Julie was happy that school was ending in a few days. She’d be able to concentrate on getting her money together for the house, talk to the benefits people at school about her retirement account, and oversee Mandy’s progress. And then there was the weather. The grounds and facilities at Crawford School were famously beautiful, but the buildings were not much better air-conditioned than her own house. David hadn’t complained, but the Cabinet Room was especially problematic. It would be wrong to seal off its one window with an air-conditioning unit, and the room was so tiny, it would get too cold too quickly anyway. David had bought a vintage fan for the night table and claimed it was comfortable. She had AC in her own window, but in solidarity, she’d decided not to use it.
She’d opened all the other windows and was lying on her bed, trying to catch an early-evening breeze as the tide was turning. She was tempted to go out to the backyard and take a hit of pot. That always made the heat seem tropical and languid instead of insufferable and polluted, and the sky outside her window was a majestic blend of magenta and ocher. But that would mean walking down two flights of stairs and then climbing back up, and she didn’t have the energy for that.
As she was driving home from work, she’d made a stop in Essex and dropped off the box of her mother’s jewelry with a woman who ran estate sales. Julie had met Pamela Kern a dozen or more times at sales she was running in nearby towns, and they’d struck up a friendship, albeit one that had proved to be site-specific. The time they’d met for dinner had been awkward; Pamela was a picky eater with multiple food intolerances and allergies that she seemed, based on her behavior, to blame on the waitstaff. She’d made an ambiguously derogatory comment about Elizabeth Warren and had given Julie the name of a man who came to your house to detail-clean your car. So much for a friendship.
But she had integrity about her work and knew every dealer in furniture, jewelry, rare books, and ephemera in New England. As Julie opened the lined box for her, she felt as if she was displaying buried treasure. A trace of her mother’s perfume (“Jicky by Guerlain, dear, the first modern perfume. Cheap scent is for amateurs”) wafted into the room, so faint more than a decade after her death, Pamela might not have noticed it, but to Julie it was instantly recognizable. She felt as if her mother had caught her doing the one thing she’d promised her she would never do.
Julie didn’t wear jewelry (or perfume, cheap or otherwise) and found these rings and diamond watches and encrusted broaches gaudy and even embarrassing. They recalled her mother’s fondness for status and her attention to style, things Julie had rejected early on. Her mother had worn these to faculty parties and when she spoke at academic conferences, all to make sure no one mistook her for another dowdy professor. Some of the pieces her mother had inherited looked almost Victorian in their ornate opulence, but most of the bracelets and rings her father had bought were sleek, influenced by the Art Deco design aesthetic her mother had worshipped, even though her subject was Renaissance poetry.
Pamela had held up a silver pendant covered in stones that somehow evoked both New York in the 1930s and Tamara de Lempicka’s Paris and eyed it lustfully. “This jewelry is wonderful. Are you sure you want to part with it?”
“It took me a lot longer to bring the stuff in than I thought it would, but now I’m sure.”
“It’s hard because you loved her so much.” Pamela nodded, no doubt having been through all this before with many other people.
“No,” Julie said. “Because I didn’t. I promised her I’d never sell it, and because we didn’t like each other all that much, I know she wouldn’t forgive me. But I’ve hit a few speed bumps I didn’t foresee. When it comes to things I want to hang on to, this is low on the list.”
Pamela looked at her pointedly. “What’s high on the list?”
“My daughter and my house.”
Pamela had cataloged everything, given Julie a receipt, and promised she’d have an estimate for her. “Probably in a couple of weeks,” she said. “Three at the most. I’ll get multiple estimates from a range of specialists. It will take a while to authenticate some of it.”
Julie had been hoping to hear sooner than that, but it was important not to seem desperate, especially when you were. “Any guesses on value?”
Pamela had winked in a way that seemed carefully rehearsed. “I’ve learned to never guess.”
The one saving grace of the day was that a few minutes earlier, she’d received a text message from Raymond Cross, her clarinetist, as Amira would say, even though he wasn’t hers and didn’t play the clarinet. Hope it’s cooler by the ocean than it is here. That had been all, but it had been enough to lift her spirits. Briefly.
She heard footsteps on the stairs and David appeared in her doorway, smiling in that way he often did—not to express his own happiness, she’d come to realize, so much as to encourage hers.
He entered the room and sat on the foot of her bed. “It’s warm up here,” he said. “Why don’t you turn on the air conditioner?”
“I don’t like it all that much. It’s like sleeping in a refrigerator, when you think about it. You should use it for your room.”
“I’m happy with the fan.”
“I’ll take you at your word,” she said. “Even though I don’t believe you. I got a call from the older woman who’s coming for a few weeks. She’s arriving tonight, and she asked if she could get a cab at the train station. I told her I’d pick her up. Hold dinner until I get back?”
“Unless you’re planning to charge her, I wouldn’t admit to Sandra you’re offering shuttle service now. Want me to come with you, in case she turns out to be a killer?”
“I’d love that. A little welcoming committee. I feel bad for her, and I have no idea why. Today was the first time we actually spoke.”
“Speaking of train stations…” David showed her the paperback book he’d been holding against his leg. “I started rereading it.” He opened to the first page and read aloud the first loopy sentence.
“‘Brisk feet!’” Julie cried.
“Exactly,” David said. “I had the same reaction.”
“I missed Lucia,” she said. “She’s so horrible and endearing. Where did you get it?”
“Mandy has been reading them. She put this on my bed. A small, sweet thing to have done.”
Julie was mortified to learn that she’d missed this about Mandy. It made her wonder what else she was missing, for surely there had to be something.
“Read on,” Julie said.
By the end of the second page, he’d stretched himself out at the opposite end of the bed with his free hand casually massaging her foot. The cozy, hilariously nasty world of the novel was just as it had been when they’d left it thirty years ago, just as it had been when it was written. Reentering it now made Julie immensely happy, even if more aware of how much had changed in her own life. When, after ten minutes, he stopped, she asked him to please read to the end of the chapter. She knew something amusing was going to happen with the guru, but she couldn’t remember what, and David’s voice had lulled her into the happy dream world of the past—both the characters’ and theirs.
“We can get to it later,” he said. “I came up to ask a favor. And don’t say no or yes before you give it some thought.”
She studied his face for a moment. He had an eager look, and she knew that what he was about to ask wasn’t so much a favor as permission to do her one.
“I need to be out of San Francisco for a little longer than I thought. It’s all about the place I’m living. If I could stay here for an extra week or two, it would be a big help to me.”
What he meant, obviously, was that it would be a big help to her. If his place was being sold, he’d be better off there, looking for somewhere else to live. Still, he’d been in Beauport four days, and she hated thinking that his time with them was running out already.
“I’d only agree if you move upstairs to a bigger room when one opens up,” she said.
“Out of the question. I love that room, and since I’ve spent the last thirty-six hours fixing it up, there’s no way I’d move. Do we have a deal?”
“As long as you don’t try to pay.”
“I don’t like the room that much, believe me.”
She felt her back starting to sweat. The longer he stayed in Beauport, the more likely it was that “things would come up,” and more specifically, one thing.
“I know you’re staying partly because you feel bad about everything that happened all those years ago,” she said. “But we both made mistakes.”
“I know that,” he said.
No, she thought. Not really.
He got up off the bed and turned on the air conditioner. “And you don’t have to leave this off just because I don’t have one in my room. And don’t look so surprised—I know you better than you think.”
But she knew that that wasn’t true either.