“I’m counting on it.”
CHAPTER 24
* * *
CHARLIE
I had forgotten how depressing my mother’s house was. I suddenly wondered if it had come to resemble her, or the other way around.
As Winnie and I turned onto the narrow driveway, choked by trees and brambles and every kind of wickedness, the memories came flooding back. I tried to stop them, but they pummeled my skin like stinging rain. Finding my dad dead in his bed. Calling 9-1-1 but not being able to get the words out. Huddling with Winnie while we waited for paramedics, and then for Mom to come home. She was in Milan. It was a long wait.
Then came my mom’s long battle with depression. Calling her to find out she had been in bed all day, and the day before that. Except it wasn’t depression. She was ill. And it was curable. But only if her children would step up.
I wanted to help her. I sincerely did. But things were complicated. I was recently married with a brand-new baby. It was my body, but not my life. Not anymore. I was a father now. I had new responsibilities, new allegiances, new priorities. If Mom was trying to buy my loyalty by throwing me a lavish wedding, it backfired—because the wedding came with a bride, and she came with demands. In a cruel twist of irony, Mom’s extreme generosity made it impossible for me to be generous in return. She was disappointed in me, and so in my cowardice I avoided her. Over the years the space between us grew and grew until it became a perilous ravine with edges too jagged to bridge.
Nathan was waiting for us as we pulled up to the house. He looked defeated with his rumpled suit and unkempt hair and shoulders slumping like a tired old tree.
“Nathan, we can’t thank you enough for being here for her,” I said as I hugged him.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. And his eyes welled with tears.
“We’re sorry, too,” Winnie said. “We know how horrible it is to walk in on what you walked in on.” Yes, Winnie did know. She was the one who found our dad white faced with his tongue hanging out. She was just seventeen. Mom told me her drinking that next year was normal for a senior in high school and had nothing to do with what had happened that day. But Mom had always had her head in the sand when it came to us.
“I didn’t make it to the house while she was . . . y’know . . . still here,” Nathan said. “Her nurse took care of things. I was all the way down in Manhattan Beach; you know what the traffic is like Monday morning.” He said it like an apology, so I tried to reassure him.
“There was no need for you to come,” I said. “It was perfectly appropriate for her nurse to handle things.”
Nathan’s chin trembled. Winnie put a hand on his shoulder.
“Why don’t we go inside and cry it out,” Winnie said, and he nodded.
We pulled our suitcases into the foyer, then followed Nathan into the dining room. He had made a pot of tea—Earl Grey, Mom’s favorite—which we drank from her Wedgwood blue china cups. He had also set out a tray of Lorna Doones—the only cookie my mother ever kept in the house.
“Your mom kept a file with instructions as to how she wanted all this to be handled,” Nathan said as he slid a folder toward us. I hesitated, so Winnie snapped it up.
“She wrote us a letter,” Winnie said, picking a note written on her monogrammed stationery out of the folder. And I suddenly got nervous. Because I knew how she felt about us, about me—and I knew whatever was in that letter was going to sting like a face full of hot sand.
“Go ahead,” I said glumly.
“To my children, family, and friends,” Winnie read aloud, “Simon Redding on Canon Drive is my attorney and will contact you if your presence is requested at the reading of my will, of which he is in possession.” She paused, like she was put off by Mom’s opening sentence. “Courteous of her to get right down to business,” she snarked.
“Do you know this Simon Redding?” I asked Nathan, and he shook his head.
“I had nothing to do with her will,” my cousin said. I thought I sensed a hint of defensiveness in his voice, like “So don’t blame me,” but I dismissed it as paranoia, which I fell into easily these days.
“I don’t wish to be remembered as a shriveled old raisin,” Winnie continued. “If you ever cared about me, you’ll respect my wish for a closed casket and quick funeral.”
“I’ve already been in touch with the funeral home,” Nathan said. “They said they can lay her to rest tomorrow morning.” I nodded my approval. I was eager to get home. The sooner we got this over with, the better. I looked at Winnie to signal her to keep reading.