Chapter Two
CHAPTER TWO
The clanging of the kitchen radiator keeps me moving.
I’m on the second box, making quick decisions on what to keep and what to throw away.
There are unpaid bills, unopened bank statements, and overdue notices from the library.
There are stacks of catalogs with dog-eared pages marking luxuries my mother had dreamed of buying but could not afford.
A tufted leather ottoman. A seafoam-green cashmere wrap.
An Instant Pot. There is a fat folder of letters from old boyfriends, some handwritten and many more printed out from emails.
There are even copies of love letters my mother had sent.
As I leaf through them, phrases jump out from her looping cursive: “your manly, musky scent,” “my soulmate, my bodymate.” The recycle pile grows.
This is the opposite of nostalgia; there’s nothing here to make me slow down and indulge in memories.
Instead, I glance and toss, glance and toss.
A photograph of my mother and the man who lured her to Gainesville, who’d always say “Hey, little lady,” when she’d make him get on the phone to talk to me.
A newspaper clipping from a Napa Valley newspaper about the opening of her tea shop, which she closed in less than a year when she decided she’d be happier in New Mexico.
A list called “Romantic Things” that includes mostly clichés (sunsets, wine-red roses, silk lingerie) along with a few wacko entries (marshmallows, hailstorms, spider plants).
There’s a blue file folder that’s so thin I assume it is empty. It looks new, so I fling it to the keep pile. But a paper floats out, its heading in bold: “Your Unique English Village Holiday!”
Another of my mother’s pipe dreams. When I was little and ready for bed, I’d lie on my stomach and she’d tickle my back and talk about the trips we’d take: to Manhattan to eat frozen hot chocolate at a place she’d seen in a movie or to Arizona to ride mules to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
Even after she left me, she’d call to share her ideas about where we should go and what we should do.
Do you want to see the wild horses of Chincoteague?
Of course I did, but mostly I wanted her to keep talking, to not hang up the phone, to come home.
As I lean over the box to grab more papers, I notice the phrase “paid in full” on the errant paper.
I pick it up and scan the words, getting more confused as I read.
How could my mother have paid for a weeklong holiday for two in a cottage in the English countryside?
She was always tight on money and never good at keeping a job.
For the past few years, she’d claimed she was too broke to come up north.
How could she have afforded a trip to England?
It makes no sense, but it’s here in black-and-white: Skye Sanders Little booked a two-bedroom cottage in a village called Willowthrop, on the edge of someplace called the Peak District.
I google Peak District, only to learn that it’s “an upland area in central-northern England, at the southern end of the Pennines,” about 150 miles north of London.
The Pennines, I read, are a mountain range but not in the American sense.
On average, the tallest “peaks” are only half as high as the Adirondacks or the Catskills.
The first of the national parks of England and Wales, “the Peak” as it’s known, includes the mostly uninhabited moorlands and gritstone plateaus of the absurdly ominous sounding “Dark Peak” and the steep limestone valleys, gorges, and rolling hills of the “White Peak.” According to Google, visitors are drawn there to hike the beautiful countryside, go rock climbing, and visit the area’s quaint, historic villages.
What I read next is even more surprising.
In addition to renting the cottage, my mother paid $1,600 for two participants to solve a “genuine fake English-village murder mystery.” Incredulous, I read on.
The mystery will be plotted by “one of England’s noted mystery writers” and enacted with the participation of actors and local villagers who will play the roles of “victim, red herrings, innocent bystanders, and culprit.” The event will include an opening-night dinner at a local restaurant (choice of steak and kidney pie, fish and chips, or chicken tikka masala), the examination of “an actual, simulated crime scene,” and the questioning of suspects.
At the end of the week, the winner (or organizers, if there is no victor) will reveal all in an Agatha Christie–style wrap-up—fancy dress encouraged—which will be capped off with sticky toffee pudding, “inclusive of your choice of custard or vanilla ice cream.” The award for solving the case is the opportunity to be the “understudy for an already deceased on-camera victim” in a future television murder-mystery show.
I assume this means that you get to step in, or, more likely, lie down, if the card-carrying actor playing the dead body takes ill or needs an extended bathroom break.
It’s unclear whether travel expenses will be paid for that return trip.
I am so confused. My mother wanted to go to England to play a game?
I read further. Participants in this unique event will be helping the tiny village of Willowthrop, as all proceeds will go toward restoring the much-loved but dilapidated community pool.
And then at the bottom of the paper, a notation, initialed by my mother, that the cost of the “murder week” is nonrefundable under any circumstances.
Nothing about this makes sense. For the first time since my mother died, I am overwhelmed with missing her—not to have more time together but to grab her by the shoulders and ask what she’d been smoking when she booked the trip. Instead, I call my mother’s best friend and astrologer.
“Such a shame!” Aurora says. “Skye was so excited. She even found a pair of rubber rain boots at the thrift shop. She called them wellies.”
“Had she recently gotten into murder mysteries?”
“Not really.”
“How could she be so irresponsible?” I eye the unpaid bills that are now my problem.
“On the contrary, she had me check the planetary alignment to make sure the timing would be auspicious.”
“Which obviously it wasn’t.” I don’t have to say “sudden stroke” to make my point.
“I’m an astrologer, Cath, not a clairvoyant.”
“My mother was in debt.”
Aurora sighs. “Money is such a millstone.”
“Who was she going to travel with?” I ask Aurora. “Had she met an Englishman? Fallen for an Anglophile?”
I long ago stopped trying to keep up with my mother’s love affairs.
I was only two when my father was killed by a drunk driver, after which we moved in with my dad’s mother.
I assume my mother went through a period of mourning and celibacy, but I can’t remember a time when she didn’t confide in me about her romances, sparing few details.
Only during college did I begin to understand how deeply weird it was to know how your mother best achieved orgasm and with whom.
It was a big day for me when I suggested that she treat her relationships like a new pregnancy and keep them secret until she’d passed the twelve-week mark, a milestone she rarely reached.
Thankfully, she never filled the new void in our conversations by asking about my romantic life, which was fine with me, as there’s not been much to tell.
I’ve had a handful of relationships, mostly with guys who wanted to keep things as casual as I did.
In between, I’ve been fine on my own. I’d rather stay single than chase love like my mother did.
I have to ask Aurora to repeat herself.
“I said, she was going to take you,” she says.
“That’s impossible.”
The last time my mother and I traveled together was on a fall weekend when I was nine and we drove from Buffalo to Vermont.
We held hands as we hiked along a gorge, visited a toy museum, and stayed in an old hotel where we slept together in a canopy bed.
The next day, we moved into an ashram. My mother gave me an old book about girls in boarding school, which I read while she did hot yoga.
At the end of the long weekend, we drove to Rochester, where my mother put me on a bus back to Buffalo, my grandmother’s address and phone number scrawled on an index card she’d zipped into my jacket pocket.
For weeks, she said she’d be home soon, but by Christmas, she’d moved in with a massage therapist she’d met in a silent meditation.
From then on, she never returned to Buffalo for more than a few days at a time.
“What made her think that I’d agree to go?” I ask Aurora.
“Again, astrologer, not mind reader.”
“But why me? Why on earth would my mother book this ludicrous trip to England with me?
“I haven’t the foggiest,” Aurora says. “I suppose that’s another mystery for you to solve.”