Chapter Three
CHAPTER THREE
Dear Miss Little:
I am so sorry about your mother. I had the fortune of corresponding with her at length and am deeply sorry that her untimely death has prevented her from indulging in what she said would be the fulfilment of a dream: to visit England with her only child.
In answer to your inquiry, no, we are not monsters. As such, we will graciously refund half of your mother’s payment. The other half, which she was chuffed to bits to allocate for you, is unfortunately not refundable, as you are not presently deceased.
However, you can recover a portion of the payment made by transferring from the two-bedroom cottage your mother selected to one of our shared accommodation offerings, Wisteria Cottage, along with two other participants, each traveling solo.
The three of you can work as a team. See details in the attached reimbursement notice.
I trust this will suit you and we look forward to seeing you on the 27th of May, when the festivities begin!
Yours most sincerely,
Mrs. Germaine Postlethwaite
Owner, The Book and Hook
Willowthrop Village
Derbyshire, England
It is 9:50 a.m., ten minutes until the shop opens, and I read the email again.
Who is this Germaine with the unpronounceable last name?
And why does she assume I want to fly to England to solve a fake murder?
I have nothing against English-village mysteries; I’ve spent hours watching them on television with Mr. Groberg.
We watch only at night or on rainy days, always with tea and gingersnaps, though I never drink the tea.
Mr. Groberg usually identifies the culprit well before I have the slightest idea of whodunit.
My mother used to make fun of me for watching “dowdy people solve crimes in bad weather with no sex.” It didn’t occur to her that what I loved was not so much the shows themselves as the time with Mr. Groberg. Had she thought I’d be into this trip?
I rest my head on my desk, not looking up when the antique sleigh bells on the door jingle and a blast of cold air rushes in. I know by the scent of patchouli that it’s Kim. The tinny sound of electronic dance music escapes from her earbuds.
“Everything okay?” Kim shouts.
I lift my head and nod toward my computer screen. “I got a response.”
Kim takes out her earbuds and pulls off her wool beanie, a mess of long blond ringlets tumbling down her back. Unraveling her scarf, she reads the email over my shoulder.
“Wisteria Cottage sounds lovely,” she says.
“Wisteria is an invasive species.”
I walk to the door, pull up the blinds, and flip the sign to “We’re Open.
” Outside, it’s still snowing, thick flakes making slow-motion cartwheels to the ground.
The plow has been through once already, but the street is white again.
Across the road, the shops look warm and inviting.
These are my favorite days, cold and muffled and clean, in the city where I’ve lived my whole life, the place my mother fled without looking back.
“How can you still live there?” she’d said the last time we spoke, about a month before the stroke that killed her at fifty-five.
She had never intended to settle in Buffalo.
She was twenty when she left home in Indiana to seek adventure in a big city.
Buffalo was supposed to be a pit stop, an overnight visit with a friend at the state university.
But down the hall in her friend’s dormitory was Ben Little, the bearded, soft-spoken resident adviser.
He was a senior, an English major who wrote poetry without punctuation and played Spanish guitar in the stairwell, where the acoustics were good.
Within a few days, my mother was ensconced in Ben’s single room.
When he graduated a month later, they moved into a garage apartment near Anchor Bar.
My mother took a job at a coffee shop while he prepared to start teaching high school English.
Within a year, she was pregnant with me.
Buffalo may have been an accident for my mother, but for me it has been the source of everything good.
Here was love and consistency. Here was my beloved paternal grandmother Raya, who stepped up when my mother left.
Who took me to the public library every week, attended my parent-teacher conferences, combed the knots out of my thick hair, suffered my brief stint playing the oboe, and indulged my love of Polly Pockets.
Who taught me how to bake challah, make a sundial, hang wallpaper, and catch and cook a brown trout.
Who told me stories about my father, who used to read to me every morning and every night from the same books she’d read to him when he was a child.
“A week away from home could be what you need,” Kim says when I’m back at my desk.
I know exactly what she means. I’ve been a cranky mess since getting back from Florida.
Last week, a customer came in with an adorable little schnoodle, one of those hypoallergenic breeds, and I snapped “no dogs” and made them leave, even though I love dogs and keep a box of Milk-Bones in my desk drawer.
Yesterday, I talked a perfectly nice woman into choosing a pair of frames that made her eyes look beady and her nose gargantuan.
Luckily, I came to my senses before the order was final and suggested a more flattering pair.
Kim thinks I’m in some sort of “grief purgatory” because my mother’s so-called funeral didn’t give me proper closure. She doesn’t understand that I don’t need to mourn. I was already used to my mother leaving me.
“You haven’t had a vacation in years,” Kim says. “A long weekend cat-sitting at Lake George does not count. And this one is paid for.”
The bells jingle and a customer walks in, thankfully stopping our conversation.
But all day, fitting glasses, adjusting frames, and cutting lenses, I can’t stop thinking about my mother’s payment to Germaine What’s-her-name.
Not getting what you paid for is like throwing money away, which makes my skin crawl.
But the English countryside? It hasn’t exactly been on my bucket list. I went to Greece after college with a girlfriend, and everything about it was luscious—the weather, the turquoise sea, the olives and feta cheese, a vacationing med student named Gregori.
An English village seems like the opposite.
If Greece is a sarong tied around your waist in a sexy knot, England is a pair of galoshes.
There’s nothing enticing about sitting in front of a fire with a bunch of old biddies doing needlepoint and debating whether it was the colonel with the cricket bat behind the field house or the vicar in the parsonage with the candlestick.
After work, I bring Mr. Groberg a Tupperware container of chickpea soup and tell him about the email and the partial refund. He’s so enchanted by the whole trip that I suggest he go as my proxy.
“When you crack the case, we can share the glory,” I say.
“Is there a prize?” he asks.
I tell him about getting to be the backup victim in a murder mystery and he says, “What’s second prize? You get to understudy two dead bodies?”
He pours some soup into a bowl and puts it in the microwave. While it’s heating up, he tells me his travel days are over. And then he shakes his head and says, “For all her faults, that mother of yours had a real joie de vivre.”
The comment stings. The first time my mother met Mr. Groberg, she waltzed into the store unexpectedly while I was working.
I hadn’t even known she was coming to town.
I was embarrassed by the way she hugged me for too long, and I apologized to Mr. Groberg for the intrusion.
Before he could say anything, she’d said, “Nonsense! I’m your mother, and I couldn’t wait to see you.
” But then she spent nearly an hour talking to Mr. Groberg, asking him all sorts of questions about his life, his business, even his childhood.
I’d worked for him for nearly a year by then, but until that day I had no idea that he’d had polio as a child and had once dreamed of being a famous ventriloquist. The longer they talked the angrier I got, though I’m still not sure if I was jealous of Mr. Groberg for getting all my mother’s attention or if I was envious of how easily she got him to open up.
What bothered me even more, though, was that my mother never again mentioned Mr. Groberg other than to ask when I was going to get a more exciting job.
Mr. Groberg takes the bowl of soup from the microwave and dips in a spoon for a taste.
“I have two things to say,” he tells me.
“One, nice touch of cumin. Two, you should go to England.” He sits down at the table, tucks a napkin over his shirt.
“Travel is never a mistake. Even if the trip is not fabulous, it will give you a new perspective. You know that moment when you fit a customer with new glasses? And everything they’ve gotten used to seeing as blurry or distant suddenly pops into focus?
You’ve made everything old new for them.
Going away from home for a little while can do the same thing. ”
That night, I have trouble sleeping again.
I think about what Mr. Groberg said about bringing things into focus.
Maybe travel offers that, but do I need to see my life more clearly?
Do I want to? There’s nothing wrong with my routine.
It’s reliable and familiar, even if I can’t pretend that lately it hasn’t felt off-kilter.
Since returning from Florida, I haven’t slept straight through a single night.
Maybe Kim is right that I need closure. Could this trip provide it, a way to say goodbye to my mother for good?
I roll over onto my stomach and punch the pillow.
The light of the clock is a penetrating blue.
It’s 4:00 a.m. There’s no way I’m going to be in a better mood tomorrow.
I flip onto my back and tuck the quilt around my legs.
I think about crossing the ocean. Landing at Heathrow, taking a train north to the distinctly low “uplands.” Maybe I should call Aurora, pretend I believe in astrology, and ask what the stars say.
Should I do this for my mother? For myself?
It’s 4:15. An eon later, it’s 4:25. By 4:45, I’m bargaining with the gods of slumber.
If I take this cockamamie trip to England, can I sleep through the night?
At work that morning, Kim reminds me that I use a credit card for the shop’s expenses and that I’ve probably accrued a lot of points. “I bet you could fly business class,” she says.
“Very funny,” I say.
We both know it would physically pain me to spend more to sit in the front of an airplane that’s going to get me to my destination at the exact same time as the people in the back. But flying on miles sounds good, like traveling for free.
“What about the shop?” I can’t remember the last time I’ve been away from work for an entire week. “Spring is busy.”
“I can handle things here,” Kim says. “And what would you miss anyway, the chance to watch another woman try thirty different frames, ask your opinion on each, and choose the first pair you suggested?”
She’s right. It’s a routine business. She can manage it easily.
“I’ll even house-sit,” Kim says. “I can water your plants.”
“I don’t have plants.”
“I’ll bring mine.”
I open my desk calendar and flip to May 27.
“We’re getting the new display cases that week.”
“And I know exactly where they’re supposed to go,” Kim says.
“What about Mr. Groberg? He relies on my hearty soups.”
Kim folds her arms and nods. “His favorite is lentil. I know.”
“But no onions. They give him gas.”
“Noted.”
“And you’ll remind him to feed his fish? Sometimes he forgets.”
“The fish will be fed.” Kim is smiling now, rubbing her palms together. “Bravo. I knew you’d go!”