“What brought you out here?” Florence asked.
“The solitude,” Helen answered without elaborating.
Florence tried to think of something else to say, but her mind was blank. Her early comments seemed so weighted—it would signal something definitive about her character and determine whether or not Helen would respect her. She couldn’t settle on the right tone, the right topic. She’d thought about telling her how much Mississippi Foxtrot had meant to her, but the words sounded trite and hollow when she rehearsed them in her head. Helen, for her part, seemed content to continue in silence.
Soon the clouds crossed the sky, blotting out the sun, and the light took on a jaundiced tint. Florence watched a flock of blackbirds descend on a single tree like a net thrown over it. A few fat drops splattered on the windshield as Helen exited the highway and took a series of turns that led them to an unevenly paved street called Crestbill Road. Florence recognized the name from the address Greta had sent her a few days before.
“It won’t last long,” Helen said as she flicked on the windshield wipers. “These spring storms come on strong but soon they get bored and move on.” She added with a glance at Florence: “Perhaps not unlike writers’ assistants.”
“Oh, I don’t plan on moving on anytime soon,” Florence assured her.
“So where did you tell people you were going?”
“What do you mean?”
“Since you couldn’t tell anyone about this job. And I trust that you didn’t.”
“Oh. I didn’t really tell anyone anything.”
Helen raised her eyebrows without taking her eyes off the road. “No? What about your family?”
“Well, it’s just my mom. And she thinks I still work at the publishing house.”
“You didn’t tell her that you left?”
Florence shrugged. She didn’t want to say anything that would hint at the circumstances of her departure from Forrester.
Helen pressed on: “You’re not close, then?”
“Not really. She’s—。 I don’t know. We’re just very different.”
“How so?”
No one had ever asked Florence to so starkly define her relationship with her mother, and she struggled to put it into words.
She finally said, “You know how Trump’s always talking about winners and losers?”
Helen nodded.
“That’s the way my mother is too. She’s constantly cataloguing the world according to this very concrete hierarchical structure that she has built in her mind, and she has very specific ideas of where I should slot into it. Her whole investment in parenthood has been about getting me up to a high-enough rung, and she gets upset when she thinks I’m sabotaging that effort. She doesn’t understand that we just catalogue the world in very different ways.”
Helen said nothing.
“She also voted for Trump,” Florence added with an uneasy laugh. “In case that wasn’t clear.”
“And you didn’t, I take it?”
“Me? God, no. Are you serious?”
Helen shrugged. “How would I know?”
“I’m not a sociopath.”
“Not everyone who voted for Trump is a sociopath.”
Florence had just spent two years surrounded by people who spent a lot of energy arguing precisely the opposite point.
“What liberals don’t seem to understand,” Helen went on, “is that rational, intelligent people are capable of separating his personal shortcomings from his policies. I mean, nobody’s voting for him to be their best friend.”
“So you…” Florence could hardly believe she was asking the question. Novelists don’t vote for Trump! “So you…you voted for him?” she asked as mildly as she could.
“Lord, no. I never vote.”
“Oh.”
After a few more minutes Helen took a left onto a long driveway marked PRIVATE. It meandered through thick woods for nearly a quarter of a mile before depositing them outside a small stone house with green shutters. On its roof, a spindly copper weathervane jerked in the wind. It had nothing in common with the low, ugly houses they’d passed on the drive.
“It was built in 1848,” Helen said, following Florence’s gaze. “I bought it two years ago, after the royalties from Mississippi Foxtrot started to come in.”
The rain was in a frenzy now, battering the rosebushes lining the front porch. Helen told Florence to leave her bag in the trunk, and they both dashed for the door.
On the covered porch, Florence dried her face on her sleeve while Helen jammed a key into the old lock. The door swung open with a creak and Florence found herself awash in brightness. The walls, the ceiling, the floors—the entire interior of the house as far as she could see—had been painted a rich, milky white.
They were in a small foyer. An old wooden table was pushed up against one wall and scattered with keys and mail. Two pairs of muddy boots sat underneath. Through a door on the left, Florence spotted a dining room. Helen led her the other way, into the living room, where she threw her purse down on a large linen-covered sofa. A full ashtray balanced nervously on its arm. In front of it sat a square ottoman piled with books and a brick fireplace where embers smoked desultorily. Helen tossed another log in, and a cloud of ash and sparks shot up in protest.
“Well, here it is,” she said.
Florence’s mother liked to imagine a life of diamonds and gilt for her daughter. But this, this, was the life Florence wanted. A blue-and-white teacup stuffed with clementine peels. A tangle of white ranunculus in a ceramic pitcher on the windowsill. Amanda had once put a vase of those same flowers on her desk at work. The whole place looked like a painting by Vermeer. And it was cold. Chilly gusts rattled the windows in their frames. Someone had told Florence once that glass was actually a liquid that settled slowly, over eons; that was why in old houses the windows were always thicker at the bottom than at the top. Was that true? Florence didn’t care. In the same way she couldn’t understand why people were so determined to expose Maud Dixon’s identity, she couldn’t understand why they needed to pin things down, turn poetry into fact. Wasn’t poetry better? Why would you turn something beautiful into something quotidian?
Helen led Florence on a tour around the rest of the main floor: a dining room with a long wooden table obscured by books and a laptop, a small guest room with two twin beds covered in faded quilts, and a kitchen with a massive old farmhouse sink. Helen picked up the pot from a battered Mr. Coffee on the counter and poured out two mugs.
“Upstairs is just my bedroom and office and a couple of spare rooms,” she said, gesturing above her head. She set one of the cups of coffee down on the counter in front of Florence without offering milk or sugar. “You’ll be staying in the carriage house out back. It’s nothing fancy but I hope it will suit.”
Florence said she was sure it would. She took a sip and watched the rain drip down the windows. All she could see beyond them was a gray-green field with some blurred brown smudges.
When the rain subsided, Florence went to collect her bag from the trunk of the car and met Helen behind the main house. They followed a path of gray slate slabs embedded in moss.