CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Jill
Thursday
Jill jammed the file drawer closed. Where could she have put that box of checks? Like the past two days, they were gone, vanished. She brought the heel of her palm to her forehead and pressed her eyes shut.
“Lose something?” Jocelyn stood in the doorway of Jill’s office.
“Some checks.”
“Where did you put them?”
Jill turned and smacked a stack of files onto the desktop. “Seriously, Jocelyn.”
“I think I know your problem. You’re too organized. There’s no contingency for failure.” Jocelyn stepped into the room and sat in the chair opposite Jill’s desk. “Now me, for instance, I have a problem with sunglasses. I lose a pair a week.” She sat back and crossed her legs. “So now I keep backups stashed all over: in my glove compartment, my gym bag, my briefcase.”
“You have a briefcase?”
“It’s not technically a briefcase. More like a tote. Gucci. To die for. But the point is, I have a system.”
“So you want me to leave blank checkbooks all over the place?”
“I didn’t say to use my exact system. Create one of your own.”
“Is this why you came in here?” The lost checks had her inventing all kinds of worst-case scenarios, all of which ended with her footing the bill for 202’s highfalutin lifestyle. Jocelyn and her nut job of a squirrel’s filing system were not helping. “Because now’s not a good time.”
“I’m worried about tomorrow. How Mom will do,” Jocelyn said. “Her long-term chances don’t sound good. And I’m freaking out a little. I needed a diversion, and company.”
“Me, too.” Jill exhaled in a show of sympathy, although she was certain her ticker tape of worries was longer. So long, in fact, she figured she might as well hire a grand marshal. Besides Ruby’s situation, the lost checks, and her ongoing money problems, Fee was sullen and moody. Keith hadn’t responded to the “can we talk?” text she wished—with all her heart—she hadn’t sent. She imagined he was busy, traveling and maybe even back to work by now. And she still wasn’t sleeping. Nonetheless, Jocelyn was a welcome diversion. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“Like what?”
“Like Hester,” Jill said. “Do you remember that awful day? The first time we took Fee into town?”
“Of course. Why do you ask?”
“Funny enough, that woman, Pamela, told me her mother was a cousin of Miss Cordelia, the librarian.”
“And?”
“Pamela called her Delia,” Jill said.
“So?”
“So, it got me thinking about what Mom meant that day. We were so caught up in our own drama, I never really processed it.” Jill scrunched her mouth as she thought. “I think Mom’s odd bounty-of-life speech, about diversity and banned books, was outing Hester and Cordelia, or threatening to anyway.”
“You think Hester was gay?”
“Think about the way Hester totally shut up when Mom called her the consummate friend of the library. And today Pamela mentioned that Cordelia, as a proper librarian, had felt she needed to hide her sexuality. It all makes sense.”
Jocelyn rubbed her palms together. “I love it.”
“And the three books Keith returned to us. ‘To H., with all my love, D.’ The D was Delia, not Daniel.” Jill placed her palm on the stack of hardcovers. “The Confessions of Nat Turner was published in ’67, I checked. Mom and Dad were married in ’65. Those books were not from him.”
“The smoking gun.” Jocelyn bounced up and down in the chair.
“Actually, I find it all a little sad.”
“How so?”
“Think about it. Hester was obviously closeted. And judging by the selection of books, their relationship went way back. They lived in a time when a lesbian relationship would have been scandalous; the town matriarch and librarian, no less.”
“I didn’t think about it like that,” Jocelyn said.
“And Miss Cordelia was a sweetheart. If they’d been together for years, there must have been a side to Hester, a softer side, she never dared show.”
“I suppose.”
Jill shook her head. “More damn secrets. Think of all the girls who came here pretending to be at Aunt Mary’s for the summer, or taking care of their sick grandmother, or at some vocational school. And then there’s Mom, so fractured by abuse that she rewrote sections of her life too unpleasant to deal with. And Dad sensing a breakdown and scrambling for a way for Fee to be raised a McCloud. Pile on my grand finale of a fib and my own naïveté in wanting to do the right thing, in thinking there is a right thing to begin with.”
“Ugh.” Jocelyn dropped her hands over the sides of the chair. “I really hate thinking that Dad knew.”
“He was the one to encourage her to go out with her girlfriend, remember?”
“A girlfriend is one thing,” Jocelyn said.
“That’s why William makes sense,” Jill said. “He was someone she knew and trusted. I think she probably reached out to him for comfort during a difficult time, a time during which her grasp on reality was slipping.”
“I had always gone with an immaculate conception theory, myself,” Jocelyn said, gathering to a stand. “Comfort sex with an old boyfriend, huh? It just doesn’t have the same wow factor.”
“I doubt it ever had much of a wow factor,” Jill said. “Even back then.”