“I was raised with my boy cousins; I had no choice.” Claire pointed to a small, oval-shaped silver frame a few feet away. “This is my grandmother. Pretty, huh? My grandfather didn’t deserve her.”
The woman had a heart-shaped face and thick eyebrows that framed her almond-shaped eyes. She was striking.
Kitty scanned the wall. “Do you have a picture of him?”
“Hell no.” Claire, it seemed, held a collective disdain for the males in her family. “Let’s not ruin the mood.”
On the wall near the front door was another of Claire’s birthday photos. This time, she was standing in a chair, about to blow out the candles on a massive cake in the center of the table.
“You had a birthday party every year?”
“My parents never missed a chance to have a party.” Claire pointed to the wall. “That wasn’t my real birthday though. Life magazine interviewed my grandmother, and that photo was taken for the magazine.” Claire’s grandmother stood next to her, dressed as though she was going to a ball. “I thought the cake was for me.”
“Did she let you have any, at least?”
“As much as I wanted.”
Kitty looked closer, unsure of what she thought she saw. At the far left of the frame was half of a face, half of a body, standing against the wall. It was a familiar half: the roundness of the face, the straight nose, the dried-tobacco-leaf tone. It was her mother, she thought. It was Hazel. Claire was a member of the Lakes family.
Claire was her sister.
Kitty studied Claire’s face, suddenly hating it, unable to recognize even a hint of familiarity in her features. She was trained to notice these things but had somehow missed every clue. It was also her own grandmother who was interviewed in Life, as the founder of BabyCakes.
“Who is this?” Kitty pointed, needing final confirmation. Her palms went to her chest, as if her heart needed comfort for what was coming.
Claire looked over her shoulder. “My grandmother’s maid. She cared for me when I was there every summer. She took care of my grandparents until they died. Missing her funeral is the one thing I regret about not having been home. My family’s insane; I couldn’t go back.”
Kitty felt a knot in her stomach. “Whose funeral?”
“The maid. Hazel was her name. Breast cancer, five or six years ago now. I regret not being there. I dropped so many things when Adam died.… She meant a lot to me; I was devastated.”
Kitty’s heartbeat sounded in her ears, blood rushed to her head, and her veins pulsed, causing her head to pound, matching its cadence. She touched the wall to steady herself.
“Are you all right?”
Kitty jerked the front door open. Claire started patting her back and, as it always did when she was emotionally distraught, Kitty’s vomit sprayed Claire’s porch steps and bushes. “I guess I gave you too much wine on an empty stomach.” She tried to help her inside, but Kitty pushed her away, unable to ask not to be touched.
“I feel so bad! Please, what can I do?” Claire started panicking.
“It’s fine. I’m fine.” She started walking toward her car.
“Wait—your purse!” Claire went inside to retrieve it.
Kitty didn’t wait. She slid into her Mercedes and, with a hand smear of vomit on the steering wheel, drove straight to Emma’s.
CHAPTER 36
Kitty
Every light in Emma’s house was on. A line of cars was in her driveway. Expecting the door to be open, Kitty walked in. Emma rose from the head of the dining-room table. “Kitty! We weren’t expecting you.”
Abigail looked up from serving the first helpings of greens. “Did I miss your call, Mrs. Tate?”
Kitty pointed at Emma. “I need to talk to you.”
Emma glanced at her husband, who stood too. “Kitty, is everything all right?”
“No, no it’s not, but I need to talk to my sister alone. Please.” She looked around the table. She didn’t recognize anyone, and they were all looking at her as if she didn’t belong.
Emma hurried down the hall and led Kitty outside to the pool.
“You said we’d know if something happened.”
Emma didn’t have to ask what she meant. “You couldn’t have gone back.”
“I would have found a way.”
“And I couldn’t take that risk,” Emma hissed.
“But I didn’t get to say goodbye! I didn’t get to be there for her.”
Emma wouldn’t back down. “No one gets to say goodbye!”
“I don’t care what you and your mother do. You should have told me mine was sick.”
“She didn’t want you to know. She didn’t want you to come back, Kitty.”
Kitty knew Emma was telling the truth but hated to admit it. Tasting the sour sweet of vomit still on her tongue, she reached to turn on the hose. “Still, it was none of your fucking business to decide for me.”
“I was following your mother’s wishes.” Emma stepped back so her mint-green dress and matching shoes wouldn’t get wet from the splash on the concrete. “Honestly, I almost wanted to tell you. But I was afraid you couldn’t handle it.”
“Me? You’re the one that crumbles every time the past comes back to you.” Kitty wanted to hurt her now.
“I haven’t made any mistakes as grave as yours.”
Kitty turned the hose on her, covering part of the hole with her thumb so it sprayed directly into her face.
“Kitty, stop!” Emma tried to fight the water with her palms. Abigail came to the kitchen window and quickly left. Maybe she didn’t want to get involved, or maybe she knew Emma deserved it. Kitty forced her thumb into the hose harder, until Emma screamed. “Stop! Listen to me. There’s more.”
Kitty removed her thumb.
“I have some things for you. Come by in the morning.”
Kitty pointed at the back door. “No, now.”
“They’re at the bank.”
Kitty raised the hose as a threat. “You swear?”
“Yes.”
“Meet me there at nine.” Their bank was closer to Kitty’s house, some distance from Pasadena.
Emma started toward her door but stopped short. “How did you find out?”
“None of your fucking business.” Meeting Claire was a coincidence that would only make Emma paranoid. “You weren’t ever going to tell me, were you?”
“No.”
Kitty drove home with tears in her eyes, grateful her mother had lived long enough to know she became a star, like the women in the picture shows they used to go see in Charlotte.
She parked down the street from her house for almost an hour before going inside. It was after ten, and Nathan would no doubt rush to greet her with inquiries about where’d she’d been. Her face was puffy, and she didn’t trust herself not to tell him the truth should he ask her what was wrong.
* * *
“I assume you’ve seen all of this already.” They sat outside the bank in Kitty’s car.
To that, Emma confessed. “I’ve known who you are since we were little girls. My momma told me.”
“Two of a kind. Borne of wealthy fathers with money we’ll never see.”
“I liked knowing we were sort of the same.”
“You never said.”
“I was ashamed then, just like you.”
The first item was her birth certificate. The line for the father’s name was blank, but a W had been written under “Race.” The next document was a note dated July 10, 1937. Written on a notecard with N. M. LAKES embossed top center, was the record of a remittance of five thousand dollars to Hazel Ledbetter.
There, in black and white, Kitty learned how her entire life had been sponsored by guilt.
The other items were photos so old that lines of color were missing through the center. In the first, Hazel held the hand of a pudgy young Claire Pew. On the back was written Shirley Claire, age 7.
“This is my sister. We have the same father.” Kitty wondered if Claire knew about the money.
“You knew her?”
Kitty shook her head. “My mother used to take care of her.”
Emma, in a rare urge to touch, hugged her. Kitty stayed close despite her still-fresh disgust over Emma’s yearslong silence.
The other picture was of Hazel holding Kitty as a toddler. Taken in front of their house in Winston, it was the only photo Kitty had of her mother, and the youngest image of herself. Kitty shook her head at Emma. “I don’t know how to forgive you.”