Had she been e-mailing a Darian boy? Or maybe she’d been in Messenger with Rachel, telling her about Digby. Girls told their mothers things, even when they promised not to. I made a mental note to check the browser history later, because the kid was definitely up to something. God, please let her just be sneak-watching R-rated anime on my Netflix. I had too much on my plate already.
An enormous crash shook the ceiling; something heavy had fallen and hit the floor above us. Lavender jumped, and I was so startled I sat bolt upright as a landslide of smaller crashes tumbled in the wake of that first boom.
“What the . . . ? Wasn’t that you up in the attic earlier?” I asked, kicking at the bedclothes wound around me.
“No,” she said, and ran to see.
I got free of the duvet and hurried after her down the hallway toward the attic stairs in my yummy sushi pajamas. I had visions of Birchie, confused and broken, lying under a chest of drawers or a pile of heavy boxes.
Lavender threw open the door to the stairs as I caught up, and the attic’s heat rolled out and over me, thick and wet, salted with dust. I sprinted up the long, steep flight ahead of her now, calling, “Birchie? Birchie, is that you?”
“It’s okay! We’re okay!” a male voice said, and I halted halfway up. Frank Darian came to the railing and stood looking down at me, mopping his red face with a bandanna. The strings of his beginner’s comb-over were scraggled, and he looked like he had aged a good ten years since I saw him last Thanksgiving. “Hey, Leia, sorry. A stack of book crates bit it, but we’re all fine.”
“You all? Who’s with you?” I demanded. My heart still felt like it was Hulking out inside my chest, swelling and banging, trying to brute-force its way out of the prison of my rib cage. “Is Birchie up there?”
“Of course not,” Frank said, and both his boys appeared beside him, their sweaty faces streaked with attic dust.
“Hey, Miss Leia,” Jeffrey said, which made me feel about a thousand years old.
“Hey, Lavender,” Hugh said, overly casual, cocking his hip like Elvis. He looked the way Frank had looked at fifteen, tall and lanky with a mop of sandy curls and a confident smile.
I became suddenly conscious that my niece was wearing tiny cotton shorts and a camisole top. Thirteen woke up dewy and kitten-eyed and thoroughly adorable, and sashaying up the stairs had set her hips asway. I started back down, turning Lavender and herding her before me.
“Go get dressed,” I whispered to her as we reached the hall. It was a palpable relief to step out into the air conditioning.
“I’m wearing shor—”
“More clothes,” I hissed, and gave her a little push toward her room.
She rolled her eyes, calling “Be right back” to one boy or another. Maybe both of them. They were following their dad down the stairs, but they both paused to watch her twinkle along the hallway.
I shook my head and backed up, giving the Darians plenty of room at the bottom of the stairs. Thirty-eight and pregnant did not wake up so fresh and fair. I had bed head and no bra. My mouth was coated with morning goo and probably smelled like Swamp Thing.
“What were you guys doing?” I asked.
Hugh, down last, mercifully closed the door on the heat.
“We dug your trunk out and took it down, and then we were repacking that back room,” Frank said, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world for me to wake up to an attic full of Darians landsliding books around at the ass crack of dawn on a Friday morning.
“My trunk?” I asked. “What?”
“You wanted a sea trunk, out of the back room?” I shook my head no, and Frank said, “Well, Birchie called last night and said you did. Do you think she was . . .” He paused, searching for words. “Maybe she was confused. We all know that Birchie is . . .” He paused again, looking down at his feet. “Not herself.” It was a kind finish, considering. I couldn’t think of a worse way to learn of your wife’s infidelity than having it publicly announced to your family, friends, and clients in the middle of a church social. I had a sudden urge to go find Jeannie Anne and smack her one. She’d been one of my summer friends, though by high school I was tired of her endless drama. She’d acted like she was on a mission to enact every plot from All My Children before graduation.
“I didn’t have a choice. I had to do what my heart told me,” she’d say, trading one boyfriend for another with a lot of overlap and sneaking. Twenty years of marriage and two kids later, it turned out she was still that girl. This time her heart had told her to get with Pastor Campbell in the choir room. By now she should’ve figured out that her heart was shitty, maybe told it to shut up.
Frank looked like hell. His eyes were puffed small with purple shadows underneath. The lines around his mouth and on his forehead looked like they had been scored double deep.
I felt swamped with empathy, though Frank might find that word presumptuous. Jeannie Anne had torched close to twenty years of shared life; on the scale of douchery, she deserved a higher score than JJ. But even so, Frank and I were two people standing in a hallway who knew what betrayal felt like.
“No, Birchie’s not herself, Frank,” I said, an indirect apology.
“She sounded good on the phone, though,” he said, not meeting my eyes.
“What time did she call?” I asked, changing the subtext if not the subject, to give him some relief.
“Maybe eight?”
I frowned. Had Birchie snuck back out of bed to call him? “Was Wattie with her?”
“Yeah, on speakerphone. You know how they do. Maybe they mean whatever’s in that trunk for a surprise?”
I didn’t think so. Not a nice one anyway, considering our constant clash of wills the last few days. I had a vague but very bad suspicious feeling growing.
“’Scuse me, Miss Leia,” Jeffrey said, and squirted past me, Hugh in his wake. “Dad, can we go down? Smells like the rolls are ready.”
Once he said it, I noticed it, too, the yeasty, sugared smell of Wattie’s cinnamon rolls drifting up from the kitchen. She must have been up way before dawn; they had to rise twice and bake for forty minutes.
“Sure,” Frank said. “But afterward you’re going to help me restack those boxes.”
They clattered down the hall, and Hugh paused at Lav’s door. He gave it a casual knuckle rap. “Yo, Lefty, come have breakfast.”
Lefty?
Lavender, now in a cotton T-shirt dress and tennis shoes, came out, and they galloped downstairs to eat a thousand calories in butter and sugary carbs that would slide right off their adolescent bodies.
“How are you holding up?” I asked Frank once we were alone.
He shook his head as if I’d asked a yes-or-no question, then gave me such a sad, cynical smile that my heart broke for him again. He was such a decent person, so good to my grandmother. In summer he sent his boys down to mow her lawn, and he acted as her man-in-the-house when the porch light went out or the doorbell stopped working. Now he was up in the thousand-degree attic heat before his workday started, moving boxes for two little old ladies who had blown up his marriage in front of his whole church.
“How are the boys doing?” I asked.
Frank didn’t answer for a sec, his tired eyes searching my face, looking for some shade of schadenfreude or gossipy interest. I hoped he wouldn’t imagine it there. I asked because he was our family friend, and because he was fresh broken in a way that I’d felt cracked my whole adult life.
Frank must have read me right, because his guard dropped. His shoulders slumped, and the dark pits of his eyes told me how hard he was working to keep himself together.
He said, “Hugh’s shut down. I have no idea. Jeffrey, he’s young. He can’t hide how hard he’s taking it. Watching him try, it breaks my heart.”
“God, Frank. I’m so sorry,” I said. I knew from Lavender that the boys were staying with him at the house. They’d been to see their mom a couple of times, walking over to their grandma’s house where she was staying, a
half mile off the square. “Have you talked to Jeannie Anne at all?”
“Yeah. I’m trying to be civil, even though she’s seeing Campbell. They’re in love, apparently. Martina Mack, God bless her black-hole heart, came by with a burned chicken casserole and that cheery news.”
“Of course she did. She dropped by here with a melted carrot cake to tell me about her aunt’s endless and agonizing death from Alzheimer’s. I wouldn’t let her in, but she shouldered into the doorway and gave me every awful detail. No one on any porch on the planet has ever so thoroughly relished a dead aunt.” We shrugged simultaneously, with the weary acceptance of small-towners toward their homegrown horrors. I added, “If it helps, she also told me that the church fired Campbell.” Adultery from the associate pastor was not a big congregational morale builder.
“Yeah. I couldn’t set foot in that church otherwise. But in some ways it’s bad. I’m scared she’ll move away with him. I’m telling everyone who’ll listen that I’m fine, it’s fine. I keep reminding folks that she’s hurting, too, and believe me, those words taste worse than Martina’s casserole. But I have to. I don’t want her driven out of town. I mean, I do. On a rail. Maybe coated in a little tar, some feathers.” He smiled, wry and weary. “But if she goes, she’ll try to take the boys, and the law leans toward the mother. I’m not letting that happen. I can’t. I have to think about them now and not strangle her.”
I swallowed, the lump in my throat grown even thicker. So this was what fatherhood looked like when it was done right from the beginning.
I wouldn’t know. The Birch line had bad luck with fathers. Birchie was the last of us to have one all the way through adulthood.
I’d had Keith, and he’d been a great stepdad. He loved me, a lot, but I still called him Keith. Once, when Rachel and I were very little, still in preschool, Keith had been playing dollhouse with us in the den. I said, “No, rocka-chair goes here, Daddy.” I didn’t even notice I’d said it.
In the next breath, Rachel launched herself at me, punching and screaming. She bit my shoulder hard enough to make me bleed. Keith had to drag her off, still flailing. Mom came running as Rachel and I both burst into tears. She stopped in the doorway, fluttering and flapping, saying, “What happened, what happened?” I stopped crying first. Rachel sobbed and heaved in Mom’s arms the whole time Keith was dressing the bite. Hard, racking sobs that ended only when Keith finished and went to hold her. I never called my stepdad anything but Keith again. Remembering, my hands moved to cover Digby, now the third fatherless Birch generation.
“You’re doing the right thing,” I told Frank.
“Yeah. And thanks for listening. I can’t say this stuff to most people, you know? It will get around.” Frank straightened, manually moving his shoulders back and down, as if they were relifting a burden. “I need to get home. Lois Gainey’s coming by at nine to write her nephew out of her will again. That’s why we came to get your trunk so early. Sorry we woke you.”
I’d forgotten the trunk. “Where’d you put it?”
“In the den. Wattie wanted us to load it in your car, but I told her we’d do that on the way out,” he said.
My suspicions were good and roused, and I turned to the stairs, saying, “Let’s go see what the little-old-lady stealth brigade is up to.” Considering they’d hidden Birchie’s illness for so long, I could not imagine that I was going to like their new plan much.
Frank began to answer and then stopped. He tilted his head, listening. A car engine had started up outside. Close. So close it had to be coming from the driveway.
“What the hell,” I said.
“Is that your car?” he asked, then shook his head no, as if answering his own question.
It had to be, though. The only car parked out there was my rental, but no one downstairs in this house had any business driving.
I was thirty-eight and pregnant, but I took the stairs in the old, fast, slide-and-leap I’d used as a kid, hands skidding down the banister. I sprinted through the den, where Lavender was sitting between the two boys on the sofa, my computer in her lap. They were all peering into the screen and eating cinnamon buns. They looked up at me with startled, sugary faces as I thundered through, Frank Darian right behind me. I flung open the front door, ran out onto the porch, and leaped down those stairs, too.
The rental car was already backing down the long crushed-seashell drive with Wattie behind the wheel. Birchie sat in the passenger seat. I could make out the hunched shape of a large chest looming in the back. Wattie must have had the boys move it while Frank and I were talking.
“Stop! Stop!” I yelled, running barefoot out onto the wet grass of the lawn.
Wattie hadn’t had a driver’s license for years now, and for damn good reasons. Where did she think they were going? Wattie’s eyes met mine, and she stomped down hard on the gas. The car surged backward.
Frank zoomed past me on his longer legs, trying to get behind the car so they would have to stop.
“Frank, no!” I screamed, still chasing the car head-on. What if Wattie didn’t see him? The Darian boys would spill out onto the porch just in time to watch their father be squashed.
The car was moving too fast, though. Frank wasn’t going to make it. Wattie’s eyes were still locked on mine, and she lost the angle as she came to the end of the drive. The back left tire cut into the yard, and the car bounced and jerked. Wattie sawed the wheel the other way, gunning the engine, overcorrecting. The right tires veered into the yard, skidding on the grass, and finally she braked.
Too late. The trunk of the car smashed into the brick mailbox pillar with a horrific crunch.
“Oh my God!” Lavender yelled. She’d arrived with Jeffrey and Hugh at just the right moment to see the crash.
I was still running for the car. Frank got there first, to Wattie’s side. He jerked at the door, but it was locked.
“Open the door!” he yelled through the glass.
Wattie wouldn’t even look at him. She stared forward through the windshield, shaken and mutinous all at once.
I leaped awkwardly down the driveway to the passenger side, the crushed seashells biting into the bottoms of my feet. I peered in the window.
Birchie stared back at me with startled eyes, her fluffy bun in a muss.
“Unlock it!” I yelled.
She obediently clicked the button, and I hauled the door open before Wattie could relock it. She was actually trying, but Frank got her door open, too. I reached in, my hands feeling all over Birchie, running up and down her arms, her face and neck, her chest and ribs, looking for damage.
“Are you okay?” I said it way too loud, right into her face.
“Of course I am, honey. Such a fuss,” she said, giving me irked eyebrows, pushing at my searching hands. “Leia, stop groping my bosom.”
“Are you all right?” Frank was jacked up and yelling into Wattie’s face, too.
“Let us go,” Wattie said, low and intense. “We’ll be right back in a minute.”
“You crashed my rental car!” I was still yelling. I could not stop.
“Bah! Barely, and we have to go,” Wattie said, angry and so very urgent. “The car will still drive. The air bags didn’t even come out.”
I was suddenly dizzy and sick, imagining if they had. Air bags going off like gunshots, striking at their frail old bodies, pulping them.
“Should I call 911?” I asked Birchie. “Does anything hurt?”
“Make her let us go,” Wattie said, clutching Frank’s arm, appealing to him.
In answer he reached across her and grabbed the keys, shutting the car’s engine off.
“What’s happening?” a voice called behind me.
I looked over my shoulder and saw the Barleys, Birchie’s elderly left-side neighbors, tottering toward us from their house. It was too early for a lot of folks to be about, but I spotted Martina Mack bustling down the street toward us from the square as fast as she could, the very last bit of hell I needed right now.
Wattie slumped in the driver’s seat, defeated.
“We’re all fine, Lisbeth. You and Jack go on in the house,” Birchie called to the Barleys. They didn’t, but they stopped on the edge of their yard. Birchie clicked her seat belt open and swung her feet around.
“I don’t think you should stand up,” I said, but she flapped her hand at me and started climbing out anyway. I took her elbow and helped her. She walked me around the car, tutting at the crumple in the bumper.
“Is everyone okay?” Lavender called.
Wattie clambered out of the car, too, silent and stoic, her face unreadable.
“Get the trunk out of that backseat,” I said to Frank, and that got her attention.
“You leave that be,” Wattie said, but I spoke over her.
“Right now, Frank. I am not kidding.”
“Frank, you need to mind me,” Wattie said.
He paused, looking back and forth between us, and his gaze finally settled on Birchie. She was still blinking at the bumper. “Miss Birchie?” Frank said.
She peered at him. “Goodness. Did we crash the car?”
I put my arm around her and stood as tall as I could. It wasn’t very tall, granted, plus I was wearing pink pajamas with cartoon California rolls and unagi sprinkled all over them, but I was still a Birch in Birchville. Maybe not the Birch, but my grandmother didn’t seem up to the job this morning.
“Get the trunk, Frank.”
Frank shook his head, almost an apology at Wattie, and then he did what I said. Hugh came down from the porch and helped him without being asked. Jeffrey and Lav trailed after, curious.
Wattie glared warning daggers at us all. Mostly me. We all stood in a cluster in the center of the lawn watching Frank and Hugh wrestle the trunk out of the backseat. Wattie stepped to Birchie and took her place beside her. They linked arms, clicking together as perfectly as Lego pieces. On Birchie’s other side, I felt suddenly extraneous.
Frank and Hugh set the trunk on the grass. It was an old brown sea chest, the edges bound in rust-speckled metal.