the chaos outside. She’d cleaned the cobwebs and dirt while she worked, and wiped down the cabinets and counters and swept the floors. The walls were a soft shade of creamy white, and the old wavy glass in the windows did something lovely to the light.
Georgina had lived here once, and before her, Margaret. They’d dreamed and wished and raged, regretted and planned and hoped. There, where she’d pulled the bed away from the wall to sweep up the dust bunnies, they’d . . .
A little spot of pink poked out of the baseboard. Katie nudged it with her toe: a scrap of ribbon, maybe, or a bow from a dress—but it didn’t budge. She got down on her knees and tugged at it with her hands: it was the hard plastic corner of something, a book or a case. But how had it gotten stuck behind the wall?
Katie felt along the baseboards until her fingernails met with a gap in the baseboard—and the pink object shifted. Just a little, but enough to dig her fingers in farther, and work out a piece of baseboard that was about a foot long. It had been carefully cut and replaced like a puzzle piece, forming a little hidey hole.
It was a book, of sorts—a diary. The year 1975 was printed on the cover in fancy gold. Inside, her mother’s handwriting—page after page of it, in different colors of ink, with little scribbles and drawings in the margins. Katie flipped back to the first page:
Thursday, February 6
I know I am supposed to say “Dear Diary” or something like that, but who talks to a book? I just need to write down my thoughts somewhere because I am going CRAZY. Two years, two months, and twenty-two days before I turn 18 and I can finally LEAVE.
Katie snapped the book shut. She was breathing hard, feeling like she’d stolen something. She got down on her hands and knees and peered into the hole, but it was too dark to see anything. Praying that rats weren’t nesting behind the wall, eager to bite her and give her rabies, she pushed her hand in and felt around.
There was an envelope, a thick one. Katie tugged it carefully from the hiding place. It was a plain manila envelope, brittle and yellowed and tied with a string. She opened the envelope carefully and slid out a stack of stiff papers.
On top was some sort of document, with an official-looking seal with the year 1963 in its center. “American Telephone and Telegraph” was emblazoned across the top in heavy ink. In smaller letters, with typewritten words filling in the blanks, it went on:
This certifies that Margaret Anne Dial is the owner of four full-value and non-assessable shares, without par value, of the common stock of American Telephone and Telegraph Company (herein called the Corporation). . . .
A stock certificate! Her grandmother had somehow come to possess four shares of—could it really be AT&T? Or, more likely, some other company that had long ago shuttered its doors and disappeared into obscurity?
Katie flipped to the next piece of paper. Another just like the first, dated 1964, this one for eleven shares of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. The one after that was stamped 1965 and its ornate border was printed in blue ink; it was for sixteen shares in the Executone company.
“Executone?” Katie said out loud. Her heard was pounding, but this was silly; her grandmother had dabbled in stocks of companies that, in all probability, were all defunct, the value of the certificates having evaporated before she was ever born. But it was another facet of the woman that she could have—should have—known, and that knowledge felt heavy on her heart.
She continued going through the stack of certificates, setting each carefully in a pile after she’d looked at it. There were probably fifty or sixty of them, and she shuffled ahead and saw that the last one was dated 2005, for fifty shares of Nvidia, a company she’d never heard of.
Katie went back to the middle of the stack. Some of the companies were familiar, like Hewlett-Packard and IBM, and others were not, like Mohawk Data and Walter Kidde. There seemed to be a lot of computer and technology stocks, which was confounding: Katie hadn’t found a single shred of evidence that her grandmother had owned a computer, or even a cell phone. Had Margaret invested in a future that she didn’t intend to participate in? Was she a believer in the inevitable march of progress, content to rattle around with the ghosts of the past?
Then she got to 1987.
One hundred forty shares of Apple Computer Inc.
“No way,” Katie gasped. “Are you kidding me, Gomma?”
Scarcely breathing, she turned to the next: 1988—three hundred shares of Apple. Then thirty-five more. And on and on over the next several years, until—Katie went back and added up all the shares—she had amassed almost three thousand shares of Apple over a six-year period.
That had to be worth some serious money, didn’t it?
Katie stood up, her head swimming. This changed things. It had to! Some
how her grandmother had found the money to invest in stocks without anyone knowing and, through either shrewdness or pure dumb luck, had possibly managed to amass a fortune. Maybe. Katie didn’t know a whole lot about investing, but she was pretty sure that these were the real thing. What she needed was someone who knew what they were doing, who—
“Excuse me,” a voice called up the stairs. “Anyone up there?”
Katie stuffed the certificates back into the envelope and pressed it to her chest, hurrying to the top of the stairs. Standing at the bottom was a woman with thick gray braids and a fishing hat.
“Oh, hello,” Katie said.
“Are you the one running the sale?”
“I—yes, ma’am.”
“Would you take twenty bucks for this?”
She held up a silver teapot covered with tarnish. Katie had no idea if it was sterling or merely plated, and no inclination to find out. “Yeah, okay. Just—I just need to find something to put the money in. Here.”
She grabbed a cigar box off the counter and came down the stairs. The woman dropped a wadded bill inside. “Thanks,” she said. “Real shame to see Mrs. Dial’s things sold off. We’d all hoped someone from her family would come in and take care of this place. Now it’s probably going to go to some tech exec, I imagine.”
“Oh,” Katie said.
“You know she was one of the replacement babies, don’t you? From the school disaster?”
“I—I did, actually.”
“Well, they’re all dying off, now. I guess that’s just the way it goes. History don’t stand a chance when big business comes into a place. You take care, now.”
She ambled back across the yard, stopping to examine a moss-covered ceramic urn. Katie watched her go, her mind reeling.
She dug her phone out of her pocket and hit redial.
“J. B. McNaughton, attorney at law.”
“J.B., this is Katie again. Can I hire you on an emergency basis today? Like, pay you time and a half or whatever?”
“What’s this about?”
Katie took a deep breath. “I need you to take a look at some documents I found. And . . . I need to borrow your car. Oh—and I need you to run a garage sale.”
KATIE ARRIVED AT the ugly little tract house a few minutes after nine. The smell of bacon wafted through the air, and two little girls were playing on the sidewalk, blowing bubbles with homemade bubble soap in a Big Gulp cup.
“Who are you?” one of them asked.
“I’m—I’m Katie. I’m here to see my cousin.”
“Who’s your cousin?”
“Scarlett. She lives here. Do you know her?”
Both girls laughed.
“Of course we know her!”
“I’ll get her for you!”
They barreled toward Scarlett’s house, abandoning the bubbles, and pounded on the door. A few minutes later Scarlett appeared, her hair tumbling around her shoulders, wearing a thin tank top and no bra and shorts with dinosaurs printed on them. “My goodness, girls, did you forget to look at the clock? What’s the Sunday rule?”
“Not before eleven!”
“But your cousin is here! We had to!”
“Can we play with Stinky?”
Scarlett glanced at Katie, her expression unreadable.
“Tell you what, sugar pies. Stinky needs a little more beauty sleep in her cage. Come back tonight after dinner, okay?”
“Aw—”
“We can make mug cakes.”
“Yay!”
“But right now I need to talk to my cousin, so you two run along, okay?”
“’Kay!”
“’Bye!”
“They’re adorable,” Katie said.
“Yes,” Scarlett said, sighing. “They are. What happened, did you sell everything already?”
“No. Although I think the entire town is there right now. Listen, Scarlett . . . what if there was a way for you to invest in this partnership with Merritt, and keep the house, just for yourself? To do what you want with? You wouldn’t even have to live in it, at least for now. You could fix it up and rent it out—you’d probably make tons of money on it, with all the jobs the fulfillment center’s going to create. You could do anything you wanted.”
Scarlett narrowed her eyes suspiciously and folded her arms over her chest. “Yeah, with what money?”
Katie took a deep breath. “That’s going to take a little explaining. Any chance I could take you out for breakfast?”
THEY ATE THEIR Taco Bueno bacon and egg quesadillas in the parking lot, because J.B. drove a Lexus CT so new that it still smelled like the showroom floor.
“No offense,” Scarlett said, “but I want to hear this directly from J.B. I don’t want to get all excited and then find out those certificates aren’t worth anything.”
“Okay,” Katie said. “Well, we’re paying her for today, so I think we can go ask her right now.”
“It’s like we have an entourage!” Scarlett smiled for the first time that day.
“Kind of, I guess. Listen, Scarlett—I know I can’t tell you what to do with the money. I would just, I mean, I think it would be the smart thing, before you tell Merritt about any of this, please hire J.B. to take care of the, um, details, okay? Or if you don’t want to hire her, we can get some recommendations for other attorneys and—”
“J.B.’s fine,” Scarlett said dully, the smile disappearing from her face. “I’ll hire her.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, it’s— Look, I don’t really want to talk about it. It’s just, the thing with Merritt’s friend, well, now they’re talking about using all of Gomma’s money for like start-up costs and whatnot.”
Katie said nothing for a moment as her blood simmered with red-hot rage. “What kind of business is it?” she asked casually.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay, sorry. So, yeah! J.B.! This is going to be great!”
Impulsively, she threw her arms around Scarlett, who stood stiffly for a moment before tentatively hugging back. Katie pressed her face against Scarlett’s neck and smelled sleep and hairspray and stale perfume and ersatz Mexican food. I love you, she thought, but she wasn’t really an I love you kind of person and she wasn’t a hugger and all of this was difficult and uncomfortable and messy.
Scarlett squeezed harder.
“I love you,” Katie whispered.
It just slipped out.
THERE WERE CARS up and down the block and they had to park J.B.’s car in Jam’s driveway (“Of course he won’t mind!” Scarlett said, and “Who cares if he does?”). Many of the big pieces of furniture were gone, and the racks of clothes and tables of junk looked decidedly picked over.
“Oh gosh,” Scarlett said. As soon as Katie turned off the ignition, she hurtled out of the car and ran toward the house. “This garage sale is over! Everybody out! Shoo!”
Katie took a moment to watch, standing next to the beautiful Lexus. Scarlett stopped at the card table behind which J.B.—in mirrored sunglasses and a baseball cap and a tank top emblazoned with the words “Pussy Grabs Back”—was minding the till, and they exchanged a few words. Then Scarlett ran up to a woman whose arms were full of clothes and snatched them out of her hands.
“Oh dear,” Katie sighed.
It took twenty minutes before they were able to get everyone to leave. Katie called the market and got Kyle’s number and called him up and told him that it was an emergency, and he and his brother rode their bikes over and they started moving the furniture back into the house.
“Thank God nobody got the chafing dishes,” Scarlett said. “That stock better be worth something.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that.” J.B. smirked. “You’ll be buying me lunch on Monday. Lobster and martinis and maybe even cigars, like the ballers we are.”
“And you can always have another garage sale if it doesn’t work out,” Katie said hastily. Somebody had to be the voice of reason, after all, and she’d had a
lifetime of practice.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” J.B. said. “The woman who bought the rolltop desk—she and her husband took the drawers out to load it up in their pickup, and this fell out of the back.”
She handed Scarlett a sheaf of letters, tied with a faded rose-colored ribbon. Scarlett carefully untied the ribbon and handed half the packet to Katie. She examined the one on top. In a spidery, careful hand, someone had written “Mrs. Hugh Pierson, 124 Oliver Street, New London.” The return address was “Mrs. Paul Wooley, Archer.” The postmark date was March 1937.
“These are from Gomma’s aunt Euda to her mom,” Scarlett exclaimed, flipping through the stack. “They’re all from 1937.”
“And 1938,” Katie said.
“They had a big falling-out before Gomma was born,” Scarlett said. “She said they never spoke again. Want to read these together?”
“Sure,” Katie said. “Good thing nobody bought that ugly-ass kitchen table.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
September 1986
In the weeks that followed, Margaret would find the fork that she had been polishing that afternoon right on the windowsill where she’d set it down, its tines still dark with tarnish and its stem bright as a nickel in the sun. She would pick it up and stare at it for a minute, puzzled, before remembering that she’d pulled her chair close to the window so that she could enjoy the breezes that still stirred as the sun was rising on another sweltering August morning.
The bigger mystery was why it took her nearly two weeks to discover the fork there. Margaret had offered to host the fund-raising committee of the Library Society for lunch and had experienced a brief burst of, if not enthusiasm exactly, at least a mild determination to outdo Harriet Barber, who’d served pimento cheese sandwiches without even cutting off the crusts the month before. Margaret had in mind something on the order of the long-ago Daisy Club luncheons, scaled down to the more modest appetites of the ladies of the committee, who were all on diets. She’d dug the old lace-trimmed napkins out of the breakfront and ordered iced petits fours from a bakery in Tyler and made a quiche bursting with flecks of bright green broccoli and cheese that she would insist was low-fat.