The day was glorious. We wound long silk scarves—mine white, Rachel’s a vibrant orange—around our hair and left for The Grange with the windows of the Thunderbird all the way down. Nonie had looked surprised; but when she saw that I was dressed for going out, she shooed me out of the nursery before I could change my mind. Michael had looked up from his blocks and gave me a tight-lipped, dutiful kiss. A few minutes later, as Rachel circled the Thunderbird out of the driveway, I put my head out the window to see Nonie standing behind Michael in the window as he waved good-bye.
As we left the lane, heading for town, I felt my heart lighten. I was still anxious, but I was neither at the house without Eva, nor was I yet faced with other people staring at me. Judging me. I was also filled with affection for Rachel—this Rachel. She was the bright, light, fun Rachel I had loved for so long. Most of her pregnancy she’d been cross, complaining that Jack was treating her like an invalid. I wasn’t sure how she was feeling about Helen and Zion, but this wasn’t the time to ask. She had obviously pushed it away for the time being. Resting my head on the back of the Thunderbird’s white leather seat, I felt the sunshine on my face, and let the wind tug at the layers of sadness that had accumulated since Olivia’s and Eva’s deaths.
When we were finally through Old Gate and on the two-lane highway that would take us within a mile of the old hotel, Rachel slowed a bit and told me to look in the glove box. Inside, I found a leather-covered flask I hadn’t seen since our college days, and a pack of Marlboros.
“Good Lord. It’s not even lunchtime yet.”
“Terrance fed us, right? It’s not like we’re drinking on an empty stomach. Besides, all I can drink is brandy these days. Everything else makes me throw up.”
Alcohol had made me sick during both of my pregnancies. Press had teased me, saying I was a big strong girl and was just pretending to be delicate, but he’d been wrong.
I opened the flask and held it out to Rachel. She drank in small sips, then handed it back to me. “This makes me happy! I’m so glad to get you away.”
Lifting the flask to my lips, I tilted it but put my tongue against the opening so that I barely tasted the brandy at all. But I wanted it, God help me. Where was my resolve to never again touch the stuff that had led to Eva’s death? And we were on our way to The Grange, which was the social center of our part of the state—a place where I was known. A place where they would all know what had happened to Eva. I might shame myself. Shame Press.
I drank as deeply as I could, given the scorching the stuff gave my throat, and ended by having a coughing fit, holding the flask far away from me so it wouldn’t spill. Rachel laughed, saying I drank like a girl.
What a strange thrill it was to be drinking in the open air in the middle of the day, as though we were teenagers again. When my coughing calmed and I could swallow again, I took another, less ambitious drink.
“Light me a cigarette, honey.” Rachel gave a little wave toward the glove box. Using the Thunderbird’s automatic lighter, I lit a cigarette for Rachel and passed it to her. We weren’t driving terribly fast, but the wind caught at the smoke, pulling it in a disappearing stream from Rachel’s mouth almost as soon as she exhaled.
“No ciggy for you? You want some of mine?” Rachel held the lipstick-stained end of hers toward me.
“No. Right now, I’m happy.” And I almost was. It was the closest I’d come to feeling happy in a long time.
Chapter 15
The Grange
The Grange Hotel was like an oasis in the wilderness, built a decade after the Revolutionary War as an inn for travelers headed across what was then the enormous state of Virginia to points west. But there’d been some change in the road, an exorbitant toll put up by a farmer who owned a small part of the land the road passed through, and his neighbors saw an opportunity and rerouted the road. The hotel suffered from the lack of traffic and the appearance of other, more modern inns, and was bankrupted more than once. But when the Civil War came, it was commissioned to house wounded Confederate officers and spruced up. During the post-war depression it sank back into ignominy, then was finally rescued by a syndicate that included Press’s grandfather. I’d witnessed Olivia being treated with a particular kind of reverence when we were there with her. But for the first couple of years of my marriage, the waiters either continued not to recognize me, or pretended not to recognize me when I was there on my own, until I signed the check with “House Account No. 12.”