Everything in the Ingraham house feels like it’s waiting for Blanche to return.
I walk in the next morning, feeling heavy and slow, last night’s failed date with Eddie sitting like a rock low in my stomach. It somehow seems fitting that this should be the day I’d agreed to go over and start packing up some of Blanche’s stuff for Tripp.
Bea’s ghost last night, Blanche’s today.
It’s been months since she went missing, but one of her handbags is still sitting on the table in the foyer. There’s a pile of jewelry there, too, a coiled necklace, a careless pile of rings. I imagine her coming home from a dinner out, taking off all that stuff, tossing it casually against the wide glass base of the lamp, kicking her shoes just under the table.
The pair of pink gingham flats is still lying there, too. It was July when she went missing, and I imagine her wearing them with a matching pink blouse, a pair of white capris. Women here always dress like flowers in the summer, bright splashes of color against the violently green lawns, the blindingly blue sky. It’s so different from how things were back East, where I grew up. There, black was always the chicest color. Here, I think people would wear lavender to a funeral. Poppy-red to a wedding.
I’ve never tried to take anything from Tripp. Trust me, he’d notice.
Unlike Eddie, Tripp has kept all the pictures of Blanche up and in plain sight. I think he might have actually added some. Every available surface seems overcrowded with framed photos.
There are at least five of their wedding day, Blanche smiling and very blond, Tripp looking vaguely like her brother, and nowhere near as paunchy and deflated as he looks now.
He’s sitting in the living room when I come in, a plastic tumbler full of ice and an amber-colored liquid that I’m sure is not iced tea.
It’s 9:23 A.M.
“Hi, Mr. Ingraham,” I call, rattling my keys in my hand just in case he’s forgotten that he gave me a key so that I could let myself in. That was back when he still pretended like he might go into work. I’m not even sure what he does, if I’m honest. I thought he was a lawyer, but maybe I just assumed that because he looked like the type. He doesn’t seem to own any other clothes besides polo shirts and khakis, and there’s golf detritus all over the house—a bag of clubs leaning by the front door, multiple pairs of golfing shoes jumbled in a rattan basket just inside the front door, tees dropped as carelessly as his wife’s jewelry.
Even the cup he’s currently drinking his sad breakfast booze in has some kind of golf club insignia on it.
There’s a photo album spread across his lap and as I step farther into the dim living room, Tripp finally looks up at me, his eyes bleary behind designer glasses.
“Jan,” he says, and I don’t bother to remind him it’s Jane. I’ve already done that a few times, and it never seems to actually penetrate the muck of Woodford Reserve his brain is permanently steeped in.
“You asked me to start on the second guest room today,” I tell him, pointing upstairs, and after a beat, he nods.
I head up there, but my mind isn’t on Tripp and Blanche.
It’s still on Eddie, on our dinner last night. The way he’d just nodded when I had said I’d walk to my car on my own. How we’d hugged awkwardly on the sidewalk, and how quickly he’d walked away from me.
I’d thought—
Fuck, it doesn’t matter. Maybe I’d thought something was happening there, but clearly, I’d been wrong, and the only thing currently happening was that I was heading into the “second guest room” at the Ingrahams’ house to pack up … who knew what.
The bedroom was on the second floor, and it was relatively small, done all in shades of blue and semi-tropical floral patterns. There were boxes and plastic storage containers on the floor, but I had the feeling Tripp hadn’t put them there. He had sisters. Maybe they had come to prepare the room for me to pick up, a sort of pre-cleaning to maintain the fiction that Tripp had his shit together.
Which he decidedly did not.
I’d only been up there ten minutes before I heard him coming.
I think that once in his life, Tripp had probably been a lot like John. Not as pathetic, of course, and blonder, handsomer. Less like something that grew in dark places behind the fridge. But there’s a similar vibe there, like he’d totally eat food with someone else’s name on it, and I bet more than one woman at the University of Alabama had turned around surprised to suddenly find Tripp Ingraham in the doorway, had wondered why someone who looked so innocuous could suddenly feel so scary.
But all the drinking had foiled Tripp on the creeper front. I think he meant to sneak up on me there in the “blue bedroom,” but I could hear his tread coming down the hall even though he was moving slowly, and, I think, trying to be quiet.
Maybe don’t wear golf shoes on hardwood floors, dumbass, I thought to myself, but I was smiling when I turned to face him there in the doorway.
“Is everything okay?” I asked, and his watery hazel eyes widened a little. There was a sour look on his face, probably because I’d ruined whatever it was he’d hoped for. A girlish shriek maybe, me dropping a box and clasping my hands over my mouth, cheeks gone pink.
He would’ve liked that, probably. Tripp Ingraham was, I had no doubt, the kind of asshole who had jerked steering wheels, jumped in elevators, pretended to nearly push girlfriends off high ledges.
I knew the type.
“You can pack up everything in here if you want,” Tripp says, rattling the glass in his plastic cup. “None of this really meant anything to Blanche.”
I can see that. It’s a pretty room, but there’s something hotel-like about it. Like everything in here has been selected for just how it looks, not any kind of personal taste.
I glance over beside the bed, taking in a lamp meant to look like an old-fashioned tin bucket. The shade is printed in a soft blue-and-green floral pattern, and I could swear I’ve seen it before. Wouldn’t surprise me—all the knickknacks in these houses look the same. Except for in Eddie’s house.
It strikes me then that actually, everything in these houses seems to be a pale knockoff of the stuff at Eddie’s, a Xerox machine slowly running out of ink so that everything is a little fainter, a little less distinct.
And then I realize where I’d seen that tin bucket lamp.
“That’s from Southern Manors, isn’t it?” I ask, nodding toward the bedside table. “I was looking at their website the other night, and—”
Tripp cuts me off with a rude noise, then tips the glass to his mouth again. When he lowers it, there’s a drop of bourbon clinging to his scraggly mustache, and he licks it away, the pink flash of his tongue making me grimace.
“No, that lamp was Blanche’s. Think it had been her mom’s or something, picked it up at an estate sale, I don’t know.” He shrugs, belly jiggling under his polo shirt. “Bea Rochester wouldn’t have known an original idea if it bit her in her ass. All that shit, that ‘Southern Manors’ thing. All that was Blanche’s.”
I put down the half-empty box. “What, like she copied Blanche’s style?”
Tripp scoffs at that, walking farther into the room. The tip of his shoe catches an overstuffed trash bag by the door, tearing a tiny hole in it, and I watch as a bit of pink cloth oozes out.
“Copied, stole…” he says, waving the cup at me. “They grew up together, you know. Went to school at the same place, Ivy Ridge. I think they were even roommates.”
Turning back to the stack of books on the bed, I start placing them in the box at my feet. “I heard they were close,” I reply, wondering just how much more info I can get out of Tripp Ingraham. He’s the only one so far who hasn’t talked about Bea like the sun shone directly from her ass, so I wouldn’t mind hearing more of what he has to say. But gossip is tricky, slippery. Pretend to be too interested, and suddenly you look suspicious. Act bored and nonchalant, sometimes the person will clam up totally, but then sometimes they’re like Emily Clark, eager to keep sharing, hoping to find the right worm to bait the hook.
I don’t know what kind Tripp is, but he sits on the corner of the bed, the mattress dipping with his weight.
“Bea Rochester,” he mutters. “Her name was Bertha.”
I look up at that, tucking my hair behind my ear, and he’s watching me, his eyes bleary, but definitely focused on my face.
“Seriously?” I ask, and he nods. His leg is moving up and down restlessly, his hands twisting the now empty cup around and around.
“She changed it when she went to college, apparently. That’s what Blanche said. Came back to Birmingham one day all, ‘Call me Bea.’” He sighs again, that leg still jiggling. “And Blanche did. Never even mentioned her real name to people far as I know.”
Bertha. The same sits heavily on the tongue, and I think back to those pictures I looked at last night, those red lips, that shiny dark hair. She definitely didn’t look like a Bertha, and I couldn’t blame her for wanting to change it.
Plus, it was another thing we had in common, another secret tucked against my chest. I hadn’t been born “Jane,” after all. That other, older name was so far behind me now that whenever I heard it on TV or in a store or on the radio, part of a snatch conversation as I walked by people, I didn’t even flinch or turn my head. I had buried that person somewhere in Arizona, so that name meant nothing to me now.
I was lucky, though. There was no one here who had ever known the other me. Bea Rochester hadn’t had that luxury. What was it like, living right down the street from someone who knew how much you needed to change?
Tripp is still talking, but none of the information is useful now. It’s just a bourbon-fueled stream of grievances, veering back to Blanche, about how he isn’t sure what he’s going to do with all her things.
I hear this at least once every time I’m over here, this idea that he’s suddenly going to toss all of Blanche’s stuff, start fresh, maybe move somewhere smaller, “somewhere near the golf course.”
He won’t do it, though. He’s going to stay right here in this house, which he’ll keep as a kind of shrine to her.
The Rochester house isn’t a shrine.
I think about this as I leave Tripp’s, shutting the door on all that sadness and bitterness. Eddie has just one picture of Bea still, that shot from Hawaii. Does it mean that he’s moving on—or wants to move on, at least?
I think he does.
And then, like I’d conjured him into being, suddenly he’s there, jogging down the sidewalk. He sees me and stops, his dark hair sweaty against his brow.
“Jane.”
“Hi.”
We stand there, me clutching my old purse tightly against my body, Eddie in his expensive running gear, and he puts his hands on his hips, breathing hard.
His chest is broad in his T-shirt that’s wet with sweat, and suddenly I don’t care anymore about last night, or his dead wife, or how many people might be watching us right now.
“Are you working for Tripp?” he asks, a trio of wrinkles appearing in his brow, and I shrug.
“Kind of? I walked his dog for a while, but now I’m mostly helping pack up his wife’s stuff.”
The frown deepens, his fingers digging into his hip bones, and then he says, “I was an asshole last night.”
I shake my head, already denying it, but he holds up one hand. “No, seriously. I used to work with Chris, and him bringing up Bea … it fucking rattled me, and I started thinking it was too soon, or that people might be dicks to you about it, and I just…”
He sighs, and hangs his head briefly. When he looks up at me, his hair is falling over his forehead like a little boy’s, and it’s so charming, so perfect, that my fingers want to smooth it back for him.
“Can I have a take two?” he asks.
Even if he weren’t smiling, even if his eyes weren’t so blue, even if I didn’t want to touch him so badly my jaw ached with it, I would’ve said yes.
I would’ve remembered the smell and closeness of Tripp’s house.
The way Mrs. McLaren looked at me in the village.
Emily Clark’s hard eyes.
Eddie’s house and the way it felt to slide my hand into his at dinner.
Yes.