Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-One
I could barely absorb the shock as I stood there on Jake’s balcony in the frosty morning. Jake’s mother was the last person to live in my house on Tinker Street? Not Marly? For some reason, I felt betrayed.
I felt even more betrayed when he told me she was still alive. The story I’d been telling myself about the woman who’d lived in my house came collapsing down around me. I’d painted a tragic picture of her, a romantic and solitary figure fading away in the clutter of her past.
“The agent said it was an estate sale,” I said flatly.
“It kind of was. Just a power-of-attorney estate sale, rather than an after-death estate sale.” Jake ran his hands through his hair.
“I don’t understand,” I said, shaking my head.
Jake shrugged, in that way he had, that said nothing and everything. “Well. My mom has the family curse,” he said. He seemed to slump, like he’d run out of energy.
“I don’t understand.” I was feeling like a parrot, my mind caught in a loop, unable to say anything else. It was Marly’s place. Marly was the old woman in my imagination. Not Jake’s mother.
“She has early-onset dementia. It’s hereditary.
” He drained his coffee and opened the door, clearly done with watching the sunrise.
“It’s dotted through the family tree. Like some kind of fungus.
My great-grandmother had it, Sylvie had it, my mother has it.
There are a few more cousins and uncles and aunts in there too. It’s a bitch of a thing.”
I followed him inside, his words hitting my heart. “That’s awful.” I swallowed hard. “I’m sorry.”
“It is what it is.”
“And I’m living in your mother’s house?”
“Yeah. I mean, it used to be our summer house, not our actual house, but after my parents’ divorce, my mom moved there full time.”
I stopped dead as it hit me it wasn’t just his mother’s house, it was his house. “Oh my God, no wonder you felt you could take the front door off. This explains how you knew where the storm windows were. And why you have opinions on everything to do with the house. It’s your house.”
He shook his head vigorously. “Nope. It’s not my house. It’s my mom’s house.”
“But you grew up there.”
“No.” He shook his head. He turned his back on me and started doing dishes. “I spent summers there.”
“Summers that got in your blood,” I said, remembering his poetry that evening on the school swings and putting the pieces together. “You moved here because this is your street.”
“So?” He gave me an irritable look, back to being the grouch I’d met on that first day. “What’s so weird about that? I loved it here as a kid. I wanted to live here forever.”
“But…” I couldn’t quite get my head around the enormity of this. “Why aren’t you living in the house? Why did you sell it?”
Jake kept his back to me, his hands in the dishwater.
“Was that why you didn’t want me to buy it, that first time we met? Because you wanted your family to keep it?”
“You’re going to be late for work,” he said bluntly.
“Can we finish this conversation later?” I asked nervously, unsettled by his stoniness. He couldn’t just drop a bombshell like that and expect to just leave it there.
“Sure.” He was curt.
I gathered my things and approached him warily. “Jake?”
“Yeah.”
I put my hand on his arm, and he stopped scrubbing the roasting pan. “Thanks for telling me.”
His greenish-blue eyes were churning when they met mine. “It wasn’t easy selling it,” he blurted.
I didn’t know what to say. I had too many questions and I was too off balance. So I rose on my toes and pressed a kiss to his mouth.
I felt some of his tension loosen. He closed his eyes and sagged against me. “It’s a long story, Zoe. And it’s not a nice one.”
“I’m familiar with those kinds of stories,” I promised, thinking of Tina. And I kissed him again. As I went down the outside stairs from the balcony, I saw him watching me through the kitchen window, a haunted look on his face.
I knew I should wait to talk to Jake, but I was churning with questions and when I saw Elton, I just blurted out what I’d learned.
He was out checking his house for storm damage when I did my walk of shame up the street, dodging the puddles and watching my breath form puffs of cloud in the cold air.
I saw him suppress a smile when he saw where I came from.
“Good morning,” he said in his usual gentlemanly way, his brown eyes twinkling. “You’re up early.”
“Jake just told me that this was his mom’s house,” I burst out. I hadn’t meant to, but it was too much to hold inside of me.
“Indeed, it was,” Elton agreed mildly. “And before that his grandmother’s. And before that his great-grandmother’s and her sister’s. And before that their parents. That old house has been in the family a long time.”
I frowned. That didn’t feel good, to be the person who broke the chain.
Although, Jake was the person who broke the chain, I corrected myself. Not me. If I hadn’t bought it, someone else would have.
“And his mother’s not dead?”
“He told you that, did he?” Elton’s gaze drifted tenderly toward Jake’s store. The pale wash of morning light caught the creases in the old man’s cheeks when he smiled.
“He said she had the family curse.” I bit my lip. “Like your Sylvie.”
Elton nodded. “It’s a pretty strong curse. Picks off a lot of apples on that tree.”
I fell silent and we stood in the dripping street, listening to the erratic gusting of the wind and the cries of the loons.
“He said it was a power-of-attorney sale, not an estate sale,” I let slip, unable to stop myself. “Because she’s not dead…”
Elton sighed. “No, Jake’s mother’s not dead. She’s in a nursing home in Camden, so she can be close to Marly.”
I felt like he’d slapped me. “Wait, what? Marly’s alive?”
“Alive and kicking and living in Camden.”
“But… hold on.” This wasn’t sinking in. “Marly of Marly’s place? My place?”
“That’s the one.”
His words replayed in my head. She’s in a nursing home in Camden, so she can be close to Marly. “Elton?”
“Yes, my dear?” He was regarding me kindly, seeing the effect the news had on me.
“Why does Jake’s mom need to be close to Marly?” I thought I knew the answer but I needed to hear him say it.
“Because she’s Marly’s daughter.”
Of course. If this had been Marly’s place and Jake’s place… and Jake’s mom was Marly’s daughter. “Marly’s Jake’s grandmother.”
The alarm went off on Elton’s phone and he fumbled to pull it out of his pocket. “Oh lordy, I almost forgot to take my medication again.”
I saw the time on his phone and yelped. I was going to be late for work. “Thanks, Elton,” I said, as I backed away down my driveway. “I have to go.
“Have a good day, Zoe,” he called. “You might want to turn your sweater around before you go to work. You’ve got it on inside out.”
Flo sent me a dozen photos of her flower girl dress fitting, and another dozen photos of her lunch, which seemed to consist of a towering stack of pancakes and a waterfall of syrup. Then she demanded more proof-of-life photos of her cats.
Jake didn’t message me once. The day dragged at work as I checked my phone compulsively. But no messages.
I had all the usual thoughts. Had I just been used?
Had he fed me a line to get me in bed? Not even in bed, on the couch.
But then I shook it off, remembering his haunted look at the window.
I was living in his mom’s house. The house he’d spent three months of the year in growing up, the summer house that made him fall in love with Oxeye.
I wondered which bedroom had been his: Flo’s?
Or the room with all the clothes in it? I remembered his familiarity with the house when he’d given us the tour, his attention to detail as he rebuilt the porch screens and turned the old laundry into a new room.
He loved the house. So why hadn’t he kept it?
Was it about money?
The thought made my stomach sink. I hated the idea that he might have been forced to sell it. No wonder he’d seemed so hostile that first day.
In the afternoon, I went down rabbit holes online looking up the symptoms of early-onset dementia—which looked like it started a lot earlier than I’d realized.
It began with losing the ability to handle money and pay bills, struggling to bathe, and some mild personality changes.
It escalated to failing to recognize people, losing the ability to read and write, and withdrawing from the world.
The final stage involved being unable to communicate, having no awareness of your surroundings, incontinence, and losing the ability to swallow.
Patients who reached this stage made uncontrollable noises, had no interest in food, had seizures.
I thought of Jake’s haunted look and my heart ached. How long had his mother lived in the house? How far gone had she been before they moved her to the nursing home?
Jake lived on the corner of her street for a reason, I thought suddenly. It wasn’t just because he loved the town. He’d been caring for her. I remembered the scrubbed bathroom and the immaculate master bedroom we’d found on our tour. He had done that for her.
Hey, I texted Jake, deciding I couldn’t wait for him to do it. But he didn’t text back.
Driven by the memory of his face at the window, on the way home I stopped at the market and bought a bunch of hothouse roses and some supplies for dinner.
As I turned into Tinker Street, I saw that the hardware store and apartment above were dark.
There was no sign of Jake or Hazel. I pulled over in front of his place and grabbed a pen from my handbag.
I ripped a page from the back of my daily planner, scribbled a note on it—Come to my place when you get this?
—and tucked it into the bunch of roses. Then I ran up the back stairs and left them propped against his kitchen door.