CHAPTER 5

“I‘m not hungry for dessert,” I said. “Maybe we should just start. I’ll get the ladder.”

“Not so fast,” Brenda said. “Have some pie.” She was stalling, but why, when I was there to help her with a big chore? We weren’t in competition for his things. She’d told me a few times she had no interest in any of it. I thought she’d put me to work right away.

“All right. I’ll have a small piece.” I wasn’t great at mind games. I was usually stupidly guileless. But Brenda was playing at something, and so I’d have to be cunning, too. I’d pretend to get along with her for the weekend, until I collected my stuff, and then I would leave and never look back—just like Susan, who had little interest in the past. I’d be free to live my life then. I’d get out from under his thumb, and out from under Brenda’s, too. I’d stand up to the dark part of him. I’d break my fucking promise. I would not make sure Brenda got the house plus fifty percent of his estate.

I cleared the table and she brought in the dessert. The chocolate-cream pie had freezer burn, but I lied and praised it. I’d pretend to listen to Brenda go on about James, smile and compliment her dinner, admire her earrings. I decided I wasn’t going to let it bother me in the slightest that she hadn’t turned on the air conditioner even though it was still over ninety degrees outside. I’d survive—I had shorts on and a light, loose tank top—and besides, I liked having the windows open, the cicadas blindly banging into the screen. The tropical atmosphere reminded me of the days when Cedar Drive was new and neighbors came outside after dinner to escape the heat. No one even owned an air conditioner then. Susan and I would dart from house to house with the other kids catching lightning bugs while the adults brought chairs onto the front lawn and had coffee there, or on the square of concrete my mother and father jokingly referred to as the East Terrace.

We could hear the roar of bathwater filling a tub through a neighbor’s window, a screen door banging, and the voices of children younger than we were being put to bed. And then it was quiet, nothing but the chirp of crickets and the reflective murmur of our parents’ muted conversation echoing off the creek bank in the velvet night. We were like prairie settlers in those early suburban days, our wagons drawn together until morning when we woke and saw that it was light everywhere, newborn, tender as grass.

“What are you after anyway?” said Brenda between bites of pie. “Most of what your father has is junk.”

“I don’t know, his papers, gardening journals,” I said. I kept my tone flat, not wanting to arouse her contempt. Brenda was the least nostalgic person I could think of. She made Susan look like Proust. “Sure, come back and go through the house and take what you want,” Brenda had said. “But you better do it already, because I’d just as soon haul that junk down to the curb for the garbage man.”

“There could be a manuscript hidden somewhere,” I said.

“What about the letters?” she said. “Are you planning on taking those?”

“Oh right. I can’t forget the letters. My mother would kill me.”

“Your mother? What’s she got to do with it?”

“They’re her letters.” I wasn’t sure what Brenda was up to.

“Evie’s?” said Brenda.

“Yes. Evie’s. The letters he wrote her during the war.”

“Not those,” said Brenda, with a dismissive laugh. “I’m interested in the letters from Caitlyn Callaghan.” Brenda leaned back in her chair, pleased. “Ah, so you don’t know about Caitlyn, do you?”

“I know about Caitlyn. You know I do. I’m just not interested in her letters.” I stabbed at my pie.

“There are a lot of things you don’t know,” Brenda said.

“That’s why I want to go through the stuff,” I said. “He wanted me to. He said he wanted to leave me his books and papers. But I know about Caitlyn.” I put my fork down ready to push my chair away from the table, when Brenda leaned in confidentially.

“Just ask me, dear,” she said. “Your father told me everything.”

I should have been enticed by the offer. But Brenda’s comments about people were unreliable. Even after four years of pillow talk with her husband, I didn’t think she’d have anything of value to say. I was probably wrong, she probably knew things, but I didn’t see it. I thought he should have married Darleen. She was easier to get along with than Brenda. I would have felt weird being two years older than my stepmother—Darleen was only eighteen when she walked barefooted into his community-college class. But Darleen won me over when she said she saw my father in me, that I made her laugh because of it—something about the way I spoke, not with a masculine gravel voice, of course, but the phrasing we used and how we both blinked when we were thinking, and how our long arms were all elbows when we talked with our hands.

When I was little, I got upset when anyone said my father and I were alike. It felt false. They had to be making fun of me. “Look at her, a chip off the old block,” my father would say. Then he and my mother laughed because everyone knew a girl couldn’t be a chip. I was a fraud. They called me a chip because of trivial things. We both liked soup and sucking marrow out of bones. The examples were silly. Over the years, a few similarities surfaced that couldn’t be snickered at and I started to hope there was something to it, that it wasn’t all a joke, because I very much wanted to be like my father. Both of us liked watching the sky, noting cloud formations and constellations. That wasn’t a joke. We were both good at drawing and fixing gadgets. The things that annoyed him were the same things that annoyed me, such as people asking if you liked the movie when you were still walking slowly backward away from the screen with the credits rolling. We both loved trees and when the seasons changed, for both of us it was as if the leaves were growing out of our bodies in spring and dying on our limbs in autumn.

But his disappointment in me overshadowed everything else. He looked at girls and saw sex. He saw weakness. He started to teach me to play chess, to set paving stones in the ground, to lay out a newspaper like the Collegian boys did, but with me he stopped halfway, he never followed through. I was left knowing how much I didn’t know. Boys are smarter, he said.

“He’s mad at his mother,” said my mother.

“Look around,” he said. “There are no great women chefs. No great women chess players, no great women composers.”

Why say that to his daughters? Could he be in competition with his own children? We were girls in a man’s world. He was God. He couldn’t be insecure.

“He’s mad at his mother,” my mother said.

“So you’re going through all that crap tonight?” said Brenda.

“Tonight and tomorrow. If I don’t finish, I’ll load the boxes into the car and sort through them when I get home.” By home, I meant my mother’s apartment. I tried to sound unconcerned, but I still felt anxious about the job. I cleared the table and half-heartedly offered to do the dishes. Brenda said she’d clean up, so I went out to the carport to get the ladder from the utility room. I’d start with the attic, really just a crawl space above the hallway. I had a portfolio of my drawings from high school stored up there. I held the screen door open with my hip and tipped the ladder under the doorframe. I was hoping Brenda would keep her back to me at the sink so I could slip by without comment, but it was impossible to bring the ladder into the house without rattling the door. I was careful not to bang the walls, though, walls that were now Brenda’s.

She came after me, drying her hands on her apron. “You’re not setting that thing up now,” Brenda said. “Get that ladder out of here.”

“But a lot of my stuff’s in the attic.”

“It’s late,” Brenda said. “You should have gotten here sooner.”

“You asked me to come for dinner.”

“I’m going to bed, and I don’t want you touching anything without me.”

“Hold the door open then.” I held the ladder horizontal, backed out again and left the ladder leaning against the carport trellis. I came inside. I’d go up into the attic in the morning. Brenda left sheets and a blanket on the sofa and I made up my bed, although I had no intention of going to sleep at eight-thirty. I figured I would read until she turned off her light and then I’d quietly start working in the den. I’d forgotten to bring a book, but I noticed my copy of Time and Again by Jack Finney on a shelf. I had finished the novel over the winter, but I wanted to go back to the passage when he first time travels to 1880s New York. My mind started to wander and the pages fluttered and the book dropped onto the carpet. I ignored it, staring into space, running my hand over the round top of the little three-legged table next to the sofa. The table legs were carved to look like elephant trunks, with little ivory tusks glued on. It was an anniversary present, hand-carried from India, my mother never failed to mention, by Eddie Zakian, a poet they knew when they lived in the Village.

“You want that table?”

I looked up. Brenda was watching me trace my finger over the ivory Taj Mahal. “Yes, I’ve always wanted this,” I said. “My parents’ friend brought it back from Delhi.”

“I’m sorry to burst your bubble, Joanna,” Brenda said. “But your parents’ friend brought them a cheap piece of tourist junk.”

My mouth dropped open. I was startled by the hostility, and also the truth of her remark. No one I knew growing up had anything like the Indian table with the elephant-trunk legs in their living room. Now that Brenda called it cheap tourist junk, though, I easily pictured stacks of them at Pier One. I drew my hand away from the tabletop. Elephants were destroyed for the ivory inlay. I’d be better off denying any connection to the tainted piece of furniture. But I was loyal to the past. “It’s not junk,” I said.