“Anything left?” Dora cleared her throat and took up a paper napkin to swipe hard at her nose once Ed Warner was gone. “Any of the books survive?”
“War and Peace,” Jenny said. “It got buried under Fifty Shades of Grey.”
“Ah, at last, a use for that particular book.”
“I thought you didn’t allow porn,” Jenny teased.
Dora colored up. “Ladies asked for it. Curious, you know.”
“Did you read the book?” Zoe asked.
“Well, I had to, didn’t I?”
Dora tipped her head and stuck out her bottom lip, daring either of them to smile.
“I’m taking this one home.” Zoe held up the copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson she’d put on the chair, tucked under her. “I’ll dry her out.”
“I think A Full and Complete History of Bear Falls, Michigan looked kind of okay.” Jenny searched her brain for something more to offer.
“Wouldn’t you know it?” Dora snorted and threw up her hands. “Priscilla Manus, president of the Bear Falls Historical Society, wrote it. She’s over here every week checking to make sure somebody takes out her book. She’ll probably donate another one, or two, or three, even if we don’t need them. She’s been bedeviling Zoe ever since she moved here to help with a reissue of the book. Probably be after you, too. If you stay long. And I hope you will.”
Dora drew a cautious breath. “I don’t suppose my mother’s Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales made it? It was out there yesterday morning. So it’s probably gone.”
Jenny looked to Zoe for support, then shook her head. She didn’t tell her it was one of the worst off of the books, every page ripped out, only the stained board covers left.
“How your grandmother loved those stories. I read them to you when you were little, remember? You and Lisa? You hated the stag beetle for betraying Thumbelina. And how Lisa loved the old field mouse. I’d hoped to pass that book down to a grandchild.” She sighed. “If one of you girls ever felt like having a baby, that is.”
She shook her head vigorously. “All my fault. I shouldn’t have given that book to anyone. Millie Sheraton’s girl came to the door and asked if I had a fairy tale book and I couldn’t bear to say no. After that, I put the book in the box just in case another child needed a dose of fairy tales.”
“Nobody’s fault, Mom. Unless you count the person who took an axe to the box.”
“Oh, yes it is. Look what I’ve done. Think of my poor future grandchildren. Oh my.”
Jenny smiled and didn’t think of her poor babies since there weren’t going to be any.
Dora put a hand up to finger her toilet paper curlers. “And the others . . . Oh dear, let me think. People have been so generous, leaving their books in my care, and look what’s happened! No one will ever trust me again!”
Dora wiped at her eyes. “Ed said a hit-and-run, didn’t he? I saw him backpedal, but that’s what he said. Just the way Jim died. Terrible to think about. Like having a curse on us. Oh dear, oh dear. If Jim knew about this, he’d be so disappointed.”
Jenny took her mother’s hand in hers. It was a nervous, flighty hand that couldn’t stay still until the teakettle whistled. Dora made a move to get up to make a fresh pot of tea, but Jenny stopped her.
“I’ll get it,” Jenny said, hoping to show she could take over a lot of things now that she was home. Maybe she could even find a way back to who she once was in this house, where she didn’t seem to fit now and where a tiny neighbor was more at home than she.
Sipping her fresh tea, Dora leaned back and sighed. With the morning light behind her, Jenny couldn’t help but think what a pretty woman her mom still was at sixty-three. Lisa looked a lot like her, but on Mom the blonde was going to gray. The bright-blue eyes were fading, wrinkling only enough to make her interesting. Dora was aging, but in a kind way. Her half smile was still enchanting. A sturdy-bodied woman, not fat, not thin. Motherly, Jenny thought, and laughed at herself. That word had so many meanings. Not endearing when Jenny was a teenager and Dora had put her foot down about slipping grades. Not endearing when the principal called, reporting that Jenny was in another fight. But charming again, yes—Jenny had to smile. She thought of how Dora had bit her lip and said nothing all through Jenny’s pretentious wedding to Ronald Korman.
Warm and kind and welcoming when Jenny needed her now.
“I hope Adam didn’t do it, Zoe. Truly,” Dora said. “Man’s had so much of his own trouble, seems he’d think twice before making trouble for somebody else. That father, Joshua Cane. Awful man. Jim and I heard about him from the first moment we moved to Bear Falls.”
She shook her head. “We saw him from time to time. Never spoke to him. People warned us not to. A big man. He had one of those plastered-down comb-overs, looked like a small plowed field on his head. And what a strut! That strut alone, fancy cane swinging beside him, was enough to keep people out of his way. I don’t think he forgot, not even for a second, that he was worth millions. From what I heard, he left all of it to Abigail. Nothing to the boys.”
Dora was unhappy. “I don’t really like talking about the dead. They can’t defend themselves—but dead or alive, Joshua Cane was a terrible person.”
Dora looked as if she was trapped someplace in her memory. “And what a funeral. That was in 2006.”
She put her teacup to her lips and held it there. “Big affair. Lots of dignitaries came to town. I think the governor was here. The police chief we had then called in other police from Traverse City to help with crowd control. He’s got a big monument in the cemetery in Acme—too important for Bear Falls, you understand. You know how rich people get lauded, at least until the grave is closed.”
“Poor Adam Cane,” Zoe sighed. “Just another ‘wasp in a wig,’ in my opinion.”
“Geez, Zoe.” Jenny gritted her teeth. “Not now.”
“Well, it’s true. Alice Through the Looking Glass. You won’t remember because the illustrator took the wasp right out of the book. Poor man didn’t know how to draw a wasp in a wig. The manuscript was only recently found so, of course, I’m featuring it in my new book. The story went that the poor wasp was bedeviled into shaving the beautiful ringlets from his head and wearing an awful yellow wig. Now that’s just the way Adam and Aaron listened to their friends and became hippies, is what I heard.”
“I’m not sure that’s the way it went.” Dora looked disturbed.
“They looked down on money. Scourge of the earth to them. That’s what hippies thought.” Zoe lifted her chin higher to better see their faces. “But then the wasp’s friends didn’t like him anymore. He couldn’t grow back his ringlets and had to wear the yellow wig, which cost him everything and left him a disgruntled old ‘wasp in a wig.’ Just like Adam Cane.”
“I don’t quite see what you mean.” Dora looked puzzled.
“Oh, Mom. Why bother to . . .” Jenny groaned. “This is the one who smells trouble coming. Literally.”
Zoe looked off, ignoring Jenny. “You see, when the brothers could’ve used the money to take them into their old age, they didn’t have it. Lost it all because of what they’d become. They followed their friends. Isn’t that right, Dora?”
Dora nodded slowly.
“Anyway, with no money, they were forced to work at menial jobs around town. That’s what I heard. People didn’t respect them. All those hippie friends were gone.”
Dora turned abruptly to Zoe. “I see what you’re saying now, about ‘The Wasp in the Wig.’”
Zoe nodded gravely and intoned,
So now that I am old and grey,
And all my hair is nearly gone,
They take my wig from me and say
“How can you put such rubbish on?”
And still, whenever I appear,
They hoot at me and call me “Pig!”
And that is why they do it, dear,
Because I wear a yellow wig.
“You’re a piece of work, Zoe.” Jenny was so flummoxed by the woman at this point, she didn’t know up from down.
This certainly wasn’t the homecoming she’d expected. Certainly not this Zoe Zola, puffed up and drinking her tea with a tiny pinky stuck up in the air. A woman who sniffed the air and made predictions. Nor a sleeping one-eyed dog under the chair, snorting from time to time and pedaling her paws as fast as she could go.
If the Hatter leaped through the window yelling, “Clean cup,” she would simply get up and move.