Chapter Twenty
“Hey, sweetheart,” Tug said when Bailey found him in the kitchen. He was focused on stirring something that smelled sharp and savory, like beef and chilies.
She set her bag from the drugstore on the butcher-block island and took a seat on a stool. “You never mentioned Tasha Keller moved next door.”
“It happened about four years ago. She asks about you sometimes, but you never ask about her, so I didn’t want to bring it up.”
“She married Gary Tillbury? Isn’t he old enough to be her dad?”
“It raised a few eyebrows, but they’re good together. And he was a big help with her mother. She couldn’t have done it alone.”
“Did something happen to Pam?”
Tug turned from the sizzling contents of the pan and wiped his hands on his half apron.
“Pam went downhill after Tasha left for college. Tasha never confirmed it, but I suspect Pam was self-medicating. Barry Gilford had to let her go from his insurance agency, then she had a bad car accident. Among other things, she sustained a brain injury. She had to do a lot of work to get herself back physically. But mentally?” He shook his head.
“Tasha had to drop out to care for her, then she met Gary. Until just a few months ago, Pam lived with them. She’s still so young and physically able that she was sneaking outside more and more.
They usually found her in our yard, saying she was protecting the Wester House from robbers. ”
“That’s terrible.” Bailey shook her head. “Poor Pam. Poor Tasha. College was supposed to be her way out.”
“Actually,” Tug said, “she’s done very well for herself.”
Bailey hated the twinge that caused. She wanted to have a reason for him to say that about her, too. She nodded to the pan to change the subject. “What are you making?”
“Lunch! It’s called sombrero pie.” He picked up an old, foxed recipe card from the counter and handed it to her. “Look at the picture. You peel back the pastry top to make it look like a little sombrero. Clever, right? Do you want to help?”
“Would it be helping, or enabling, at this point?”
“You sound like your grandmother.”
By the time they finished lunch—Mim had only wanted soup again—there wasn’t enough time to bleach her hair before tea, so at the designated time, Bailey went to the sunroom, still in her teddy bear hat.
She didn’t want to do this, sit down with Mim over tea like they were revisiting a good memory, but she’d put a lot of work into trying to become a better person.
And a better person wouldn’t ignore the last request of a dying woman.
“Ready?”
Bailey spun to see Tug behind her in the hallway, carrying a tray with Mim’s teapot and cups. “I thought she invited only me.”
“She did. But it’s difficult for her to make tea for herself anymore. She finally relented and let me do it. I’ll need some help with the door.”
Bailey knocked once and turned the knob to let Tug enter first.
He walked in and placed the tray on the coffee table in front of Mim, who was sitting on the cabbage-rose settee, the umbrella propped beside her. Autumn sunlight was falling on her in such a cinematic way that Bailey was reminded of the first time she’d ever seen her, how starstruck she’d been.
“Since you’re so fond of the obvious,” Tug said good-naturedly, “here is your tea.” He poured two sugared cups and handed one to Mim. Then he handed the other cup to Bailey, who was just standing there stupidly. “And here is your granddaughter.”
“Nice touch,” Mim said, “showing me which is which.”
“I wouldn’t want you to embarrass yourself.”
As soon as he walked out, closing the door behind him, Mim said, “Please have a seat.”
Bailey sat in one of the magpie chairs Mim’s grandmother had embroidered, which felt strange to her now, like sitting in the lap of a spirit. “Why the theatrics with the note under the cloche?”
Mim smiled. “I did that for Tug. He has so little to amuse him here. He’d rather be in Chapel Hill.”
She didn’t want to jump on that, but if he had confided in anyone, the only likely person was Mim. “He said he’s seeing someone there.”
“So I gather, but he hasn’t said anything to me yet. He’ll tell you everything in his own time. And when he does, he’s going to assure you that it will never change his love for you. What he’ll need to hear is that it will never change your love for him.”
Bailey had to fight to close a sudden fissure of anger that broke open. “Nothing would change my love for him. I left because you threatened to tell him what happened that night, and I didn’t want him hurt. Or did you forget that part?”
“I remember everything about that night,” Mim said into her cup before she took a sip.
“I think we just need to get this over with. Do you want me to say I’m sorry again? I’m sorry. Do you want me to forgive you? I forgave you a long time ago.”
“That’s not what this is about. You have nothing to be sorry about, Bailey. And I know I don’t deserve forgiveness.”
“Then what is this about? You made it clear you didn’t want me here ever again. And now I don’t want to be here.”
“I know this is hard for you, and I’m sorry. But I have a story you need to hear.”
Had Mim just apologized for something? That was unprecedented.
“Does it have something to do with Clutch? Because I think that’s the story I need to hear, the one that might actually give me a measure of peace.
” She had done many, many Google searches on him over the years, and there were no hits.
Mim had paid him off that night. Maybe she was still paying him to keep a low profile.
Bailey had no idea what to expect once Mim was gone.
“It isn’t about Clutch.” She thought for a moment. “Not directly.”
“Are you going to tell Daddy about him?”
Mim shook her head. “I’ve never said a word, and I never will.”
“Are you still paying him off?”
“No. He’s gone. I would never have asked you back if you had anything to fear.
” Mim took one more sip of her tea before setting her cup down.
“Where do I begin?” she asked herself. “At the beginning, I suppose. Hen Town was a very different place when I was young. There were few newcomers, so when someone new did come to town, it caused a stir. My grandmother didn’t like it.
People who weren’t from here thought she was a joke, because locals called her psychic.
But no one ever underestimated her for long.
She controlled every aspect of my life, grooming me to become her successor, but the single freedom she allowed me was to choose my own friends.
And when I was eighteen, those friends betrayed me on a scale of such magnitude that I still haven’t recovered.
I didn’t want the same for you. I know I made you dependent on only me and your father for companionship, but I thought it was the one thing that would keep you safe until you could make your own decisions.
But what really happened was you grew up desperate to feel connection, which led you to Clutch.
If I had just told you this story of the man I fell in love with, instead of imposing on you something you didn’t understand, things would have ended differently. ”
This ranked up there as one of the last things Bailey expected to hear. “Are you saying this story is about Andy Smooth?”
“No. But I understand why you thought it was him. I know the rumors. And the first time you mentioned the Feathers, you must have seen in the yearbook about him coming to Hen Town, because afterward you listened to his music and looked up all you could about him in your room.”
“How could you possibly know that?” Bailey asked, surprised.
Mim smiled. “I was a teenage girl once, too. The man I fell in love with was named Jack.”
Bailey suddenly turned to stare out the sunroom windows, trying to capture a strange memory. She finally caught it and turned back to Mim, only to find her looking at her with such fondness that she almost forgot what she was going to say.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Mim said. “I was just thinking of how beautiful you are.”
Bailey put her hand to her hat self-consciously. “The night you sent me away, you said it would be a relief to finally tell someone about Jack. Is this the story you were going to tell me?”
“It’s the same Jack, but a different story. Will you stay for a few days and listen to the rest? Please? I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.”
It was hard not to wonder if Mim had ulterior motives. She surely knew that promising Bailey a story, which would have been a gift greater than gold to her as a child, would make her stay. Bailey finally nodded.
“Good. Thank you. We’ll continue tomorrow.” Mim reached for the umbrella leaning against the settee, and stood slowly. “Please excuse me. I need to lie down.”
Bailey watched her walk away. “Why did you decide to finally take the umbrella out of the vent?”
“It was time. It belonged to Jack, actually. It had been his grandmother’s.” She turned at the door. “He once told me he called her Mim.”
“So how was it?” Tug said, coming out of his office as Bailey set the tea tray on the kitchen counter.
Strange, she wanted to say. “To be continued,” she said instead. “She gets tired easily, doesn’t she?”
“She hates that it’s noticeable. I’m glad the two of you are talking. I’m glad you came. We were both a little worried you wouldn’t.”
Bailey had been worried, too. Now, she had to admit, she was curious where this tale was going. “Did she ever mention someone named Jack to you?”
“No, I don’t think so. But there was a time when we first moved here that you had an imaginary friend named Jack. You were very secretive about him. For weeks, every time you walked into a room, you whispered, Are you here, Jack?”
“The piano man.” She smiled. “I’d completely forgotten about him.”
“The piano man?”
“I associated him with the piano, for some reason.” She shrugged. “Maybe I imagined him playing it? I don’t even remember what I thought he looked like now.”
“You had such a big imagination as a child.” Tug watched her twist the long strings on either side of her hat around her fingers. “Okay,” he said. “What’s with the hat? You haven’t taken it off since you came home.”
Bailey laughed. The house reacted the way it always did, with a sense of joy in its lonely world.
“Just a few more minutes, and I would have gotten away with it,” she said, taking it off.
“I bought a bleach kit this morning. I get on these color kicks sometimes. I bleach it out when I know you’re coming to visit, because I don’t want you to worry I’m having another crisis.
I’m not. I’m just trying on things and seeing what fits.
When you called about Mim, I didn’t have time to change it, so I bought this hat at the airport. ”
He mulled it over, then said magnanimously, “The blue matches your eyes.”
“Nice try,” she said as she headed upstairs.
Certain parts of the Wester House were falling into disrepair because neither Willamena nor Tug had the skill set to fix them, and repairmen still weren’t allowed inside because of the Wester Rules.
Only one bathroom was functional on the second floor, the plumbing in the other was shot, so Bailey sat on the edge of the chipped bathtub while the bleach itched and smelled so acrid she had to open the tiny window over the commode.
After leaving Hen Town, she’d given up on her hair. At night she would party, but during the day she would ditch classes and sit in an empty student gallery where no one wanted to display because it was rumored to be haunted by an art student who had taken her life.
One day as she sat there, a girl she’d never seen before walked in.
She looked as unhappy as Bailey. It glittered around her.
She floated listlessly around the room as if looking at artwork that wasn’t there; then she turned to Bailey.
Bailey knew she looked horrible. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d bathed.
“Start with your hair,” the girl said. “Believe it or not, you’ll feel better.”
Bailey never saw her again. To this day, she wondered if she was even real. But it was advice she would later come to live by. Doing something different with her hair was always her first step when she wanted to do something different with her life.
She finally got to her knees on the tile floor and angled her head awkwardly under the tub faucet, pleasantly surprised when her hair didn’t come out in clumps.
She turned off the tap and scrubbed her hair with a towel, then turned to the desilvering mirror over the sink to see what it looked like. The bleach had turned the blue into a platinum color.
Every time she colored her hair, she liked this moment best—looking in the mirror and seeing someone she didn’t recognize, hoping it was someone she finally wanted to be.