Rosalie was very quiet. “Why would he do that?”
“He told me it wasn’t anything important, so I sold it to him for fifty dollars.”
She sat back in her seat and put her hand to her stomach. “Oh, no! Oh no, I’m so sorry, I wish I had thought to get in touch with you directly. Oh, why didn’t I do that? I feel awful. Can I help you get it back?”
“As a matter of fact, I have it back.” Laurie slowed down here, because this story was much more enjoyable to tell: Rocky, the closet, her brother, the parking lot of the church, and the fact that her duck was now safe and sound in Dot’s living room.
“And you haven’t heard anything else from Matt?”
“Not yet,” she said. “He has a problem, right? If he comes to me and he’s mad about it, he has to admit that he scammed me—he wouldn’t be mad about something that’s worth fifty bucks. He also probably doesn’t have any way of proving exactly what happened, although I’m sure he’s going to put together that I have it at some point.”
“Well,” Rosalie said, “I can honestly tell you it gives me a lot of comfort to know it’s back with you. I know my grandfather cared about Dot very much. It might seem like a small thing, I guess, giving a gift to someone you couldn’t give a lot else to, but for what it’s worth, I think they had a lot of happy times, in spite of how complicated it was.”
“She kept it for, what, almost fifty years?” Laurie thought about what this meant, that Dot had been keeping this safe for ten years by the time she herself was born. “I think it’s safe to say it meant a lot to her. Maybe the fact that she never told anybody about it or gave anybody any idea she had it or knew him, at least as far as I know, tells you how important it was. And what do I know? Maybe she told her friends. Maybe she told her sister. But they’re all gone. The people she knew then, the people in her Polaroids from that year, they’re gone, or at least I’m not going to find them.”
“I wonder who took the picture,” Rosalie said. “The picture of the two of them together with the duck. They looked comfortable together. I’m sorry I don’t have it to show you, but they really did. They looked happy. So they knew someone. Someone knew them. They had a friend together.”
Laurie nodded, and she suddenly had a thought that landed on her like a weighted blanket: heavy, but almost comforting. “I’m never going to know,” she said. “I’m never going to know this whole story. He’s gone and she’s gone, and most of the story is gone. The story is over. He gave it to her, but I’m not going to figure it out beyond that.”
She smiled. “It wouldn’t even matter if they weren’t gone, though. The default is forgetting, not remembering, isn’t it? You’ve forgotten more about your own life than you remember. I have, too. I look at those pots in the front hall sometimes, those pots that some wonderful kid I love put in my hands and wanted me to have. And every one of them, I wrapped up and brought home and put there myself. I am certain I thought about that kid when I put that pot or that ashtray or that vase on my table. But now? I don’t remember exactly who made what anymore.”
“Why do you keep them, then?”
She shrugged. “Oh, even if I don’t know which is which, they’re my only hard proof that there’s any reason for me to have been overworked and underpaid for the last thirty years. I don’t have to know which pot came from which kid, you know? All the pots came from all the kids.”
Laurie nodded. “I’m a reporter. I have a hard time leaving things unresolved.”
“I’m an artist,” Rosalie said. “I do, too.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
When Laurie got back to Dot’s, she drew a bath—you can do anything in the middle of the day when you work for yourself—and she climbed in with a big glass of white wine. She filled the tub until the suds were threatening to spill over the sides, and she lay back and let her neck rest on the cold porcelain.
It was an affair, maybe. It was a tragedy, maybe. It was lovely, maybe. There was nothing to know. He made Dot a duck, and he gave it to her, and she put it in the bottom of a wooden chest, and it was still there when she went to China, when she saw Avenue Q, when she traveled to Patrick’s wedding, and when she lay dying in the hospital. It was still there when Laurie said she would see to the house, and it was still there when Laurie started on that bedroom and opened the chest and wondered what was under all those blankets.