Chapter 10
Rebecca woke up early the next day, walking to the front window of the apartment to turn on the apple-blossom Tiffany lamp, admiring its soft, welcoming glow in the dim light of morning as she did.
Then she made a pot of coffee and a piece of toast and turned to the to-do list she had started with Sabrina the night before, over wine and dinner.
The diner contents needed to be boxed and either sold or donated.
She’d need to clean and stage the apartment, in the same way Sabrina had spruced up her bedroom.
It was a big job no matter how you looked at it—but sorting through her grandmother’s things felt like the most daunting task of all.
So, pragmatic Rebecca decided to tackle that first. She was not procrastinating in calling Cort, she told herself.
It was still early. That could wait a little longer.
She walked slowly down the hall, steaming coffee in hand, toward her grandmother’s study.
This room was Lenore’s space, and it still felt that way to Rebecca.
She stood in the doorway of the office, the adult of the house now—but could remember what it was like to be a child in this room, Sabrina at her side.
In her sudden memories, they were nine or ten, sneaking in and whispering, Let’s find out who your father is; there have to be clues in here somewhere.
Rebecca’s mother, Evie, had been nineteen when she gave birth to Rebecca.
She had left Bramley Hollow to go to university in Montreal but then come back without finishing her first year, pregnant.
No one had ever said anything about her being heartbroken.
Not to Rebecca’s face, at least. There were always whispers, which Lenore shielded Rebecca from so firmly that the only clue Rebecca had, and this she had mostly extrapolated, was that her father was from Montreal, and her mother had met him during her first semester at McGill.
Rebecca could almost see the ghosts of herself and Sabrina as preteens, wide-eyed, conspiratorial, whispering, fluttering around Lenore’s desk. Maybe he’s a famous writer, the childhood version of Sabrina whispered, tugging open a drawer. Maybe we can take the train to Montreal to find him!
Thinking about her father’s identity was something Rebecca had grown used to not doing.
As a child, she had always felt that asking questions, searching for another family, might threaten Lenore’s place in her life.
Lenore had been everything to her: mother, grandmother, her entire family.
Harold McIntosh, her grandfather, had died in his fifties of a sudden heart attack that had been shocking for Lenore and a difficult concept for a young Rebecca to comprehend.
But what had stuck with Rebecca was that she was all her grandmother had.
Lenore had never made Rebecca feel hemmed in by this, or overwhelmed. But it had still been true.
She and Sabrina, during their fact-finding mission all those years ago, had only found restaurant ledgers and order sheets in this office.
Then Lenore had come upstairs and they had panicked, running straight to Rebecca’s room and collapsing in fits of alarmed giggles.
Rebecca remembered feeling a little relieved that they hadn’t found anything.
It wasn’t what she had wanted, not at the time.
She stepped farther into the office, stood still for a moment, then headed for the closet and opened the door.
It was filled with her grandmother’s winter dresses and coats.
Rebecca sighed, her heart heavy. She should have done this a year ago, instead of fleeing Bramley Hollow after what had happened with Cort.
Now she riffled through the clothing and pulled out a tan camel trench coat she remembered well.
She held it to her nose for just a moment, and smelled Yardley powder, felt the sharpness of nostalgia.
She put the coat aside to keep, and the rest of the dresses in a pile to be donated.
Then she dug deeper into the closet, which was filled with boxes, most of them labeled with tax years. But on the very top of a teetering pile was a shoebox—and Rebecca’s breath caught in her throat when she saw it was labeled “Evie.”
She pulled it into the light and stared down at it, her heart racing.
She had always longed for more of her mother.
There were photos framed on walls, albums, yearbooks, yes, all of that.
Lenore would say things, such as, “Your mother loved apple crumble more than she loved pie.” Or “Your mother was afraid of thunder, but she loved lightning. She’d come running to my bed, scared, during storms, but later, I’d wake up to find her by the window, watching.
” These stories felt like crumbs Rebecca could never get enough of, and never wanted to ask for more of, because of the sadness in Lenore’s eyes when she spoke of the daughter she had lost too soon.
She lifted the lid off the box. It was full of photographs, some of them with little holes from thumbtacks, as if they had been removed from the same corkboard Rebecca had eventually put her own photos on.
There was a driver’s license, which Rebecca picked up and examined, thinking it could just as easily have been a photograph of her at sixteen, half smiling at the camera.
There was a little stuffed bear wearing a McGill University sweater.
A photograph of Evie sitting at the diner’s back table, where Cort and Rebecca used to sit and study, surrounded by friends, a wide grin on her face.
Another photo gave her pause. It showed a much younger James Calloway, Sabrina’s father, with his arm around Evie.
They were close, their heads touching. It looked like they were at a concert.
It surprised Rebecca to see this image. She had known her mother was friends with the Calloways in high school, both James and Marion.
But she had never realized Evie was this close to James Calloway.
There was something intimate about the photograph, and it filled her with a strange, uncomfortable feeling.
She put it aside and reached back into the box.
Now her hand touched first glass and then the cool of metal.
She moved aside more photographs and lifted out a frame.
This image of her mother took her breath away: It was of Evie out by the apple tree in the corner of the yard behind the diner.
It was autumn. Rebecca could tell because the tree was heavy with ripe apples.
Evie’s stomach was softly curved beneath a red-and-white polka-dot sundress.
Unlike the rest of the photos in the box, where Evie stared grinning at the camera, or made a silly face, there was an introspective quality to this one.
She looked much more mature than nineteen, which she had to have been in this photo, because she was pregnant.
Her gaze was downcast, at her growing stomach. There was a gentle smile on her face.
Evie’s death had come shortly after giving birth to Rebecca—it was a sudden infection that had taken everyone, even the doctors, by surprise.
Once, when Rebecca was a teenager, she had asked Lenore, “Do you ever wish I hadn’t been born?
You lost your daughter because of me.” Lenore had stopped what she was doing—kneading biscuit dough—and approached her granddaughter.
She hadn’t taken her in her arms, or offered trite words of comfort.
Instead, she had put her hands firmly on Rebecca’s shoulders and looked into her eyes.
“Not for even one second,” she had said. “The very idea of you filled Evie with such joy. She loved you, and she would have done anything for you. Caring for you, loving you, makes me feel so close to your mother. It’s what she’d want. I’ve never wished for things to be different.”
Rebecca swallowed over a lump in her throat.
She never forgot those words from Lenore, about her mother’s love for her, but she had never fully understood how true they were—until now.
She could see her mother’s love in this photograph.
She had never seen any pictures of her mother pregnant, and this made her realize something else.
While Lenore had reassured her she would never have had things any other way, seeing images of her daughter just before she died had probably been difficult for her.
It was sad to consider—but still, the frame felt solid and heavy in Rebecca’s hand, in a reassuring way.
This was possibly the only photograph of the two of them, of Evie and Rebecca, together.
There was something about this photo that made Rebecca feel it might be possible, someday, to know her mother in some way.
She stood and walked down the hall, to put the framed photograph on the bookshelf in her bedroom, somewhere special, safe, a place where she knew it would never be lost. Then she walked to the window to look out at the apple tree that still stood in the yard, its trunk much thicker now, its branches covered in their green September leaves.
The McIntosh apples hanging there were a deep red—reminding Rebecca it was time to pick them, the way she and Lenore had each year when she was young.
Lenore would store the apples in a bushel, set them aside.
“Your mother planted this tree when she was just a girl,” Lenore had told her once. “I remember the year it got taller than she was.” A nostalgic smile. “She was ten that year. It always gives the best apples, and these ones are not for the diner. These are just for us.”
They’d bake tarts and cakes with the apples, make applesauce and Lenore’s famous applesauce cake when they were beginning to soften.
Rebecca decided as she gazed out at the tree that she would harvest those apples, too.
The past was a dangerous place for her, filled with loss—but there was warmth there, too.
And love. Enough to sustain her through these difficult days.
She didn’t have to throw everything from her past away. She could hold on to some of it.
Rebecca went to look for a container to put the apples in and found the old bushel basket Lenore used to use in a closet near the kitchen.
Outside, she approached the tree, plucked the first apple from it—and was struck by a sudden memory.
Cort, in front of the diner, picking an apple from the tree, shining it on his shirt, and bringing it to her. An apple for my tutor.
She knew exactly who she was going to give this apple to. It was the perfect peace offering.