part three

 

chapter twenty

 

 

 

Sam was a large girl, big-boned, her mother would say. Others called her heavy-set. And some just called her fat. Insults were Sam’s lot. Her name made it so easy.

Sam crams spam and jam.

She could go by Samantha, but that felt worse than the jiggle of her flesh every time she moved. Sam’s mother was stick thin. Her father might have been, too. Any questions about him were met with shrugs. When Sam was thought old enough, she got the story from her neighbor, Layla Endicott, who made an effort to take Sam under her wing on the many afternoons when Sam’s mother was still at work, and Sam’s grandparents, with whom they lived, didn’t want her around.

Sam was the result of a rape against her mother when her mother was nineteen and on her way home from the tacky diner where she waited tables. The rapist was Henry Delacourt, the scion of a wealthy family who liked shedding all outward signs of privilege to go slumming. He enjoyed occupying the last booth in the diner and drinking coffee into which he poured whiskey from a fancy silver flask. He pulled the brim of an ancient fedora low, so that he had to tip his head back a bit to see. His coat was torn, the soles of his boots let in the rain, and his normally smooth cheeks bristled with three days’ growth.

He fooled no one.

Even in the pitch dark of a starless November night, Sam’s mother made him at once from the smell of his cologne, which he felt necessary to splash on himself even under such a getup. She caught it up her nose more than once at work, when pleasantries had been exchanged.

“A pretty flower, you are,” she said.

“Like you,” he replied.

He took her for a flirt. Maybe that’s why he chose her. A natural, if overly violent following up. The cologne was imported from France and had an overlay of cinnamon, a spice Sam’s mother had, until that night, enjoyed on winter nights in a steaming cup of apple cider. She never tasted cinnamon again.

Henry Delacourt left town not long after the incident and settled somewhere out of state where it was said he died two years later at the hands of a jealous husband. His picture was in the Dunston High School yearbook, which Sam found online. She saw nothing of herself in his face. She didn’t look one bit like her mother either. She was sure she had been cast into the water of life by some random hand, a hand that liked to turn cruel, but not always against her alone. Her mother, Flora, had been born to strict parents who looked upon their daughter’s misfortune without sympathy. She was punished for being a sinner. When they died, rather than feeling free, she withered, as if she had needed the iron law of their simple morality to hold her up.

She and Sam remained in the dead parents’ tall, narrow house. Three years after Sam graduated from high school, and following a string of boring, entry-level jobs, which she quit after only a few months, she escaped to southern California. She figured the time had come to feel hot sun on her skin.

L.A. was a hard place to be fat. The bodies around her were lean and tanned. Clothes were minimal. Sam cleaned motel rooms and wore black polyester pants even after work. When she walked on the beach, she cast a big shadow that bumped along in a reflection of her own awkward gait. For along with being fat, Sam had a bad leg, a birth defect, which her grandmother, Edna Clarkson, said was the Lord’s retribution. Sam was glad Edna and her nasty husband, Hubert, were both dead. She had silently rejoiced at their passing.

Sam was strong. The ease with which she could lift and tote came in handy when she moved into her apartment in a mid-century building called the Betty Lou. Across the street, the tenants of the Nancy Ann were often noisy late into the night. And on the other side of a wide alley that always stank of garbage, the grandest of the three, the Shirley Lynn had a fountain with running water twenty-four hours a day. Who were these women? Why not the Samantha Louise? Sam’s middle name was another misery inflicted upon her. Her last name, Clarkson, she shortened down at the courthouse. Sam Clark sounded as strong as she was. A big, solid woman needed a big, solid name.

She didn’t doubt her sexual identity. She wasn’t a lesbian. While she didn’t find men particularly appealing, she wasn’t drawn to women as love objects either. This was no doubt Fate’s way of keeping her from reproducing. All she had ever really adored, it seemed, were small treasures: bits of sea glass, porcelain figurines, the tiny pearls in a hairclip a motel guest left behind. She arranged these carefully on a sill below a west-facing window that gave a clear view of the parking lot. Sam would have preferred a view of the ocean.

Stingy window, Sam thought. But I’ll wash you anyway.

Some people might not want to do at home what they had to do all day at work, but Sam didn’t mind. She didn’t waste her time using spray cleanser, as she did at the EconoLodge, but white wine vinegar and a squeegee. The window was tall, the one nice feature in an otherwise bland, dingy living space. Sam didn’t need a footstool. At five foot ten, the top was an easy reach. It was there, one smoggy Tuesday afternoon, with the anticipation of eating a nice pork chop and fried rice for dinner, that Sam first saw her.

Even from that distance, Sam could tell she was a tiny little thing. It touched Sam’s heart to see that she was making up for her small stature by wearing ridiculously high heels. She teetered across the parking lot, a big cardboard box in her arms, which she strained to see around. She stopped some distance from the building’s main door, put the box down, and removed her keys from her stylish red handbag. Then she couldn’t pick the box up again with the keys in her hand, so she placed her key chain between her teeth. The effort she made exhausted Sam to watch. Sam dropped her squeegee and bottle, lumbered out the door, banged down two flights of stairs, and out into the parking lot. The little thing stared up at her. Sam lifted the box. The woman grabbed her keys with her left hand and smoothed her straight, black hair with the other.

“You downstairs neighbor,” the woman said.

“What makes you think that?”

“I see you take mail from box below mine. Boxes placed the way apartments are placed.”

Sam felt stupid for not having understood that arrangement.

“I am Suki,” she said.

“Chinese?”

Suki shook her head. “Japanese.”

Again, Sam felt stupid.

“You are?” Suki asked.

“American.”

“No. Name.”

“Oh, Sam.”

Suki continued to stare up at her coolly. Sam asked what was in the box.

“Tea service,” Suki said.

Sam didn’t understand.

“Pot and cups. Also, many box tea. From Japan.”

They went inside and up three flights of stairs. Sam wished the building had an elevator.

In Suki’s apartment, Sam put the box on a low table in the middle of the floor. On either side of the table were a number of large cushions. A potted orchid, its petals an extravagant fleshy pink, drew light from the same tall window Sam had one floor down. The bedroom was visible though its open door. A mattress lay on the floor, covered with a blue and white blanket in an abstract pattern of flowers.

“Sort of minimal, no?” Sam asked.

“I like way of my country. American way not always better.”

And then Suki asked Sam to please leave, as it was time for her daily meditation.

They balanced each other out. In fact, one dreary afternoon, when the first of the season’s rainstorms had driven everyone indoors, Suki poured Sam a cup of tea that Sam would have preferred to drink standing up rather than crouched awkwardly on Suki’s cushions and said, “We are yin and yang.”

“That’s a Chinese idea, isn’t it?”

Suki laughed. Her teeth were as tiny as she was, and brilliantly white. Sam’s teeth were big and sturdy, with a distinctly yellow tint that no amount of brightening toothpaste could help.

They didn’t have anything to talk about, having nothing in common. The invitation to tea was Suki’s payment for the kindness Sam had done her. Sam cut the visit short. A big girl like her did badly trying to sit cross-legged on the floor, especially with a bum leg.

Then certain information began to reach Sam about Suki, courtesy of Suki’s next-door neighbor. She went by Mrs. Hopp. She wore loud Hawaiian dresses and green eye shadow. Her dyed hair was more orange than red. Sam admired her stacked bracelets though. Many had small beads in tones of blue and purple. Mrs. Hopp managed to run into Sam in the laundry room every time Sam was down there waiting for some cycle to finish.

A small lace camisole was left in the dryer. Mrs. Hopp said it had to belong to “that Japanese girl.” Sam agreed. Although she didn’t know many other tenants by name, she’d seen quite a few from her perch at the window where she often sat in a second-hand rocking chair she bought at Goodwill. The men and women who came and went across the parking lot weren’t hideous nor were they prime specimens, and almost all tended to be on the large side, with sloppy, elongated American builds. None could possibly own something so fine and delicate as the camisole.

“Shame to put a silk garment like that through the dryer,” Mrs. Hopp said, and tossed the camisole onto the yellow plastic table flecked with gold that the management had graciously provided for folding.

Sam continued to sort her own things: size 10 underpants, size 18 shirts and jeans, and her trusty flannel nightgown, which she wore out of habit, though it was far too warm for the gentle climate of Southern California.

“I can take it up to her,” Sam said.

“Oh, no, dear, you don’t want to do that.”

“Why not?”

“She has another guest.”

Mrs. Hopp looked sly and held her tongue. Something rose in Sam’s blood that Mrs. Hopp seemed to recognize as a threat. She quickly relented. Suki, she said, had “gentlemen callers.” Young Japanese men, mostly, though sometimes an older Japanese man.

“How do you know that?” Sam asked.

“I like to know who comes and goes on my floor.”

Sam had trouble seeing Mrs. Hopp get to her feet to peer out the peephole every time steps passed her door, but anything was possible, especially for an old woman with time on her hands.

Suki’s bedroom was on the other side of the wall from Mrs. Hopp’s, and good heavens, you should hear the ruckus sometimes! Mrs. Hopp had to actually bang her hand on the wall to say that enough was enough. She knew she was right about Suki because Suki never met her eye when they passed in the hall.

“You think she’s in business?” Sam asked. She wasn’t naive. These things happened, particularly in a tough economy.

“Well, I hate to speculate, but it’s really the only thing that makes sense.”

To Sam’s surprise, Suki admitted as much after Sam invited her down for a beer. Suki sat on a wobbly bar stool, which was too low for her to put her elbows on the counter.

“It not bad as you think. Men are nice men. They come here on business. Miss home. Miss their wives or girlfriends.”

“You’re taking money to have sex with them. It’s illegal. What if the building manager finds out?”

“He seldom on premises.”

That was true. Sam had trouble with her kitchen faucet, and the guy was never in when she stopped by.

Suki sipped her beer. Sam could tell she didn’t like it.

“How do they find you?” Sam asked.

“Agency.”

“Agency? What agency?”

Suki explained that the agency was an answering service where the caller made his request, and one of the girls there recommended Suki or any of a number of other young ladies, depending on the caller’s specifications.

“And how did you find this agency?” Sam asked.

“I see ad in paper. Ask for Japanese girl to give lessons.”

Sam snorted.

“Language lessons,” Suki said. For the first time, a merry twinkle came into her black eyes. She shook her finger at Sam. Sam was charmed! Every fiber in her wanted to be Suki. Small, pert, enchanting. Life was so unfair; sometimes she just wanted to kick God in the face.

“And they offered you another position. One with greater earning potential,” Sam said.

“Yes.”

“Must be nice to have lots of cash.”

“Most pay credit.”

“Credit?”

“My phone has plug in. I swipe card.”

It was hard to imagine this.

“But, don’t you mind it? I mean …” Sam’s experience with sex amounted to a single encounter with Jasper Kline after school one day in her senior year of high school. Afterward, he said she should be grateful that she wouldn’t have to go through life as a virgin. Then he told her not to worry about getting knocked up, because she was so fat, people probably wouldn’t notice. When Sam kicked him, he howled in pain and went off limping.

“Not so much now. In beginning, I mind more,” Suki said. But Sam could see her distaste in the way her shoulders suddenly seemed to harden, giving her an air of firm resistance.

She’s trapped in it. She wants to get out and can’t.

Suki thanked Sam for the beer and went on her way.

Sam didn’t see Suki again for a little while because one of the other maids at the motel quit and there were extra shifts to be had. Sam was a hard worker. It was suggested that one day she might be promoted to head housekeeper. Sam didn’t exactly see herself making a career in the motel business. But what else the future had in store, she couldn’t say.

Suki went out of town for a few days and asked Sam to water her plants. Along with the orchid, she had a number of African violets that needed to be watched closely, she said, so their soil, once dry, wouldn’t remain so. Sam took her time with the watering. She wanted to soak up the atmosphere and get a firm sense of Suki’s private life.

What she found was evidence of a young woman with a taste for luxury and comfort. She had cashmere sweaters that would never be wearable in L.A. Hand-painted silk scarves, French perfume, fine gold necklaces that Sam didn’t remember seeing Suki wear, mother-of-pearl hair clips, even her dishes were a designer name, so was her crystal stemware. There were no books or magazines, and Sam assumed their absence reflected Suki’s struggle with English. There were no photographs, not of people, at any rate, only one badly composed shot of the beach. Sam wondered if Suki had taken it herself, but there was no camera in the apartment. Sam was careful to put everything back as she had found it. She stood a long time by Suki’s low bed and imagined, with distress, the things that happened there. Men were brutes. Her own father. Her grandfather, who had whipped her with his belt more than once while her mother cowered in the corner and pleaded. The sports nuts who stayed at the motel when there was a football game, idiot drinkers who left vomit and piss on the bathroom floor, holes in the wall, used condoms in the bed.

Once again, as thanks for a favor performed, Suki poured tea while Sam bore the discomfort of having to sit on the floor. Sam asked where she’d gone. Suki shook her head. Sam guessed that the trip had been arranged by a client. Sam sipped her tea, which she didn’t care for. She couldn’t think of anything to say. Silence fell. Sam grew uneasy. Finally, Suki mentioned that she was going on another visit soon.

“Oh, where?” Sam asked.

“See family.”

It hadn’t occurred to Sam that Suki had a family. But that was dumb. Everyone did.

“Family very important,” Suki said.

“Sure.”

“You no talk about family. You tell me now.”

Sam stretched her legs. What to say? Her grandparents had despised her.

“Dirty rotten seed, that’s what you are!”

Her mother told her to stay out of their way, and not provoke them.

“Honestly, Samantha, if you’d eat a little less and give up all those cookies, your grandfather would have no reason to call you fat!”

Since leaving Dunston, Sam and her mother were seldom in touch. Whenever Sam had a letter from her, it was full of whining and fear about what terrible things were certain to happen to her so far away. Sam’s mother had never gone more than a few miles from the town she still lived in. The larger world was full of mystery and menace.

“I have a big family. Four brothers, three sisters. That’s why I booked out. Got tired of having to share a bathroom,” Sam said.

“You miss them?”

“Oh, sure, sometimes. Especially Adele. She’s only six.”

“You oldest?”

“Yup.”

“You no want to stay, help raise children?”

“Hey, I may love ‘em, but they weren’t my idea, if you know what I mean.”

Suki’s eyebrows came together, causing a line between them. “Maybe one day I marry one of your brothers. My family want me marry American boy.”

“Well, I don’t know about that. My brothers are all kinda nuts.”

“You have picture?”

“No.”

Sam didn’t feel bad at all. Why tell the truth when a lie was so much more entertaining? She could go on like this all afternoon, inventing one tale after another. Suki, though, looked far away, almost sad. Sam got up to go. Suki invited her to visit a Shinto shrine over in Little Tokyo the following day.

“You’re religious?” Sam asked.

“Of course. Only empty people do not believe.”

“In Shintoism?”

“In anything beyond their own existence.”

Sam’s grandparents had been Lutheran. To her, the whole paradigm was cold, harsh, and dull as toast. She turned away from Christianity at an early age. Yet she found wonder and beauty in the world, and didn’t know how to account for it.

The day was stale and hot, although Thanksgiving was only another week off. The bus was slow, crowded, and gave Sam a headache. Suki sat perfectly straight in the seat next to her, her hands, with their thin white fingers and crimson nails, clasped quietly in the lap of her blue silk skirt. Sam’s hands were sweaty, as always.

They reached their stop, got off, and made their way along a wide sidewalk with flecks of mica that sparkled. Sam’s shadow covered Suki’s completely. Sam wore a dress, one of two she owned, because of the formality of the occasion. Her thighs rubbed together. She thought bitterly of the heat rash she’d develop later and wondered if she had any Vaseline at home.

The entrance to the shrine stood past a concrete wall, then a chain link fence. They walked through a wooden structure that reminded Sam of a doorframe, into deep, cool shadows provided by a line of poplar trees. A stone column with Japanese lettering stood just beyond. Suki stopped to look at it, then ran her fingers lovingly along the carved grooves. Sam had a sudden sense of not belonging. She didn’t want to continue, and told Suki she would wait for her there, on a bench in the shade. Suki made no reply, and went slowly through the sliding wood and rice paper doors into the shrine itself.

Sam felt like an idiot. Why come all that way, on a stinky hot bus, just to plant her ass on a bench? She should get up and go inside, too. She couldn’t. Her mind was in turmoil. She was on the edge of something bigger than she was, but it wasn’t a higher power. It was something deep within her, completely at odds with any notions of peace.

As the quiet murmurs of the devoted reached her there, in the darkness of the trees, it occurred to Sam that she needed to fix her life. Her task list was long: weight loss, a better haircut to tame her wild dirty-blond curls, decent clothes to wear when she wasn’t at work, higher education, a book club. Maybe if she met new people she wouldn’t need Suki so much.

Suki returned, looking as though she’d been washed from the inside out. She strolled silently past Sam, who got to her feet and followed. Neither spoke. Around the corner, a man in an ice cream truck handed a little boy a cone with two scoops of ice cream—one white, one pink. Sam desperately wanted some and suppressed the urge. Suki looked at the small curved stone she’d gotten at the shrine. An amulet of good fortune, she said.

They fell silent again on the bus. At the door to the Betty Lou, Suki said, “I am ready now for journey.” Sam nodded dully and went on her way.

That night she slept fitfully. The heat of the day seemed to soak into her skin. The bedroom window’s small, pathetic air conditioner didn’t do anything but make noise. Around midnight she lurched to her feet and turned it off. She went to the kitchen for a glass of water. There was urgent knocking at her door. Sam willed the intruder to leave her alone. The knocking continued. Through the peephole, she saw Mrs. Hopp, frantic, yet resplendent in her bathrobe and curlers. Sam opened the door, and remembered at the last moment that she was in her underwear. Her flannel nightgown was too heavy for her that night.

“There’s trouble at Suki’s place,” Mrs. Hopp said. She was out of breath. There was something odd about the way she spoke. Sam realized it had to do with her teeth, or lack thereof. She’d removed her dentures.

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“Well I did. Go see what it’s all about,” Mrs. Hopp said.

Sam rubbed her eyes against the glare from the hallway light. Her head felt woolly and thick.

“Oh, all right,” she said.

She got dressed. She slipped on the flip-flops she used when she went to and from the laundry room, which was across a courtyard that always collected puddles from the automatic sprinklers. They smacked loudly as she went up the stairs. Behind her, Mrs. Hopp huffed step by step.

The sound of wailing filled the hall. Sam told Mrs. Hopp to go back to her place and stay there.

“Should I call the police, do you think?” Mrs. Hopp asked.

“Well, if you were going to, why did you come get me?”

Mrs. Hopp didn’t know. She went inside and closed her door.

Along with the wailing was a man’s raised voice. He was speaking Japanese, Sam was certain, though if pressed she probably wouldn’t be able to tell it from any other Asian tongue. He wasn’t angry so much as desperate. His voice dropped to something softer yet more urgent, followed suddenly by the sound of something shattering. Sam thought of the lamp by Suki’s bed. Solid crystal, it looked like.

One of her clients was acting up, and Suki was fighting back. Sam took three deep, slow breaths to ready herself, then pounded on the door with her fist. All noise inside stopped. She banged again. The door opened, and Suki’s head appeared.

“Make no more noise. Sorry for trouble,” she said. Her eyes were red, her face streaked and grimy. And she reeked of booze, gin to be precise.

Sam pushed the door open and went inside. The man was in the kitchen, filling a glass with water from the tap. He was slightly built, like Suki, but taller, though not nearly as tall as Sam.

“Get out,” Sam told him.

“Sorry?” the man said.

“Bet your damn ass you’re sorry. Beat it.”

“Will not. I stay. I have right.”

“Fuck your rights. Get going.”

Suki said something in a plaintive tone. Her bad English was worse under the effects of alcohol.

Sam crossed the living room. She grabbed the man by the arm and was surprised by how thin it was. Yet he put up a decent struggle when she yanked him. Even so, he was no match for her energized bulk. She dragged him to the still open door and shoved him out. She slammed the door against him. Suki resumed her wailing, and Sam told her to shut up. Suki dropped onto one of her floor cushions and sobbed. Sam looked through the peephole. The man was still there. He shouted something in Japanese.

“If he’s saying he’ll call the police, tell him the neighbor already did,” Sam told Suki.

“He want jacket.”

The man’s jacket was on a stool next to the kitchen counter. Sam took the jacket and opened the door. She dropped the jacket and told the man once more to get lost. The man tried to see around her to where Suki sat, but Sam blocked him. He said something else, and Suki lifted her head for a moment. Sam closed the door. Suki wept.

“Don’t be embarrassed. One of them was likely to pop sooner or later,” Sam said.

“No understand.”

“You know—johns, they’re not right in the head. It was only a matter of time before one of them took a swing at you.”

“He no hit me. He brother.”

“Say what?”

“Brother. Come to take me home. Only he say I cannot go home. They do not wish me.”

Sam sat down across from Suki, forgetting for the moment how much she disliked accommodating that low table.

“He came all this way to say you can’t go home?” Sam asked.

“More honorable to say to my face.”

Sam gazed up at the popcorn ceiling. Her right leg cramped. She flexed her toes. Suki sniffed.

“You should not have pushed him away,” Suki said.

“Yeah, guess not. Look, maybe I can go after him and explain.”

“Do not. Please go now.”

“Suki, look, I was just trying …”

Suki shook her head.

Sam stood. In her misery, Suki looked even tinier. Sam wanted to help her and knew that anything she offered would be rejected. Sam left her alone. As she went down the hall she hoped Mrs. Hopp wouldn’t open her door. The door stayed closed.

Back in her own place, Sam listened for Suki’s footsteps on the ceiling. She thought of her up there, unhappy and stuck. She thought of dragging Suki’s brother across the floor. She heard a distant moan, almost ghostly. Maybe Suki was weeping again, full of remorse and regret. Maybe she was wondering how to fix things. Maybe she figured she couldn’t.

And what about my own life?

The details were fuzzy, but the gist was clear. She’d had enough of the golden west. Time to head for home.

 

chapter twenty-one

 

 

 

Sam didn’t read poetry in L.A., but poems were always with her. In her ear, in the beat of her good, non-lame foot. In her hand wiping clean the motel television screens. Even polishing the rim of a toilet that messy, stupid men had used, poetry was there.

In elementary school, her rendition of “The Little Ghost” by Edna St. Vincent Millay was passionate to the point of ridicule. Her teachers accused her of making fun. She was supposed to recite, so she did. She saw no reason to hold back.

She read poems on her way to school and when she returned home, unless her grandparents were in the house. They thought reading was a silly pastime. Young hands should hold brooms and dishcloths, fold towels and sheets, scrub counters and floors.

Now that she was home and the house was hers—well, technically her mother’s—she read whenever she damn well pleased. Her favorites were Millay, Dickenson, Sexton, and Plath.

 

I made a fire; being tired
Of the white fists of old
Letters and their death rattle
When I came too close to the wastebasket
What did they know that I didn’t?

 

Plath was her favorite. All that despair and rage! Thank you, Ted Hughes.

The first motel where she got a job was in College Town and rented by the week. The occupant of the end room was an English major, or so Sam assumed from her collection of books, particularly T. S. Eliot. She hadn’t read Eliot. One afternoon, she sat down on the bed she’d just made, and did, for over an hour, at which the point the manager walked in, raised his voice, and threatened to fire her. Sam wanted to tell him where to go, and didn’t, for the sake of her paycheck.

Then the motel was sold to a developer who planned to tear it down.

She held two more motels jobs before she learned that the Lindell Home was hiring. There, no one minded her carrying a book of verses and reading to the residents, most of whom were deaf as posts or disconnected from what went on around them, especially those that lay in bed, staring at nothing. Now and then one would smile in recognition of some lines learned long ago that took them back to younger selves, and happier times.

“Don’t you hate being around those old folks all the time?” Flora asked.

“I grew up around old folks, remember?”

Flora looked sad for a moment. She thought of her dead parents every single day.

“They weren’t so bad, were they?” she would sometimes ask.

“They stunk, and you know it.”

Flora looked even sadder then, and Sam regretted saying that. She poured her another cup of coffee, though she hadn’t asked for one.

“Look, I’ll be getting my own place eventually, once I have a little more money saved, so why don’t you sell this dump and rent one of those new apartments downtown? A change of scene would do you good,” Sam asked.

“And live there alone?”

“Well, sure, I mean …”

“I can’t do that.”

This was always a sticking point. Sam was more than ready for an apartment of her own. Since coming back from L.A. it hadn’t been easy living with Flora. It wasn’t that her mother intruded on her privacy, or made demands. It was just that she was so weighed down by her own misery! There was an air of gloom around her that nothing could lift, and Sam found it very annoying.

“You did fine without me before,” Sam said.

“I did not! You don’t know how lonely I was!”

Flora had a boyfriend she pretended was really only an old pal. Chuck Knight. He’d been in the picture a long time, well before the death of her parents. He never came around because they hadn’t approved of him, and Flora probably got so used to keeping him a secret that she thought she still had to. It was absurd, really, because he called all the time on the telephone, and Flora went out with him a lot, too, and sometimes spent the night at his house out on the lake. How he stood Flora’s constant depression, Sam had no idea, except possibly by being dense and thus insulated from it somehow. The few times Sam had met him, his good cheer and lack of curiosity about anything in the larger world always gave the impression of a major dope.

Sam was late for work, and she left Flora by herself in the kitchen. As she drove, she listened to one of the recordings she’d made of herself reading Emily Dickinson. The recorder sat on the passenger seat. One of these days she might get a used laptop and burn CDs, but for the moment, an older technology was fine.

 

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!

 

Sam really got a kick out of Dickinson, especially because she lived a very solitary life. The idea was appealing.

Her co-worker, Eunice, was late, as usual. Their supervisor, Karen, never said anything to her about it, which ticked Sam off. Karen and Eunice had a lot in common. Both had disastrous histories with men. Neither had children. They often commiserated with one another, which probably accounted for Karen always looking the other way when Eunice failed to be on time.

When Eunice finally showed up, her excuse was the guy she was living with. He had problems with his kids, who were more or less estranged from him. What trouble could you have with someone who was basically out of your life, unless you wanted them back in? Sam didn’t ask that question. She dusted, straightened, scrubbed the toilet in each room, and hummed.

Fannie Etheridge smiled and nodded when Sam came in. Sam recited the poem she’d listened to in the car before cleaning up. She squeezed Fannie’s hand on the way out.

Sam liked the residents. She also felt sorry for them. Take Nell Morely for instance. She was often blue, and held her husband’s picture in her lap hour after hour. Frank Norton, who was called “Sarg” by the staff, looked bleakly at his younger self in an Army uniform, where he smiled confidently into the camera. Then there was Constance Maynard, who’d stopped taking her sleeping pills and was, for a time, almost frisky. Now the quiet had returned, and the frequent presence of her daughter, Meredith, didn’t seem to help.

That was because Meredith was a sap. Always mooning around. The way she acted, you’d think she was a resident herself, though she was a hell of a lot younger than most of them. Eunice said she’d just moved from L.A. At the mention of that huge, hot, dusty city, Sam’s skin crawled.

Good old Suki. Whatever became of you?

She wheeled her cart full of cleaning supplies and fresh linens up the hall. The fluorescent lights above her buzzed quietly. A trailing ivy plant, set carelessly on a stand in a dark corner, was wilted. Some leaves were brown, and others had detached and fallen to the floor. Sam thought it was in very bad taste to leave a living thing to die in a place where everyone else was, too.

She went into the storeroom next to the nurse’s station looking for a watering can or anything with a spout so she could pour water onto the soil without sending it all over the carpet as well. The carpets at Lindell were routinely abused. Incontinence was a big problem, and Sam had asked Karen why they didn’t install tile floors instead. Karen looked at her as if that were a very stupid question, which was her way of saying that whomever made these decisions would flat out refuse. That seemed to happen a lot, Sam had noticed. There’d been a request for new tablecloths for the dining room, also a new coffee pot, and nothing had come through. Velma, the cook—and the one who oversaw everything culinary—told Sam the people who ran Lindell were a bunch of idiots. Sam believed it.

When she couldn’t find a watering can, she went down the hall to the recreation center. There was an indoor pool and a workout room. Both were empty. She opened the storage closet and found a bunch of weighted balls, stretchy ropes, and yoga mats.

I could use this stuff.

For a moment, she thought of walking off with some of the items in front of her, but decided not to risk it.

Next, she wandered into the kitchen where Velma was furiously stirring something in a large, green mixing bowl. A lit cigarette stuck to her lower lip. Smoking was forbidden at Lindell and within twenty-five feet of any entrance, which Velma knew, of course. She also knew she wouldn’t get fired. Aides were one thing, and not all that hard to come by, but someone who could make large batches of good-tasting food, which the residents and their guests praised often, was another story.

“You know where I can find a watering can?” Sam asked.

“My office.”

Velma’s office was right off the kitchen, next to the staff breakroom, and sure enough, in a corner on the floor was a plastic watering can. Sam realized that Velma was responsible for the row of African violets on the breakroom’s windowsill.

“Make sure you bring that back,” Velma said, still stirring.

“Watch your ash.”

“Ash or ass?”

“Ha!”

If Velma were younger, closer to Sam’s age, she’d make a good friend. Sam had a good friend, though, and one was all she needed.

Lucy lived across the street. She was twenty-seven, five years older than Sam, and had four kids. Her husband was a cop. When Sam needed a break from Flora, she went over to Lucy’s and watched her kids roll around on the floor and fight. Lucy kept them in line by banging two pots together and, when silence had fallen, pointing her finger at each one in turn. Sam didn’t know what unnamed threat lay behind that pointed finger, but the kids sure did, because they always stopped their mischief when it came their way.

Sometimes, when Flora was off with Chuck, Lucy and her brood marched over to Sam’s. Sam cooked Sloppy Joe’s for the kids. She and Lucy ate pretzels and drank wine. Lucy’s husband, Glen, wanted to leave town and make a fresh start somewhere else. Lucy had talked him out of it several times already, but Sam could tell she was afraid that one day she wouldn’t be able to, and that he’d quit the force, find a job doing something like driving a long-haul truck, and pack them off to someplace even colder than Upstate New York. For some reason, he had a hankering to move to Minnesota, or maybe Wisconsin. Lucy told Sam woozily over a third glass of wine if that were the case, why couldn’t they move somewhere warm, like Florida? Sam pointed out that if Glen really wanted to drive trucks for a living, it probably didn’t matter where they lived, in which case they could just stay in Dunston. Sam didn’t want Lucy to leave. She adored her. She was skinny as a rail, even after four kids. Lucy explained her figure by saying she must have the metabolism of a squirrel.

Recalling that now, lumbering back to the nursing wing with Velma’s watering can, Sam chuckled. She swung into Constance’s room, which was closest to the ailing plant, filled the can with water from the bathroom sink, and was on her way out when Constance said, “Wait.”

Sam turned around. She approached Constance’s bed. Constance motioned that she wanted to sit up. Sam put the watering can on the floor, pressed the button that raised the head of the bed, pulled Constance forward, and plumped her pillow. She was still in her nightgown. Just last week she’d declared she didn’t want to get dressed, so Sam and Eunice left her as she was but made sure to get her in a clean nightgown every third day, which coincided with her being bathed. Over the nightgown, she had a sweater knit from a light-weight wool. Her white hair had gotten so thin that patches of pink scalp showed through.

“Where is she?” Constance asked.

“Your daughter?”

Constance nodded.

“Is she coming today?”

“She comes every day.”

“She’s very devoted.”

“She’s very scared.”

“Of what?”

“My dying.”

“You’re not dying.”

“Bull.”

Sam laughed. Constance closed her eyes. Her breathing was so quiet. Sam watched her chest rise and fall.

Constance opened her eyes.

“I have something to say. I’d rather tell Eunice, but she’s not here, so you’ll do,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Get that chair, bring it here, and sit down. Please.”

Sam did as she was told. Constance said nothing. Sam wondered if she should remind her that she was there. In the hall, Stony Morris, another retired professor, wheeled himself past Constance’s room. He was muttering. He always muttered. Sam had once asked him how he’d gotten his name.

He’d stared at her crossly and said, “From my parents, you dope, what do you think?” Eunice said the name came from a former student, about his expression, but Karen said it was because he had a particular fascination with the Confederate general, Stonewall Jackson.

“Meredith is not my daughter,” Constance said.

Great. Now the old bat’s gone off her rocker.

“She knows it, too,” Constance said.

“Sure.”

“Naturally I assumed she’d get used to the idea eventually. But now, all these years later, she still resents me.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

Constance closed her eyes. She looked completely worn out.

“Tell her I embraced irony, and overlooked the human element,” Constance said, her eyes still closed.

“You’ll tell her, yourself.”

“She’s not easy to talk to.”

“I’m sure she’s a good listener.”

At that, Constance opened her eyes, stared sharply at Sam, then closed them again. Sam asked if she wanted the head of the bed lowered. Constance said nothing, so Sam went on her way, watering can in hand.

She drenched the dried up ivy, hoping the next time she passed it would be green and strong. She returned the can to Velma’s office, then went to find Angie Dugan, the Home’s social worker. Her lair was just off the main reception area. She was at her desk, reading the contents of a thick file.

Sam hadn’t had much contact with her but felt a connection because she was overweight, too. The staff at Lindell was disproportionately slender. Sam had instantly felt out of place when she started working there, but now, starting on her third month, she was more at home.

Sam told Angie that she’d just had a weird conversation with Constance Maynard. Angie invited her to sit.

“She says her daughter’s not really her daughter. And that she—the daughter—knows,” Sam said.

A line formed on Angie’s forehead.

“Interesting,” she said.

“Maybe she’s projecting, you know. Wishing she weren’t her daughter. That kind of thing,” Sam said. She really didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, but it wasn’t a terrible notion either, as these things went.

“Possible.”

“You think she’s, you know, losing it the way they do?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. She seemed pretty sharp when I talked with her last.”

“Okay, then.”

Sam stood up. Eunice would be wondering where she’d gotten to.

“You seem to have settled in well,” Angie said.

“I guess.”

“You don’t feel like a fish out of water, with all the seniors around?”

“Nah. They’re good people. Even the cranky ones are kind of fun.”

“I hear you enjoy poetry. You sometimes read to the residents.”

“Anyone complaining?”

“Not at all. I’m sure they love it. It’s wonderful of you to take such an interest.”

“It’s sort of a thing with me. Poetry. Just wish I could write it, myself.”

“‘Many are called, few are chosen.’”

“Yeah, no kidding.”

Sam hesitated. She wasn’t ready to walk away yet.

“Well, thank you for letting me know about Constance. I’ll ask Karen to keep an eye on her. You do, too, of course,” Angie said.

“You know, Eunice and the daughter seem to be buddies now.”

“Really? Well, maybe Eunice can shed some light on this as well, if anything gets worse.”

Sam didn’t know what could get worse. Saying your daughter wasn’t your daughter was pretty damn bad.

“Families are tough. My grandparents—case in point. Couple of real jerks, if you’ll pardon the expression. Drove my mother nuts. Though, she was probably well on her way there, anyhow, on account of how I got into the world.”

Sam could see that Angie wasn’t interested in all that.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it then,” Sam said, and left.

She thought about the times she wished she’d come from a big family, and the one she’d invented for Suki. Then she thought about all the people in the world who had a big crew and wished to hell they didn’t. Sylvia Plath knew all about that. Poor Sylvia, sticking her head in an oven.

 

Against a silence wearing thin.
The door now opens from within.
Oh, hear the clash of people meeting —
The laughter and the screams of greeting:

 

The reception area was empty except for Janet at the main desk, reading a book, definitely not poetry, or even literature as far as Sam could tell. Probably another one of her stupid, steamy romances, the kind of thing you found in a drug store next to the cheap sunglasses. Well, to each his own. The automatic doors whooshed open to admit Laverne Welker and her granddaughter, coming back from another outing. The granddaughter was probably Sam’s age. She always looked fierce, if not downright pissed off. Laverne waved at Sam.

“Great day out there, isn’t it?” Sam asked, her voice overly loud. She’d learned that it was better to blare a little than to have to repeat yourself.

“Very nice, very nice,” Laverne said. Her tone was high and wobbly, but cheerful. The granddaughter glared at the carpet.

“Well, have a good one,” Sam said. She went out the door they’d just come in so she could cut across the field and enter the nursing wing through a back door. Fresh air kept you going. Soon, when the weather turned nasty, she’d have to keep a coat with her if she wanted to duck outside.

Her cell phone buzzed in her pocket. She wasn’t supposed to have it on her at work but leave it in her locker. To hell with that, she’d thought after Karen explained the rules. She just turned the volume off. The buzz was mild, not audible to anyone else except maybe Eunice, who didn’t care one way or the other.

It was Flora. She was going away for the weekend with Chuck.

“It’s Wednesday. Why are you telling me now?”

“Because we’re leaving tonight.”

“It’s not the weekend yet.”

“Chuck’s weekend, I meant.”

Chuck worked at Greene’s Nursery over in Dryden. Obviously, his days off were Thursday and Friday. Flora had probably mentioned this. Yes, Sam was sure now that she had.

“Where you guys headed?” Sam asked.

“Buffalo.”

“What’s in Buffalo?”

“His sister.”

“Oh. She sick?”

“No. But he thought it was time we met.”

Sounds serious.

No doubt her mom and Chuck would tie the knot and sell the house. Or keep it, and he’d move in. Either way, that place of her own couldn’t happen fast enough.

“Well, have a blast. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” she said.

“Oh, you.”

Her mother didn’t hang up. Sam had reached the door of the nursing wing. She was anxious to get inside now, and back to work. She’d been gone a good twenty minutes at that point.

“Samantha, listen,” her mother said.

“Yeah?”

“You know what Friday is, right?”

“Nope.

“Well, honestly! You should. It’s the anniversary of your grandfather’s death.”

“And?”

“And I won’t be there to visit the grave. I want you to go for me.”

“Are you nuts?”

“Don’t be rude. You don’t even need to buy flowers, if you really don’t want to. Pick some from the yard and tie them up with some ribbon from the drawer in the kitchen.”

“Forget it.”

“Samantha!”

“If it’s so important to you, why don’t you go yourself?”

“I told you. I’m going to Buffalo with Chuck.”

“Go a different day.”

“We can’t.”

“Too bad.”

Flora sniffed. Sam gave up.

“All right. I’ll go,” she said.

“While you’re there, say hi to your grandmother, too.”

They were buried side by side. Sam remembered the discussion of how expensive cemetery plots were. There’d been some yelling about it, though she couldn’t remember from whom. Maybe it was she herself who’d yelled, telling them all to shut the fuck up. Though of course that hadn’t happened. She’d gotten slapped down every time she opened her mouth.

chapter twenty-two

 

 

 

When the day came, Sam’s courage sagged. She didn’t want to go to the cemetery alone. She enlisted Lucy to come along. They’d take the kids, make a day of it. Lucy thought that was a lousy idea. It was fine for Sam to like the thought of watching the little monsters race and tumble all over the place, because at the end of the day she could go home to peace and quiet. For Lucy, not so much. She called her mother and told her to come over. Lucy’s mother was bad-tempered and strict. That, and hating to babysit, made her a great choice for keeping the kids in line.

They took Sam’s car. She’d recently bought a used station wagon. She fantasized about throwing everything she owned in the back and just taking off, as she had before. She had no plan to, now that she was working. But knowing she could, if she really wanted to, was comforting.

Sam hadn’t been to the cemetery for years, and had no idea where the graves were located. She expected to find someone on duty, manning the little house at the entrance, but it was empty.

“Now what?” Lucy asked. Her voice was light, full of energy. She was so happy at the change in her routine that she’d traded her brown turtleneck for a sleeveless pink one with small white buttons down the front. Sam was in her work clothes: red stretch pants and a red and white smock. She’d had time to put on something nicer but decided not to. She saw no point in making any attempt to honor or show respect to the people she’d agreed to visit.

“They’re under a tree, I think,” Sam said.

“Place is full of trees.”

“A big one.”

They looked all around and settled on the tallest tree they could see, an elm quite a ways off. Sam suggested they drive along the path that wound through the grounds, but Lucy wanted to walk. It was such a beautiful day, she said, and the exercise would do them both good.

“I saw your mom leaving with her boyfriend,” Lucy said.

“Yeah?”

“I mean, I’ve seen him before, of course. He comes over a lot, doesn’t he?”

“Lives there half the time.”

“They seem happy.”

“Suppose so.”

“You don’t like him?”

“Can’t really say. He’s all right.”

“She’s been on her own a long time, I guess.”

“True.”

“What happened to your dad?”

Sam slowed her pace.

“He died.”

“How old were you?”

“Maybe around two.”

“So, you never really knew him.”

“She never really knew him.”

They had left the cemetery road and were walking in newly cut grass, over one grave after another. Sam told her the whole story.

“Jesus, your poor mother,” Lucy said.

Other people had said the same thing over the years. While Sam understood that her mother was a victim, she’d always wanted something better for her. For them both really.

“She didn’t name him. She could have named him,” Sam said.

“I know, but his family had money, you said. They’d have gotten a good lawyer and trashed her on the stand.”

Sam stopped and stared at Lucy.

“You like Perry Mason reruns or something?” she asked.

“My husband’s a cop, remember?”

“Right.”

They came to the tall tree they’d seen from afar. None of the graves below it belonged to Sam’s grandparents. The shade was pleasant. Sam and Lucy sat. Someone had recently placed a bouquet on one of the graves. Just as when she’d realized that no one was taking care of the ivy at Lindell, Sam was annoyed. Why underscore the fact that all things die?

She picked up the bouquet and brought it to her nose. The carnations were spicy and the lilies almost sickeningly sweet. They were lovely, she had to admit. Maybe it was someone’s way of celebrating a person’s life, or life itself, even if the irony was blunt.

“I was supposed to bring flowers,” Sam said.

“Take those. But then, we still don’t know where the damn graves are, do we?”

Sam returned the flowers to their original spot. She ran her hands over the grass. She picked up a fallen autumn leaf, bright red. It, too, signified death.

Lucy lit a cigarette. She offered one to Sam. Sam declined. In the distance, a lawnmower started roughly, spluttered, fell silent, then began again. The sound dimmed as the mower moved farther and farther away from where they sat.

“This is nice. Just sitting. No kids,” Lucy said.

“They must keep you busy as hell.”

“Damn straight.”

The strain in her voice was clear. Yet, there must be good moments, too. Why else would you have them in the first place? Okay, accidents happen. Once, maybe twice, but four had to be intentional. At least Sam hoped so. A woman who didn’t control her womb was an idiot, she thought. Unless it was a case of what happened to her mother.

Sam had often wondered why she hadn’t gotten an abortion, not that she was sorry she was alive, of course. Only, when she imagined being attacked, raped, impregnated, and then going through with having the baby, it all seemed so monstrous. But of course the grandparents would have made the idea impossible. They were so into the will of God, they would have preached acceptance, forbearance, humility. Sam was sometimes sorry they were dead, because she’d tell them a thing or two about life that they’d chosen to ignore. Like all about self-determination. And compassion.

Lucy said something to her that she didn’t entirely register.

“What?”

“I said, Halloween’s coming and the kids are going nuts.”

“They dress up?”

“Of course!”

Sam didn’t know why she’d asked that question, since they’d trooped across the road last year and banged on her door. They all seemed to have been made up as pirates. Flora had baked chocolate chip cookies. She didn’t usually bother with Halloween, but the addition of a young family nearby motivated her to be neighborly. Lucy didn’t know them all that well at that point and politely declined. Flora had been crushed. Sam explained that store-bought candy was better because it was wrapped. There had been cases of tampering, and parents were wary. Flora was blue, so Sam ate many of the cookies, herself.

“You make ‘em yourself, the costumes?” Sam asked.

“I do now. Glen’s sort of picky about that.”

“Yeah?”

“He says I’ve got nothing but time on my hands, I can at least make my own costumes. Besides, it’s cheaper.”

Lucy’s expression darkened.

“He must work a lot,” Sam said.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t usually see his car in the driveway, so I figure he’s out working, overtime maybe.”

Lucy said the truth was that her husband had a hard time being at home, what with the four kids and all, and a lot of the time he stayed over at his parents’ place.

She stubbed out her cigarette against a bumpy tree root. She put the butt in her pants pocket. She looked at her watch. The lawnmower stopped. Sam suggested they get going. They were never going to find the graves unless they covered every square inch of the place.

They ambled slowly, not talking. Sam didn’t feel guilty for not trying harder to find the graves. It was too bad in a way, though. She would have liked to spit on them. Flora had specifically asked her to lay her palm on each stone, first her father’s, then her mother’s, close her eyes, and think well of them, if only for a few seconds. That was as close to praying as Flora ever came. As a small girl, Sam got hauled off to church every Sunday until one time she pitched a fit so bad that after her grandfather finished beating her with his belt he relented and said she could stay home and read the Bible in her room. No Bible ever came her way, however, for which she was glad. She also took it as a sign that her grandparents had given up on her.

That was when she’d discovered poetry. A single volume of Tennyson was on a shelf in the living room, under a vase that held a bouquet of plastic red tulips. The book had been necessary to keep the vase from toppling, which it did the moment Sam removed it. She threw away the broken pieces and the flowers, too, awaiting her brutal punishment, though none came. She decided that the universe was rewarding her curiosity, and though the poems were a bit dense and hard to make sense of, Sam had been transported far from the peeling paint and scratched wood floors of her small bedroom.

From then on it was the library that kept her alive. She loved the space as much as what it contained: the smell of dust, the scratched wooden tables, the ceiling fan over the reception desk that spun silently, but not the women who took her card and checked out her books. They looked at her with curiosity, sometimes pity. She always wondered if they had heard the rumor about her mother and Henry Delacourt, though she also knew that her wretched grandparents had forbidden Flora ever to speak of it outside the family.

“How did you and your husband meet?” Sam asked.

“I got T-boned at a light, and he was the cop who showed up.”

“Romantic.”

“Not at all. I was pretty badly shaken up. The other driver was a jerk, so Glen put him in the back of the cruiser, and I had to call my mother to come get me. The car was totaled.”

“Well, you got a new car and a husband out of it.”

“Another used car, actually.”

“Not a used husband?”

Lucy didn’t see the humor. Sam let it go. Her parked car came into sight as they reached the top of a low hill.

“Did you always want a large family?” Sam asked.

“No.”

“A surprise blessing, then.”

Lucy snorted.

“Only someone with no kids would say that. No offense,” she said.

“None taken.”

 

.   .   .

 

Sam awoke to voices breaking the night. One was deep, sonorous yet harsh. The other was high, screeching, at times louder than her partner’s. Sam understood that she was hearing Lucy and Glen across the street. The digital clock by her bed read 2:47.

“Jesus Christ,” she said.

Silence came abruptly. The noise didn’t resume. Sam stretched, and was glad her mother wasn’t home. She’d have been up and glued to the living room window otherwise. Flora was a terrible snoop, living vicariously, drawn to all sorts of drama, especially the kind that caused weeping and rage.

The pounding on her front door woke Sam a second time. The sky was still dark. Sam didn’t bother looking at the clock. She sat up and burped.

Fucking onions.

Then she put her bare feet on the floor and wriggled into her ancient bathrobe, realizing how badly she needed a new one, and then recalled some of the nicer ones the folks at Lindell had.

Thinking about bathrobes at a time like this.

Her heavy lame gait took her down the stairs, through the living room, dining room, and kitchen, to the door where Lucy’s frantic face was clear through the glass.

She let Lucy in and told her to take a seat at the kitchen table.

“Let me guess, he belted you one,” Sam said.

Lucy shook her head. Her hair was everywhere. She’d thrown a sweatshirt on over her nightgown. Her nosed dripped. Sam brought her a piece of paper towel.

“He’s losing his mind. He says he’s going to shoot himself in the head,” Lucy said.

“Wait, what?”

“I took his gun and threw it outside.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. In the ditch along the road.”

“Where are the kids?”

“My mom’s. She took them after we got back from the cemetery. I just had a feeling he might be in one of those moods.”

“He’s done this before?”

Lucy nodded.

Sam scratched her head. She was hungry, but her stomach still danced from the onions she’d spread on her meatloaf sandwich at dinner. She opened the front door and peered into the night. A street lamp cast a pool of yellow light to one side of Lucy’s house. If she’d tossed the gun in that part of the ditch, Glen would have to pass through the light to find it, assuming he knew where it was.

“He see you?” she asked, when she returned to the kitchen.

“He was still in the bathroom. He locked the door.”

“Any way he can off himself in there without the gun?”

“No.”

“Pills, razors, anything?”

“I cleaned everything out the last time.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Lucy tore off a small piece of paper towel, then another, and collected them in her lap.

Sam put the teakettle on to boil. She always put a kettle on when she had to do some hard thinking. The night she decided to go to L.A., the kettle’s steam coated the windows until she couldn’t see out. Before she wiped the glass clear, she wrote her name, Sam Clarkson, then wiped the away the son.

It had made so much sense; she didn’t know why she hadn’t seen it before.

“I should go,” Lucy said. She didn’t move. She went on tearing the paper towel.

“He ever do any counseling?” Sam asked.

Lucy lifted her eyes for the first time since Sam put her in the chair. They were full of rage.

“Not Glen. Glen’s too good for that. Too smart, to hear him tell it, and I heard him tell it over and over and over. I wish to hell he’d get fired or something, so he’d have to face the fact that—”

He’s nuts?

“Getting fired would only put a financial strain on you and the kids. The man needs help.”

A swift kick in the ass is more like it.

Lucy shook her head and cried. She used the paper towel to wipe her nose. Sam was at a loss. Seeing her cry was the worst yet.

“You know, it really would be better if he just died,” Lucy said.

“Come on!”

“He’s so miserable. And when he’s miserable, he’s mean. The other day Benny said, ‘Mommy, Daddy’s meaner than Oscar the Grouch.’”

“Who the hell is Oscar the Grouch?”

“From Sesame Street.”

“Gotcha.”

Lucy was weeping now, and put her head down on her folded arms.

“Wait here,” Sam said. She turned off the stove and padded across the street in her bare feet. A small stone cut sharply, and she cursed under her breath. She’d have preferred to yell but figured there’d been too much of that already tonight.

She entered by the back door. The kitchen smelled of fried food, yet was spotless.

Lousy ventilation.

The dining room was tiny. Sam had been there before many times, but then—in the dark, silent, almost empty house—it was unfamiliar and sad. The living room was large, with plastic bins full of toys stacked tidily against one wall. The wood floor creaked. The house was old, like Sam’s, built in the twenties when wealthier townspeople thought it was stylish to live in the country and have farmers for neighbors.

“Glen, it’s your neighbor, Sam!”

The hallway leading to the bathroom was also dark, and Sam wondered if Lucy had had the presence of mind to shut off all the lights before she ran out or if they’d been carrying on in the gloom, which seemed more likely.

A dim light seeped from beneath the bathroom door. Sam put her ear close. She heard nothing. Then there was a brief movement within.

“How you doing in there, Glen?” she said in the same overly cheerful voice she used to address the residents at Lindell.

“Leave me alone.”

His voice was heavy.

“Open the door, Glen,” she said. To her amazement, he did. He sat on the closed lid of the toilet. The room was small enough he could have turned the doorknob without getting to his feet. He was in his officer’s uniform, even down to the thick-soled black shoes. The holster on his hip was empty. The collar of his undershirt was stained with sweat. He stank of it, too. His black hair was thinning on top and looked greasy. So did his skin. Sam had never seen him up close. When they’d first moved in, she’d waved at him across the road. He’d nodded in reply. Sam remembered that nod. It was dismissive, cold, hostile. Or maybe he was just shy.

“What say you and me go sit where it’s a little more comfortable?” Sam said.

“Where’s Lucy? Do you have her?”

“She’s at my place, but I don’t have her. Now, come on, up you go.”

“Get out of my house.”

“Can’t do that, Glen.”

He lifted his head and stared right into Sam’s eyes. The anguish in them was chilling.

“What did she do with my gun?” he asked.

“I have no idea.”

Sam wondered then how Lucy had managed to get it away from him. Glen wasn’t particularly tall—in fact, Sam was sure she was taller than he was by a good couple of inches—but he was wiry. Maybe he had just let her have it. Maybe he just gave up.

“Look, you can’t sit on the can all night. Come into the kitchen. I’ll make coffee.”

“I need a drink.”

“A drink’s the last thing you need.”

Glen put his face in his hands and sobbed. She’d never seen a man cry.

Well, they’re not any better at it than we are.

“Look, you got a lot to live for. Those kids, for one thing. They’re enough to keep anyone going, right?”

Sam regretted her words when Glen cried harder.

She went into the hall, lined with framed shots of the kids. She took down two and brought them into the bathroom.

“Glen, look at these precious faces. Come on, look. You really want them to grow up knowing their dad didn’t love them enough to stay alive?” she asked.

Glen looked at the pictures without seeming to see them. Sam put them on the small counter.

“Glen, you don’t come out of this bathroom, I’m going to have to haul you out. Now, don’t give me the rap about being a big strong cop and all that. I’m big and strong, too, and you’re in no shape to argue, so what do you say you stand up and come with me, okay?”

Glen didn’t move. He wasn’t crying then.

Sam put both hands under one arm and pulled. She got him on his feet. He leaned on her as she shuffled him slowly across the hall and back the way she’d come to the kitchen, where she loaded him into a chair. She turned on the overhead light. Glen’s face was blank, his eyes glassy.

Christ, I hope he didn’t get his hands on something and took it after all.

But then he straightened up and focused.

“Go tell Lucy to come home,” he said.

“Not until you and I have a little talk.”

“Nothing to talk about.”

Sam sat down across from him. The surface of the table was covered with one of those thick pads that protects the wood underneath. The thought of Lucy trying to keep her furniture from getting scratched moved her. That woman worked her ass off, and for what? To listen to this slob bitch and moan?

“What’s got you so down on living, anyway?” Sam asked.

Glen stared at the surface of the table for a long time, so long that Sam was about to ask him again.

“She doesn’t love me,” he said.

“Of course she does! She’s frantic with worry this very minute.”

“She just feels guilty.”

“About what, for God’s sake?”

“Being in love with someone else.”

“Who?”

“Someone she used to know.”

“And she told you this? ‘I’m in love with so and so.’”

“I can just tell. I see it in her face. I feel it every time I touch her.”

He pounded his fist on the table, toppling the saltshaker and causing some dried rose petals to fall from the aging bouquet leaning in a vase. Sam had seen Glen get out of his car with the flowers in hand and thought maybe it was their anniversary. Then she’d recalled that Lucy had said they’d been married in the summer, and it was fall, then. In that moment, watching Glen carry the flowers along the stone path to the back door, Sam thought how nice it would be to have someone in your life who brought you something pretty, just because, just to remind you that you were loved.

Except these flowers were a plea to be loved in return.

Sam righted the saltshaker.

“I’m no expert, believe me, but there’s got to be a way to work things out. You’ve got four kids,” she said.

“You think I don’t know that? I begged her to break it off. Time and again.”

Sam was exhausted. She went into the kitchen and took a plastic glass from the cabinet. She knew where they were kept. She’d helped Lucy with the dishes more than once. She poured herself some water, drank it, rinsed the glass, and put it in the dish drainer. The glass was decorated with several laughing dinosaurs, green and yellow.

“I’m going to go home now and talk a little bit with Lucy. You have to promise me not to do anything stupid,” Sam said.

Glen said nothing. She stood, put her hand briefly on his shoulder, and left.

Though the sky was still dark, the presence of light was near. Sam sensed it in the stillness, the deeper quiet of the hills whose gentle tops would be the first to warm.

Lucy was where Sam had left her, at the table, staring through the window into the night. Sam sat. Her stomach was on the warpath again. The folks at Lindell sometimes complained about heartburn, so she figured it was basically an old person’s problem. If true, she’d aged decades in that one evening.

She waited for Lucy to ask how Glen was. She went on sitting, looking out. Then she turned her head, and Sam saw in her eyes the same blank expression she’d seen earlier in Glen’s. Whatever the bullshit was between them, it was killing them both.

“Who’s the guy?” Sam asked.

Lucy’s face tightened.

“There is no guy. There never was.”

“Glen said—”

“I know what Glen said. He’s been saying it for years. Every time he messes up and I call him out, he starts talking about the guy who doesn’t exist, deflecting onto me his own crappy behavior.”

“Huh.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I don’t know what to believe.”

Lucy put the pile of torn bits of paper towel on the table.

“Well, it doesn’t matter, one way or the other. It’s my problem,” she said.

So why the fuck did you wake me up in the middle of the night?

Sam took a deep breath. No point in going down that particular road at the moment.

Lucy got up and let herself out. Sam stood and went to her front window to watch her go slowly across the road. She didn’t retrieve the gun from the ditch. She’d have to before the kids came back. Maybe Sam should go remind her, because she might not remember in the morning.

“Fuck that,” Sam said, and took herself to bed.

 

chapter twenty-three

 

 

 

Flora demanded to know why she was so down, if something had happened at work, if one of the residents Sam was close to had died. Sam said she was fine. Everything was fine. Flora let it go but watched her in a way that was long-standing and deep between them.

Sam hadn’t talked to Lucy since that night, two weeks before. She saw her come and go, with the kids and without, returning with groceries or not, just living her life as if nothing had happened.

At work, Eunice was in the dumps, too. She was worried about Constance Maynard lying in bed all day, though it was fairly common at this time of life. On top of that, her mother had fallen at Lakeside, Dunston’s Medicaid facility. She’d broken her hip. That signaled the beginning of the end for her, too. Eunice told Sam about her Grandma Grace, who’d suffered the same fate. She went on and on about her, how great she’d been, how she alone had been the person in Eunice’s young life who’d given a damn about her.

When Sam’s interest in Grandma Grace, or anything else except the specific chore right in front of her, failed to materialize, Eunice asked her what on earth was wrong.

So, Sam mentioned Lucy and Glen, and Glen’s failed suicide attempt.

“And this guy’s a cop. That’s super scary,” Eunice said.

They were cleaning Katherine Foley’s room. She was one of the few residents in the skilled nursing wing who’d put her own touch on the place. Her dresser was crowded with crystal figurines, which Sam was very careful not to break. The giraffe was her favorite, though the seahorse dangling from a gold wire was also sweet.

Suki and her little treasures.

The thought made her even sadder.

Katherine was propped up in bed, working on a crossword puzzle. She’d had polio as a young woman, which meant her mobility was very limited, otherwise she wouldn’t be in that wing in the first place. Her mind was sharp. She liked listening to Sam and Eunice talk.

“Very scary. Very scary indeed. Though I have to believe that emotional stress of all kinds is very common for first responders,” she said.

“Goes with the territory, I expect,” Eunice said.

Sam stuffed Katherine’s dirty clothes into a drawstring bag.

“My brother was Sheriff of Tioga County. The things he saw! Now this was years and years ago; the country was much more rural than it is today. A farmer’s pig got loose. Dug herself out, or someone left the gate to the sty open, I don’t rightly remember. But this pig, she had such personality, such wit. Pigs are witty creatures. Never forget that. Anyhow, this pig, Beulah, was pregnant. Don’t know why she took herself a notion to go roaming when she was expecting and her teats were practically dragging through the dirt, but she did, and so off she went. The lane the farmer lived on never got much traffic, being way out, and all, but this one driver was going along, drunk as a skunk, right at the moment Beulah decides to cross the road. And of course he runs smack into her. He ends up in the ditch, Beulah ends up dead as a doornail, and her piglets choose that moment to be born, right there on the road, in the middle of a starry summer night, crawling out of the tear in their mother’s stomach. My brother gets the call, made by the fellow who lived by the ditch the drunk slid into, and gathers up the piglets before he even checks on the driver, who turned out to be just fine and didn’t remember a thing about it! My brother was an animal lover, and the sight of Beulah put him in a bad place for quite a while. Then there were all the dead deer over the years, and people’s dogs. Really took a toll on him. After a while, he said he couldn’t take it anymore, and asked for a desk job. He was dead the next year. All that stress had just built up inside him with nowhere to go but his heart, and that was that.”

Katherine picked up her crossword puzzle. Sam threw the laundry bag onto the cart. Eunice emptied Katherine’s trash basket.

“That’s quite a story,” Sam said.

Katherine looked up from her paper and over the top of her glasses.

“I was trying to make a point, what was it?”

“About the stress of being in law enforcement?” Sam asked.

“Yes, yes. Exactly. Though it sounds to me as if your friend is a little more than stressed out if he’s threatening to kill himself. He needs serious help.”

Sam thought Glen would benefit from spending some time with Katherine and her firm words. So could Lucy, who seemed to have taken Sam’s efforts completely for granted. Sam had expected either an apology from her or an expression of gratitude.

I don’t know what I would have done without you.

But nothing came, and Sam realized that their friendship had passed some wretched frontier from which it was unlikely to return.

At four o’clock, when Sam’s shift ended, she looked in briefly on Constance, who lay in bed as usual and might have been asleep. It was impossible to tell. Meredith had been by recently, judging by the faint aroma of perfume she’d left behind. Sam had heard nothing more from Constance about her. Their last exchange, however, was still fresh.

She’s not my daughter.

She thought of the evening ahead. Flora would cook, Sam would do the dishes, Chuck would watch television with Flora by his side on the ancient couch. Chuck would tell her to buy a new one, and she’d shake her head. Her part-time job bagging groceries, plus the remains of her parents’ insurance policy, didn’t stretch very far. They left Sam alone, didn’t make demands, yet she felt like an outsider in her own home.

Before things got more serious with Chuck, Flora’s attention had always been on Sam. Usually that attention was negative, informed by anxiety, layered with criticism, and surely reflecting her own frustration, but now Sam wondered if maybe all the time it had been informed by guilt.

Rape victims carried a lot of guilt, or so she had heard. They wondered if they’d done something to invite the attack or misled the attacker before the fact, pretending an interest that wasn’t really there. Sam had tried to imagine her mother thinking these things, suffering from them, being accused of them by her parents.

How had it all come about? Not the rape itself, about which Sam had given considerable thought, but afterward? Flora would have come home in a state of bruised disarray, and would have tried hard to hide it. She would have been shaken, terrified that she would run into Henry Delacourt again, and then relieved when he left town. She would have begun to recover, to heal, to feel as if there was a life almost worth living from then on, until she discovered that she was pregnant.

Then, even if she had managed to hide the rape from her parents, the results of it would be impossible to conceal. There would have been fury, beatings, too, accusations about her wanton ways rather than support, understanding, and love. Some women in that position had been known to take their own lives rather than live with such monstrous shame. But Flora survived. Sam survived. Layla Endicott, to whom Flora must have confided everything at some point, surely in whispers and tears, took it upon herself to make Sam aware of why her father was a phantom.

At the time, Sam was eleven years old. Layla’s words were shocking, naturally, but even more shocking and disappointing was that Flora hadn’t come to her with the truth herself. Sam confronted her at a strategic moment when the grandparents were out of the house. Flora denied nothing, and when Sam forced her to explain why she’d kept quiet all that time, Flora said, “I just wanted to think it never happened.”

Flora was alone in the house when Sam returned after work. She stood at the stove, stirring a pot of chili from the smell of it. Chili was an important dish in their family. When Flora made it, something big was in the wind, such as the day before Sam left for Los Angeles or the evening after it was confirmed that her own father was terminally ill with lung cancer, caused by decades of cigarettes whose smell Sam could still detect in the small bedrooms upstairs, including hers, though the walls had all been repainted since.

Sam got herself a bottle of beer from the refrigerator. She’d recently started drinking beer on the advice of Caroline Boone, who declared that a serving a day was responsible for her still being alive at the age of 97. Although alcohol was not served to the residents and was actively discouraged, Caroline’s grandson kept her supplied with a weekly six-pack (Caroline abstained on Sunday), which she was allowed to keep in the kitchen. When some of the bottles went missing, Sam knew one or more of her fellow employees were helping themselves. She suggested that Caroline’s grandson provide a small refrigerator, the kind that had a key like in fancier hotels—though Sam had never seen one herself, she remembered Suki mentioned them, calling them “mini-bars.” The suggestion was taken; the refrigerator now sat in a corner of the closet, and the key hung on a string around Caroline’s neck, which she refused to remove, even when bathing. The chronically damp string caused a rash, so a thin silver chain was found somewhere to replace it.

Flora tasted the chili and nodded to herself in satisfaction. She put the lid on the pot, the spoon on a plate by the stove, and took off her apron, one that Sam had given her for Christmas with an image of a smiling reindeer holding a cocktail in its cartoon hoof. She ran the water, filled the sink that held a number of utensils she’d used to make the chili, poured a stream of bright orange dish soap in, and watched a mound of bubbles rise.

Seeing it, Sam was suddenly taken back. She was eight years old. She and Flora and the grandparents were at Lake Placid, in a cabin, on vacation. They’d never taken a vacation before. Her grandfather worked on a dairy farm.

“Cows don’t take time off,” he said.

But then, they had, apparently. Later, Sam learned that her grandfather had been fired. They’d all gone away so the adults could confer about a plan of action, which seemed more complicated than just his looking for a new job.

Sam’s chore was to wash dishes. She had made a mass of bubbles, too. She loved them, loved washing, even loved drying.

She broke a cup, or a plate, she couldn’t remember which. Her grandmother swept the shards into a rusted dustpan, threw them into the metal trash container out back, propped the broom in the corner of the kitchen, and then hit Sam hard enough to make her head ring. Her nose bled down her white, sleeveless shirt, which her mother told her not to wear because it emphasized her fat arms. Dirtying the shirt enraged the grandmother further, and as she raised her hand once more, Sam picked up a heavy wooden stool and said, “I’ll beat the crap out of you if you touch me again.” Her grandmother was so surprised she just stood there with her hand still raised until Flora got between them and hauled Sam out, still holding the stool. A couple of years later, Sam was taller than her grandmother. They took to avoiding each other from then on.

Flora turned off the water. She took a pitcher of iced tea out of the refrigerator. The refrigerator was yellow. So was the stove. She sat down. Her black sweatshirt was stained with tomato sauce.

Flora drank iced tea. Sam sipped her beer. Flora’s brow was knit; the lines in her face were deep. She was only in her mid-forties but looked considerably older, something about which she occasionally complained and then once sought to correct by dying her hair raven black.

“Remember all that junk we threw out a couple of weekends ago?” Flora asked.

“Sure.”

“We kept that box of pictures. You want to go through them with me?”

Sam wasn’t interested in old pictures. At work she was surrounded by them, always black and white, of husbands and wives who were long gone. She supposed they were useful for keeping the mind alive, but the wear and tear on the heart must be terrible.

Unless with time, love and longing faded. Was that possible? Could the heart’s fire dim and go out altogether?

If so, then it was Nature’s mercy, bestowing inner calm before meeting eternity.

“You’ve been in the dumps for days,” Flora said.

“And you think pictures will cheer me up.”

“They can be fun to look at. Makes you imagine life back then.”

“I prefer poetry.”

From across the road, the sound of car doors being slammed reached them. Sam had left the back door open when she came in, making the noise audible. There were three slams, which meant that Lucy had returned with at least two of her children. Sam missed them. Maybe she should invite them all over for chili. She put the idea to Flora.

“Really?” Flora asked.

“Oh, I guess not. She probably doesn’t want to see me right now.”

“What did you do?”

Sam put her beer bottle on the table and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t give me that. You think I did something to Lucy, and that’s why I haven’t been seeing her, right?”

“I don’t think anything of the kind.” Flora’s color was rising. Sam rinsed out her bottle in the sink. She took another from the refrigerator. She sat back down.

“Why do you assume I’m to blame? What if I’m not to blame at all? What if all I did was try to help?” Her voice was firm and even, not a hint of rage.

“I don’t think you’re to blame for anything.”

“The hell you don’t. Let’s consider the case of your dear departed parents. You always told me not to piss them off, to do what they wanted so they wouldn’t get mad. You know what? They got mad anyway because they were a couple of crazy fucks. And you made me think it was my fault. It wasn’t. It was their fault for being intolerant, uptight pains-in-the ass. I could have been Miss Goody Two Shoes and they’d have hated me, because I was a reminder every single day that you’d been raped.”

Flora put her face in her hands and for a very brief moment Sam was glad she’d wounded her. When her mother looked at her again, Sam wasn’t glad.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you about this for a while. In fact, I wanted to bring it up just the other day.”

“Bring what up?”

Flora said nothing. She was quiet so long, Sam finally said, “Well?”

“It’s hard.”

“Quit stalling!”

Again, Flora just sat. Sam put her palms on the table, ready to stand up and leave the room.

“I wasn’t raped. I only said so because I didn’t want my parents to think I’d let him,” Flora said.

“Wait.”

Flora raised her hand to say Sam should be quiet and listen.

She’d been in love. He said he was in love with her. Such an old story, she couldn’t believe she fell for it, but she had. Had Sam ever considered that the history of the world could be written on the hearts of deceived women? Her mother’s poetic turn of phrase was new—a part of her, like the truth about Sam’s origin, that she’d kept to herself.

He said he wanted to get married, and though Flora wanted very badly to believe him, she was worried that his family would never approve. He said they’d be won over by her in an instant, then never brought her home. She came to see that he had no intention of marrying her, that he probably wasn’t even in love with her. When she told him she was pregnant, he bolted.

“So, little Flora gets herself knocked up, passes herself off as a rape victim who bravely keeps her child, and raises that child on a fat, fucking lie,” Sam said.

Flora looked grim.

“Did you tell Layla Endicott the truth, or did you lie to her, too?” Sam asked.

“I lied. I hadn’t meant to. I mean, I didn’t want to tell her anything, but she saw me come and go, my stomach growing all the time.”

Lucy’s children were playing outside. The eldest, Alice, had a high, bossy voice. She was only eight, but Lucy relied on her to take the others in hand. Sam thought of her as Little Lucy, a name that had made Lucy smile, and Alice frown.

“And your parents bought the whole story, no questions asked,” Sam said.

“Yes.”

“And didn’t report it.”

“No.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I’d brought shame on them.”

“So they didn’t care about seeing justice done. They just wanted to sweep it under the rug.”

Flora said nothing.

“How did they explain me to their friends?”

“They didn’t have any.”

Sam couldn’t remember anyone coming to the house for dinner, a cup of coffee, a game of cards.

“What about your friends?”

“I only had one. I told her what I told everyone else.”

“Who was it?”

“Mayva Barns. You met her years ago, before she moved south.”

A tall, skinny woman with wispy hair came to mind. She’d worn clogs that made noise on the wood floors. She took Sam to the lake once, without Flora or the grandparents. Her car had a strong smell of dog. She told Sam the dog’s name was Eloise, which Sam found funny. She decided that Eloise was pretty, with white fur and a black nose. She wanted a dog, and Flora said she couldn’t have one. The grandparents were firmly opposed.

“Why didn’t you move out?” she asked.

“I didn’t think I could manage by myself.”

When Sam’s grandmother wasn’t busy at her church, she cooked, cleaned, laundered, all in a state of silent fury. She’d been a small woman with bright blue eyes, and held herself taut, as if wrapped around a steel cable. Sam’s grandfather wasn’t much taller than his wife, and he carried himself in the same stern way, until he fell ill, when he seemed to soften and shrink.

There had been other kids at school who didn’t have fathers. Divorce was most often the reason. Sam told people her father had died, which was what Flora had told her many times with an emphasis that now rang false.

“He’s not really dead, is he?” Sam asked.

“No.”

“And never actually left Dunston?”

“Right.”

“You know this how?”

“I looked in the phone book.”

Flora rose and stirred the chili. She put the spoon down, and didn’t return to the table. Sam finished her beer. Lucy’s kids must have gone inside. It was getting on dinnertime. Soon Chuck would lumber through the door with his inane good cheer.

“Does he know all of this? Chuck, I mean?” Sam asked.

“Some.”

“What part?”

“That I was involved with someone and we didn’t get married.”

“Doesn’t take a fucking rocket scientist to figure that out, Mom.”

Flora looked at her with a blend of fear and despair.

“Why are you telling me now? Why not before?”

“Because his father died.”

Franklin Delacourt’s death had been in the paper that he owned along with two radio stations. His wife had died years before. His house was up for sale, which meant Henry could cash it out. It was a big property. The whole estate would be hefty. Sam should go and stake her claim.

“Hold on,” Sam said.

The idea was nuts, yet she couldn’t overlook that she’d been poor all her life. So, obviously, had Flora. The only asset Flora had was the rickety house she was standing in. Sam was no genius at real estate, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t worth a whole lot. The assessed value had dropped for the last few years. Flora would have been thinking about that when she put two and two together.

“Why don’t you go and stake your own?” Sam asked.

“I might get something, if you were still a minor, but you’re not.”

“You’ve really given this a lot of thought.”

Flora shrugged.

“You’re hoping I’ll reward your good advice, which I’m sure as shit not likely to do, given what you put me through with your lying bullshit, unless you made the case that I owed it to you, like a, what’s that called, a finder’s fee.”

Sam could see that this was exactly what her mother had had in mind.

“What makes you think I’ll get anything, anyway?” Sam asked.

“Because you’ll hire a lawyer and insist on a DNA test.”

“Aren’t you the clever one.”

Flora sat down. She seemed wrung out. But then, she always seemed that way. As long as Sam could remember, her mother had been as drab and dismal as the brown plaid wallpaper on the kitchen walls. Once, though, she must have been bright and shiny, back when she was falling for Henry Delacourt.

Chuck’s car rolled up the driveway. He came through the door humming. He was deeply tanned from working outdoors. His hands were dirty.

“Hello, lovely ladies!” he said. He went right to the sink and washed up. Sam didn’t understand why he never did this before leaving work. It was as if he needed to mark his territory by leaving grime. He wiped his hand on the dishtowel Flora kept folded on the counter. He tossed it back down, without refolding it. He helped himself to a bottle of Sam’s beer. He took a long, eager drink.

“You two look like the bill collector’s been banging on the door. What’s up?” he asked. He touched the back of Flora’s neck.

“Just girl talk,” Sam said.

Chuck nodded solemnly.

“Whatever you got cooking smells awful good,” he said.

“I’m going for a walk,” Sam said.

“Samantha—” Flora said, just after Sam went out the door.

 

chapter twenty-four

 

 

 

Eunice asked her to come for Barry’s birthday. Sam didn’t know why Barry would want her there. Eunice said new faces were called for. She’d invited Angie Dugan from Lindell, and told her she could bring someone. Sam said she’d have to see if she were free, though of course she was. These days, all she did was go to work and go home, where Flora made herself scarce, thank God, by spending most of her time at Chuck’s.

Sam went through the box of pictures Flora had suggested she take a look at the day she spilled her news. They were all of Henry Delacourt. The man must have a huge ego, to give away so many shots of himself. There he was, on a sailboat, rowing with his college team, standing under the Eiffel Tower, on a cobblestone street. He was tall and fit. Sam decided that she looked a little like him, after all.

As her curiosity about him grew so did her rage. He got Flora pregnant, then just walked away. Did he know she kept the baby? Had he ever wondered?

She drove along the lakeshore to Eunice’s house. Their place was hard to find because the white post with the address was set back from the road. Sam had to circle around twice. Eunice should have put up a sign or tied some balloons to it. The driveway was long and descended a good sixty feet before leveling out in front of a modern-style property where a few other cars were already parked. Sam put her station wagon where no one could pull in behind her so she could leave when she wanted.

Eunice had said not to bring a present. Sam didn’t feel right showing up with nothing. She’d never met Barry before and knew nothing about him except that he owned a bar, but figured she couldn’t go wrong with a tastefully decorated coffee mug. The one she chose had an image of the Dunston University clock tower. She’d climbed it once, several years before. One hundred and sixty-one steps had winded the hell out of her on the way up. Then, coming down, her knees strained and burned.

The front door was open, and no one was in the entry hall. A wooden table along the wall held a small bouquet of white flowers. Sam put her gift there. The sound of mellow jazz led down a hall and into an open room with a wall of glass windows looking right out over the lake. The sky was restless, and the rushing clouds cast moving shadows on the water. It seemed like a beautiful place to live, and Sam felt a pang of longing.

Voices in the kitchen were light and pleasant. Eunice was there, removing a baking sheet from a wall oven. She wore a dress. Sam could see that she wasn’t used to dresses from the way she kept tugging at the hem after she placed the sheet on the counter to cool. When she turned and saw Sam she smiled a tense, anxious smile. It was strange to see her outside of work, as if Lindell was their only world. For a moment, they were like aliens landing roughly on a new planet. The moment passed quickly. Eunice said she was so glad Sam could make it.

Eunice introduced Sam to Barry. He shook her hand weakly. He, too, looked tense, as if he’d rather be sitting down, watching television, or out of the house altogether, maybe back at his bar. When the invitation came, Sam asked why Eunice wasn’t hosting the party there. Eunice said it wasn’t the nicest atmosphere.

Angie Dugan was present, too. Her olive pants were drab, though her silver top gave her a festive air. She had two orange bracelets, obviously plastic, on one wrist. The other had a modest silver bangle. Beside her was a tall, black-haired young man who instantly caught Sam’s eye. He wore black jeans and a white T-shirt under a light-weight leather jacket. Even his shoes were stylish. He reminded her of the guys in L.A. He nodded to her, though said nothing.

“This is my brother, Tim,” Angie said.

“Timothy,” he corrected her.

Even his voice was pleasing, low, gentle. Sam wished her clothes were nicer. She had on khaki pants and a blue knit top to which she’d added a necklace with blue stones she’d gotten for herself in L.A. right after the fiasco with Suki’s brother. A reward for her bravery and resolution, she’d told herself.

Two more people arrived, one of the bartenders from Barry’s place and his girlfriend. Looking at everyone, Sam realized that Eunice and Barry were the oldest people there.

Eunice directed everyone to a table where glasses and beverages had been arranged. Timothy grabbled a bottle of beer from a tub packed with ice. He offered one to Sam. Sam took it. She inspected the end of the table where food had been laid out. There were crackers with cheese and some nasty-looking red stuff that Eunice said was roasted red bell peppers. Sam chose a baby carrot from another plate and shoved it into some dip, which to her dismay turned out to be onion-flavored. She used a pink cocktail napkin to receive the partially chewed carrot, looked around for a trashcan, then shoved the napkin in the pocket of her pants.

“Not a fan?” Timothy asked. Sam hadn’t been aware that he’d seen her. They removed themselves from the group and occupied a window seat covered in white leather.

“Great view,” Sam said.

“It would have taken some big bank to level the lot like they did. Most of the houses around here are built to accommodate the slope.”

“You’re a contractor?”

“I work in retail.”

“Where?”

“The GAP.”

“Their stuff never fits me.”

“You have to go a size up.”

“They don’t have sizes for fatties.”

“You’re not fat.”

Sam drank her beer.

“Big-boned, then,” she said.

“Does it matter?”

“No, I guess not.”

They sat in silence. The others had remained in the kitchen. “Such a wonderful time of life really,” Angie said. Laughter followed. The telephone rang. No one answered it. The mellow jazz that had ushered Sam in changed to classical.

“How do you feel about Mozart?” Timothy asked her.

“It’s all right.”

“You mean, ‘he.’”

“Yeah, he.”

They laughed. Sam didn’t like feeling ignorant, though she knew she was, about many things. Timothy, though, didn’t seem ignorant at all.

“Let me guess. You went to college,” Sam said.

“Right here at Dunston University.”

“Ivy League. That’s pretty rad.”

“Took me five and a half years.”

“Why so long? Working on the side?”

“No. Had a little trouble getting focused.”

Sam could see him drop into himself at the memory. Then he lifted, and said it was his mother who’d wanted him to go to school. Angie was already in college over in Cortland. It was his mother’s plan that all her kids benefit from higher education. Sam asked how many kids there were.

“Five,” Timothy said.

“Wow. That’s a lot.”

Timothy’s face drew into a small passing frown.

His mother hadn’t gone to college, herself, he said. Nor had his dad. She left him for a rich guy, a real bonehead, in Timothy’s opinion, though he had to give the guy credit for improving his mother’s life, at least in a material sense. At the time, though, he’d thought she was just a greedy jerk, but then he realized that not having money is a huge pain, and while having it doesn’t guarantee happiness, it makes life a hell of a lot easier.

Sam wanted to ask him why he worked if he was so well off, which made her think. If she got money out of Henry Delacourt, would she quit Lindell? Obviously, that depended on just how much she got, but yes, she’d probably quit. And do what? You had to spend your time somehow, even if you didn’t need a paycheck. Which is no doubt exactly what Timothy figured. Also, the step-dad’s generosity might not extend to him, but just to the mother.

“And do you like it? Selling clothes?” Sam asked.

“No.”

“What would you rather do?”

“Draw.”

“Draw?”

“Cartoons.”

He pulled a folded up piece of paper out the pocket of his jacket. He opened it and handed it to her. It had an image, done in pen, of a penguin playing an accordion. The penguin was smiling. Its head was perched at a jaunty angle on its little round shoulders.

“Very good. Does it have a name?” Sam asked. She gave the paper back to him.

“Not yet.”

“Patty, the penniless penguin.”

“Playing for her fishy supper.”

Angie approached them from the kitchen. She asked if they needed anything. Sam said she was fine. Timothy did, too.

Timothy said Angie always did that, play hostess in someone else’s home. He said she wasn’t being bossy—though God knew she used to be, when they were young—she just had a keen sense of responsibility to other people. Sam suggested that such a trait would be necessary—and highly valuable—in a social worker.

“You thinking you want to sell your cartoons?” she asked.

Timothy put his empty beer bottle on the carpet.

“More like write a children’s book.”

He said it quietly, not meeting her eye, as if the statement were embarrassing. Or maybe Sam was the first person he’d shared that ambition with. She hoped it was the latter.

“And if it sells a lot, then you quit the GAP, right?”

“Something like that.”

He looked at her then and didn’t seem embarrassed.

Then he turned toward the water. The wind was up. The surface was all choppy. He stared at it a long time, until Sam asked what he was trying to see below the surface. He apologized if he looked like he was brooding—hardly appropriate for a birthday party. It was just that back in college he’d stood at a window once, looking down at the lake when it was gray and full of white caps, just like today.

“Is that what you meant about trouble focusing? Nature was more fun than the inside of a book?” Sam asked.

Timothy smiled for the first time since meeting her.

“No, not more fun.”

He’d rushed a fraternity—against his mother’s wishes. He saw later that she’d been right about the culture, but at the time it was very important to him to belong to a group of people outside of his family. Sam had no doubt heard about some of the really stupid things pledges did just to get accepted. Usually these involved alcohol and running around half-naked soaked in shaving cream, that sort of crap. His assignment had been more subtle. There’d been a girl, a student, who belonged to some Christian group that preached abstinence until marriage. In that day and age? It was all positively medieval, which made the idea of seducing her all the more intriguing.

“Wait. You had to seduce someone you didn’t even know?” Sam asked.

“Well, I got to know her, obviously, by joining her group, pretending to care about it.”

He took her out on a few dates, played it cool. She saw through him at once. She’d been down that road before with at least one other guy, though not from the same frat. He apologized and said he’d leave her alone if that’s what she wanted. She didn’t. One evening, she had him up to her place and made him dinner. That was where he’d stood, watching the water, though from a different direction, obviously, since she lived in College Town.

Well, to make a long story short, the reason this girl preached abstinence was to diffuse all the sexual tension around her. She was pretty—beautiful, actually—and guys were always hitting on her. But that wasn’t the whole story. She’d been raped when she was a teenager, by one of her father’s business partners. Her father didn’t believe her.

“That’s rough,” Sam said.

“The partner assumed she was interested in him, so he might not even have felt he was forcing her.”

“She say that?”

“No. But that’s what it sounds like to me.”

“You’re saying she gave the impression of consenting.”

“She said they were friendly, sometimes a little more than friendly. He might have gotten the wrong idea.”

“Maybe she claimed rape for the sake of protecting her own reputation.”

Timothy looked at her closely. Her cheeks warmed.

“So what happened?” she asked.

“With what?”

“You and her.”

“Nothing. We went our separate ways.”

His voice carried a tone of regret. Maybe he’d been in love with her.

She stared at the water, longing to be in a sound boat heading for the far shore. She’d been on a boat only once, when she was quite young. Her grandfather was there, and someone else, not Flora or the grandmother. The sun had been in her eyes; the motion of the waves threw her off balance. She almost went over the rail. For an instant, there had been fear in her grandfather’s eyes, something she never saw again, even when he knew he was dying.

Sam looked at her empty beer bottle. More laughter flowed from the kitchen. Eunice called out that they were cutting the cake. Sam and Timothy went to see. The bartender was patting Barry on the back, which Barry didn’t look like he cared for. There was a big space between them, and the bartender stopped patting. Then he put his arm around his girlfriend, who stood on his other side. She didn’t warm to his embrace, and Sam decided, watching all this, that they weren’t going to be a couple long.

“Shall we sing?” Angie asked.

“No,” Barry and Eunice answered in unison.

“No candles?” the bartender’s girlfriend asked.

“Too many to count,” Eunice said. Then she seemed to regret her words, but Barry was unperturbed. He looked less tense than he had at the outset. He held a full glass of wine, which was no doubt the reason.

Eunice cut the cake. She did it badly. Sam offered to help. Eunice handed her the knife.

“I never could slice a cake properly,” she said.

“Nothing to it,” Sam said.

People handed her plates, and she filled them until everyone had a share.

“Forks?” the bartender’s girlfriend asked.

“Oh, right, so sorry!” Eunice spun around and yanked open a drawer. She dug out a handful of forks. Sam and Timothy still came up short. Sam helped herself to the same drawer, and was amused to find that along with utensils it held a lot of rubber bands.

The cake had a lemon flavored frosting, which Sam recognized at once.

“Velma made it, didn’t she?” she asked, her mouth full.

“She did. She even offered. I think Velma secretly yearns to be a pastry chef,” Eunice said.

“Who’s Velma?” the bartender’s girlfriend asked. Her eyes were brown, almost beady, and looking at them. Sam disliked her all of a sudden.

“She’s the cook at Lindell,” Eunice said.

“This is pretty damn good,” Barry said. He’d had to put down his drink to manage the plate of cake. He looked around for it, though it was on the counter directly in front of him.

“Lindell? The old folks’ home?” the bartender asked.

“Retirement community,” Angie said.

“Same dif.”

Angie smiled warmly, to hide her annoyance, Sam thought. Angie turned away and helped herself to a glass of something from the drinks table.

“Happy birthday,” Sam told Barry.

“Thank you, dear,” he said.

Dear?

Sam and Timothy returned to their perch in the living room. Sam took a second slice of cake along. She was enjoying it a lot. The sugary flavor reminded her of a birthday party for one of Lucy’s kids several months before. Balloons, shrieking, wrapping paper in shreds on the floor. The cake Lucy made hadn’t been as tasty as Velma’s, but then Velma baked from scratch. Thinking that, Sam decided that she must be moving on if she could recall something without sadness that only a short while ago would have made her ache.

She found Timothy studying her.

“What you said before, about a woman making a false accusation,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Where did that come from? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Get me another beer first. Please, I mean.”

Timothy did as she asked. He didn’t bring another for himself. Sam put her dirty plate on the floor and accepted the beer. He hadn’t opened it for her, but the cap twisted off easily. She put the cap on the plate and drank. She could see tension in the way he held his shoulders. He sat forward, elbows pressed to his knees.

She told him about her mother and Henry Delacourt.

“Jesus. That’s a hell of a lie, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Just a little.”

“You think it’s true, what she’s telling you now?”

“I thought about that. She has no reason to lie now. She had a reason before. So, yeah, I guess I believe her.”

Then she added that her mother thought she could make some financial claim against Delacourt. Provided she could prove they were father and daughter. She’d need to find a lawyer, one who was willing to take her on with the promise of a cut of the money later.

“A contingency fee,” Timothy said.

“If that’s what it’s called.”

Footsteps fell from the front door into the kitchen. Whoever it was walked slowly, almost hesitantly. Words of greeting were made. Then Eunice led Meredith into the living room where Angie was sitting with the bartender and his girlfriend on a blue velvet sectional on the other side of the room from Sam and Timothy. Sam hadn’t realized they’d left the kitchen, which meant Eunice and Barry had been in there by themselves.

Not too sociable, now are they?

She wasn’t surprised to see Meredith. Eunice had mentioned that she might come. She looked woeful, and Sam wondered if Constance had died. But if she had, Meredith wouldn’t be there, would she?

She was elegantly dressed, as always, in a lightweight, boat-necked sweater and a pair of pressed linen slacks. She put her leather shoulder bag on the table in front of the sectional and shook hands with the bartender and then with the girlfriend. When Eunice led her over to the window, she shook Timothy’s hand, and nodded politely to Sam.

“How’s your mother?” Sam asked.

It was a stupid question, because Sam had seen her just the day before, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“The same.”

Eunice stood with her arm looped through Meredith’s. She was claiming her somehow. Or protecting her.

“You should try the cake,” Sam said.

“Yes.”

Then Eunice led her away, as if she just couldn’t navigate the room by herself.

Sam drank her beer and enjoyed the scudding clouds. She didn’t feel like she had to keep the conversation going, and neither, apparently, did Timothy.

Then after a moment, he asked, “So, aside from working at Lindell and needing a lawyer to slam dunk your biological father, what else are you into?”

“Poetry.”

“Yeah?”

“Mostly Sylvia Plath, these days.”

“That’s awesome.”

“Hang on.”

Sam went into the kitchen where she’d left her purse on the counter. Eunice, Meredith, and Barry were seated at the table, drinking, speaking quietly. An untouched slice of cake sat before Meredith. Sam took the book she carried with her these days and returned to Timothy.

“Here,” she said, handing it to him. It was Ariel.

He opened the book to the page she’d turned down.

“Read the last paragraph,” she said.

 

There’s a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

 

“I didn’t mean aloud,” she said. She turned to see if the others had taken note. They hadn’t.

“She sounds angry.”

“Well, sure, but she’s also taking charge. At least, that’s how I see it.”

“I find poetry hard to understand sometimes. Not that I read it all that often. Not since college, anyway.”

“It is hard to understand. And when I can’t figure it out, I just concentrate on how the words make me feel.”

She told him about the tenant at the motel who’d had poetry in her room, and how Sam had been found sitting on her bed reading a volume of T.S. Eliot. Then the motel closed, and Sam didn’t know her name. She had no way of finding out. If she had, they could have gotten together to discuss the greats. It was so hard meeting people who shared your interests.

“Unless your interest is drinking, or watching football,” Timothy said.

“Good point.”

Angie laughed at something. She was joined by the bartender’s girlfriend. The girlfriend slapped herself hard on the knee. The bartender, sitting between the two women, laughed, too.

Poor Eunice, Sam thought. Here she’d gone to the trouble to invite people to make Barry’s birthday a success, and they weren’t talking to him all that much. Why didn’t he have any friends of his own? And why didn’t Eunice?

“You have friends?” she asked Timothy.

“Sure.”

“Lots?”

“I wouldn’t say lots. People I go out with sometimes.”

“Girls?”

“Not really.”

He blushed.

“I was just thinking about this party, and the other guests, and why none of Barry’s friends are here. I mean, that guy he works with doesn’t seem too chummy, if you ask me. Which you didn’t, of course. Just saying,” she said.

Some people had trouble making friends, Timothy said. His own mother was a good example. She got married young. Her life was all about her kids and keeping things going for the family. After she got married again and had time to do what she wanted, she still didn’t make friends. Sam said she must be lonely, then. Timothy said he never had that impression of her. But she’d always been hard to read, so it was entirely possible.

“What about your dad? Are you guys close?” Sam asked.

Timothy took a moment to consider.

“More than we used to be. I didn’t like him much when I was young.”

“Because?”

“He drank all the time and sat on his ass, basically.”

Sam said Timothy’s dad would have gotten on great with her grandparents. Not.

“Hardasses?”

“Rock hard.”

Eunice had entered the living room and was insistently tapping her glass with a fork. Silence fell. Barry was on one side of her, and Meredith on the other.

“I, that is, we, would like to make an announcement,” she said.

Sam and Timothy swung around, so the lake was behind them now. Timothy leaned close to Sam and quietly hummed the wedding march. Sam jabbed him with her elbow.

Eunice gestured to Barry, inviting him to speak.

He rocked onto the balls of his feet a couple of times. He stopped.

“Go on,” Eunice said.

“Okay. Well. First. Thanks for coming to my party. You get to be my age, birthdays don’t mean so much. Except when you can share them, with friends.” He paused. Sam could see his mind go somewhere else. He looked distressed. Then he recovered himself.

“So, now’s a good time to let you all know that I’m giving up The Caboose. Jax, you already know about this. We’ve been talking about it for several weeks,” Barry said.

Jax—the bartender—nodded solemnly.

“I’m looking for a buyer,” Barry said.

“Because you won’t let me have it for fifty K under asking,” Jax said. There was no edge in his voice, but Sam sensed some bad feeling there.

“But you’re in complete charge until that time. All I ask is that you don’t run her into the ground,” Barry said. Jax’s girlfriend looked cross.

“You’re retiring?” Angie asked.

“Moving on to a new venture. Which brings us to announcement number two. Eunice and I are going into business. Starting an elder care service that lets people stay at home longer.”

Angie clapped. No one else did.

“What’s it called?” she asked.

“Lillian’s Angels.”

He talked on. Life is a funny thing, he said. You never knew what doors were going to open. There he was, all settled in this house, and in The Caboose, thinking he’d reached the top, or maybe not the top, but a plateau, a nice comfortable place where he could look back on things with an even perspective. And then you meet someone who changes things for you, only you don’t see at first what those changes are, exactly. You just go with the flow. You have to be open, he said. You have to trust.

As he continued to delve into matters of the heart, Sam watched Eunice listen. She stood, hands clasped, gazing up at him with a soulful expression, especially in her eyes.

Then Meredith was talking. It seemed that she, too, had news to share.

“I’ve agreed to donate a little seed money to Lillian’s Angels.” There followed soft murmurs of approval. “And, out of respect for my mother’s wishes, I’m also going to turn her childhood home into a community center for women wanting to better themselves,” she said.

“Oh, how wonderful!” Angie said. She stood and put her hand on Meredith’s arm.

She and Angie took a seat together on the couch. Barry and Eunice sat, too, signaling that the party might now resume.

“How about you? Any announcements?” Timothy asked Sam.

“I need to use the bathroom.”

“Ground breaking.”

“Earth shattering.”

She asked Eunice where to go, then went down the hall she’d indicated on the far side of the kitchen. The floor was slate. Framed pictures of children, clearly taken decades before, hung on both walls, and Sam was unpleasantly reminded of Lucy’s home and the night she put two of them before Glen in the bathroom.

Assholes.

Come on, be fair.

They were just a couple of fucked-up people, in over their heads.

As she washed her hands and examined her reflection in the large mirror, she wondered if she were capable of love. She’d always believed it of herself, though events with Suki and Lucy now caused her to doubt. She had needed them both, cultivated them, and then become disappointed, which raised another question—could you still care for someone who let you down?

She returned to the party. Timothy looked up immediately, as if he’d been watching for her. Something about him suggested an accustomed anguish, which along with how he’d described his parents meant he might have asked himself the same question.

 

chapter twenty-five

 

 

 

She ordered herself not to be nervous.

Pull yourself together this instant!

Her stern resolve was fleeting, and gone altogether by the time she reached the genteel brick building on the far side of campus. This was a part of Dunston she’d never been to before, which struck her as strange given how long she had lived there.

He was a therapist, specializing in children and young adults, according to the small brass plaque mounted by the front door. Sam hadn’t known that beforehand. All he said on the telephone was to please come to his office. She realized, as she climbed the short flight of stairs to the door, that he might have thought her a prospective patient when she’d said the matter was urgent and couldn’t wait.

She entered the foyer of a converted house. A pair of French doors, lined with fabric, were just to her right. She knocked. When there was no answer, she opened one and stepped inside. There she found a large desk with a computer monitor on it and some papers. Beyond the desk was another door, which is where Sam assumed she’d find him.

What kind of doctor has no one out front?

Her unease grew rapidly. Once again, she gave herself a firm rebuke.

Oh, go on, get in there!

She didn’t have to, though, because he came out to greet her. He was tall. His hair was dark, thick, and streaked with gray. The tweed jacket he wore reminded Sam of some of the people who came to visit at Lindell. His slacks had a sharp crease. The hand that gripped hers was warm and dry. Sam knew hers was damp with anxious perspiration. He ushered her into the room he’d come out of, and gestured to a large leather chair across from an elaborately carved desk.

He waited until she sat, then he took the chair behind the desk.

He watched her calmly for a moment, waiting for her to speak.

“So,” she said.

“Why don’t you tell me what brings you here today?” he asked. He seemed like a nice person. He’d have to be, right? You couldn’t be a therapist and be mean. You’d go out of business in no time. What she couldn’t figure out was why a guy like him would go into that line of work in the first place. Maybe he was working out his own guilt complex.

“You’re my father,” she said.

He leaned back in his chair, as if to take her in from a different perspective.

“Yes, I know,” he said.

“How? You’ve never met me. And I sure as hell have never met you.”

“Because you bear a striking resemblance to my late mother.”

From the top of the bookcase behind him, he removed a leather folder containing two pictures, side by side, of a man in one half and a woman opposite him. He handed the folder to her across the desk. Sam wasn’t sure what decade the picture dated from, but she guessed the 1950s from the woman’s flowered hat and pearl choker. And there she was, Sam in an earlier day, the same broad forehead and long nose. The fleshy lower lip was pretty much exact, too.

“Wow. What was her name?”

“Edith.”

“Edith Delacourt.”

“Edith Langley, before she married.”

She gave the pictures back. She didn’t know what to do next.

“When you called to make the appointment, you sounded angry. Were you?” he asked.

“Sure. Why not? I mean, wouldn’t you be?”

“I suppose so.”

They went on looking at each other. Sam tried to see him being involved with her mother, dating her, making love, telling lies.

“I just want to know why,” Sam said.

“Why …?”

“Why you bailed, why you never tried to find me, why you never did a damn thing for me.”

Again, the long look from the leaned-back chair.

“Are you absolutely sure of your facts?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“One, I didn’t bail. Two, I did ask to see you a number of times. And three, as to not doing anything for you, it was clear that my efforts would be highly unappreciated.”

Sam rubbed her forehead with the tips of her fingers. A dull ache had begun there. Also in her stomach because she’d had no breakfast.

“You’re having trouble knowing what to believe,” he said.

“Something like that.”

“Let me begin at the beginning then.”

They’d been in high school together. They met in the Drama Club, to audition for the roles of George and Emily for that year’s production of Our Town.

“I thought you met in a diner,” Sam said.

“A diner?”

“Where my mother worked.”

Henry shook his head.

Just another fib.

He resumed. Neither of them were chosen, but they continued to attend rehearsals because they each had a friend in the cast. And they liked spending time together. He found Flora lively and full of mischief. Did Sam know that her mother had once coated the seat of a lunchroom chair with glue, at the table where the cheerleaders always sat, and it just so happened that the lead cheerleader chose that particular one to plop herself down in, on a day when she was in uniform, no less? Flora had confessed the prank not long after they met, and he assumed she was trying to prove that she was the kind of girl he should be interested in. She struck him as vulnerable, though at the time, being a boy of eighteen, he wouldn’t have used that word.

It soon became clear to him that she was two people, or to put it in terms that made more sense, she lived two lives—one at school and the other with her family. During the day, she laughed, teased, and spoke of the future optimistically. But on the weekend, when he picked her up for a date, she came out to his car downcast, quiet, and brooding. She never invited him into the house. He never met her parents. He understood, from the few references she made, they were strict, old-fashioned even, suspicious of people.

“She said she was in love with you,” Sam said.

“And I was in love with her.”

He was going away to college. She wasn’t. He said he’d marry her when he’d finished his first year at Yale. She said that if they did marry, he must take her away from Dunston forever. He tried to get to the bottom of it. Something changed in her then. She became defensive, almost irrational. He didn’t bring it up again. When she told him she was pregnant, he offered to marry her then and there. She agreed.

He bought a ring, got the license. He told his family nothing; he assumed she told hers nothing as well. They were to meet at the courthouse. She never came. He called and was told she wouldn’t speak to him. He went to her home, and the father, a mean, angry-looking man came to the door with a baseball bat in his hands and told him never to come back. He assumed that the parents were holding her captive, refusing to let her leave the house.

He consulted a lawyer, a friend of the family who would keep the matter in the strictest confidence. Unless he had good grounds, it would be unwise to go to the police. The lawyer suggested writing a letter, though given their past behavior, it was likely that it would be destroyed before ever reaching Flora’s hands. He wrote anyway, sometimes sending pictures of himself, begging her to contact him. To his immense relief, she did, also by letter, in which it said she had changed her mind about marrying him and to please leave her alone.

“What could I do?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Assert your rights.”

He sat, hands folded on the smooth surface of his elegant desk.

“I thought it would be harmful to you both if I got in the way,” he said.

“Because …?”

“Her parents were capable of doing harm.”

“All the more reason to have saved us!”

“It was a difficult choice. I made the one I felt best.”

He offered money; it was always refused. By the parents, not by Flora. He was pretty sure they had stopped passing on his messages.

“She told them you raped her,” Sam said.

For the first time, his eyes registered a sudden, sharp look of surprise.

“Hoping to protect herself from them, no doubt,” he said.

“Except that they punished her anyway. They treated her like shit.”

He shook his head. Then his gaze left her face.

“What I don’t understand, though, is what her parents made of a presumed rapist wanting to have contact with his victim, and then offering money for the support of the child he fathered,” he said.

“Maybe they thought you were trying to lessen your crime by making amends.”

“Then they didn’t know much about human psychology.”

“All they knew about was cruelty.”

“They were hard on you, too?”

“Of course.”

“Making you pay for your mother’s sins.”

For a moment, he looked truly sad. Sam thought about the kinds of things he must hear in that office. The fear and rage of ordinary people. She bet he hadn’t heard anything quite so strange as what she’d just told him. Her thoughts turned then to Flora, the lie to her parents, Sam herself, Layla Endicott, and her one good friend, Mayva Barns.

“She told me you were dead,” Sam said.

“And you decided to look for me anyway?”

“Just the other day she came clean about not having been raped. When she told me that, I figured the rest of it was crap, too. She admitted you were alive and well, right here in Dunston.”

“I wonder what made her decide to share the truth now, after all this time.”

“She read about your father in the paper. She said you’d probably come into money, and that I should try and get some.”

Now he looked amused.

“You don’t mince words. I wish more of my patients were like you,” he said.

“Is there any?”

“Money? Not much. My father wasn’t a thrifty man. In his youth, yes. But as he aged, and after my mother was gone, he spent freely. Then there were the stupid schemes he invested in—real estate developments that went nowhere, principally. He had this friend from school who talked him into all kinds of nonsense.”

Sam thought he sounded like an idiot, but kept that to herself.

“I invested something for you, though, years ago. In case we ever met,” he said.

“What if I had never looked you up?”

“It’s in my will that you’re to receive it when I die.”

Sam asked the sum. Just about forty-two thousand dollars, he said.

That was worth almost two years of working at Lindell. All those days of freedom. Or a new car. A car and a trip. A trip somewhere new.

“That’s not chump change,” she said.

“No, it’s not. Which is why you want to be careful with it. I can help you weigh your options, if you like. But, that’s up to you, of course. If you’d rather I not interfere, I won’t.”

“No, it’s not that.”

He stood, came around to her side of the desk, and gently put his hand on her shoulder.

“It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it?” he asked.

She nodded. Rather than brimming with joy, she felt drained and empty.

“It’ll take a couple of days to get the money from the brokerage firm, if that’s all right,” he said.

“Sure. You have my number, right?”

“You left it when you called.”

That had been only three days before. Now, if felt like a much longer time.

Sam stood. She hoped he wasn’t going to embrace her. He didn’t. He took a step back, leaving a wider space between them. At the last minute, she thought it appropriate to shake his hand, though when she did, she didn’t meet his eye.

 

chapter twenty-six

 

 

 

Sam said nothing to Flora about meeting Henry Delacourt. She spoke only of bland, neutral things—the weather, if they needed to buy more laundry soap, and how late in the day the new mailman swung by their place—which caused Flora to watch her with concern and suspicion. Those moments of scrutiny were short-lived, though, since she and Chuck had decided to marry.

“I finally gave in,” Flora said.

She beamed. At times she was giddy. Sam had never seen her that way, and was reminded of how Henry Delacourt had described her back in high school. The thought of an outwardly cheerful young woman who was in fact lonely, browbeaten, and mistreated gave her pause once again. She still fumed over the deceit she’d been handed, but it was tempered by seeing more clearly than ever before the emotional hardship Flora herself had suffered.

Flora and Chuck were going to live at his place. That meant for the time being, Sam would have the old house to herself.

“What do you mean, for the time being?” Sam asked.

“Chuck thinks I should put it on the market.”

“Does he?”

“You said you wanted to find your own place, didn’t you?”

“I suppose so. But, the house is in pretty bad shape. I don’t know how easy it’ll be to find a buyer.”

“Chuck says for the right price, it’ll sell in no time.”

The old farm two lots down from Lucy and Glen was for sale. Sam had seen in the paper that a developer had proposed a slew of new homes but was having a little trouble with the zoning board. New housing was in hot demand in and around Dunston, something to do with a small technology company that had been founded by a couple of graduates of the university. The company was growing, and people were moving in.

“I should probably start looking, then,” Sam said.

“Oh, take your time. There’s no hurry.”

Sam went to her room and sat at the same desk she’d used all the way through school. The desk was placed in front of a window that looked out over the rear of the property. It was a three-acre parcel, and since no homes had ever been built on the back of the adjoining plots, the view was uninterrupted. Sam couldn’t deny that it was peaceful. She’d always found it so, even when nursing her bruises, inflicted on her by angry hands.

To one side was a stand of trees and undergrowth that had never been tended. Sam had often thought of it as belonging to her alone because no one from the family ever went there. She walked its quiet seclusion when she was troubled, which she often was. One day, she offered something to the woods that she’d since searched for but never found.

She made a friend in the third grade, Missy Thomas. Missy was everything Sam wasn’t: petite, stylish, well cared for. Missy liked Sam for her brash nature and for being impossible to embarrass. When boys teased Sam, she just moved off. Sam became not only a friend but a protector. Missy had an older brother, a tall, handsome boy in the sixth grade, whose verbal abuse of his little sister was constant and merciless. One day on the playground, the brother, Davy, called Missy “ferret-face,” and Missy’s flawless blue eyes welled. Sam walked over to Davy and punched him hard on the arm. He was so surprised, he did nothing but gape. Missy invited Sam to go home with her that afternoon. Davy had Boy Scouts and wouldn’t be there to bother them.

Missy lived closed enough to walk. Her neighborhood was as charming as she was. The road she lived on followed a creek. They stopped to lean on the railing above and look down into the gentle rush of water. Missy told a story of being very young, maybe four years old, and having a passion for toothbrushes. It must have been their bright colors that she had liked. Her father bought her one whenever he visited the drug store. She took the newest toothbrush with her everywhere, and one day, walking with him by that very spot, she accidentally dropped it into the water. He went down the path by the creek’s edge and looked for it, with no luck. As she watched him climb back to her, she decided to be brave and not cry anymore. Sam loved that story. It was thrilling to think of Missy as someone with passions, wanting to possess things that made her happy. She liked the image of her father trying to recover her lost treasure.

Missy’s house was empty because both her parents worked at the university. Every day she returned to find a cupcake on a plate on the kitchen counter by an empty glass. The glass was for milk, which she could pour herself. Her mother set these things out before she went to campus in the afternoon. She was a professor, Missy said, and was only teaching one class that semester because she was going to have a baby. Missy hoped for a sister, not a brother. She didn’t know where she’d fit in with another boy in the house. Sam asked if Davy had a snack prepared for him, too, and Missy said no, he was old enough to take care of that himself.

Missy shared the cupcake with Sam. It had a luscious chocolate filling. They ate at the table in the formal dining room. Sam’s house didn’t have a formal dining room; they took their meals in the kitchen. Missy’s table and chairs were painted white. The seat cushions were red velvet. When they were done, Missy put the dish and glasses in the kitchen sink. Then they explored her parents’ bedroom. Sam was drawn by the large jewelry box on the dresser. It was made of wood and had three drawers, each with a gold-tone knob. Missy opened the lid for her. Sam looked down on a sea of glitter. Necklaces, bracelets, and rings lay carelessly jumbled on a bed of dark blue satin. The drawers were loaded, too. Missy said her mother had gotten a lot of her stuff when she was married before, and that her dad didn’t mind her keeping it, though she didn’t wear it very often, probably to avoid hurting his feelings. To Sam, they sounded like nice people, which made her feel a little awkward when she stole a yellow topaz pendant from the middle drawer while Missy was in the closet, pulling out a number of brightly colored scarves and lining them up on the four-poster bed.

Sam was sure that Missy’s mother would never miss the pendant, and nothing was ever said about it later. She kept the pendant safely hidden in her room, in the pocket of a homemade dress at the far end of her closet. Sometimes, she took it out and held it to the light, adoring its warm honey glow. Then she put it away, and let weeks pass before she looked at it again.

The following year, Missy’s dad took a job at another university, and the family moved away. They said their good-byes on the playground. Missy’s mother was there, with Missy’s baby brother in a stroller. She was a tall, elegant woman with a fine, slender throat, perfect for displaying the jewel Sam had pinched. That was the first time Sam felt guilty, and the feeling never left her, even after she took the pendant to the dark stand of trees, closed her eyes, and threw it far away.

With the property going to strangers, the pendant might be found and celebrated with delight and wonder.

“How did it get here?” someone would ask. “Oh, what a lucky thing! Here let me put it on you.”

How odd that what bound her most strongly to this place had never really been hers at all.

That afternoon she got a call from Henry Delacourt saying he’d like to mail her a check for the sum they discussed. She asked him to hold off for another two weeks. Flora’s wedding would take place then, and until that time, she’d be “in and out,” as she put it. Seeing his name on an envelope would force a discussion Sam wasn’t ready to have. Would she prefer to pick it up at his office? No, that wouldn’t be convenient. She wanted to tell him about the stolen pendant, and realized that would sound weird. Maybe, if they became friends, she’d find a good moment to bring it up.

 

chapter twenty-seven

 

 

 

For Eunice’s last day at Lindell, her supervisor, Karen, held a tea in the common room. She set the time to fall during the afternoon quiet time so the staff could be free to come and wish Eunice well. Sam arrived forty-five minutes in to find Eunice and Meredith at a large table, an untouched plate of cookies before them, and two empty teacups. Because the saucers each had a spoon, it was clear that the tea had already been consumed. By the sink on the other side of the room were other cups, waiting to be washed. At least a few people had stopped in to say good-bye, Sam thought. But why did Eunice look so sad?

Sam joined them. Up close she saw that her eyes were wet.

“Her mother died last night,” Meredith said.

“Oh, no! I’m so sorry!”

“They said it was coming, after the broken hip and all. She just never seemed to bounce back,” Eunice said.

“That’s what I call rotten timing,” Sam said. She took a chocolate chip cookie from the plate and was annoyed to discover that it was actually oatmeal raisin. She ate it anyway.

“So funny to think of her being gone. I mean, we weren’t on the best of terms most of the time, but still,” Eunice said.

“She was your mother,” Meredith said. Then it was her turn to look glum. Constance had slipped into a coma the day before. Her time was coming, too, maybe that very day.

“I’m tired of all these people dying,” Sam said. Those words surprised her. The sadness around her had pulled something out she hadn’t known was there.

“I don’t mean your people—your moms, that is. I just mean everyone here, at Lindell. I know it goes with the territory—it’s a retirement community, right? But still, don’t you ever wonder sometimes what it would be like to work around younger people, or even kids? No one getting old and feeble, no one passing on.”

Eunice pushed her empty teacup further away from her and said, “I used to feel that way, back when I first started.”

That had been almost thirty years before. She couldn’t believe how long she’d been a part of the Lindell family. One of these days she should sit down and figure out just how many people she’d taken care of in that time, and try to remember them all. In the beginning, not long after she came on board, she was certain the job would only be for a little while, until something better showed up. Then she found that she really did have a knack for talking to old folks, and keeping them engaged. That was something her Grandma Grace had often said about her—she’d mentioned her before to both of them, right? She’d been a great old lady, full of piss and vinegar, if you’ll pardon the expression. Sam would have liked her, and Meredith too. And now, all these years later, Eunice realized that the one thing she’d done her entire life was take care of other people. That wasn’t a bad way to spend one’s time, was it? There were worse ways to make a living.

What Sam heard in her voice wasn’t exactly regret, but an acceptance of something that hadn’t always been easy, or made her happy. Eunice stopped talking.

“Do you want to take it with you now? Or come back later, when the room is being cleaned out?” Meredith asked her.

“Oh, I hadn’t really thought about it. Whatever’s easier, I guess. Now then, I suppose.”

Meredith explained that she was giving Eunice the needlework Constance had begun again with great energy, and then had to give up when that energy failed. She knew Constance would have approved. Eunice said she had no idea what she’d do with it, because she had no skill with that sort of thing at all and, in fact, couldn’t even thread a needle. But once she got Lillian’s Angels up and running, there might be any number of old ladies who’d be glad for a little project like that. Her face softened when she said it would be a fine tribute to Constance’s memory, wouldn’t it?

Meredith agreed. And she’d do her part with the community center. She already had a good idea of what classes to offer and who would teach them. She’d put out her feelers and had gotten quite a good response. People were so willing to offer their time, it warmed her heart, it really did. The tenants would be gone by the end of the year, and then the house could be seen to. There was a lot of furniture from Constance’s childhood that Meredith had absolutely no idea what to do with. She didn’t want any of it herself. Of course, it could all be sold, but there were some nice pieces that should go to a good home.

“You should come by when the time’s right and take a look around. I’d be glad to let you take your pick,” Meredith said to Sam.

“Me? Oh, well, thanks. I could use a good dining room table, though it should be on the small side. I’ll be moving into an apartment after my mom gets married and we sell our house. She said I could take anything I wanted, but our stuff is all junk. And when I say junk, I mean junk.”

One of the nurses entered the room quietly and whispered in Meredith’s ear. Meredith’s face froze. Sam had seen that look before. Meredith was most likely thinking what a shame it was that she hadn’t been at Constance’s bedside when she went. If she got the chance, Sam would tell her it was often that way, there at Lindell. Family gathered to watch and wait. Then they took a break, got a bite to eat, a cup of coffee, a breath of fresh air, and bam, that’s when it happened. As if at the end, the dying preferred to pass on in the company of strangers.

 

chapter twenty-eight

 

 

 

Flora was off on her honeymoon with Chuck in Old Orchard Beach, up in Maine, when Henry Delacourt called Sam. She’d received his check four days before, and had yet to deposit it. She explained that she was heading to the bank later that day, but that wasn’t why he’d called her.

“We didn’t get a chance to talk much about my life since your mother left it,” he said. “It’s not that I’m so fascinating, believe me, but I wanted you to know that I’m married and have two children, a son and a daughter. I’ve told them about you. Naturally, it was a bit for them to take in, but they’re sturdy, compassionate souls. And they’ve expressed a lot of curiosity. So, to get to the point, I wonder if you’d like to meet them?”

Maybe that fake family I made up for Suki wasn’t so fake after all.

Sam said she’d think about it and would let him know. He said they were about her age. The daughter was twenty, and the son was twenty-one. Sam had just turned twenty-three. Henry hadn’t wasted much time putting his life back together after Flora’s parents slammed the door in his face. But then, why should he have gone on waiting for something that would never be?

“Which makes me think,” Sam told Timothy over a beer at her place.

“Of what?”

“If maybe I’m doing the same thing, waiting for stuff that won’t happen.”

“Like?”

For one, success at something. She didn’t have any solid goals. She said this plainly, no trace of despair or self-pity.

“Go to school. Study poetry. You’d be great at it. You probably know most of what they’d teach you,” Timothy said.

“And then?”

“You don’t have to map out your whole life. One thing at a time.”

Snow was on the way. The air smelled of metal. Sam hoped the old furnace would hold up just a few weeks longer, then it would be someone else’s problem.

“I need to find a place to live. The house is on the market,” she said.

Timothy took in the yellow wall oven with its missing knobs, the stove, also without a complete set of knobs, and the yellow refrigerator that leaned because of a dip in the floor.

“Well, not to be a downer, but it might take a while for someone to fall in love with it,” he said.

“I’m not waiting until it goes. I want to move now.”

“Move in with me. I’ve got room.”

“House or apartment?”

“House.”

“Will the landlord mind?”

“I’m the landlord. My mother bought the house for me. To promote stability in my life.”

Sam took a moment to imagine someone buying her a house.

“What do you want in terms of rent?” she asked.

“No rent. Just help with the utilities.”

“Where is it?”

“In the Heights.”

“Of course.”

That was the nice part of town. She’d have professors for neighbors. Maybe a lawyer or two.

She couldn’t deny it would make things easier. She just didn’t know how she felt about living with someone she might become romantically involved with, not that things showed signs of going that way. They were friendly, nothing more. Yet sometimes she found him looking at her in a strange, almost hungry way. She had more or less assumed that men weren’t interested in her because she was chubby, and now wondered if she’d sold herself short. As far as Timothy himself, she found him very dashing with his mop of dark hair. He reminded her a little of what Ted Hughes must have looked like, but then Ted Hughes had been an asshole. He was the reason Sylvia Plath killed herself, Sam was sure. She didn’t hold to all that history of depression stuff. When you found out your husband was cheating on you, and you were stuck with two young kids, the despair from that alone would have been enough to get your head in the oven.

The other day Sam had told Timothy about meeting Henry. Now she went over his phone call, her extended family, and not being sure she wanted to meet them.

“You should. Why not? Nothing to lose,” Timothy said.

“What if they hate me?”

“Then to hell with them.”

But what if they were good people, nice people who were interested in her? Maybe they were like her in certain ways. Maybe they could be friends.

“Well, it’s not like I’m up to my armpits in close company,” Sam said. She thought ruefully of Lucy, who was still estranged. Now, with Sam moving, there’d be no reason for them to ever see one another again.

“You have me, and at some point I’m sure you’ll meet the rest of my family. But, only if you want to,” Timothy said.

“Won’t they assume, you know, that I’m your girlfriend?”

“They can think what they like. Who cares?”

“You’re awfully nonchalant, Mr. Dugan.”

He’d had to learn to be that way. Growing up, he’d been hyper vigilant, always on the lookout for the next flare up between his parents. He felt responsible when they didn’t get along, though even then he knew it wasn’t his fault. He just always felt guilty about things, a sentiment that was helped along a lot by his mother’s criticism, though many of her remarks were true. He’d been lazy as a child and teenager, then resentful and self-destructive. He wouldn’t have wanted to have himself for a son either.

“That’s a little harsh,” Sam said.

“Maybe.”

She asked his advice about quitting her job, now that she had this money. He said unless the work was driving her nuts, she should hang on a little longer, until her plans were more clear.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Thirty-one. Why?”

“Just curious.”

He looked amused.

“Making sure you can trust my judgment?” he asked.

“Something like that.”

She put their empty bottles in the sink and said that if it was okay with him, she’d like to go and take a look at the house.

 

chapter twenty-nine

 

 

 

It was actually more of a cottage in terms of size, and also because of the lead windows in the living room, which made Sam think instantly of a picture book she’d once had. She wasn’t used to feeling nostalgic, though the emotion wasn’t altogether unpleasant. Her room was in the back. She was delighted to find that she had her own bathroom.

A two-sided stoned fireplace separated the living room from the TV room, and with the weather now miserably cold, Timothy kept the woodpile stocked. Their work schedules were such that they didn’t see a lot of each other. Sam didn’t mind, because she knew they’d cross paths often enough to keep a connection alive. She assumed Timothy felt the same way.

Flora was glad Sam had new digs. As for herself, she was happy, and even described her state of mind as being “over the moon.” Chuck was no great catch, she said with a laugh, but she’d found a home in his heart, and that was a good thing. Sam didn’t begrudge her her happiness. She still hadn’t told her about being in touch with Henry Delacourt, though. She had to admit her reluctance stemmed from her entrenched anger at the depth of Flora’s lie.

For the holidays, Lindell was resplendent with garlands and bows. On the door of each resident’s room a small decoration had been attached—a silver star or a candy cane, sometimes a few strands of tinsel. Constance’s old room was vacant. It wouldn’t be occupied until the first of the year. Sometimes Sam stood in the doorway, remembering the fierce soul that had lived within.

With Eunice gone, Sam worked with a new aide, Stell.

“Not Stella?” Sam had asked. Her response had been a weary sigh. Stell was fifty if she was a day, and from the few remarks she’d made, she’d taken the job because of a recent financial misfortune involving her husband.

“Probably lost his job,” Timothy said, after Sam filled him in. It was a Thursday, the one day both of them had off. It was also the day Sam had agreed to visit Henry Delacourt and his family. She was a wreck. She’d already pulled out her phone twice, ready to call with the excuse of being sick or that her car wouldn’t start.

Watching her fret, Timothy said he’d go with her.

“Don’t do that,” she said.

“Then stop me.”

She’d learned that he could be like that, forceful and kind at the same time. She asked him what she should wear.

“You look nice in purple,” he said.

She paired her purple sweater with black pants. The black ankle boots were new, an indulgence made possible by the money. She wasn’t used to spending on herself and found it glorious. It was something she’d have to be careful with. She was starting to think seriously about school, just as Timothy had suggested.

She hoped her outfit would convey strength and spirit. She hoped they were small people, over whom she could tower. Henry was tall, though, so they probably would be, too.

“You want a drink before we go?” Timothy asked her.

She shook her head.

“Might steady you.”

“I’m fine.”

He kissed her on the cheek. For luck, he said.

The Delacourts lived in the same neighborhood as Timothy, though their house was considerably grander. It had a brick walkway that led from the street. The door was framed by tall arches, and through one of the huge windows on either side of it a Christmas tree dressed with round silver and red ornaments was visible. Smoke rose from the chimney. Sam had the same nostalgic sense she’d had when she first walked into Timothy’s place, as if something from a childhood story had come to life.

Only this story was now hers.

 

 

END