He had been slightly concerned about Mr. Gibson, a blind man with long scraggly gray hair who had grabbed Chloe’s hand and wouldn’t let go, not letting her leave or feed him. Blake gently, but not too gently, pried Mr. Gibson’s dinosaur fingers off Chloe’s white wrist.
“He’s fine,” Chloe said. “He’s just lonely. Like Lupe.”
Blake was off again about Chloe and her pants vanishing.
“Give it a rest, Blake. I’m not your project, I’m not your story.”
“But if you disappeared,” he went on, speeding invincible in her father’s siren-less off-duty truck, “that would be quite a story, wouldn’t it?”
“No! It’s only a story if there’s a reason why I disappeared.” She paused. “Also what does my disappearance have to do with your blue suitcase?”
“Maybe everything,” he said.
“You leave me out of your lunacy, Blake Haul.”
“It’s fiction,” Blake said. “In fiction, you can have everything to do with my lunacy. Isn’t that what you told me? I can use my imagination and have it all turn out exactly how I need, how I want.” Fiendishly he rubbed his hands together while driving with his knees. His expression was for once both serious and remote, as if he was thinking about something else entirely.
Covering her face, Chloe groaned.
It was a good afternoon.
SHE RAISED HER GAZE FROM THE TRASHY GOSSIP MAGAZINE, from sordid uncouplings and inappropriate attire of beautiful strangers, and focused the red dot of her anxious brain on her mother. Rather, focused on her mother’s back, while her mother’s studious front was forming tiny spicy Mediterranean meatballs with feta and fennel.
“So why’s she coming?”
“You shall see.”
“Why can’t you tell me?”
The eminently sensible Lang pointed out that if she told Chloe, then Moody wouldn’t need to come over.
The eminently sensible Chloe opened her hands to say, exactly! But it was done to her mother’s oblivious back. “I’m making meatballs,” Lang said. “Do you want to help me?”
“If I help you, will you tell me?”
“You will help me,” said Lang, “and I won’t tell you a thing.”
“It’s about Barcelona, right? She’s got some plan?”
“It’s about a man with a horse. Come here and help your mother.”
Their house had once been Moody’s summer retreat. Lochlan Devine built it with his own hands for his young bride back in the fifties so she could have a home by the lake as she had dreamed. Twenty years later Moody gave it to Jimmy and Lang as a wedding present.
“Why would she suddenly be visiting us again?”
“She says it’s been too long.”
“Tell me why so I can prepare myself.”
“Prepare yourself for what?”
Chloe wanted to provoke her mother. “She told me last Thanksgiving that she doesn’t come to us anymore because she’s mad we still blame Uncle Kenny for everything.”
“Well, that’s just silly,” said Lang, looking at no one.
Her father spoke his first sentence of the afternoon. “We do blame my brother for everything,” Jimmy said.
“Jimmy, shh.” Lang turned to Chloe. “Stop stirring the pot, young lady. Your grandmother wants to help, that’s all.”
“Help who?”
“Did we ask for her help?” Jimmy said.
“Yes, Jimmy, we did,” Lang said, one hand on her husband’s shoulder, one hand straightening out the errant lamp shade behind him. She had been feverishly cleaning as if preparing for an open house viewing.
“You did,” Jimmy said. “Not me. Chloe is right. My mother shouldn’t come if she’s still angry.”
Lang leaned her tranquil solemn face into a sitting and grim Jimmy. “She is putting away the bygones and coming for your daughter.”
Jimmy sat coldly. “They’re not bygones,” he said.
“Come on. We agreed.”
“You agreed. I’m resigned to it. Big difference.”
She kissed his forehead. “You promised you would be civil, kind, polite.”
“No. I promised only that I’d be silent,” Jimmy said, standing up. “And you’re not letting me keep my promise, woman.” He went outside to do some yard work.
The next three hours crawled by in epic time, in Thackeray time, every day lasting a thousand tragic pages. Blake stopped by to cut down the rotting willow. Mason stopped by. Hannah stopped by. Then her friends left to go have fun in North Conway with other young people who didn’t have horror-movie grandmothers. Jimmy left to go pick up his mother and bring her back to their house.
Finally six o’clock arrived like the executioner’s hour.
Sometimes Chloe thought of her grandmother as Zeus in his Athenian Temple, gargantuan and fierce. Sometimes Moody was like Tamerlane of Mongolia, murderous and crippled. Sometimes Chloe saw Moody as Siddhartha, half the size of China, wise but terrifying in his omnipotent silence.
On Memorial Saturday, Moody was just a kettle-sized white-haired woman. She had been married to Lochlan Devine since just after the war until his death, fifty years, four of them pretty good. She had given him six children, five surviving, all boys, though what she wanted was two measly daughters. Everybody knew it because she never missed an opportunity to say it.
She was nearly deaf in both ears, but denied she was hard of hearing in even one. She grew odd white fuzz on her face. She liked to drink whiskey and eat caramels and strange spicy sausages she said were from the old country. She smoked unapologetically. She spoke fluent English in a loud, heavy and indeterminate accent. She had occluded sight, which prevented her from driving, though didn’t prevent her from complaining about not driving. Hence her life’s motto about envying the good fortune of people who could push around their own wheelchairs, which she repeated again tonight as she walked through the front door. “They don’t know how lucky they are,” Moody said.
Behind his mother, Jimmy walked in without a word, dropped his keys on the side table and went to sit down. Lang, dressed in church clothes, fussed like a tumbleweed. After Moody hugged Chloe, she blurted without so much as a half-blind appraisal, “Why do you always look so dour, child? What is this awful thing you’re wearing? You’re a beautiful girl. Why are you hiding yourself from boys? Or is it one boy in particular you’re hiding yourself from? It won’t work. They all know what’s inside the hefty bags you wear for clothes. Come, let’s go. I’m not even taking my coat off despite your mother’s efforts. Take me to the cemetery. Don’t protest, better go quick before it gets dark. You don’t want to go to the graveyard at night, do you? I jest. Of course you don’t. Believe me. So let’s go pick some flowers from this famous garden of yours, and get to it. Jimmy, give your daughter the truck keys. You haven’t suspended her license for speeding—or other violations—have you?”
“You mean like Dad didn’t suspend Kenny’s?” Jimmy