“Did my mother know about this? About Granddad having prostate cancer, too?”
“Uh, I’d think so.” Poor Everett seemed to know he’d stepped in something. “Your father would’ve told her, right? When they talked about their families?”
“My mother wouldn’t have told him about her family.” Anita acted as though she had no history, as if she’d washed up on the shores of America fully formed, like Aphrodite, or a piece of sea glass, broken and beaten but remade into something better. “And she tells me nothing.”
She left poor Everett in midsentence and strode toward her mother. She didn’t even acknowledge Mr. Beecham. “I’m walking home,” she announced, drowning out his platitudes.
“Liebchen.” Anita lifted a damp, dark curl off Janeen’s forehead. Now that they were close, Janeen could see red at the corners of her brown eyes and around the rims of her nostrils. But when had she wept? She’d been stiff and erect as a lightning rod throughout the service. “Do not run off alone. We have been invited to Charlotte’s for supper. They will close the restaurant tonight in honor of your father, so that we who knew him might dine together, reminisce . . .”
“I’m sorry,” Janeen said in Mr. Beecham’s direction, without meeting his eyes. As she fled her mother managed to grab her fingertips, calling her name. Eyes closed, lashes wet, Janeen wrenched herself free, knuckle by knuckle.
• • •
A few mornings after Remy’s funeral, Anita went back to work.
“I do not think I need explain, Liebchen, why I must return so soon to the library,” she’d said the night before as they watched television. “We need money, for one. Also it will be good for me to have my hands busy. You will see, when you return to lifeguarding. It is a shame you aren’t in school right now.”
“Yeah. Would’ve been nicer of Daddy to die in the fall.” Janeen stuffed her mouth with the last of her TV dinner.
“Janeen, for hell’s sake!”
“Mutti, it’s ‘for heaven’s sake.’ No one says ‘for hell’s sake.’” A newspaper lay on the ottoman in front of Janeen; she tented it in front of her so that her mother wouldn’t see she was about to cry. Anita would only act dismissive. “Chaneen,” she would croon in her accent, “it will all be okay.” It was not supposed to all be okay. They were supposed to be sad. To be angry. To throw things.
“Heaven, hell, whatever it is. You know what I mean.” Anita got to her feet, the long bones in her toes cracking, and went to adjust the rabbit ears. Onscreen, Marlo Thomas had her toe stuck in a bowling ball. The laugh track echoed. “You have been acting as if your father’s death is my fault. And I think it is a bit unfair, considering I am mourning him too.”
Janeen said nothing, staring with glazed eyes at the U.S. section of the paper. On the third page was a photograph of a father and daughter on a beach. The man was swinging his little girl by the arms, and the girl’s head was thrown back, her mouth open in adoring laughter.
“If you become lonely tomorrow, Janeen, have lunch with me in Shortleaf Park.” Anita ran her hand over her head, leaving rake marks in her short, sweaty hair.
Janeen said nothing. She took a second look at the man and his lucky daughter. They’d been photographed from a distance, and the image was grainy. Then she noticed the second photo that accompanied the article, one of a fair, hawk-nosed young man in a black cap and gray jacket, silver bars on his collar. A swastika on his sleeve.
She sat up, knocking her fork to the carpet; she ignored her mother’s squawk. “Neighbor Claims Missing Man Is Former Nazi,” the headline declared. Henry Klein, the man in the beach photo, had been missing for over a month. Before his disappearance, a woman had reported she recognized him as Klaus Eisler, a former officer in the SS intelligence service.
“Huh. Look at this.” Janeen spread the newspaper down on the ottoman. “A Nazi was living in Florida.”
“Psst,” Anita replied, pretending to spit. “May they catch him and string him up by the little hairs.” Her eyes flitted briefly toward the article. Then she did a double-take. She brought Janeen’s arm closer, her fingers cold and rigid. In the blue light from the television, her face seemed drained of color.
“Mutti,” Janeen murmured, “did you know this man?”
“Did I know him!” Anita rolled her eyes and snorted, horselike, but Janeen noticed that the hand holding her tumbler of schnapps seemed to shake.
“It says he grew up in Berlin, like you.”
“Berlin is a large city, Liebchen, didn’t you know?” Anita squeezed her dark eyes shut once, twice, as though she were using her lids to erase what she’d just seen. Her mouth set itself in a hard line. “It is time for me to fall asleep, and so should you. Stop reading this nonsense.”
“Okay,” Janeen said, her eyes on the page.
“And it would not hurt if you would take a minute to clean out the refrigerator in the morning.” With that, she’d gone to bed. Janeen had stayed on the sofa for hours, waking only when faint light began to creep under the drapes. The newspaper lay over her lap like a blanket. Her fingers and the side of her face were stained with black ink.
That morning, alone in the house for the first time in she didn’t know how long, she opened the refrigerator. It smelled terrible. Casseroles wrapped in aluminum foil or plastic were shoved in every which way, behind which she and her mother had let fruit and vegetables molder, a carton of milk turn lumpy. A hastily wrapped block of Cheddar bore green spores. Science experiments, her father would have called them.
At the back of the top shelf, Janeen saw why her mother couldn’t bring herself to throw out the spoiled food. There was the final pie her father had baked, peach crumb. Late at night, after they’d come back from the hospital, her mother had been taking tiny bites directly from the dish with a fork. Now white fuzz dotted its surface.
Janeen stared at the glass dish for a while. Her father’s last pie. His blunt fingertips had crimped the edges of the crust. He’d softened the peach cubes in butter and brown sugar. Come fall, the apples on her father’s favorite scruffy tree would rot on their branches. Come Thanksgiving, there would be no bourbon crème, no chocolate pluff mud pie. A vision flashed past: Janeen and her mother parked glumly in front of a Christmas special, freezer meals on their laps. Silence between them. For a minute, she couldn’t move.
And then she could. She yanked the dish from the fridge, took it to the garbage can, and shook it until the pie went splat across the top of the trash. The underside of the crust looked naked and exposed, shattered into a dozen pieces. She put her wrist to her forehead, breathing hard. Anita had never been sentimental or delicate, but she should have known Janeen wouldn’t want to do this by herself.
Anita’s own father had passed away when she was a girl. Shouldn’t she have understood? All she would say about it was that she’d lost her parents at a very young age—too young to remember, she said. Too young to grieve?
• • •
For a while that afternoon, Janeen lay on her stomach in the spare bedroom, which would have been her sibling’s if her parents had another child. Instead it hosted their record player and her father’s rarely used banjo.
Lately, she’d been dying for a sibling.
Their house was a ranch, the windows low enough for her to watch blue-black birds nip insects off the tops of the grass. Through the screens she could smell pine resin and, from the salty flats of the Lowcountry, a hint of brine. The grass needed a trim, the tops of scattered blades turning to seed.
Tending to the yard had always been her mother’s job. She was the only woman in the neighborhood who could operate a lawnmower, which she did with