“Ouch!” Cassie exclaimed as Buddy walked into the kitchen. “I’d forgotten how often you get burned, frying bacon on top of the stove. I suppose we won’t dare ask Gordon to replace the microwave and the remote control right away, will we?”
Addie sipped at her coffee, obviously having otherwise finished her breakfast. “No, we won’t. Not when he’s just sent us the money for four new tires. We used to be able to get along without a microwave and a remote. We’ll just have to learn to do it again.”
“I don’t mind getting up to change channels. But we used the microwave so much.”
Grandpa wandered in from his room, heading past them toward the dining room. “I’m cold,” he announced. “I’m going to turn up the heat.”
“No, Grandpa,” Addie said, standing up and blocking his way. “It’s already plenty warm enough in here for everybody else. Put on your sweater and you’ll be fine.”
He stared at her crossly. “I don’t know where my sweater is.”
“Well, I’m sure Buddy will be glad to help you find it.” She turned toward Buddy. “He probably dropped it in his rocker, that’s where it usually is. It’s bright blue, so he can see it more easily. He can still detect color quite well if he wants to, in his peripheral vision.”
Buddy nodded and headed for Grandpa’s room as his clock chimed out the time again. The sweater was right where Addie had said it would be, so she brought it back with her. Grandpa looked a bit surly, but he did put it on.
“I have to go,” Addie said, picking up her purse. She was looking quite smart in a dark suit with a white blouse and a bright printed scarf. “See you at suppertime.”
Cassie forked bacon onto a plate covered with paper towels. “Run upstairs, would you, Buddy, and tell Max that breakfast is ready? Usually he smells bacon and comes on the double.”
“All right,” Buddy agreed, and wondered who had done all the little errands when she wasn’t there. She returned a few minutes later with her report. “He’s not in his room.”
Cassie hesitated with bread ready to drop into the toaster. “Was his bed made?”
“No.”
“He must have gotten up and left before I was up. Now why did he go and do that?”
Because he didn’t want to see anybody, Buddy thought. Not his father, not Cassie. And maybe he doesn’t intend to do the chores Gus told him to do this morning.
Cassie sighed. “I was counting on him to help me get Gus down to the car when we’re ready to go.”
Another reason to disappear, Buddy thought. She held her breath, waiting for Cassie’s request for her own help. It came, but not in helping with Gus.
“I hope you won’t mind looking after Grandpa while we’re gone. As soon as I’ve finished here I’ll hide the knobs again so he can’t use the range. You can get them down if you need to warm up some soup for him. Or he can just have a sandwich. He likes peaches. You might open a jar. The pantry’s full of canned stuff.”
A relieved breath slid out of her as Buddy agreed. Looking after Grandpa seemed an easier task than anything to do with Gus.
“I’ve put corned beef and cabbage in the Crock-Pot for supper,” Cassie said, loading a plate and carrying it to set before Buddy at the table. “You don’t have to do anything with that. I need to get the car over to the garage to have the tires put on. I’ll be back as soon as I can. I just have to carry this other plate up to Gus. He didn’t want to come down to breakfast.”
Buddy didn’t know all that much about alcoholics, being lucky enough not to have known any personally. But she guessed that having been drunk enough to fall down and cut his head open last night probably meant that Gus would have a hangover headache this morning.
“Don’t I get any breakfast?” Grandpa asked.
“You already had some, honey,” Cassie told him. “Bacon and pancakes, remember? Would you like a doughnut and another cup of coffee?”
So Buddy and Grandpa ate breakfast together, her first and his second. Before the meal was over, he had activated his hanging clock seven times.
Cassie came back down with Gus’s tray as it sounded the last time. “I hope that didn’t keep you awake last night,” she said.
“I heard it a few times,” Buddy admitted.
“It drives Addie crazy. But since he can’t see anymore, can’t read, can’t work in the garden, it seems to be the only thing that keeps him oriented to where he is and what’s supposed to be going on. He needs to know what time it is.”
Buddy nodded. It was disconcerting, the way everybody discussed Grandpa as if he weren’t there, even when she realized that he probably wasn’t hearing very much of it.
Cassie had a purse ready, too, and keys in her hand. “If Max comes back, would you remind him about mowing the lawn? Gus will be annoyed if he doesn’t do it.”
Buddy hesitated, mopping up the last of the maple syrup with a bite of pancake. “What kind of mower do you have? I used to help Bart sometimes. Maybe I could do it.”
Cassie brightened. “Do you think so? I used to do it, before I married Gus and Max came to live here. Come along with me and I’ll show you.”
The power mower wasn’t exactly like the one stored in the garage at the old house, but they got it up and running, and by the time Cassie had backed the car out onto the street, Buddy was cutting the first swath across the side of the lot. She rather enjoyed doing it, and was finished by the time the new tires had been put on. She was in the back hall, tying up bundles of old newspapers, when she heard Cassie and Gus leave the house, with him protesting that he didn’t want to go, and Cassie insisting.
There was an old wagon in the garage. She loaded the newspapers into it and hoped Max would come back in time to tell her where to take them for recycling. Now it was time, she figured, to check on Grandpa.
He had obviously turned up the heat, for the house was sweltering. She went into the dining room and adjusted the temperature downward, noting that someone had put duct tape and a small wooden guard on the thermostat so that it couldn’t be pushed above eighty degrees.
It wasn’t hard to find him; all she had to do was follow the speaking clock. He was in the kitchen, punching futilely at the numbers on the microwave. “It won’t work,” he announced as she entered.
“No,” Buddy agreed. “Can I heat something for you on the stove?”
“There’s no way to turn it on. All the knobs are missing.”
“How about a sandwich? And Aunt Cassie said I could open some peaches, from the pantry.”
He was easily diverted. “A sandwich and peaches. That sounds good.” He tilted his head, presumably so he was looking at her through the part of his eye where there was still vision. “Do I know you, Sister?”
“I’m Buddy. EllaBelle’s daughter.”
“Oh, yes. I thought you seemed familiar. Your voice . . . I remember your voice.”
Buddy stepped over beside him and opened the ruined microwave with its blackened interior walls. There was a cup of coffee in it, and she took it out. If she’d caught his movements accurately, he had tried to set the timer for thirty minutes, long enough to have boiled the coffee over and possibly damaged the oven again if it had been functioning.
“How about a glass of milk instead of this? Okay?”
“Okay,” Grandpa agreed. “Where’s Sister?”
“Aunt Cassie’s gone to Kalispell. Aunt Addie’s at the library.” She opened the bread box and started getting out fixings for the sandwich. Tuna fish with mayonnaise, she decided, since that was what she spotted in the refrigerator.
“Umm. I used to go to the library at least once a week,” he told her, moving toward the table, poking ahead with his cane. “I can’t read anymore. Not even the Good Book. I memorized a lot of that, though, and it’s still stuck in my head. But I can’t read novels. Mysteries, or Westerns. I don’t like those science fiction things about all those spaceships and aliens, do you?”
“Yes, I like those. Do you want chopped pickles?”
“Yes, pickles are good. What about the peaches?”
Buddy found them in the pantry, row after row of home-canned fruits and vegetables. She made a nice lunch for the two of them, and they ate in a companionable silence, for the most part, though occasionally Grandpa would make an intriguing remark. “Sister writes novels, I think. I don’t believe I’ve read any of them.”
And that reminded Buddy that she and Grandpa were the only ones in the house, and that Addie’s rooms upstairs held not only a manuscript that had been returned, but a photograph album that had old family pictures she hadn’t seen.
After Grandpa had had two dishes of peaches, he wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and pushed back his chair. “I think I’ll take a nap now,” he said. “I wish Blackie would come and sleep by my feet. Do you know where he is?”
“Not exactly,” Buddy replied, hoping he wouldn’t press any further. It must be terrible not to remember that you’d been told that your pet had died, so that you felt the sorrow all over again each time.
She heard the talking clock several times while she was clearing the table and wiping off the counter, and then there was only silence. The big house seemed to be waiting for her to do something.
She knew it wasn’t right to pry into anyone else’s belongings. Yet there was a picture of her father in that photo album on Addie’s dresser. A picture she had never seen before yesterday, one that demanded an explanation, though it was unlikely anyone would provide it.
She walked quietly up the stairway—hearing the squeak of that one loose step—and stood in the doorway of Addie’s bedroom.
The door was open, and across the room she could see the photograph album, in plain sight.
What harm would it do to look at old pictures, taken years before?
It wasn’t only that snapshot, of course. There were the things she’d overheard her aunts and her great-grandfather say. “It’s not fair to hold . . . the way you feel about EllaBelle . . . against Buddy. She can’t help what her mother did.” And, “I got out the clothes, with a painful memory in every stitch I had put into every dress. . . . I’m reminded of difficult things when I look at Buddy, . . .” Addie had said. Because Buddy looked like her mother, was the implication. And, “I don’t blame her for the money being gone.” How could she find out what all that meant?
And Grandpa had said, “Sister cried when EllaBelle ran off and married Dan Adams.” Which sister had cried, Addie or Cassie? And why?
Hesitating, Buddy looked around Addie’s room. It was large and sunny and full of shelves of books and pictures and objects Addie had collected over the years. A beautiful pale pink shell. A devotional book, lying flat with a purple ribbon marking a place. Photos, including one of her mother in a graduation cap and gown.
Why was she keeping that, in plain sight, if she felt EllaBelle had done something wrong? Something to hurt her? Was Addie the sister who had cried when EllaBelle had eloped?
There was nothing in the room to suggest that Addie had lived here with a husband, nor that she had retained things from her own girlhood. This was a woman’s room, where Addie lived alone.
What had she said about Uncle Ed? “At least Ed had the decency to die on me.” Did that mean it was a relief that he was gone?
Buddy thought about Gus, and wondered if Cassie would find it a relief if he were to die. Even his own son had expressed the hope that he’d fall and break his neck. Buddy couldn’t imagine thinking anything like that about her father.
And when they had mentioned the fact that Grandpa had sold the store that had supported his family for so many years, they’d said something about cash. A whole bagful of cash, hadn’t Grandpa said that?
If he had a lot of money, why did they have to depend on Uncle Gordon to buy tires for the car, and why weren’t they able to replace the microwave and the remote control? Was it Grandpa’s money Addie had referred to as being gone? If so, what had happened to it?
There was a miniature cedar chest on the far end of the dresser. Buddy reached over and lifted the lid, expecting to see the same kind of odds and ends her mother had kept in one just like it. But there were no souvenirs of high school proms, no pressed flowers, no sentimental notes, no jewelry.
There were folded handkerchiefs, smelling faintly of cedar, and a small blue bank book.
Buddy flipped open the cover and saw that it was an account that had been started many years ago. Addie had put small amounts into it, and taken small amounts out from time to time, and the balance right now was less than one hundred dollars.
Feeling guilty, Buddy closed the lid.
The return envelope from the publishing company lay where she had last seen it. It was still sealed, as if Addie had not been able to bring herself to open it and read the rejection letter it contained.
Of course the photographs and snapshots were what she’d come to look at. She picked up the album, listening to the silence of the house. There was no reason to think she had to hurry. Neither of her aunts would be coming home to surprise her in this room where she had no right to be.
She carried the big book over to sit in the rocking chair at the foot of the bed, and opened it on her lap.
The picture of her father and Addie, taken so long ago, was just as she’d left it earlier. This time she studied it more closely, then turned it over to see what was written on the back. Dan and me, was all it said, Fourth of July.
No date.
Slowly Buddy leafed through the album, as she had done with the one belonging to her mother. There was nothing out of the ordinary about it. Snapshots of a family, three sisters and a brother, with parents and grandparents and an occasional pet mixed in.
It told her nothing except that her father and Addie had been friends. They had had their pictures taken together at least half a dozen times. There was no snapshot of Dan and EllaBelle together.
Somewhere in the house was a sound that brought her upright, heart pounding. She had learned nothing, and now she would feel guilty forever, snooping this way. But how else did a kid find out anything important, without snooping?
She replaced the album where it belonged and went back downstairs, trying to think of an excuse for having gone up there if she got caught. She had no legitimate excuse for being upstairs.
It must have been just the creaking of the old house, she decided. There was no one around. Not even Grandpa’s talking clock marred the silence.
In the kitchen the aroma of corned beef and cabbage drifted from the Crock-Pot. She wondered if they’d keep Gus at the hospital if he did have a more serious injury than Addie had thought, or if she’d have to sit through another of those uncomfortable meals with Max’s father present tonight.
Max came through the back door as she was trying to decide what to do next. She wished Bart would call with an update—had he talked to anyone yet who had seen Dad or his truck? But of course not. He’d let her know when there was any news. He knew how worried she was.
Max was wearing a blue jacket and a baseball cap, and he pulled the kitten out of the jacket front as he entered the house.
“Who mowed the lawn?” he demanded, putting the animal down near his bowl and getting out what was left of the tuna for him. Apparently Scamp didn’t object to pickles and mayonnaise, because he ate greedily.
“I did. The mower is almost like ours at home,” Buddy said, before she remembered that she no longer had a home.
“You tie up the newspapers, too?” He’d noticed the wagon load near the back steps.
“I didn’t know where to take them,” Buddy said.
“Come on, I’ll show you where the recycling place is. It’s just a big bin, behind the grocery store.”
“I’m supposed to be watching over Grandpa,” Buddy said. “He’s taking a nap.”
“He usually sleeps for a couple of hours in the afternoon. Just like a baby,” Max said. “We can be back before he wakes up.”
She wasn’t sure that was the proper way to watch over the old man, but she did want to get back out in the sunshine. “Okay,” she agreed, and was glad Max pulled the wagon and didn’t expect her to do it.
They were on the way back when she finally asked the question that had been on her tongue for some time. Her mouth felt dry, and she didn’t know if he’d answer or not. “They said Grandpa sold his store for a lot of money. Cash, he said. A whole bagful of cash.”
“Yeah, I guess it was thousands of dollars. They were all mad at him for demanding it in cash instead of a check to put in the bank. That way, it probably wouldn’t have disappeared.”
Buddy paused on the sidewalk to take that in. “It disappeared? Don’t they know what happened to it?”
He stared at her in surprise. “Yeah. Didn’t you know? Your mother stole it.”