Then Josephine said, “I didn’t melt the thing, if that’s what you’re thinking, Hugh. I’m trying to tell it in order.”
A chair scraped.
“Sam came to me with the stone from his grandmother’s old brooch. His girl didn’t want a big old-fashioned thing. She liked half-round bands and that stone would sit in a four-prong setting if I put it east to west. So I tried out her design on the band that came in from Beatriz. The weight and the size were exactly right. I had every intention of doing a fresh casting for her later and giving Bea the band back the way it came in.”
“You bought the band,” younger Hugh said. His voice, so quick and clear that his daughter put her hand over her mouth, came from a little farther away.
“I paid our collection the purchase price. Beatriz never took the money. The receipt is still in my desk. After the fire hall supper Maisie came in and saw the ring on my bench. She thought it was hers. From the look on her face I knew Sam hadn’t asked her yet. She assumed he had a big surprise planned, and I didn’t know how to tell her I was just seeing how the stone looked. I told her it still needed finishing.”
“Did she take it?”
“She came back a week later and I couldn’t tell her she’d made a mistake. It wasn’t her fault I’d let her believe something that wasn't true. I’d have had time to do the casting if I hadn’t spent all the time I had getting this building into trust. There was a part of me that thought I’d earned the convenience. So I put Beatriz’s ring on Maisie’s finger and let her go.”
Nobody in the room moved. Miriam had heard a great many people praise her mother in the years since her death. A portrait hung in the business school, there was a little scholarship fund and a park bench, and one of the nicest women on the city council had wanted to rename a street. Miriam hadn’t really understood how much anger she still had at a dead woman until she found herself sitting with her shoulders drawn up, listening to her mother explain to a tape recorder what she couldn’t explain to her friend.
“Did Sam know?” Hugh asked.
“Yes. I told him. He said he’d fix it when the time was right. It hasn’t been right for years apparently. Well. I’m getting a little old to schedule a right time. I asked you over because tomorrow I’m going to go and see Beatriz. If she wants the ring I’ll have to get it from Maisie. If she wants money I owe her more than the weight of the gold. Write down that expense against me. Don’t you go writing it down against the workshop.”
In Hugh’s living room, Daniel put out a hand to stop the tape. On the little plastic counter they were at 137. He wrote the number on his wrist.
“When was this made?”
“Just before she died?” Claire asked her father. He tilted his hand in a so-so motion.
“How much before?”
He held up two fingers. Days? They shook their heads at each other several times before they got it. Two months. In the last two months of her life, Josephine had gone to the hospital for an investigation, come home with an electric blanket she fell asleep under in all weathers, developed a taste for rice pudding with pickles, resumed work for precisely nine days and died during the lunch hour on the tenth.
“Did she see my mother before she died?”
Hugh wrote slowly. I DROVE HER.
“And did my mother agree to take the money?”
Hugh held up the card that said ASK ME A QUESTION I CAN ANSWER. Daniel considered this. “Did you hear what they said to each other?”
No.
“Then we have to go see her.”
They were nearly an hour from home, and it was already after two. Miriam’s phone showed a message from her lawyer and two from Thomas Pike, one of which contained the words good faith in capital letters. She sent Caroline the three sentences she wanted forwarded to every party to the transaction. The workshop was visibly occupied and operating. She had participated in an erroneous certification of its status. Any representation that vacancy would be delivered at closing was disputed by the proposed purchaser.
She wrote the last line three times before she got the word disputed to come out without a spelling correction into disgusted, which pleased her enough to show it to Daniel. He thought it was the first useful contribution the phone had made to the day.
Claire asked to come with them. Her father’s sitter would be there at three. She could get someone to cover the first half hour. Daniel said he would prefer to let his mother decide whether she wanted four strangers on her couch.
“Fair,” said Claire. “Will you take the tape?”
Hugh tapped his pencil on the number Daniel had written on his wrist and gestured toward the recorder. There was more. They had almost forgotten.
On the tape Josephine seemed to have gotten up and walked around the table. Her voice was fainter but her meaning was clear. “There’s one more reason I’ve had you out here, Hugh. Pike has written off the loan three years in a row. This year was the last payment. I’m going to record the release. I want to know somebody else knows the copy I take to the county is the one Maisie has signed.”
“Isn’t that a funny thing for his wife to be signing?”
“Funny’s one way of putting it. Make sure you’ve got enough tape. I’m about to ask you to witness her signing in person.”
In the living room the old man’s eyes were wet. Slowly, very slowly, he lifted his pencil and wrote DID NOT.
“Didn’t sign?” Miriam asked.
He shook his head. Another two words. SEE HER.
In that case they would need to see Maisie Pike too. There was only one difficulty with this plan that Miriam could see. She had attended Samuel Pike’s funeral fourteen months ago and stood beside his wife while the organist played something stirring and inaccurate. His wife’s name had been Elizabeth, and she was a widow of thirty years when Samuel married her. There had not been a previous marriage in his obituary. Nor, in the whole of Miriam’s considerable experience of occasions on which the family had rented every vase and folding chair in the town, had she ever heard a woman called Maisie mentioned.
“Who is she?” she asked.
Hugh pointed to Claire. Her face changed.
“My mother was called May,” Claire said. “Margaret really. They wrote Margaret on all her certificates. Dad called her Maisie when he was feeling affectionate. She was married to my father for forty-one years. By the time this recording was made she already had me.”
“Could be a different Margaret,” Daniel said.
Nobody answered. From below the far end of the street came the sound of a truck reversing. Miriam had thought the day was going to proceed like a row of catches on a mechanical lock, one little fact lifting the next until the door came free. Instead, with each thing she learned, an ordinary house seemed to open onto another family’s ordinary house until she didn’t know where the walls had ever been.
Claire sat down by her father. “Did Mom marry Sam Pike before she married you?”
He raised the NO card. This time he held it out after she had read it, and she put her fingers on it until he let it go.
“Did he want to marry her?”
Hugh looked down at his tray. After a while he began to write again. MEANT TO. The effort cost him, so nobody hurried him as he added two more words beneath. CHANGED MIND.
“Whose mind changed?” Miriam asked.
Hugh tapped the words with his pencil. Then he pointed at the empty chair by the window, where perhaps his wife had sat for years.
Claire laughed softly through her tears. “Yeah. That sounds like her.”
They left father and daughter together, a part of the tape unwound and shining on the little coffee table, and drove back toward the city. Vernon fell asleep before they reached the highway, his injured hand stretched palm up on his lap like a man waiting for somebody to give him his change.
Miriam tried her son. He answered from somewhere that sounded like a flour mill in high wind.
“Are you there yet?”
“Where is there?” he shouted.
“School!”
“Oh! I thought you meant are we there emotionally because Miss Palmer keeps asking if we are there emotionally and nobody knows the answer so we all just say absolutely. We’re trees. What emotions should we have? Is there a concern about rain?”
“I’m not going to make the train, Theo.”
“Is something really wrong?”
“Yes.” She tried to think of a way of explaining what had happened that would put it in context or make it funny. In the end she told him the truth. “Somebody took a woman’s wedding ring. It might have been Grandma.”
“My grandma?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. I didn’t know she did stuff like that.”
“I didn’t know either.”
“Are you going to get it back?”
“I’m going to try.”
“Okay, then I’m definitely glad I’m a tree. I just have to throw an apple at a scarecrow.”
After a moment he added, “I did want you to come though.”
“I know, honey.”
“No, I mean both those things are true. That’s what Miss Palmer means by there emotionally. Probably.”
He said he would ask his father to film the throwing of the apple in particular. She promised to watch every available angle. For the next ten miles, driving behind a van with a loose length of yellow ribbon fluttering from its back door, she wondered when her son had learned to let two things be true at the same time, and whether he could show her how to do it.
Chapter 7 — What Beatriz Remembered
Daniel’s mother lived in the back apartment of a house on Slater Place. At the entrance was a doorbell with a picture of a sleeping baby taped beneath it. The baby had probably long since learned to operate the doorbell. Daniel knocked twice in the particular way of a son who has been letting his mother know it’s him all his life. A voice from inside yelled, “The sweepstakes people knock different!”
“Are you sure it’s not them?” he called back.
“If it’s a million dollars put it through the letter slot.”
She opened the door herself. She was seventy-six, with black hair going white in a single stripe that ran from her left temple up into her bun. She wore a green smock with paint on it. Her right hand was stained blue.
“If you’re here about the stove they’ve already fixed it,” she said to Miriam. “Of course they’ve fixed it so good that there’s a piece left over. Daniel, did your little girl finally talk you into abandoning her at the jewelers?”
He kissed her on her good cheek. “With Ada Price. We had to go by somebody’s house.”
“Vernon Price, by God.” There was a great deal of pleasure in her voice. “You still alive?”
“Only in places.”
She drew him close, and Miriam saw in their embrace a piece of time to which she would never have the key, one of those rooms that will go on existing between certain people even if every physical place in which they have lived should be bought and sold and torn down to its cellars.
On the kitchen table were six small paintings of the same orange on the same dish. The first one was more yellow than orange, the second so bright it might have been lit from within, and by the sixth the orange was a little pool of reds and grays with exactly the right weight. Beatriz wanted to know which Miriam liked.
“The last one.”
“I did that one first, so you’ve just ruined a very good teacher’s reputation.”
“Was I supposed to like them in order?”
“You’re supposed to like the one you like. What are all these men here for?”
They told her. She listened with her hands folded on a piece of newspaper. Each time they stopped she waited a little in case the story might come to a better end under its own power. When it was done she went to the sink, washed the blue paint off her hand, and poured water from a jar marked NOT BRUSH WATER into a glass.