The minister closes his dog-eared Book of Common Prayer. My father’s sobs have turned desperate, guttural. He stumbles toward Mary. She opens her arms wide to embrace him, but he passes her by and throws his arms around me instead. I feel a momentary triumph when I see her red-slash lips tighten in humiliation.
I hold my father close, feel the sodden chill of his trench coat against my cheek. “You have no right to cry,” I whisper in his ear.
After the funeral, we all walk across the road, up the steep driveway to the house. The rain has let up, but the trees in the orchard—the crabapples and plums still heavy with unpicked fruit—weep into the tall grasses under their boughs.
I leave Anna and Peter mixing drinks in the living room, discussing the case Anna is working on. Anna is a litigator at a fancy law firm in downtown L.A. “Well, I would have preferred you did something in the arts, but I suppose it’s good you found a way to put that frightful argumentative streak of yours to work,” was Mum’s congratulations when Anna first called to tell her she’d gotten the job. I wander down the hallway to our old bedroom off the kitchen. It is exactly as it has always been: our twin beds made, our favorite children’s books still on the shelf, a red tobacco tin filled with crayon stubs. I know if I go into the guest bathroom and reach up blindly onto the top shelf above the toilet I will find a pack of menthol cigarettes, hidden where she thinks no one will find them. The most wonderful thing about my grandmother, among many wonderful things, is that everything is always the same. The lovely lemon-wood smell of the house, the little bottles of ginger ale pushed to the back of the icebox for hot days. The silver thimble her mother gave her when she was a girl, nestled in a lavender box on her bureau.
I open the cupboard in our room. As far as I’m concerned, my father and the Bitch can have everything. They’ll take it anyway. Anna can fight them for the four-poster bed and the first edition of Gatsby. There’s only one thing I want to keep. I reach back behind the dusty pile of board games—the old Scrabble box and Chinese checkers. The Game of Life. My hand searches for our treasure box filled with the paper dolls Anna and I made. But the box isn’t there. I take everything out of the cupboard and pile it on the floor in a heap. Check the closets, under the bed. Nothing.
Anna is in the dining room on her cell phone. “No. You stay on the 22. Past Pawling,” I hear her say as I walk past. Her new boyfriend Jeremy has just flown in from L.A. “And don’t rush. The roads are wet and you’ve already missed the funeral.”
In the living room, mourners are eating Triscuits and Brie, stiff drinks in their hands. My father sits alone on the sofa, staring into space. There’s a streak of mud on one of his polished black leather shoes. He looks perplexed, as if he’s waiting for his mother to appear from the kitchen, apron still tied around her waist, holding a plate of sugar cookies.
“Dad.” I sit down next to him. “I’ve been looking for a brass box that lives in our bedroom cupboard. It was there last time I looked. Can you think where Granny might have put it?”
“The paper dolls?” he says.
“Yes,” I say. “I looked everywhere.”
“Mary’s niece was here with us a few weeks ago. She liked them. Mary said she could take them home with her when she left.”
I stand up. “Well, I should go. The sooner everyone’s out of the house, the sooner you can sell it.”
I reach over to the bookcase behind his head, pull my grandfather’s treasured first edition of The Great Gatsby off the shelf. “I’m taking this for Anna.”
* * *
—
Peter drives us home, taking the slick curves of the blacktop roadway too fast. Our high beams cut a path through the rainy night. Ahead of us, trees lean in on either side like massive shadow puppets. The radio is off. I close my eyes. Listen to the windshield wipers back-and-forth-ing. I cannot speak. I cannot even cry. We hydroplane around a steep S curve, but Peter pulls us back to center, accelerates. I don’t tell him to slow down. I am grateful for the distance he is putting between my past and the present.
“I hate him,” I say finally.
“Then I hate him, too.” Peter takes a hand off the wheel, puts his arm around me. “Scooch over,” he says, and pulls me tight to his side.
The car swerves slightly, but I don’t mind.
25
1994. April, New York.
I push my chair back from my desk, stretch my back. I’ve been correcting papers for what feels like ten hours. I pick up the phone and call Peter at the office.