‘Who?’ he asked, knowing.
‘That lady. Sarah.’
‘Honey, I just took her up for a birthday ride. That’s all.’
‘She’s sick, Dad. It was like one of those trips to summer camp for dying kids. She’s all alone in Fort Cromwell, and the Fergusons wanted to make sure her last birthday was happy.’
‘It wasn’t her last birthday,’ Will said, surprised by how much the idea of that upset him.
‘If it was mine, I’d want to know. I’d want to plan my last birthday and have a great old time. We’d go back to Rhode Island, for one thing. I’d take everyone on the Edaville Railroad. There’d be more cake than you could handle, and I’d give out presents. We’d just keep going round the track till I said everything I wanted to say. And I’d have my favorite music playing. I’d want to hear all the songs I like, my own top one hundred countdown.’
‘That won’t happen for a long time,’ Will said, knowing he was in dangerous territory.
‘What won’t?’
‘You dying.’
‘It did for Fred.’
‘Fred …’ Will said, taking the chance to say his name.
‘His last birthday passed, and he didn’t know. When his last day came, he didn’t even know that. How can it happen, Dad? That you wake up happy and fine one morning, and by fourteen hundred hours you’re drowned?’
Will looked across the untouched salad plates. Secret was staring straight at him, no blame in her expression. Just the wide-open gaze of a child who still trusted her father, after everything he had failed to do, to give her a straight answer.
‘I don’t know, sweetheart,’ he said, because honesty was the best he could offer her now.
‘Mom’s over it,’ she said bitterly.
‘She’ll never get over it. You don’t “get over” losing one of your kids, honey.’
‘She never talks about him. Whenever I mention him, she tells me to shush, it upsets Julian. And he’s just a rich bastard who spends all his time car racing and going to lectures. Is that where they are tonight?’
‘Don’t say “bastard,” Susan. A play, I think she said.’ His ex-wife’s life was a mad smorgasbord of cultural events at the local colleges.
‘Jerk, then. Idiot. Numskull. Dickhead. Drip. Flaming creep. Full-dress weenie. Turdman. Shitbreath.’
‘Susan. Secret,’ Will said wearily. ‘Stop, okay?’
‘Sorry, Dad,’ she said, drizzling plain vinegar onto her salad. She had taken only lettuce leaves, a pile of mediumsized shreds. Assuming she had left all the good stuff for him, Will took an extra helping to make her happy.
‘The grapes were a good call,’ he said, taking a bite.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘She looked nice.’
‘Who, honey?’
‘That lady, Sarah.’
‘She was,’ Will said.
‘I hope she’s okay,’ she said. ‘Because death sucks.’
Sarah had begun to open the shop for a few hours every day, usually from ten until two. She loved how the morning sun streamed through the tall windows, throwing light and shadows on the pale yellow walls. Today she felt a little tired. She imagined curling up for a nap in the middle of the things she sold: quilts and pillows, some filled with white down from the geese on her father’s saltwater farm in Maine.
The bell above the door tinkled. She glanced up from an inventory list she was perusing, and smiled at the two college students who walked in. They stared at Sarah for a second. She felt she still looked weird, with her tufty white hair, and she grinned to put them at ease.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Let me know if I can help.’
‘We will. Thanks,’ the taller girl replied, smiling as her friend lay flat on the sample bed, prettily made up with a fluffy quilt in an ecru damask cover. Feather throw pillows covered with narrow umber stripes or golden swirls and hand-printed oak leaves were strewn around the headboard.
‘I want this exact bed,’ the second girl sighed, sprawled amid the pillows.
‘You do?’ Sarah asked.
‘The linen service at school doesn’t exactly provide sumptuous bedding,’ the tall girl explained. ‘We’re fantasizing.’
‘Be my guest,’ Sarah said. ‘Everyone deserves sweet dreams.’
‘I don’t have a credit card,’ the other girl said. ‘But if I call my parents and they give you their account number, can I charge every single thing in your store and take it back to campus?’
‘That can be arranged,’ Sarah said. ‘I’ll deliver it myself in a silver sleigh.’
The girl giggled and sighed again, the sounds muffled by all the padding around her.
Sarah remembered her own college days. Too-thin sheets and scratchy old blankets had been her inspiration for starting her own business, Cloud Nine. She had dropped out of Wellesley after her freshman year. Opening her first store in Boston, she had stocked it primarily with down products made by her father, back on the farm.
The farm had been on the verge of failing. Her mother had died when she was fourteen. Sarah and her father never talked about it, but she knew she had saved him. She had gotten her own financing, come up with all the ideas, expanded into mail order, taken on lines from France and Italy to supplement the stuff from Elk Island. The original store remained in Boston, but after eight years and the last in a series of ridiculous love affairs, Sarah had expanded to this college-rich valley in upstate New York. She had been here for ten years now, and her father had all the work he could handle.
The telephone rang, and Sarah answered it.
‘Hello, Cloud Nine,’ Sarah said.
‘Happy birthday,’ the deep voice said.
‘Thank you,’ she said. Her heart contracted. She couldn’t talk. She had the feeling if she breathed or sneezed, the line would go dead.
‘I’m a day late. Sorry.’
‘That’s okay, I didn’t even notice,’ she lied.
‘What’d you do? Go out for dinner or something?’
‘I took a plane ride,’ she said. ‘To see the leaves. They looked beautiful, all red and orange and yellow, like a big bowl of Trix. I couldn’t stop smiling, it made me think of you, and I knew it would make you laugh. I mean, flying over this beautiful fall landscape and thinking of Trix. Remember when that was your favorite cereal?’
‘Huh. Not really.’
‘How are you?’ she asked. She could picture him, standing in the big basement kitchen, with a fire burning in the old stone hearth. Closing her eyes, she was back on Elk Island, could see the dark bay, the prim white house, the fields full of white geese. She could hear the waves, smell the thick pines.
‘Fine.’
‘Really? Do you still like living there? Are you honestly enjoying the work? Because –’
‘What about you?’ he asked, sounding sullen and accusatory. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m great,’ she said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yes.’ She turned her back, so the college girls wouldn’t hear. ‘I finished chemo last month, and my X rays look good. There’s no sign of any tumor. I had an MRI, and