“That would be nice of you, Virginia.”
Well, Gincy thought, that was as close to a “thank you” as she was going to get, but she would take it and be grateful.
“Mom?” Tamsin said. “Do you think we could get Uncle Tommy a membership to the trolley museum for Christmas? I know he’d really like that. You get a free hat with membership. It’s a real old-fashioned train engineer’s hat. You know the kind.”
Gincy smiled. “I don’t see why not.” And maybe, she thought, the next time she paid a visit to Appleville, she would go to the museum with her brother. And she would not be embarrassed by her family.
CHAPTER 28
“We got more snow,” Rick told Gincy when she called him later that evening. “Another two inches.”
“Still nothing here,” Gincy reported, “though it certainly feels like we’re in for some bad weather. It’s awfully cold and damp. Which reminds me, I’ve got to hire someone to shovel for Mom when the snow does hit, which of course it will.”
“Winter in New England. What would it be without cars skidding into ditches, frozen water pipes, and a run on emergency generators?”
“Nicer,” she said. “Hey, of speaking of the hazards of cold weather, guess what I found today?”
“What?”
“A stack of brochures for cruises to destinations warm and sunny. They’re Mom’s. Tommy told me.”
“Really?” Rick said. “I’ve never heard your mother mention an interest in going on a cruise.”
“Me neither! Imagine, Rick. My mother won’t come to Boston because of the strolling rats but she’s willing to set sail on a ship with a serious pituitary problem!”
“Your point is what?”
“My point is that ships are notorious for being infested with rats!”
Rick laughed. “Old wooden ships, Gincy. Today’s cruise ships are held to a higher standard of cleanliness. Well, okay, maybe they’re not but . . .”
“I’m just so surprised, that’s all,” Gincy said. “My mother—plain, sour-tempered Ellen Gannon—on a cruise. Forced joviality! Dressing up, if people dress up on cruises these days. Sipping cocktails. Watching a magic show. Playing shuffleboard. Isn’t that what people do on cruises, play shuffleboard? I just can’t picture it. I wonder how Dad felt about taking a cruise. Maybe he told her they didn’t have enough money just so he wouldn’t have to go.”
“Gincy, your father would never have done something so sneaky.”
“I know, I know,” she said. Then she told Rick about Tommy and the computer class. “I’m still so surprised that he shared that bit of information with me,” she said. “I didn’t know what to say other than I’m sorry, but I felt awful.”
“Poor guy,” Rick said. “And not wanting his parents to know. . . .”
“It could break your heart. You know, Rick, I’ve been so lucky. Being smart, I mean. My brain got me to where I am in life, and yet I’ve always taken it for granted. I’ve always been so cavalier about it. My brain and my drive. But I didn’t do anything to get this brain and this drive. It’s just what I was born with. It’s just who I am. How unfair, really. I got so much and Tommy got so little. Life has always been so much more of a struggle for him than it’s been for me.”
“Life is unfair, Gincy,” Rick said gently. “That’s just the way it is. But don’t forget, it has its good points. Try not to let what’s going on in that house totally drag you down.”
Gincy laughed. “Christmas cheer and all that? Well, I guess I should sign off. I’ve been so tired since I’ve been back home. I mean, to what used to be home. I constantly feel on the verge of a yawn.”
“This is probably the longest time you’ve spent under that roof since you left New Hampshire after high school. Didn’t you tell me you spent most of every holiday in the dorms?”
Gincy thought about that for a moment. “You know what?” she said. “You’re right. In the dorms or on a friend’s sagging couch in some disgusting little apartment in Allston. Being here is a shock to my system.”
“Then go to bed,” Rick advised. “Sleep is always a good thing.”
They said their good-byes. Gincy turned off the lights in the kitchen and made her way upstairs to her old bedroom with the paint peeling off the ceiling and the comfortless mattress.
There were reasons she had stayed away from Appleville, she thought now, and they were good reasons. But maybe those reasons didn’t apply anymore, not at this point in her life, not all the time. Maybe going back to where you had come from once in a while wasn’t such a bad thing after all, even if it was exhausting and at times disorienting.
It was only when she had tiptoed around her sleeping daughter and was in her bed with the lights turned off that she realized she hadn’t told Rick about her mother’s offer for her and Tamsin to stay through Christmas Day. Rick would understand if his wife and daughter were compelled to spend the holiday in New Hampshire, and at least he would still get to celebrate the day with Justin.
But still. Gincy really wanted to go home.
CHAPTER 29
At nine the next morning the doorbell rang.
“Who can that be?” Gincy asked. Tamsin, in the kitchen with her mother, shrugged. “No one’s come to the house since we’ve been here but the mailman. It’s probably someone trying to sell something or get Mom to sign a petition she won’t want to sign. I’ll send whomever it is packing.”
A moment later she opened the door and exclaimed, “What are you doing here!”
“Hello to you, too, Gincy.”
“I didn’t ask you to come,” Gincy blurted. “I mean, hi.”
Clare Wellman Livingston was wearing a well-cut, dusty pink wool coat and a white wool beret. Her small, pale blue leather cross-body bag was from Coach. Clare always carried a Coach bag. Her shoulder-length blond hair was held back in a simple, low ponytail. “It’s freezing out here,” she said. “Can I come in?”
“Of course. Sorry.”
Gincy stepped back, and Clare stepped into the small front hall.
“So,” Gincy said, “why are you here? Not that I’m not glad to see you but . . .”
“Tamsin called me,” Clare explained. “She asked if I could come for a day to help lift your spirits. School’s out for the holiday, and Eason and Sam are happy to have father /son time, so I said, sure. And before you ask, we both agreed not to tell you that I was coming, because you would have put up such a fuss.”
Just like Mom would have put up a fuss if she had known that I was coming to visit, Gincy thought. What had Tamsin said the other day? That Gincy and her mother were alike in never asking for help when they needed it.
“Mom,” Tamsin said, suddenly standing next to her mother, “face it, you need your friends at a time like this. Grandma is a handful. And I can tell you’ve been worried about Tommy. Hi, Clare. Thanks for coming.”
Clare and Tamsin hugged while Gincy looked on, torn between gratitude and annoyance.
“Well, now that you’re here . . .” she said. Oh boy, she thought, there I go again, sounding just like Mom! “Sorry, Clare. It’s great to see you. You look wonderful.”
“What’s going on? Who is this?”
Gincy turned to her mother, who had joined them in the hall. “This is my friend Clare,” she explained. “Clare’s surprised us with a visit.”
“I hope you don’t already have plans, Mrs. Gannon,” Clare said, after shaking the older woman’s hand. “I was hoping we could all spend the day together. It seemed so silly that we’d never met, and it is the holiday season, so . . .”
Ellen was beaming. Gincy had never seen her mother beam before and was momentarily worried that her blood pressure had risen dangerously.
“That would be lovely,” Ellen said. “But you must allow me to change. I won’t be a moment.”
Tamsin grinned at her mother as Ellen hurried off.
“I can’t promise you’re going to enjoy yourself,” Gincy warned her friend.
�
��That’s not the point of the visit,” Clare said. “If I do enjoy myself in the process of taking some of the pressure off you, that’s lovely. But it’s not what I’m expecting.”
“All right, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Clare laughed. “Good old Gincy, Miss Doom and Gloom!”
Ellen returned about five minutes later in a dress Gincy had never seen. Her hair was impeccably done, and she had even put on powder and a bit of lipstick. Ed Gannon would have said that his wife looked spiffy.
“Grandma,” Tamsin said. “That’s such a pretty dress. I love the shade of blue.”
“Thank you, Tamsin,” Ellen said. “I only wear it on special occasions.”
And it wasn’t a special occasion when her daughter came home to visit after an absence of six months? Well, her mother in a nice dress trumped her mother in a badly buttoned cardigan, no matter the reason.
“We can take my car if you like,” Clare said when everyone had gotten into coats, hats, mittens and scarves. “It’s a monster. There’s plenty of room for us all. Eason and I ski,” she told Mrs. Gannon, “and he’s also a snowboarder, and we camp year round, so we need a huge car to carry all of our equipment.”
“Does Sam ski, too?” Tamsin asked. “Sam is Clare’s son, Grandma. He’s eight.”
Clare laughed. “Like a demon.”
“How lovely,” Ellen said, turning to Gincy.
What was so lovely about the age of eight or skiing like a demon Gincy couldn’t say but she smiled and said, “Isn’t it.”
They were piling into Clare’s massive Chevrolet Suburban when Gincy spotted Tommy driving down the street in the direction of the house. She waved to him, but he didn’t return her wave or turn into the drive as she expected him to. Instead, he continued on down Crescent Road and was soon out of sight. That was odd, she thought, experiencing a twinge of concern. She wondered if he could have been intimidated by the presence of a newcomer—Tommy’s social skills weren’t great; in fact, he could be very shy—or maybe it was the obviously expensive vehicle in his mother’s driveway that had changed his mind about stopping.
“Wasn’t that Uncle Tommy?” Tamsin asked quietly when she and her mother were seated in the back, Gincy behind Clare and Tamsin behind her grandmother.
“Yes.”
“I wonder why he didn’t stop.”
“He was probably on his way to work,” Gincy said.
“Where are we going?” Ellen asked when they were all buckled in.
“Well,” Clare said, “I saw a sign outside a lovely little church about a mile away. They’re having a Christmas fair today. Is anyone interested?”
Ellen shook her head. “The fair went right out of my mind! That’s my church, the Church of the Risen Lord.”
“That’s the one,” Clare said.
“I usually work at the fair, helping to sell the baked goods, but . . .”
Tamsin leaned forward and put her hand on her grandmother’s shoulder. “This is an adventure, right, Grandma?”
Ellen smiled. “It’s a lovely surprise is what it is.”
Gincy frowned. Her own surprise visit hadn’t been greeted half as enthusiastically. But Clare had the advantage of not being family. Of course Ellen Gannon would be happier to see Clare on her doorstep than her own daughter. It was just the way things were.
Still, Gincy thought grumpily, did her mother have to be quite so ecstatic?
CHAPTER 30
The Christmas fair was already in full swing when they got to the Church of the Risen Lord. It was being held in a basement room that wasn’t much larger than the living room at Number Nineteen. Members of the congregation, mostly older women, Gincy noted, were selling homemade cookies and cakes and jams and jellies and pine wreaths and hand-knit scarves and hats and mittens. One long folding table held several rows of old books, spine side up, the hardcovers priced at a dollar and the paperbacks at fifty cents. At another folding table, young girls wearing the uniform of the Girl Squad, an organization Gincy was unfamiliar with, were selling Christmas stockings.
“We made them,” a very tall girl announced proudly when the women stopped by to admire. “We learned to sew this summer.”
Ellen Gannon smiled at the girl. “It’s a fine skill to have,” she said. “I wish my own daughter had taken the time to learn. But she was never interested.”
It was true, Gincy thought. In their home back in Boston it was Rick who wielded a needle and thread when a button came loose or a pair of Tamsin’s jeans needed to be hemmed. He might be accident prone in general and dangerous around kitchen knives, but for some reason he was a whiz with a needle.
The women moved on to the next table, where what looked like the contents of someone’s attic were being sold for pennies. Ellen chatted easily with the woman manning the table, asking questions about the old cigar boxes and assorted glass doorknobs and collection of fabric-covered buttons. Before they went on, the woman reached across the table and took Ellen’s hand. “It’s so good to see you after all this time,” she said. “Have a very merry Christmas.”
Gincy would have to have been blind and deaf not to see that every person who spoke with her mother that morning said something to the same effect. “Ellen, how lovely to see you! It’s been an age!” She thought, too, of the people who had gone out of their way to greet her mother at the grocery store the other day, and she realized that her suspicion that Ellen had been the one to isolate herself after her husband’s death had been confirmed. It was certainly good to know that her mother’s neighbors hadn’t abandoned her. It was sure to put Tamsin’s mind at ease, as well.
“You must meet my very good friends!” Ellen suddenly announced, leading Gincy, Tamsin, and Clare over to a table where two women whom Gincy thought looked vaguely familiar were selling raffle tickets.
“Marilyn, Lizzie,” Ellen said, “I’d like you to meet my daughter’s good friend, Clare. She’s come all the way from Maine to spend the day with us! Isn’t that wonderful?”
Marilyn and Lizzie made the appropriate noises of welcome and appreciation, shaking Clare’s hand and asking how she found “our little town.” Clare told the women that she found it charming and bought five dollars’ worth of raffle tickets. Then Ellen drew Tamsin forward and introduced her with equal enthusiasm.
I’m the daughter, Gincy thought, feeling a frown come to her face. Why didn’t she introduce me first?
And then she almost laughed out loud with the shock of it. She was jealous of the attention her mother was heaping on Clare! And she wondered if her mother felt embarrassed by or disappointed in her in some way. Then again, she wasn’t at all sure Ellen Gannon had ever harbored particular expectations of her, so how could she possibly have let her mother down?
Tamsin interrupted these disconcerting thoughts.
“Mom,” she whispered. “You’re frowning.”
“Sorry. Just thinking.”
“Why does thinking make people frown?”
“I don’t know,” Gincy admitted. “I’m sure there’s some scientific explanation for it.”
Tamsin nodded. “I’ll look it up.”
“Virginia.” It was her mother. “Don’t just stand there, come and be introduced.”
But I’ve already been introduced, Gincy realized as she stepped forward. I met these women at Dad’s funeral. But her mother wasn’t acknowledging that earlier meeting. Maybe the memories of those trying days were simply too painful for her to recognize. Gincy held her hand out to one of the women at the raffle table, and then to the other. “Hello,” she said. “I’m Gincy.”
“Virginia,” her mother corrected. “I don’t know how that silly nickname came to be.”
“I hope,” Gincy said, “that the fair is a success for the church.”
The woman with the short, steel gray hair smiled. “I’m sure it will be,” she said. “God will provide, He always does.”
The other woman, the one in a busy holiday-themed sweater, looked to Ellen
. “I hope we’ll see you at services on Christmas.”
Ellen Gannon gave a brief smile but made no commitment. “Virginia,” she said, “we should join the others now.”
After sitting down for a snack of homemade gingerbread and cups of weak tea, they were able to tear Ellen away from the fair. Her cheeks were bright, whether from the heat generated by the fairgoers packed into the small basement room or from excitement, Gincy couldn’t tell.
“Where to next?” Clare asked, starting the engine of the Suburban.
Ellen replied promptly. “Well,” she said, “there’s a lovely little shop only a few blocks away. It sells the most interesting things. I hope it’s still there. I haven’t been since the spring. . . .”
“We’ll find out,” Clare said. “Just point me in the right direction.”
Ellen did, and Clare pulled out of the church’s parking lot. The woman who had served them tea waved at them as they passed and Ellen nodded back, somewhat regally, Gincy thought.
“I feel like a celebrity,” Ellen said. “Don’t they all drive these big fancy cars?”
“It’s only a jumped-up truck,” Gincy muttered to Tamsin. “It’s not the Queen’s chariot.”
“You’re jealous that Grandma likes Clare’s car better than yours,” Tamsin whispered.
“Look!” Ellen cried. “It is still here! It really is my favorite shop! Do you know the owner makes all the doilies she sells by hand? Can you imagine the patience it must take?”
Clare found a parking spot a few doors down the street, and Tamsin helped her grandmother descend from her seat.
Ellen laughed. “You almost need a ladder to get into and out of this car!”
“You never mentioned this shop to me, Mom,” Gincy said as they approached the storefront, with a prominent sign announcing it as Bea’s Hive. “I would have been happy to take you here.”
The display windows were crammed full of rag dolls (handmade, Gincy assumed), elaborate wreaths made of woven strips of patterned fabric, colorful pottery in some odd shapes, and large paperback books on topics such as macramé, beading, and baking. Well, Gincy thought, eyeing one of the strange clay pots, maybe she wouldn’t have been happy, exactly, to bring her mother to Bea’s Hive, but she would have done it. And the holiday fair. If she had known about the fair, she would have offered to take her mother there, too.
The Season of Us Page 13