Chapter 15 Heat Transfer #3
“I think I’d know if we were.” Jack piles sugar in his mug, and I want to fling myself into an active volcano.
“I certainly hope so. Oh well.” She shrugs quaintly. “I guess it’s for the best. You were always so protective of your brother—it would be a tad out of character for you to seduce his girlfriend.”
“Let’s not use the word seduce before eleven a.m., ’kay?” Jack stands and starts moving around the kitchen. “And let’s talk about something else, since Elsie’s in the middle of an anoxic event.”
I absolutely am. My organs are shutting down.
“What else shall we discuss? I am but a helpless elderly lady. Nothing ever happens to me. Ah yes: the neighbors’ dog has been defecating on my lawn again. I’m considering hiring someone to go defecate on theirs. Would either of you be interested?”
“I’m a bit busy,” Jack says. A second later, a steaming mug appears in front of me.
Jack cages me from behind, one hand next to mine on the table, the other fussing with something papery.
He steeps a tea bag in the hot water, and I feel his chest brushing against my back and hair as he says, “But Elsie is in the market for a new job.”
I twist around to glare at him, but he’s already back to his seat. Millicent, on the other hand, is giving me an expectant look.
“I—sorry, I . . . I can’t, and . . .” It’s probably illegal? “Sorry.”
“Second job offer she’s refused this morning,” Jack murmurs.
“Mmm. Picky. No matter, I’ll ask my other grandchildren, then. Perhaps strongly hint that their inheritance will depend on it?”
“Less helpless elderly lady and more bitter old hag territory,” Jack says fondly.
“Perhaps. What’s with the tea?” she asks Jack.
“Elsie doesn’t like coffee.”
“Oh.” There’s something loaded in that oh. “You could have said so, Elsie.”
“No, she couldn’t.” Jack’s eyes hold mine from above his mug. The dimple appears, making my heart stutter. The air between us smells like Earl Grey, raspberry jam, and early Sunday morning. “But we’re working on it.”
My phone is long dead, there are no clocks in the kitchen, and I have no clue how long we sit at the table.
I’m occasionally part of the conversation, but neither Millicent nor Jack asks much of me, and it’s nice, being in this Smith limbo of sorts.
Focusing on the way Jack and his grandmother interact, a combination of teasing and deep, utter love for one another.
I don’t think I’ve ever been in a room so full of honesty before, but I’m positive that not a single lie has been uttered since I came into this house.
It’s exhilarating, but in a stomach-dropping way.
Like a roller coaster, or eating blue cheese.
Jack and Millicent, I discover, spend part of every weekend together—preferably through an ambush. “Last week’s ‘life-or-death emergency’ was that she needed Bitcoin explained to her,” he says dryly. It’s obvious that he doesn’t mind.
“I also don’t get Bitcoin,” I say after a long sip of tea—the third hot drink Jack’s made for me in twelve hours. Not sure how this is my life.
“See?” Millicent smiles triumphantly. “Greg’s maybe-girlfriend is on my side.”
Jack and Millicent know more about each other’s lives than any relative of mine ever did about me.
She tracks with no difficulty names, places, events he mentions, and in turn he doesn’t miss a beat when she announces that she’ll wear a green dress to the Rutherford dinner, or after she complains that she finished her show and has nothing to watch.
“You did not finish it,” he says.
“I did.”
“I got you twelve seasons of Murder, She Wrote. You cannot have watched them in one week.”
“There are no more episodes on the TV.”
He stands with a sigh. “I’m going to switch the DVD. Be right back.”
I open my mouth the second he disappears, ready to fill the silence with some comment about the weather, but Millicent is already giving me one of her piercing looks. “You’re not a librarian, are you?”
I clear my throat. “No. I’m sorry I lied. It’s a long story, but—”
“I’m ninety—no time for long stories. What is it that you do, then?”
I fidget with the tea tag. “I’m a physicist.”
“Like Jack.”
“Sort of. Not really.” I keep my eyes on the mug. The state of my career is a sore point. “He’s a world-renowned professor. I’m just an adjunct. And he’s an experimental physicist, while I’m—”
“A theorist.” She nods. “Like his mom, then.”
I look up and blink at her. “His mom?” Is Millicent getting confused? Like Grandma Hannaway before passing, when she’d mix me up with her least favorite sister and yell at me for stealing her apron? “You don’t mean the one who . . .”
“Died. Well, of course. He only ever had the one.” She scoffs. “It’s not as if Caroline was eager to take over. Heartbreaking, watching those two boys grow up so close. Same house, same family. One with a mother, the other without.”
“Oh.” I shouldn’t ask any of the questions buzzing in my head. Millicent is clearly under the impression that Jack and I are something we’re not, or she wouldn’t disclose this. But . . . “How old was Jack?”
“When Grethe died?” Grethe. “About one. My son remarried just a few months later. They had Greg soon after. You see, for the first few years, it was me who insisted that we tell Jack nothing about Grethe. I thought he could have a normal life, believing that Caroline was his mother and he had lost nothing. But Caroline was never fond of him, and . . . well, it was her right to refuse. I shouldn’t have interfered.
Because I made it worse: a few years later he got into some trouble like children often do, and Caroline screamed at him, ‘Don’t call me Mom—I’m not your mother.
’ It was a moment of weakness. And Caroline did feel guilty afterwards.
But by then, Jack knew.” She sighs. “Hard to explain to a nine-year-old that everything he believes is a lie. That he shouldn’t call Mom the woman his brother calls Mom.
” Millicent massages her temple. “Jack seemed to take it in stride. Except that he stopped calling his father Dad, too. I became Millicent. And ever since, he’s been very distrustful of lies.
Very preoccupied with . . . boundaries. More than is healthy, I believe.
” She busies herself stacking mugs on top of the empty cookie plate.
For the first time since I met her, she looks her age.
Frail, old, tired. Her mouth is downturned, bracketed by deep lines.
“And yet Jack and Greg grew up thick as thieves, despite all that. The one saving grace.”
I remember Jack taking care of Greg after the dentist, and my heart squeezes. I try to picture them as kids, picture Jack being anything but his tall, assured, authoritative self, and fail miserably.
“Are you sure she . . . Grethe.” I want to ask if Turner was her last name. The reason Jack’s a Smith but not really a Smith. “Are you sure she was a theorist?” Physics runs in Jack’s family, when the only thing that runs in mine is eczema.
“Why do you ask?”
“Just . . . Jack doesn’t seem to like theorists very much.”
Millicent gives me a look. “He likes you, doesn’t he?”
She speaks like I’m the least sharp cookie in the jar, and I flush. “But he once wrote an article that—”
“Oh, that.” She chuckles, like it’s a fond family memory.
First day of kindergarten, meeting Goofy at Disneyland, and that time her grandson sent an entire field of study into a tailspin.
“That had nothing to do with theoretical physics. He was just a teenager acting out, angry because of what he’d found out about Grethe.
But he’s a man now. A good one. Too bad I can’t leave him my money, or he’ll just divide it up between the rest of my ungrateful family. ”
“What had he found out about Grethe?” Was the entire Smith-Turner Hoax about his mom? Did he . . . hate her? Was it some sort of revenge on her for . . . for what? Dying? It’s too ridiculous. “Did he write the article because of her?”
I must be asking too many questions. Millicent’s expression shifts, first to guarded, then to vacuous.
“I forget,” she says with a ditzy shrug, even though she doesn’t.
Millicent, I’m certain, hasn’t forgotten a single thing in her life—not Greg’s name, and certainly not what led Jack to be who he is today.
“Jack will tell you. When you’ve been together long enough. ”
“No, we . . . Really, Jack and I are not—we’re not doing it,” I say. My brain cringes so hard, it folds in on itself.
“Oh, I know. This is something else altogether, isn’t it?”
“It’s nothing at all. We’re not even friends.”
“Right.” Her tone is almost . . . pitying? “Well, you’ll figure it out in your own time.”
“Figure out what?”
“DVD player’s all set,” Jack announces, emerging in the doorway, “and I’ve left detailed instructions on how to switch to the next season, since the ones I wrote last week are gone.”
“Oh, yes. I had to throw the notepad at your aunt Maureen when she said my green pullover was too bright.”
“Of course, you had to. Can I drive Elsie home now? Or is the abduction still ongoing?”
Millicent huffs. “Do take her, please. I’m sick of both of you. You’re not nearly as entertaining as Jessica Fletcher.”
She kicks us out as unceremoniously as she welcomed us in, making a symphony of faux-irritated noises that are belied by how hard she clings to Jack’s hug.
“I’ll stop by later to shovel some snow,” he promises.
“Fine, but do not come in. I’ll be busy with my show.”
“I know.” He kisses her forehead. “Be good till next weekend. Have fun writing spite wills.”
“I shall,” she says defiantly before slamming the door in our faces.
“Does she really?” I ask on our way to the car. The snow crunches under our feet.
“What?”
“Write wills for spite.”
“Probably.”
“Why?”
“Pettiness. Boredom. Loneliness. When I was sixteen, my father made a comment about her roast being dry, and she pledged a million dollars to a bunny shelter.”
“God. Why?”