“My dad had that dress made for me by a dressmaker in Atlanta. I hated it. Goldfish? He was clueless.”
“Wait, is he dead?” I asked, suddenly suspicious.
“No, he’s still alive,” she said.
“Oh, good,” I said, but I didn’t mean it. It just came out. “Good,” I added, just in case.
“I remember that maybe you hadn’t even brushed your hair,” she said.
“No, I’d definitely brushed my hair,” I told her.
“I remember when you walked into the room, like a lightning bolt, I knew that I was going to love you.”
I wondered where her husband was. I felt like we were about to make out. I felt like maybe the job was to be her secret lover. My pulse was racing, as it always did in her presence.
When I didn’t respond, her eyes turned a little glassy all of a sudden, and she said, “I always felt like I missed out on something really wonderful when you left Iron Mountain.”
We weren’t going to have a reckoning, not really. Not yet. She wasn’t going to bring up the fact that her not-dead father had paid me off to take the fall for her, so that she could have this mansion, this senatorial husband, and all these expensive things. We were, I understood, being polite.
“But now you’re here!” she said. She poured sweet tea, and I drank it down in, like, two gulps. She didn’t even look surprised, just filled my glass up again. I ate one of the sandwiches, and it was gross, but I was hungry. I ate two more. I didn’t even realize that there were tiny plates stacked on the tray. I’d held the sandwiches in my dumb hands. I didn’t even want to look down at my lap because I knew there were crumbs there.
“Where is Timothy?” I asked, expecting to see her son walk into the room with a coonskin cap and a wooden popgun, his skin pale like old royalty’s.
“He’s taking a nap,” she said. “He loves naps. He’s lazy, like me.”
“I love naps, too,” I said. How many sandwiches did you eat at something like this? There were nearly twenty more on the trays. Did you leave some for propriety’s sake? She hadn’t touched them. Wait, were they decorative?
“I bet you want to know why I asked you to come all this way,” she said.
It sank in that this was temporary, that I’d have to leave, so I became curious as to what had been so important that we finally had to see each other face-to-face after so many years of correspondence.
“You said there was an opportunity for me?” I continued. “Like a job, maybe?”
“I thought of you because, Lillian, this is honestly very private, what I’m about to tell you, regardless of what you decide to do. I needed someone who could be discreet, who knew how to keep a secret.”
“I can be discreet,” I said. I loved this stuff, bad stuff.
“I know,” she said, almost blushing, but not really.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“Yes and no,” she said, twisting her mouth like she was rinsing it out. “Yes and no. Did I ever tell you about Jasper’s first family?”
“I don’t think so. I read about them, I think. Do you mean his first wife?”
She looked apologetic, like she knew she was pulling me into something that might ruin me. But she didn’t stop. She didn’t send me back to my mom’s house. She held on to me.
“Well, he had a first wife, a childhood sweetheart, but she died. She had a rare kind of cancer, I think. He doesn’t talk about her at all. I know he loves me, but I know he loved her the most. Anyway, after that, there was a long period of grieving. And then he ended up marrying Jane, who was the youngest daughter of a really powerful man in Tennessee politics. Jane was—well, she was strange. She had darkness inside of her. But, not to speak ill of my husband, it was politically advantageous to be married to her. She knew the world he moved in and could do the things that he needed done. And they had twins, a girl and a boy. And that was their life, you know? Until he met that horse woman, and everything went to shit.”
“But then you met him,” I offered. “It all worked out.”
She didn’t even smile. She was in this now. She was doing it. “It did. We had Timothy. I still get to be involved in politics, just from a different angle, a kind of support position. And it’s nice. Jasper listens to me. Honestly, policy kind of bores him. It’s just his family’s legacy. He likes the fame, but he’s not big on laws. Anyway, things were fine.”