Massonville 2006
Susie watched her mom and Katie stare up at the statue of Edward Rain. Neither of them had said anything for a really long time, and Susie was about to point out that there was another statue in the garden that they hadn't seen yet, when Katie turned around.
“I can't let it go,” she said in a kind of whispery voice.
Mom looked like someone had just told her all of her clients had fired her. “What?”
“Look at him.” Katie pointed up at the statue. “He worked all those years to keep this theater alive. And now Mike Killian is going to tear it down….”
“And you and I are going to get a nice piece of change.”
“So many people cared about this place, Randa—”
“Those people have nothing to do with us!” Susie hoped Katie would realize that her mom's voice was getting all loud and high because she was afraid. “This theater has nothing to do with us!”
“Somebody thought it did. We can't let it all end.”
“Watch me.”
“I'll buy you out. I'll have enough money after I sell my co-op.”
“Are you out of your mind? You can't sell your co-op. Where will you live?” Mom demanded.
“Here. I'm going to move to Georgia.”
“You are out of your mind!”
“I'll live upstairs in the family quarters.”
“You can't leave New York!” Mom was totally freaking now. “You can't live in that old dump! The wiring is shot! There was a dead squirrel in one of the chairs!”
“That's why God made exterminators and electricians.”
“Your life is in New York. Your job, your agent, your boyfriend—”
“I hate my job. My agent wants me to retire and write a masterpiece. My boyfriend is a son of a bitch.”
Katie was awesome, Susie decided. Her mother started walking really fast out of the garden. Katie tried to follow her.
“Randa, wait!” she shouted. “Will you slow down? I can't keep up with you.” Susie could have told her not to try; Mom clocked major hours on her treadmill. “Where are you going?” Katie called out as Mom opened the gate and ran through it.
“She'll wait for us in front of the theater,” Susie told Katie. “She won't let me walk back to the hotel without her. She's super-responsible.”
“What the hell was that about?” Katie said.
“Mom doesn't want to like the opera house.”
Katie turned around and looked back at the statue of Edward Rain. “It's not just the opera house…. It really is the stories.” She was doing that thing adults did when they pretended to talk to a kid because they didn't want to look like they were talking to themselves. Susie nodded anyway, to keep her going. “Who left it to us?” Katie went on. “And why? Doesn't your mother want to know? I mean, forget Faulkner, didn't she ever read Nancy Drew?”
“You scared Mom.”
“I scared her?”
“She thinks you'll get fired from your job because you'll lose your edge if you're not in New York, and no one will hire you ever again.”
“Oh.” Katie said, as if that was something she hadn't thought about.
“And you'll spend all your money on the opera house but it won't be enough to fix it because it's a black hole for cash and you'll wish you'd never come here but it will be too late, so you'll wind up all destroyed and broke like her father.”
“I see.” All of a sudden, Katie had stopped looking so strong.
“But that's just what my mom thinks,” Susie said hastily.
“Right,” Katie said. Her voice was kind of shaky.
“Mom is totally paranoid about not having money.”
“Yeah.” Katie started walking slowly toward the gate.
“I think what you're doing is awesome.”
“Don't take this the wrong way, but I wish you were about twenty years older and that you'd balanced a checkbook a couple of times in your life.”
“I know someone who's going to like it a lot that you're staying here,” Susie said, trying to get them back on a positive note. “R.B.’s going to be really glad.”
Katie wasn't listening. She was looking up at the back wall of the opera house. “You don't happen to know what they do when they point a building, do you? Because I think they did it once on my apartment building in New York and it cost over a million bucks.”
“I bet R.B. could tell you who left us the opera house,” Susie said desperately.
Katie started walking again. “He told us the grantor of the trust wanted to be anonymous.”
“But don't you think he could find out?”
“He said that would go against the intention of the will. There's probably a rule about that in the lawyer handbook. They get disbarred, or shot, or something.”
“You could ask him anyway. He really likes you.” Susie hadn't thought about that until she'd said it, but R.B. and Katie would be cute together. Plus, with Katie getting kind of scared, it wouldn't be a bad idea for her to have another reason to stay in Massonville. “I think R.B.’s hot,” Susie added, to push things along.
“You're talking about a man who wears a bow tie,” Katie said. But she was smiling a little.
Her smile was probably why the next thing just came out of Susie's mouth without her wanting it to. “Well, you wear glasses. And that dress—” Susie stopped herself.
Her mother would have been totally destroyed because someone had said she wasn't perfect, but Katie just kind of sighed. “Bad, isn't it?”
“It's fine,” Susie tried, but Katie was looking at her like she didn't believe it. “The color is kind of gross.”
Katie sighed again. “I figured it would hide my hips.”
Susie had to think about that for a couple of seconds. “The thing about R.B. is, I don't think he hides stuff. I think he wears those bow ties because he likes them. And that's cool.” There were times when “cool” was the only word that worked.
Katie put her arm around Susie's shoulders. “You are a smart person,” she said.
Her mom needed to get to know Katie better, Susie decided. Katie would be good for her. But when they caught up with her mother a few minutes later, she refused to say a word to Katie for the whole walk back to the hotel. Mom could get wired so easily.
Back at the hotel, Susie went online. She'd been trying to track down information about Mom's father, Richard Jennings. There were tons of genealogy websites, and she signed up for several of them, but she hadn't turned up anything. She'd finally convinced her mother to let her post some questions and a bio on a find-your-family website. But Mom wanted to supervise that because of all the bad stuff going on with the Internet. Susie sighed. That meant she was going to have to wait until Mom got over being freaked about Katie before they could check the responses.