Chapter 3. Lenore
Lenore
There’s a lot you can learn about a person from the things they leave behind.
A house is a little like a museum—my grandmother’s house perhaps more than most. It’s a glimpse into a life, but that’s not quite the same as living it.
There are things about my grandmother that you might have guessed if you’d walked into this house a few years ago.
You might’ve seen the wiry silver strands collected in her boar-bristle hairbrush and surmised that she wore her hair long, even in old age.
Maybe you’d notice the pair of green rubber gardening boots on the side porch, or the fraying straw hat hanging on a peg in the mudroom, hints that she preferred to spend her time outdoors.
You could even take stock of the books, wedged between brass duck bookends on the mantel, and decide that she had a healthy appreciation for the classics: Robert Frost and Shirley Jackson, among others.
You would learn a lot, but there was far more you wouldn’t know.
Like the fact that no one was allowed to call her Gabby for short—it was always Gabrielle, or, to Damien and me, Gran.
A pair of gardening boots couldn’t tell you that her favorite flowers were black-eyed Susans, not cultivated but grown wild.
Without living with her, you wouldn’t know how she would curl up on the couch in the evenings, a reading light clipped to a pulpy old romance novel, creases pressed into the spine, billowing shirts and heaving bodices on the bent paperback cover.
I lost her slowly, in bits and pieces. Sometimes I think about that Dylan Thomas poem—“rage against the dying of the light”—but Gabrielle French didn’t rage, or burn.
It was like watching a fire dwindle, embers too faint to spit sparks.
Slow enough that you don’t realize you’ve grown cold until only ashes are left behind.
After moving her into a care facility three years ago, we sorted through everything left in the house, paring it down to the things we could justify keeping.
I returned to New York with a broken heart and a box filled with things that I thought, maybe, would help me better understand the woman who stepped in to raise us when our parents failed.
I was barely able to look at that box while she was still alive. It felt like a betrayal, inviting myself to pieces of her that she never intended me to know. Now, with the house changing hands, and her gone, it’s the only connection to her that I still have.
Sitting cross-legged on the bed, I dig out a velvet ring box and pop it open.
Damien asked our grandmother for her engagement ring before he proposed to Katie, which left me with our great-grandmother’s ring: a marquise-cut emerald, clouded with age.
It was important to Gran, though—she used to wear it on her right middle finger rather than have it resized.
I remove it from the box and wriggle it onto my ring finger. It’s a bit of a tight fit, so I give it a twist to work it past my knuckle and then hold out my arm so that it catches the light. Accent diamonds wink in the yellow gold setting. It’s perfect.
Matt never proposed, exactly. It was more like he stumbled into an engagement, because it sounded less frivolous during business dinners to introduce me as his fiancée rather than his girlfriend.
And then there was the ring to maintain appearances, and somewhere along the way, the lines between desire and convenience got blurred.
I was all too happy to give that ring back to him when I broke things off.
It was never the ring I’d always wanted, with its gaudy diamond and flashy white gold setting, although I tried to pretend for a while.
His choice of ring was the second sign that something was amiss.
Feeling like I needed to pretend to be someone I was not—that should’ve been the first.
My phone vibrates. I look over at the nightstand, where the screen is lit up with an incoming call: Gita Chaudhari.
“What now,” I mutter, swiping to answer and putting it on speaker. “Hello?” I try to tug the emerald ring from my finger to put it away, but it won’t fit back over the knuckle.
“Hi, is this Lenore French?” a woman chirps.
I twist the ring back and forth, but it’s no use. I’m starting to wonder how I managed to squeeze it on in the first place. “Yes,” I remember to answer through mounting panic.
“This is Gita with Green Mountain Realty. Sorry, I tried to get ahold of Damien, but I couldn’t seem to—”
“Oh, it’s no problem at all,” I grunt, doubled over as I try to wrench the ring from my finger through sheer force. I give up with a sharp exhale, puffing out my cheeks. Shit.
“I’m calling because the buyer is hoping to get the home inspection done sometime next week—I know there’s no one living there, as of right now, but we wanted to make sure we’re in the clear.”
“Next week sounds great.” I turn my palm to face up and inspect where my skin bulges around the ring band. Am I imagining it, or does my finger look a bit blue?
“Excellent,” Gita is saying. “I’ll reach out with an exact date and time once we have that scheduled for you.”
“Thank you.” I tap my screen to end the call and give the ring another firm twist, but it doesn’t budge.
This is fine. It happens to everyone at least once. Maybe not to Gran, whose hands were downright dainty compared to mine, but this is definitely a thing that happens. A little lotion and it’ll slip right off.
I climb off the bed and dig my makeup bag out of my suitcase, overturning it onto the rug with a clatter of nail polish bottles and a tube of mascara.
I sink to my knees to sort through everything.
I packed setting spray and a tub of under-eye night cream that cost a fortune, but I forgot to pack everyday lotion.
I could use a daub of the night cream, but that would probably be the equivalent of an hour’s pay, so better to not.
With a growl of frustration, I push to my feet and head downstairs.
My grandmother always kept Oil of Olay in the medicine cabinet, but ransacking the bathroom only turns up a bottle of DEET-based bug repellant and refill containers for a Glade Plug-in.
No hand soap, either. I debate trying the bug repellant but decide against it.
It’s no big deal. I need to head to the store anyway, to stock up on food for the week.
I grab my rental key fob from the hook in the mudroom, slip my feet back into my clogs, and head out the door.
Downtown Whitbury comprises a single street, hemmed in by brick buildings that are wedged together like books on a shelf.
I ease my foot off the gas pedal and peer out the window at familiar mom-and-pop shops, the hardware store, and the three separate pizzerias embroiled in a decades-long turf war, but there are new tenants as well.
A coffee shop called the Hidden Acorn beckons.
I park in the public lot behind the post office and step out.
Sunlight gleams over curved car roofs. I cut through an alleyway with rainwater collected in potholes, and chalk drawings ground into the asphalt.
A covered staircase leads to second-story apartments, perched above the shops, though they almost never go up for rent thanks to the statewide housing shortage.
A bitter wind funnels between the buildings, stirring my hair across my vision. I tuck strands behind an ear.
I emerge onto the main street. Old-fashioned lampposts line the sidewalk, boasting faded star-spangled buntings that are swapped out for major holidays but are currently caught in the wide swath of calendar between Labor Day and Halloween.
A young man in a green apron greets me inside Beacham Trail Market & Variety Store.
I’m relieved that I don’t recognize him.
I’m not ready for the questions that’ll be thrown around when word inevitably gets out that I’m back in town.
That’s one thing I prefer about New York: anonymity.
You can be somebody and nobody at once. In a town like Whitbury, trying to be somebody draws too much attention, and not all of it positive.
I grab a handbasket and make a beeline for the health and beauty section, which is less a section in the traditional sense and more a footnote at the bottom of an endcap. I’m presented with an array of handmade shampoo bars and a hand cream made from beef tallow.
It’s all upward of ten dollars each, and I’m already stretching the budget by taking three weeks off from work. I’ll order some cheap bodywash and other necessities straight to the house, but in the meantime, I need something that’ll help with the ring situation.
“Can I help you find anything?” It’s the employee in the green apron.
“Dish soap,” I say, hurling the words at him with alarming urgency.
If he’s in any way perturbed by my hitherto unprecedented fervor for washing dishes, he doesn’t let it show. His expression is the very picture of customer service apathy as he leads me to the correct aisle. “Let me know if you need anything else,” he says before leaving me to it.
I select an inexpensive generic bottle and toss it into the handbasket.
Afterward, I gather ingredients for a few easy meals—peanut butter and jelly, bread, soup, dried pasta, and jars of sauce. Whatever will keep me alive for the next few weeks with minimal effort.
Finally, I approach the register. It’s the kid in the green apron again, because this market can probably only afford to keep one person staffed on any given day. I cast him a tight-lipped smile as I unload my basket onto the conveyer belt.
“Do you have a phone number with us?” he inquires.
“No,” I say, taken aback. “Do I need one?”
“It’s for our rewards program,” he says.
Last I remember, Beacham’s was still using analog cash registers. A rewards program seems a bit technologically advanced for a town where the retirement community is statistically overrepresented.
“Did you want to sign up?”
“That’s all right,” I say. “I don’t really live here, so—”
“Lenore,” someone interrupts behind me. “Lenore French?”
I turn to find a woman with frothy white curls standing in line, her cart overflowing. Her patchwork vest boasts various plaids, checks, and rosy florals.
“Oh my goodness, it is you,” she says, then turns to the cashier like she hopes he’ll share in her excitement. “Gabrielle French’s granddaughter, all grown up.”
The cashier raises his eyebrows and humors her with a bemused smile, the register beeping rhythmically as he scans my items.
“How long has it been, now?” the woman asks me. “At least ten years?”
I glance at her distractedly while unloading my basket. “Sorry, I don’t remember—”
“Oh, it’s no bother—Patricia Wilcox, with the Whitbury Historical Society. I went to school with your grandmother. God rest her soul.”
Her hand shoots out, flecked with age spots and decked in gaudy costume rings, none of which appear stuck on any of her fingers. I set a can of baked beans on the conveyer belt and stretch across her cart for a handshake.
“Ah, right,” I say. “You guys meet over in the little steepled church—”
“—with the white siding, yes, that’s the one,” she finishes for me.
The cashier takes my empty basket and sets it behind the counter. I fish around inside my canvas tote for my wallet.
“You know,” Patricia continues, “I would love to poke around that farmhouse of yours while you’re in town, maybe see whether there’s anything of historical value in the attic before it changes hands.”
“Oh, if there was anything worthwhile, I’m pretty sure my grandmother would’ve donated it to you already.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Patricia says.
“Did you want to buy a bag?” the cashier asks. I nod and hand him a few bills, sifting through my tote in search of the loose change that jingles around at the bottom.
“You know, it’s really a shame that you’re selling,” Patricia says. “It’s so rare for a house to be kept in the family. Who knows whether the next owner will respect its historical integrity—they’ll probably gut it and modernize, like everybody else. But these sites need to be preserved.”
I slide a couple quarters and a nickel across the counter to the cashier and start bagging my own groceries. “Why didn’t the historical society buy it?” I ask without really thinking.
“Oh!” Her head rears back in a laugh, and she touches a hand to my shoulder, like I’ve just told a brilliant joke. “It would take more than a few bake sales to raise that sort of money. No, I’m afraid we wouldn’t be able to afford the upkeep, even if we did put in an offer.”
“Right. Sorry.” I’m flustered as I shove canned soup into the reusable bag.
I swing it over my shoulder and accept the receipt from the cashier.
“Tell you what,” I say to Patricia. “I’ll check out the attic while I’m in town, and if it looks like there’s anything interesting up there, I’ll give you a call. ”
“Perfect,” she says, and pops the snap open on her purse. “Oh, I know I’ve got a card in here somewhere—here you go.”
I accept her business card, glancing at the title: PATRICIA WILCOX, TREASURER. “All right. It was good to see you, Mrs. Wilcox.”
“Oh, please,” she says with a dismissive wave of her hand. “My husband’s been dead for sixteen years. Call me Patty.”