AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He spoke before I could, clearing his throat. “Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said.
“You mean just now or at my house this morning?” I said. It was meant to be a joke, but came out sounding peevish, and I winced.
“Your house,” he repeated, the corners of his mouth drawing upward—and if I didn’t like Jack Dyer’s scowl, I liked his smile even less. “Your house,” he said again. “Well, I guess it is. Since you live there. You know, I used to live there, too.”
“You?”
“Ayuh. Long time ago. Never thought of it as my house, though.”
I blinked, feeling stupid. Of course: Shelly had been the live-in housekeeper. With no husband and nowhere else to go, of course she would’ve stayed on—first pregnant, then with her baby.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize.”
“Your granny, she never mentioned it? Never talks about my mother?”
“Not really. There’s a lot she doesn’t remember anymore.”
“Ah,” he said. “Well, my ma sure remembers her.”
“Does she?”
“Sure does. She’s got some stories. Not that she’s telling them now. Ma had a stroke a while back. She can’t talk no more. I’ve been taking care of her.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “That sounds rough.”
“It is what it is. We didn’t have the kind of money to put her in a nice place like your granny.” He paused. “Or take her out of it, nurse and all.”
I couldn’t sayI’m sorryagain, even if I wanted to—and I didn’t. I thought that Jack Dyer had some nerve, to be so ungracious about Mimi when she was the one who’d given his pregnant unwed mother a roof over her head, a job, another chance despite the scandal. I gestured toward the door. “They’re waiting in the car for me. I’d better get what I came for and go.”
“And what did you come for, missy?”
Accompanied by Jack Dyer’s fierce stare, the words felt like an accusation. I glanced around until my gaze settled on the chalkboard with the candy-cane lettering. “Cranberry holiday cake. You know, uh, for the holiday. Merry Christmas,” I added lamely, and turned away. He didn’t sayMerry Christmasback—didn’t say anything at all, just stood there—and I avoided looking at him as I paid for the cake and left. I hadn’t noticed his truck as I walked in, but I saw it now, parked on the opposite side of the lot almost directly behind us. There was an old woman with long gray hair sitting in the front seat; even through the grimy windshield, I could see that one side of Shelly Dyer’s face was slack, her mouth pulling down at one corner. As I watched, her hands came up in front of her face, holding something—like a child playing peekaboo, I thought, but she wasn’t playing. The object in front of her face was a tablet, and she was pointing its camera at me. She was taking my picture. I thought of waving, then heard Jack Dyer’s bitter voice in my head—my ma sure remembers her—and thought better of it. I also thought instinctively that I would not mention any of this while Mimi was in earshot.
“Success,” I said cheerfully, brandishing the cake as I climbed into the back seat. The scent of sugar and cinnamon wafted under my nose.
Adam looked back, smacking his lips exaggeratedly. “Oh wow, that’s something. Looks delicious. Doesn’t it, Miriam?”
My grandmother turned her head, but not to look. Her eyes were closed and her expression was dreamy. She inhaled deeply and smiled. “Oh, darling,” she said. “It’s so wonderful.”
In three days, she would be dead.
9.
1947
Autumn
She is eighteen, and the state is about to burn.
It’s the first year that she’s stayed long enough to see the little seaside village empty out at the end of the summer season—and to see her breath in the air in the morning, weeks later, as the trees began to blaze with autumn color. A change of seasons, and a change of scenery. For the first time, the Day family has come from Egg Harbor to the Whispers with no plan to leave.
At Edward’s funeral, the minister had read from Ecclesiastes: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.” Miriam could hardly concentrate on the words then as she clutched the hand of her brother’s wife—the sweet young woman who had looked so beautiful all those summers past, dancing and laughing in a dress of cream-colored silk, now draped in black, a pale and hollow-eyed widow at twenty-three.But she feels the weight of them now. They echo in her head as she stares out the window at the changing landscape, while Edward’s little white dog, Patches, sleeps curled in a ball at her feet. She feels a kinship with the dog: both of them were planted in one place, now plucked up and set back down in lives that bear no resemblance to the ones they’d had. She also envies Patches, who doesn’t seem to mind at all that his family situation has changed, just so long as he has one. Dwelling on the past is strictly a human concern.
For Miriam, the past feels like another life—and the future, a question with no answer. Before Edward’s death, there had been talk of going abroad with her mother after school was finished, but nobody would think of leaving Papa at home now. Her school friends, who hugged her so tightly at their graduation parties and promised to write often, promptly disappeared into a whirlwind of college studies and travel and engagements that she finds out about from reading the newspaper rather than from their letters. Moving on with their lives while Miriam treads water, unsure and stuck in place.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.
This summer had been full of mourning and not much else. Papa always said he’d retire and live out his remaining days at the seaside, and Miriam used to imagine that he’d spend years that way, a king in his castle, holding court in his favorite chair with a book and a glass of his very best scotch. Now she sometimes looks at her father and thinks, with quiet despair, that he’s disappearing before her eyes. The formidable Roland Day is diminished, shrunken by grief, and the high back of his favorite chair looms over his hunched shoulders. The legendary parties where he entertained dozens of guests are a distant memory. The house has had only one visitor all summer, and he’s no guest; he’s more like part of the furniture, a coarse man of thirty or so whom Papa calls “my young friend from the old days.” Mother calls him “that man.” And the man in question calls himself Charles Smith, but Miriam noticed the first day how he and Father paused and exchanged looks before he introduced himself, which almostcertainly means that his real name is something else—that he used to be someone else.
