Chapter 4
The day after the funeral, Maeve was up early, and when she peeked outside her bedroom window, she didn’t know whether to be relieved or chagrined to discover that the Beast wasn’t parked in the driveway.
After her calls to her sister’s phone went directly to voice mail, she reluctantly called Aunt Fran, only to be told that Therese had spent the night on her sofa.
She brewed a pot of coffee, toasted an English muffin, and sat at the dinette table in the kitchen as she made a list of the day’s tasks.
The week before her mother passed away, she’d invited Angie Gary, one of her St. Mary’s classmates who was now a successful real estate agent, to drop by to take a look around the house and discuss listing it.
The instant the agent stepped inside the front door, Maeve felt naked, and somehow ashamed of her childhood home.
“Maeve,” Angie whispered, clutching both her hands. “I heard the news about your mom. I’m devastated! She was always so nice to all us girls when we’d drop into your uncle’s drugstore after school.”
“Thanks,” Maeve said. “You know, she and my aunts were all St. Mary’s girls.”
“Is she…?”
“Mostly she sleeps,” Maeve said. “The hospice nurse says it’s probably a matter of days. Mama made me promise I’d let her die at home, so that’s what I’m doing.”
Angie turned a practiced eye around the living room.
“Then I won’t take up much of your time.
The good news is that this neighborhood is hot, hot, hot right now.
Young families with kids want this school district, and professionals who’ve been priced out of the historic district and Midtown are really starting to scoop up these mid-century ranch houses like yours. ”
“And what’s the bad news?” Maeve asked, although she pretty much knew what the answer would be.
“It’s dated,” the real estate agent said as she walked through the rooms. “But you’ve got a functional floorplan and anyway, most buyers will want to gut it and start over.”
“Several houses in the neighborhood built off this same floorplan have been remodeled in the past few years, and I know at least two have added pools,” Maeve volunteered.
“Bathrooms?”
“There are two. I can show you the hall bath, but the other is in Mom’s room.”
“No need,” Angie said quickly. “Look, I’ll be super honest with you. You’re probably looking at a teardown here. The value in this house is the lot.”
“Teardown?” Maeve choked on the word.
“I guess we could market it as a fixer-upper. Who knows what could happen if we put some lipstick on this pig?”
They were back in the living room now. Angie pulled a small notebook and pen from her pocketbook and started jotting notes.
“Okay, let’s talk about your prelisting checklist. Definitely you’ll need to declutter.
Pack up everything personal, knickknacks, family photos, like that.
We want to make all the rooms look larger, so I’d say lose most of the furniture in here. ”
She ran the toe of her shoe along the surface of the carpet, which, Maeve suddenly realized, hadn’t been vacuumed since Mary Helen had fallen ill. Her face burned with embarrassment. “My mom’s been living alone for a long time, and she always hated change, and then, well, she’s been so sick, and…”
“I get it,” Angie said. She pointed at the carpet. “I’d pull this up. Hopefully there’s hardwood underneath, right?”
Maeve shrugged. “I don’t know. We’ve always had carpet throughout the house.”
“Well, if it’s just a concrete slab under here, maybe we slap down some LVP.”
“What’s that?”
Angie’s smile was patronizing. “Luxury vinyl plank. We could probably get away with just doing the living room and dining room for around three thousand.”
Maeve bit her lip. “That’s a lot of money to spend on a house that’s just going to get torn down.”
“The online listing photos are going to be key to getting buyers in here,” Angie said. “I guarantee it’ll be worth it in the long run.”
“I’ll have to see what Terri says,” Maeve said.
“Who’s that?”
“My older sister, Therese. She was a year ahead of us in school.”
Angie wrinkled her nose. “Wait. Therese Dunagin? She’s your sister? I thought she left school mid-semester.”
Maeve felt unaccustomedly called to defend the family honor. “It was a misunderstanding. Sister Bernard blew things completely out of proportion. So she finished at Savannah High and then went to drama school up north.”
“Right, of course,” Angie said. “Give your sister a call, talk it over with her, and let me know what you decide to do about the listing.”
“I’ll do that,” Maeve said, already feeling deflated. A teardown? She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. This was their childhood home. All the memories, good and bad, were tied up here at Blueberry Hill. Selling it was the practical thing to do; she knew that. In theory.
The three-month unpaid leave she’d taken during Mary Helen’s illness had eaten into her savings, and God knew her sister was always hard up for money. Selling the house was a no-brainer.
Therese probably wouldn’t care about what happened to the house. She’d only sporadically lived here since high school, showing up when acting jobs or money were short, and leaving suddenly, and with no notice, when something better beckoned down the road.
Now that the hospice folks had picked up the hospital bed and the rest of what Maeve thought of as “sickroom stuff” she decided to start the chore she’d been dreading the most, packing up her mother’s bedroom.
Best to rip off the Band-Aid and not allow herself to wallow in the maudlin thoughts that threatened to derail her progress.
But as soon as she opened the bedroom door, she was assailed with a jumbled-up bouquet of scents—the astringent burn of antiseptic spray that barely masked the odor of the now-removed potty chair, and beneath all that, the faintest tones of her mother’s signature cologne.
She flicked on the light switch, pulled open the flowery chintz curtains, and yanked the window open to let in some fresh air.
Mary Helen’s room was painted a pale pink, and the wall-to-wall carpet was a faded pinky beige.
She started with the closet and began making two piles of clothes; one to discard, the other for donations to the St. Vincent DePaul Thrift Shop, where Mary Helen had been a devoted volunteer since retiring from the drugstore.
Just another chore, she told herself. But when she opened the top dresser drawer she was almost struck down with an unexpected wave of grief as a cloud of Youth-Dew wafted from the neatly folded piles of lingerie.
Lingerie—such an old-fashioned word, but one her mother always used to somehow glamorize her collection of bras, panties, slips, and yes, girdles.
Maeve tossed the granny panties and a dozen packages of unopened pairs of bronze-hued pantyhose into the trash bag without a second thought and ran the palm of her hand across the silken folds of Mary Helen’s slips and nightgowns.
She couldn’t remember the last time she herself had worn a slip, but here was almost a whole drawer full of them, in a pastel rainbow range of lavender, apricot, pink, and powder blue, lace-trimmed, many with tiny satin ribbons and flower appliqués.
As little girls, she and Terri had delighted in playing dress-up in their mother’s slips and nighties. They’d been princesses, movie stars, and brides, using half slips bobby-pinned to their heads as veils.
Nine-year-old Maeve had howled with laughter the time Terri donned a corset complete with garter belt and bullet-cupped bra—surely a relic from their grandmother—and performed her own version of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” video that they’d seen on MTV.
She set aside an apricot satin nightgown with delicate nude lace trim for herself—out of sentiment—and a few slips and nightgowns for Terri—who’d probably wear them out clubbing—then consigned the rest of the lingerie to the pile of donations.
Maybe some other little girls would enjoy playing dress-up.
Maeve worked her way through the dresser and was about to attack the closet when she heard the front door open.
“Hello,” her sister called.
“I’m in Mom’s room,” Maeve responded.
“Is there any coffee?”
“In the kitchen.”
Fifteen minutes later, she found Therese in the living room, holding the portrait of Lady Geraldine, which she’d taken down from the wall over the mantel. She was seated on the sofa, examining the back of the painting.
“I see you’ve been busy.” Therese glanced around the room at the cleaned-out bookcases and boxes of knickknacks.
“Week before last, I had Angie Gary come out to give me an idea of what we’ll need to do to get the house ready to sell. You might remember her—she was in my class at St. Mary’s. First thing out of her mouth was that we needed to clear away the clutter.”
Therese reached into a carton and picked out a plaster statue of praying hands. “Were you going to consult with me on whether or not I might want to keep any of Mom’s so-called clutter?”
Maeve shook her head. “I might have, if you’d bothered to stop in the whole time Mom was dying in that back bedroom. But you’re welcome to take the praying hands. There are at least a dozen more in the bottom of that box. Take all you want. I don’t give a flying fuck about any of it.”
“Such shocking language, baby sister. I didn’t know you had it in you.”
Maeve fixed her sister with a level stare. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
Therese tossed the statue back into the box. “Yeah, I don’t want any of this shit either. Too depressing.”
She pointed at the painting of Lady Geraldine. “What do you want to do with her?”
Maeve felt a prickle of something. Her sister might be an actress, but the forced casualness of the question belied her disinterest.
“We can’t give her away,” Maeve said. “Mom always made us promise we’d never let her out of the family. She swore that portrait was priceless. Of course, that was probably just another Mary Helen Dunagin fable.”
“Maybe,” Therese said, running a finger across the signature on the bottom left corner of the portrait. “Or maybe not.”
The doorbell rang. “That’ll be Uncle Keith,” Maeve said.
“Any clue what’s on his mind?”
“Probably something about the estate. I know Mom made him executor.”
“She made Keith executor? She told me a long time ago that she wanted me to do that.”
“Maybe she changed her mind. Because you were never around.”
“Here we go,” Therese said. “Pack your bags, folks. All aboard for the Maeve Dunagin guilt trip.”
“Fuck you, Terri,” Maeve said.
“Right back at ya.”