A Place We Knew Well

by Susan Carol McCarthy

  Avery cleared his throat.

  Her fingertips tightened their grip, then, in a quick graceful movement, closed, folded, and set the paper on the desk. She stood and looked at him, tall enough to meet his gaze eye-to-eye.

  “Hello, Wes.”

  Avery’s mind bucked at the impossible, the unimaginable, sight of her.

  “K-Katharine.”

  “Oh, please.” She smiled. “It’s still Kitty. That much, at least, hasn’t changed.”

  “B-but…,” he stammered. Kitty? Alive? “But Dolores…Dolores said you were dead.” Mentally, he scrambled for the details of his mother-in-law’s long-ago—five years ago? six?—late-night phone call: a car crash in California, both occupants killed, ashes scattered at sea. He and Sarah had been shocked but also (though he hated to admit it) more than a bit relieved.

  “Oh, she told me the same thing,” Kitty said with a dismissive toss of platinum-blond curls. Kitty alive, and blond! “ ‘You’re dead to me,’ Mama said. But obviously…” She extended both arms sideways, palms up, and hitched a slim hip.

  Avery’s instinct ricocheted between the need to step back and steady himself against the desk and the urge to step forward and hug her, welcome her back among the living! Unsure what to do, not wanting to offend or presume, he extended his hand lamely—the polite, automatic response of a good deacon at church.

  Inside his head, the edges were blurring. The world outside the office had in that moment ceased to exist. The past seventeen years, the future as he’d perceived it, had collapsed forward and backward onto themselves like a seaman’s telescope. A handful, a hundred questions went off rapid as flak inside his brain.

  Kitty turned to eye Steve’s approach. He had a couple of credit cards in hand and would need to access the machine beside the register.

  “Is there someplace else…?”

  Avery’s mind flew through options: Here in the office, there’d be constant interruption. Home was impossible. Ditto a local restaurant. Kitty was too attractive not to…and someone seeing them together might…But of course…

  “Yes,” he said, pointing out the side door.

  She picked up her purse, a shiny black envelope, slim as a cigarette case. Avery took her arm, tossed Steve a look that said he’d be back later, and steered her to the Imperial.

  “It’s just up the street. Like me to drive?”

  “Why don’t I follow you?” she suggested.

  Better still. “All right,” he told her, fishing his keys out of his pocket.

  All the way up Princeton, he berated himself for his stiff response to her, his lack of focus on the most basic of issues. Kitty alive; driving a car with Hillsborough County plates. Was she living in Florida now, in Tampa? He’d been too—What? Floored? Flabbergasted? Dumbstruck! Yeah, struck dumb by the sight of her—to ask: After seventeen years of no contact, how did she find him? What was she doing here? Why now? And most basic, most important of all: What did she want?

  Half a block before the cottage, he put on his turn signal and watched her do the same. When he swung into the drive, he pulled all the way up to the house to leave her plenty of room.

  He intended to walk back and open her door. But she was out of the car and striding toward him before he could reach her. She accompanied him without comment up the drive; but at the base of the brick steps, she stopped and asked warily, “Anybody home?”

  “It’s an empty rental,” he assured her. “Tenants moved out first of the week.”

  As he worked the lock and the dead bolt, she clicked open her purse, dropped in her keys, and snapped it shut. Sneaking a sideways peek, he noted she wore no rings, no other jewelry except for the ankle bracelet and a large single pearl necklace in the V of her red sweater. The cloud of platinum-blond curls was a shock, as were the fine lines around her carefully made-up eyes and lips. But, my God, her face was so stunningly familiar—same oval shape, elegant nose, pale, porcelain skin; yet somehow less soft, more composed than her younger sister’s.

  By the look of things—the clothes, the car—she’s done well for herself, he thought, opening the door and stepping back. Kitty lifted her chin as she passed, as if she’d read his mind and was answering, Yes, I have.

  She even smells expensive, he thought dizzily. Roses mixed with some exotic spice.

  He watched her gaze sweep over the compact living room, the hallway to both bedrooms on the right, the archway into the dining room and kitchen on the left. She seemed to take in the small details he’d added over the years: the five-inch baseboards, a perfect match to the golden oak floors, the built-in bookcase surrounding the small window seat, the recessed china cabinet in the dining room.

  “Charming,” she said, stopping to touch the chair-high wainscoting and run an appreciative hand over the polished wood grain.

  He followed her into the kitchen, acutely aware that, aside from the very short time he’d spent with her the week before his and Sarah’s wedding, most of what he knew about Kitty—a lot of it not good—had come secondhand. From his mother-in-law, who’d flat-out lied about her own daughter’s death. And from Sarah, who, from the get-go, bore her only sister a long and extremely complicated grudge.

  At the sink, she leaned forward to peer out the window—her hair haloed by the diffuse light—and gave a small cry of delight at the playhouse in the back corner, a perfect miniature of the cottage right down to the white window boxes and green shutters.

  She turned, and in her smile he saw that the slight overlap in her front teeth, which he’d thought endearing, was gone. Her teeth were perfect now, and obviously she no longer bit her nails.

  She moved toward the door as if to step out onto the small back porch, but stopped short to study the markings on the molding beside the jamb—his and Sarah’s measurements of Charlotte’s height at various ages. He’d intended to move it to the new house but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Did she realize what it was? Kitty turned again, fingering the pearl on its delicate silver chain, resettling it in the soft hollow at the base of her throat.

  “Mind if I smoke?” she asked.

  He pulled out a chair for her at the small kitchen table, found an ashtray in the cupboard, opened the window over the sink, and sat down opposite. He watched her extract a cigarette and a slim, silver lighter from her purse, saw the slight tremor in her fingers as she got it lit, the deep and hungry drag followed by her long, ragged exhale.

  “So this was Carly’s happy home?” Her tone was light, but her eyes betrayed the effort.

  He nodded, berating himself for not thinking about the effect the cottage might have on her. “We call her Charlotte.”

  “Of course you do.” She took another greedy pull, then stared at her exhaled smoke, retrieving a memory. “Last thing Sarah said to me was she thought the name Carly ‘common,’ that she had something else in mind.”

  He’d forgotten about that.

  Those gray eyes—the same color as Sarah’s though a slightly different shape—frosted over. “How is Miss Priss, by the way?”

  “Sarah’s fine.”

  “Moved on to bigger and better digs, I s’pose?” Her eyes raked the room.

  “Split-level on the lake, six blocks from here.”

  “So she got her happily ever after…except…What about the other kids? Thought y’all wanted a houseful.”

  “Didn’t work out,” Avery said quietly, then screwed up his courage to ask, “You?”

  “Three ex-husbands, no kids.”

  Aw, jeez, Avery thought. At the base of his skull, the news set off a prickling alarm.

  “Not that I ever wanted ’em.” She stopped to drag again, her eyes half closed in a remembering squint. “When I turned sixteen, all I wanted was a car. Daddy found this old, beat-up roadster…a ’24 Packard, with a rumble seat, for God’s sake!” She paused to favor him with a wan smile. “Never been happier in my life. That car got me out from under Mama’s thumb; it was my ticket to freedom! But Sarah? Know what Sarah ask
ed for on her big birthday?” Her eyes mocked her absent sister. “All Sarah wanted was for Daddy to build her a cedar hope chest and for Mama to give her Grandma Ayres’s Royal Albert china.”

  Images of the chest at the foot of their bed and the blue-and-gold china in their dining room breakfront came to mind.

  “Funny thing is…Sarah was the one with real talent. People used to swoon over that voice of hers.” She shot him a piercing look. “She ever do anything with her singing?”

  “Solos in the church choir,” Avery said, feeling a rush of loyalty.

  “That’s it?” she said, incredulous. “Poor Mama!” She threw back her head, red lips wide in a loud, braying laugh brittle as glass. “When we were little, Mama was convinced she was raising a pair of thoroughbreds. Had her sights set on a Miss Alabama or, the very least, a governor’s or senator’s wife. Turned out”—her bitterness sliced the air, shard-sharp—“I was the black sheep in horse harness and poor ol’ Sarah the sacrificial lamb.”

  Black sheep, Avery understood. He’d heard the tales. But Sarah a sacrificial lamb? Kitty’s zero-to-sixty mood shift—a hallmark of both Ayres girls and their mother—had taught him to be wary of asking. Better by far to steer things back to his mother-in-law. “You know Dolores passed, a year ago August?”

  “Cousin Maura sent me the clippings.” She studied the lit end of her cigarette for a moment as if re-reading them. Then she looked up, rancor discarded, eyes bright. “Tell me about Carly. What’s she like?”

  “Wonderful…an A student, state champion majorette, and as sweet a girl as you can imagine.”

  “Well, I’m sure that’s your doing.”

  “Oh, now…” Avery felt compelled to rise to Sarah’s defense, but Kitty cut him off with an abrupt wigwag of her hand.

  “Save it, for her.” Cigarette smoke zigzagged between them.

  The questions he had for her were piling up inside his head. Where? How to begin?

  “So you live near Tampa now?”

  “Not near. In. Neighborhood called Bayshore. You know it?”

  “Right on the water. Ritzy.”

  “One of the better ones. Great views of downtown. But unfortunately…” She paused. Her eyes bored into him, her tone turned careful. “…just north of MacDill.”

  MacDill.

  Avery’s thoughts spun. As if he was caught in a time warp. As if, instead of hours, only seconds had elapsed between Jimmy Simms’s half-whispered warning, “DefCon Two,” and Kitty’s telltale remark, “just north of MacDill”—Tampa’s SAC base.

  In the silence, come down heavy as a hammer between them, he pictured the day he first met her. The big house on Greensboro had been bristling with family drama. Downstairs, Sarah and her mother, and a blur of female relatives, scurried about, getting ready for that weekend’s wedding. Upstairs, Kitty lay hugely pregnant and alone, confined to her childhood bedroom, door closed, shades drawn. Poor kid hadn’t been allowed outside in weeks, not once since her surprise return home from Rome.

  Their mother, no-nonsense Dolores, had already arranged to place the infant in an orphanage when it came, but Avery, tentatively at first, then more insistently, had intervened. The day before the wedding, he and Sarah had their first argument. “I saw my fill of death and dying on Tinian, and over Japan,” he told her. “And it left me certain that life is precious, and family is everything. This plan of your mother’s—to just dump Kitty’s baby on strangers, orphan your own flesh and blood—strikes me as coldhearted and uncaring. This baby’s your family, for God’s sake,” he argued. “If nobody wants it here, we should take it with us to Florida; give it the love and protection it deserves.” Sarah, her head full of worries about the wedding, resisted. “Why should I cover up another one of Kitty’s catastrophes?” “Why not?” he countered. “I can see your sister’s been judged and juried…but it’s the baby being punished. Tell me, where’s the justice in that?” “But, Wes, how can you even think about taking on another man’s child?” she argued. “It’s half Ayres, isn’t it? How can we not?” In the end, she’d agreed, and helped him lobby Dolores with “The child is an innocent, and deserves a good home among loving kin.”

  Abruptly, Kitty got up, ground out her cigarette in the sink, and rinsed away its remains. Once again she peered out the window to the playhouse. Only then did she turn to face him.

  “Seventeen years ago, I trusted you, Wes. I’d never have agreed if it weren’t for you. Everyone else treating me like a leper, worried about the scandal, the precious family name….” Her tone was sharp with remembered pain. “As if the whole town didn’t know all about Daddy’s tomcatting!” Then, visibly, she softened. “Everyone but you, Wes. You were the only one who even asked me about Carlo, who showed me any sympathy for his loss. You talked about losing your grandfather—Old Pa, you called him, remember?—and earlier on, losing your daddy in that awful accident. You still carry that broken screw in your pocket?”

  “No,” he told her, flattered that she remembered.

  “You said how much you looked forward to kids of your own. You were kind to me, Wes. I’ve never forgotten that. In the hospital, when the time came, I didn’t give Carly to Sarah, do you remember? I handed her to you.”

  The memory of that moment—Charlotte so tiny yet so perfect, an exquisite little doll pulsing with life, and the welling in his heart, the overwhelming need to protect her—was a touchstone for Avery. He returned to it often; as recently as yesterday, in fact, when she’d appeared at the station so fragile and frightened. Charlotte had come to him for comfort and for the truth.

  And he’d always given it to her—except for this one thing.

  On their honeymoon drive down to Florida, Sarah had drawn the line. “I’m her mother and you’re her father. Let’s just leave it at that.” It had been easy to present themselves as Charlotte’s parents, easier still after they heard from Dolores that Kitty was dead. But now?

  Kitty’s eyes blazed with intention. “Seventeen years ago, I quit Tuscaloosa and everyone in it. But not before Mama and Sarah made me promise, made me swear on the family Bible, ‘No contact with the child, no deathbed confessions of motherhood, no nothing, ever.’ I’m not here to break my word. But to tell you the truth, Wes—I mean, who really knows where all this missile-business is headed?—I just want to see her. If we’re all bound for hell in a handbasket, I want to lay eyes on my only daughter, just once…before I go.”

  For the second time that day, Avery recalled the nauseating sense of jumping out of the known, falling through nothingness, and landing in a new, never-imagined hell. Kitty, whom everyone thought was dead, was not only alive, but wanted to see his daughter. Avery swallowed hard against the surge of bile at the back of his throat.

  He was struggling to stay on top of a sudden swell of emotions. Think, man, think! In chess terms, this is surely only a check, not checkmate. What are your options?

  If Sarah were here, she’d have ordered Kitty out by now, insisting she honor their agreement exactly as planned. Certainly, she’d expect him to do the same.

  But under the circumstances—who knew what was going to happen?—how could he deny Kitty her request? She was, technically, Charlotte’s mother. And all she wanted, she claimed, was to “lay eyes” on Charlotte. Where was the harm in that? But Sarah…Sarah was her mother, too. The only one Charlotte had ever known, with a lifetime of care and devotion to her.

  Two mothers, one child. In the Bible, it had taken the wisdom of Solomon to set things straight. But he was no Solomon. More than that—his jaw hardened with resolve—although Charlotte had two mothers, he was her only father. Her real father, Kitty’s Italian fiancé, was long gone, killed in The War the week before V-E Day. He’d never even known of Charlotte’s existence. Or that Kitty, an army nurse in Rome, had been quietly discharged, come home unmarried, pregnant, and, in her family’s proper southern mind, disgraced.

  And what about Charlotte? What if she learned the truth of their lifelong lie to her: tha
t Sarah was her aunt. That he was, in fact, her kindly uncle. By marriage. With no genuine blood ties between them. Would she forgive or reject him? The possibility that he might lose her over the untold truth, the deliberate lie, being exposed was too painful to consider.

  Somehow, he had to help Kitty.

  Not because he was kind. Not because it was the right thing to do. No. He’d help Kitty because, bottom line, helping her might help him if Charlotte ever learned the truth.

  “She’s up for Homecoming Queen,” he said quietly. “The parade’s on Friday afternoon down Edgewater Drive, College Park’s main drag. You come, you can see her then.”

  He heard her sharp intake of breath. “Homecoming?” Her eyes flared open, then shuttered so quickly, he couldn’t be sure of her true reaction. “Thank you,” she said hoarsely, barely above a whisper.

  He walked her out, opened the front door, and stood back to let her pass, hoping she couldn’t hear his heart hammering inside his chest. “So, you headed back to Tampa now?”

  “No.” She clicked open her purse. “I was going to leave this at the station in case you weren’t around.” She handed him a business card. “The number on the back is the Cherry Plaza Hotel. With all the action out at MacDill, I haven’t slept for days. l’m hoping to catch up.” She paused. “Y’know, Wes, Daddy liked to say Sarah was his songbird and I was his black cat. I got all the lives, he’d say, but Sarah…” She reached out and, with a red-tipped fingernail, traced the line of his jaw. “Sarah got all the luck.” Her finger stopped at the base of his chin. “I sure hope she appreciates how lucky she is,” she murmured, then leaned in.

  Her kiss, petal-soft, nicotine-sweet, stunned him. As did the heady swirl of her perfume and the dizzying undertow of feelings between them: her gratitude for his remembered and renewed kindness; his relief that she’d come to him at the station, instead of surprising Sarah at home, or seeking out Charlotte on her own at school. He gripped the door handle with one hand and mindfully withdrew the other, which had somehow snaked around to press the small of her back. Careful, he thought (his life’s motto).