“Well, when I’m done with my coffee, I’m going up to the attic. Ivy said Sylvia stored a couple of containers up there and I want to look through them.”
Zoey was taken aback. Sylvia had diffidently shown her and Jessica the contents of the trunks once or twice when they were girls but Mark had never demonstrated any interest in her keepsakes.Kitsch, he called them. Most of the knickknacks she’d put into storage in the attic weren’t worth more than fifty dollars apiece, but they held a wealth of sentimental value to her. It seemed odd that he’d taken a sudden interest in his grandmother’s favorite doilies, bric-a-brac and the dress she’d worn when she got married.
Or was he hoping to find something else, something more valuable. Like… what? Mark knew that Sylvia had given her wedding ring to his father so he could use it when he proposed to Mark’s mother. After Mark’s mother died, his father sold the ring and used the money to buy a new one for his second wife. Zoey tried to imagine what else Mark may have been looking for, but she drew a complete blank. And it wasn’t as if she could have asked him about it outright; while Mark had no problem drilling others, if someone asked him a question he didn’t want to answer, he accused them of interrogating him.
So she squelched her curiosity, and at the risk of offending him by pointing out what he should have thought of by himself, she asked, “Could you please wait until after Aunt Ivy and Gabi get up from their naps? Otherwise they’ll hear you tromping around overhead and they won’t be able to sleep.”
“I didn’t plan ontromping,but whatever. I’ll come back this afternoon.” Clearly insulted, he left his cup on the table and headed out the door.
Couldn’t he have at least brought this to the sink?Zoey thought as she lifted the cup and wiped the wet ring beneath it.I’m not his personal servant.
As with other things Mark sometimes said or did that irked Zoey, this trivial gesture wasn’t particularly offensive in itself. But it bothered her because it reflected his deep-seated sense of entitlement. Or maybe it reflected what Zoey’s father had referred to as “poor training.” Which was his way of saying that Mark’s parents hadn’t taught him how to be responsible for himself and considerate toward others. And as much as it pained Zoey to admit it, because she loved her great-aunts dearly, they had spoiled him rotten, too.
While she poured the rest of Mark’s coffee down the drain and washed his cup, Zoey recalled that when her family used to come to Sylvia and Ivy’s house for their annual two-week vacation, Mark was usually already there. His mother had died when he was seven and although his father remarried six months later, neither he nor Mark’s stepmother seemed to know what to do with him when school wasn’t in session. So, they’d ship him off to visit Sylvia and Ivy. In retrospect, Zoey realized it must have been upsetting for the young boy to know his parents essentially didn’t want him around. But at the time, she resented how self-centered and lazy he was.
Zoey and Jessica’s parents had always expected them to pick up after themselves, as well as participate in chores that benefitted everyone else. But Mark refused to clear the table or take out the trash. He wouldn’t help load beach chairs into the car’s trunk. He never even dashed through the house closing the windows when it rained or took a turn filling the basin everyone used to rinse the sand off their feet before entering the house. What was really maddening to Zoey was that her aunts hadn’t seemed to mind, especially Sylvia.
“It’s not fair,” she’d once complained to her mother as a child. “Can’t you tell him to take out the garbage tonight?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because what Mark does or doesn’t do is between him and his grandmother and great-aunt. And how your cousin behaves shouldn’t have any bearing on howyoubehave. You should help your aunties because you love and appreciate them and because it’s the responsible thing to do,” her mother had lectured her. “But if you really feel it’s such a hardship to set the table or dry the dishes while we’re here, just let me know and next year we don’t have to come back.”
Zoey smiled, remembering how effectively her mother’s threat had shut down her adolescent grievance. Years later, her mom admitted that Ivy and Sylvia had mollycoddled Mark’s father, too. But by then, Zoey had learned a lot more about Ivy and Sylvia’s history through the stories they’d shared, as well as secrets her mother confided, and she’d come to understand why they may have indulged “the boys.”
So, Zoey’s cousin had grown into a man who still expected his grandmother Sylvia—and more notably, Ivy, since she was the wealthy one—to cater to him. Not just in little ways, like getting up earlier than usual to make him breakfast because he had a craving for buttermilk pancakes. Oh, no. They babied him on a much bigger scale; like buying his first car and then paying for his speeding tickets. Giving him the down payment for a house he moved out of after less than a year. Compensating his attorney the first time he divorced. They even settled his gambling debts—and those were just the things Zoey knew about. It was safe to say there was no financial crisis or legal jam Mark got into that Sylvia and Ivy didn’t get him out of. According to Zoey’s mother, they had done the same kind of things for his father, too.
Although Jessica and Zoey had many private discussions about Mark exploiting their aunts, Zoey had followed her mother’s example and held her tongue about it in front of everyone else. It wasn’t her money or her relationship, so it wasn’t her business. As she matured, she came to the realization that if she had asked them to, her aunts would have helped her just as much as they’d helped Mark. But that was the difference between the two cousins; Zoey never would have expected Ivy or Sylvia to rescue her, especially not from a mess she’d made herself.Like allowing Erik to deplete my life savings, she thought ruefully.
But dwelling on her regret was a poor use of her time. With the funeral behind them, Zoey needed to resume her job search. After putting away the last dish, she decided to follow up on a few leads she’d researched earlier in the month. She tiptoed upstairs to get her laptop, stopping to peek in on Ivy and make sure she was actually napping and not weeping.
Downstairs again, she went into the living room, or the “keeping” room, as it was originally known. When the house was built in the early 1800s, the room was intended to “keep” family members warm. It was right next to the kitchen, where the woodburning stove provided a major source of heat, and contained a fireplace of its own, as well as a small beehive oven for baking bread.
Of course, keeping warm wasn’t a challenge any more; over the years the house had been modernized to include a heating system, as well as electricity and a landline for the only kind of phone Ivy ever used. The servants’ cramped quarters, both upstairs and down, had also been converted into bathrooms with functional plumbing long ago. The kitchen had been remodelled in the late seventies, but otherwise, except for essential updates and the occasional fresh coat of paint, Ivy declined to make many superficial changes to the rest of the house’s interior, including to its original wide-plank floors and simple but elegant molding and chair rails. Nor did she replace her numerous antique tables, chairs, lamps and mirrors because, as she said, they were tangible reminders of her family’s history.
She was especially fond of the “best parlor” or “best room,” which was still solely used for its originally intended purpose of entertaining guests on special occasions. It also housed numerous Winslow family heirlooms in two floor-to-ceiling built-in china cabinets. The best parlor’s décor had virtually remained unchanged, for better and for worse, for at least the past seventy years. Ivy treasured the room so much that not even Moby was allowed to tread across its threshold without explicit permission from her, and most of the time, the door was kept shut.
Zoey preferred the living room anyway, where she could settle into an antique mahogany lady’s writing desk in front of one of the windows facing the harbor. She opened her laptop to type an email inquiry, but the room was so warm and her stomach was so full of pancakes that she lowered the lid again. Crossing her arms, she rested them on her laptop and put her head down.Just for a minute…
Zoey woke to the muffled pitter-patter of Moby slinking across the floor behind her. But when she turned, she discovered it was her niece who had entered the room. The teenager yawned and gracefully folded her legs behind the coffee table as she took a seat on the sofa. Getting up to join her there, Zoey resisted the urge to tell her again how much she looked like Jessica.
“Did you have a good rest?”
“Yeah. Except when I woke up I couldn’t figure out where I was.” Gabi pushed her bangs out of her eyes and pointed to the dome-shaped, brick opening in the wall to the right of the Rumford-style fireplace. “I used to be scared to walk past the beehive oven. I thought bees really lived in there.”
Zoey chuckled, happy that her niece was starting to remember more about being here.
“Hey.” Mark had come in without her hearing him. He plunked himself into an armchair across from them, causing the antimacassar to slide off the back of the headrest. “What were you two laughing about?”
When Zoey told him, Mark said to Gabi, “That’s not so silly—Zoey used to be afraid of the dentil molding.”
Zoey had forgotten all about that and she was surprised her cousin remembered. “I wasn’tafraidof it. I wasdisgustedby it.”
“What’s dentil molding?” Gabi asked.
“It’s the kind of wood trim in the best parlor.” Zoey gestured to the edge of the ceiling opposite them. “But it’s not as plain as this crown molding is. Dentil molding was considered very ornate and at the time, it was expensive. So the original homeowner could only afford to put it in one room, the best one.”
