2. That It Remain in the Family
THAT IT REMAIN IN THE FAMILY
MARNIE
Ostrander's office sits over the hardware store on Main, up a staircase with a rubber tread on every step and a handrail somebody refinished badly sometime in the eighties. I noticed the handrail. It's a professional deformity.
We were nine minutes early. Bridget was already there.
She'd taken the chair at the end of the conference table nearest the window, coat over the back of it, travel mug in front of her that she'd brought from home. She brings her own coffee everywhere. She brought her own coffee to her mother's wake.
"There you are." She stood to hug Glenn, held on a second longer than the hug needed, and said over his shoulder, "Marnie. You look tired."
"It's February."
"It's all February." She sat back down. "Rich is parking. Patrice isn't coming, she's got the thing with her hip."
Rich came up four minutes past, blowing into his hands.
"Cold enough," he said, to nobody.
"They don't heat the stairs," Bridget said.
"They don't heat anything." He took the chair across from me, then moved one down so his back was to the window. "You two been out to the place this winter?"
"We closed it up two weeks ago."
"That's right. You do that." He nodded like a man confirming the weather. "Somebody's got to."
At nine past, Ostrander came in with a folder, apologized for nothing in particular, put his reading glasses on, poured himself water from a carafe nobody else touched the whole hour.
I've been in a lot of rooms like that one and I remember them the way I remember buildings.
Eight chairs. A table with the veneer edge lifting on the far corner.
The window onto the alley with a radiator under it going hard, so the whole hour smelled of cooked dust. A framed print of a covered bridge that wasn't even one of ours.
I sat on Glenn's left. He had his hands flat on the table like a man waiting for a dentist.
Ostrander did the housekeeping first — executor, that was Bridget; then the estate, the timeline, probate, the accounts. He read the way lawyers read, in a voice that sands everything down to the same grain, so you have to work to hear where your own life comes into it.
The specific bequests started about twelve minutes in.
The dining set to Rich, because Eunice had promised it to his wife.
The good clock to Patrice. Four thousand dollars to the church for the boiler fund, which even I thought was funny in a room where nobody was laughing.
Eunice's mother's ring to Kayla, held in trust until she turned twenty-five.
The car to Bridget. Savings, CDs, whatever was in the brokerage, divided residuary, half to Glenn, half to Bridget.
Then Ostrander turned a page.
"To my daughter Bridget," he read, "I leave the property on Sorel Lake Road, the cottage and the parcel, that it remain in the family."
He kept right on going. There was more after it, something about the contents passing with the house, something about the executor's discretion regarding personal effects, all of it coming to me like a radio in another room.
The radiator let go of a knock, three of them, spaced. Ostrander waited it out without looking up. Rich shifted in his chair. Down in the store somebody dropped something metal on a metal floor, and nobody in that room reacted to any of it except me.
So I looked around the table.
Rich was studying his own thumbnail. Ostrander had already moved three lines down. Bridget had her eyes on him with a kind of composed sadness, a woman receiving a flag. And Glenn — Glenn was looking at the table. Not at me. Not up. His hands hadn't moved.
Nobody looked at me.
I sat there in my good coat with my hands in my lap for the remaining nineteen minutes, which is a long time to have nothing to do but arrange things in order.
So I went back through the past eleven days, item by item, the way I go through a file when a document turns up that has no business existing.
Bridget on the phone the night after the funeral, asking Glenn what the winterizing schedule was.
Asking Glenn. Rich at the wake, telling me it was going to be strange out there this summer, then not finishing the sentence.
Patrice hugging me at the church door — you poor thing, all that work.
Glenn at the mailbox with his hand still on the compressor.
Not one of those had meant anything by itself. Laid end to end, in date order, they meant one thing.
When it was over Ostrander said there'd be releases to sign in a couple of weeks, no rush, and everybody stood up at once the way people do. Rich came around the table with his hand out to Glenn, then remembered me halfway and adjusted, so what I got was the second half of a handshake.
"Well," he said. "That's that."
"It is," I said.
"She had it all worked out, didn't she. Boiler fund." He laughed at that. "That's Aunt Eunice for you."
"It is."
"You two'll still be out there all summer, though." He said it kindly, the way a man says a thing everybody has already agreed on. "It's not like anything's different."
"No," I said. "Apparently nothing's different."
"Attagirl." He lifted his coat off the chair back with two fingers, the way he does. "Patrice'll want to hear about the clock. She's been asking about that clock since November, which I did not tell her mother."
He patted my shoulder on his way past, satisfied. Behind him Bridget was putting her coat on, unhurried, tugging her cuffs straight. Then she came around the table and put her hand on my arm above the elbow, warm and settled, the way you'd steady somebody on ice.
"Nothing has to change, honey," she said. "You know that. Come out whenever you like. Just text first, so I know."
I looked at her hand on my arm a moment longer than was comfortable for either of us. She left it right where it was.
"So there's no collisions. That's all it is." She patted twice. "You and Glenn have made that place so nice."
Then she picked up her travel mug, said something to Ostrander about a bank appointment, and went down those rubber treads ahead of all of us.
Glenn and I got in the truck. He started it and let it run a minute for the defroster, which he does even in April.
I've been calm in a lot of rooms. I once told a man from the state, across a folding table, that his engineering report on a 1794 meetinghouse was a work of fiction, and I did it in the same voice I use to order soup. That was the voice I had in the truck.
"Okay," I said. "Say it."
"Say what."
"Whatever you were going to say in there and didn't."
He put it in reverse, then didn't back up. Put it in park again.
"It's what Mom wanted, Marnie."
Six words, even as a torque spec read off a card. Then he waited.
Out the window a woman came out of the hardware store with a bag of ice melt on her hip.
"Thirty-one windows, Glenn."
"I know."
"Every one of them out of the frame, on sawhorses in that yard.
Glass out, points out, the old putty chiseled out.
Reglazed. Primed onto the glass, eighth of an inch past the rabbet, every one.
Thirty-one. Plus the porch, plus the piers, plus the roof deck, plus sixty-two stones of that path, plus every stick of trim in that house that isn't original, because the original was gone before I ever got there. "
"I know, Marn."
"That's not an answer." My voice went flat, the way it does. "That's inventory. I just handed you inventory, you handed it back. Neither of those is an answer."
He put both hands on the wheel and looked out the windshield at the alley wall.
"What do you want me to do," he said. "It's her house. It was her house. She could've left it to the fire department if she wanted."
"That's true."
"So."
"So the question isn't what she could do." I turned in the seat to look at him. "The question is what you did in there. You didn't take a breath, Glenn. Not one. He read that sentence out loud, and your whole body was already sitting still."
"I was sitting still because my mother's dead."
"I know she is. I sat with her too. I did her nails that last week because the nurse didn't have the time."
"I know you did."
"I'm not asking to be paid for it. I'm telling you that you just used her to end a sentence."
He didn't answer that. The defroster cleared a wedge at the bottom of the glass, and through it I could see the alley wall, the downspout, a milk crate somebody keeps by the hardware store's back door. I looked at all of it a while before I sat back around.
"One more question and then I'll stop for today."
"Marnie."
"In that room, when he read it — did anybody at that table look at me?"
He didn't answer.
"It's a yes or a no. You were sitting next to me, you had the whole room in front of you. Did one person look up?"
"I don't know. I was looking at the table."
"You were looking at the table," I said. "So that's four of you."
"Marnie."
"Drive, please. I'm cold."
He drove. Twenty-two minutes, plus the four he added going around the square because the light at Fifth was out. Somewhere near the county line he put the radio on, same as coming back from the lake, and I reached over and shut it off. He didn't say anything about that either.
At home I hung up my coat, put the kettle on out of habit, turned it off again without pouring.
There was a roasting pan in the sink from Sunday I'd been leaving for somebody else to deal with, so I washed it, dried it, put it back in the cupboard where it goes.
Then I went out to the little back room I use as an office, where the register nominations live in their file boxes, four years of the Halloran farmhouse taking up three of them.
I stood in the dark a minute with my hand on the switch, not turning it on.
There's a second binder at home. The working copy, because I don't trust a single original of anything.
Same green, thinner, since it stops in 2014, the year I finally admitted the good copy lived out there.
I took it down and opened it flat on the desk to the front, which is 2006: four photographs in plastic sleeves, my handwriting under each one in pencil.
The first is the porch. Cheap camera, bad light, late October, everything gone blue.
The porch roof is holding, more or less, but the deck has dropped at the west corner where the pier failed.
The whole thing hangs off the front of the house at an angle, the floor sloping into the ground like a jaw come loose.
There's a five-gallon bucket in the frame.
There's my old station wagon at the edge with the hatch up.
Underneath, in pencil: 10/2006. Piers failed W corner, sills sound at E. Start here.
I sat down with my coat still on the hook out front.
My camera was in the bag by the door, where it always is, charged. It had gone with me to that lake every trip for twenty years. Before, during, after. No exceptions.
I did not take it out that night. I closed the binder instead, put it back on the shelf, spine out, square to the edge.
I didn't take a photograph of anything for the next nine weeks.