Chapter Eight
Present Day
Willamena was already in the foyer, staring at the door, when the doorbell rang.
She didn’t move.
“You’re a remarkable woman, Wills, but even you can’t open a door without turning the knob first,” she heard Jack say from behind her.
“I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Of course you can.”
She nervously flapped away some imaginary wrinkles on her skirt, then she smoothed her bob-length blond hair behind her ears. She took a deep breath to compose herself. Then she finally opened the door to a man and a little girl on her doorstep.
“Hello, Mother,” he said.
One Month Earlier
The arguments, late at night after five-year-old Bailey was in bed, were always the same.
They started and ended with her mother’s resentful question to her father, Why can’t you love me the way I love you?
But there was something different about tonight as her mother woke her quietly from sleep, wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, and shuffled her outside.
The blanket trailed behind Bailey in a satisfying way, like the train of a gown.
It was like when Bailey would play her favorite made-up game, Wedding Bride, alone in her room.
“Where are we going?” Bailey asked as her mother slid open the side door to the gray minivan, revealing that the back was full of suitcases. The air felt shivery and exciting.
“Who knows?” her mother answered, her eyes rimmed with pink and her nose stuffy. She buckled Bailey in, then got behind the wheel and pulled out of the driveway into their cul-de-sac.
Later, Bailey was told her mother had mistaken the interstate off-ramp for an on-ramp and had driven onto I-40 the wrong way.
There was little traffic at that time of night, so she hadn’t realized her mistake until a bank of headlights from a cluster of oncoming cars disoriented her.
The impact had caused the minivan to roll several times across the interstate, breaking windows and littering a long line of luggage in its wake.
It had taken a few confusing moments for the people in the other cars to assess their own injuries and get out, to finally rush over to the minivan.
By that time, Bailey was sitting by the interstate with her blanket still over her shoulders, unharmed.
The only thing she remembered clearly was her mother leading her away from the minivan, then sitting with her until the people approached.
Bailey told the same story to the bystanders, the EMTs, the police, her father.
It was, of course, impossible. Her mother had died on impact.
The one thing Bailey was sure of was the one thing everyone said couldn’t be true.
So she tucked it away, stuffed it into the closet where we store all impossible things.
By the time she and her father moved into the Wester House in Hen Town weeks later, she had already accepted that while some things were real and some things were not, she wasn’t the best judge of the difference.
Which meant the unusual occurrences within the house were perfectly in keeping with what she knew of the world.
Bailey used to have cul-de-sac playmates who would visit their grandparents on summer vacation, and when they returned they would tell stories of being allowed to watch daytime TV and eat candy, of money stuffed into their pockets for no reason at all.
This was a source of considerable envy to Bailey, because she didn’t have grandparents.
Her entire family, as far as she knew, consisted only of her father and mother.
They were both too much and not enough, and she often felt trapped between her mother’s loud resentments and her father’s quiet self-loathing.
But all along, there had been a grandmother.
Everyone who came around after the funeral with food and sympathy—neighbors, coworkers, friends—understood her father’s decision to move back home, even validated it. He needed support, they would say. He needed family.
But there was one man who came around, always at night when Bailey was supposed to be asleep, whom her dad never let in. He whispered through a crack in the door and Bailey remembered this man once saying, “You don’t have to do this. You hate it there. You always hated it there.”
Her dad said, “This isn’t about me, Ash. This is for Bailey.”
The man replied sadly, “Your wife punished you for being you. Now you’re doing the same thing to yourself.”
“Next stop, Hen Town!” Her dad sounded like an exhausted train conductor when he buckled Bailey into the back seat of his SUV.
“If I have a grandmother, why did she never come see me?” Bailey asked, just one of dozens of questions she’d asked over the past few weeks.
“I told her when you were born,” he answered patiently. “She sent flowers. She said it was best if she didn’t meet you.”
“Do I have a grandfather, too?” No one had yet mentioned that, and they usually came in pairs.
“No, sweetheart,” he said. “My father died when I was ten. But he would have loved you. His name was Terrence, just like me.”
He closed her door, got behind the wheel, and then drove out of Raleigh.
It felt like there was physical resistance at first. The car engine even seemed to labor, like it was pulling something so heavy it was almost too much to bear.
But then what had been tethering him broke and they shot forward, so fast Bailey’s head bumped the back of her seat.
Her father had finally let go of whatever he’d been holding on to.
An unattainable dream, perhaps. Or maybe simply the idea that, because he’d been living somewhere different, he would have become different.
Once out of the city, they drove on a rural highway for almost two hours, passing endless fields of tobacco and sweet potatoes in North Carolina’s central Piedmont.
Bailey stared out the car window while eating her favorite thing, jelly beans, which she liked to pretend were jewels.
Her mother had once tried to explain that you don’t eat jewels.
But Bailey had insisted that, yes, you do, and that’s what made you rich.
Her mother had dramatically hidden her jewelry box on a high shelf after that, as if afraid Bailey would ingest her rings.
They were in the middle of nowhere, winding their way through a labyrinth of back roads, when signs of civilization began to appear. A commercial greenhouse. A gas station. A dollar store. And, finally, a large, chicken-shaped billboard that read:
HEN TOWN WELCOMES YOU!
As if by magic, a postcard-worthy downtown suddenly appeared.
There was a grassy park, as round as a circus ring, surrounded by dozens of shops and restaurants.
Anchored on the far end was a gray stone courthouse with an imposing clock tower.
Bailey didn’t know where to look first. There were chicken sculptures everywhere, from small cast-iron guinea hens in front of brightly painted businesses to a six-foot-tall tin rooster in the center park, whose sole purpose seemed to be for tourist photo opportunities.
Downtown had a distinct shine and bounce, full of the kind of energy new people bring to an old place.
But the neighborhoods they turned in to had a different energy altogether; they seemed more set in their ways, and rather resentful of downtown’s newer energy, judging by the lack of chicken decor.
The car finally slowed on an affluent street of large homes set on a hill, and came to a stop in front of a house with three square stories of red brick and black shutters.
The brick made it seem impenetrable, as if anything could be going on inside.
In contrast, there was a newer glass sunroom addition to the side, sunlight winking off it.
“This is it?” Bailey asked.
“This is it,” her dad replied.
Bailey pointed to the green Victorian-style house next door. It had a white front porch wrapped around it like the bow of a present. “Can that be ours instead?” she asked.
“It doesn’t work that way, sweetheart.”
They got out and Bailey ran up the concrete steps, her dad following with their bags. He stacked them by the door next to a topiary in a very large pot, then paused to roll down his shirtsleeves and button the cuffs.
“Best behavior, okay?” he said as he slipped on a navy-blue blazer, the one he usually wore to work. He was sweating, which made his cologne smell stronger, as if he’d just put it on.
Bailey nodded.
He took a deep breath and rang the doorbell.
The black door opened. The beautiful older woman who stood before them was wearing a tweed skirt and a shirt that looked made of liquid, with a large bow tied at the shoulder. Her soft blond hair was cut just below her ears.
“Hello, Mother,” he said.
“You’ve lost weight, Tug,” she replied, staring at him with birdlike eyes.
That made Bailey turn to him, as if meeting him for the first time.
She’d never heard anyone call him that before.
Her mother had called him Terrence. His boss called him Terry.
He had charm without a whisper of ego, and he even looked like a sweet man, with his blond hair cut short in back and longer in front, where it swooped boyishly over his forehead.
He often seemed rudderless. Bailey thought Tug suited him.
It was more indicative of the way he tugged at your heartstrings, especially now in the gauntness of young widowerhood.
The woman finally stepped back and opened the door wider. “Please bring in those bags. People will think I’m moving, and I refuse to give them that delight.”
“The neighbors would like you more if you didn’t spy on them.” Tug picked up the bags and herded Bailey in.
“I do not spy,” she said as she closed the door behind them.