Instead, she held her hands out for the linens and said, “Let me make up the couch for Frédéric. You’ve done enough for all of us for one day.”
If Simone and Frédéric hadn’t both suffered such a great loss, if Markie hadn’t been too emotionally spent from the day’s trauma, too exhausted from having the bungalow filled to capacity all day by Mrs. Saint’s beloved Defectives and her estranged sister, if she hadn’t been miles past the end of her rope when it came to secrets and lies, she might have told the two older French Canadians where they could stick the linens, along with whatever it was Frédéric was concealing under the blanket. Or, at least, she might have blown an exasperated breath of air out and turned on her heel to stomp out of the kitchen.
But she could barely stand any longer, or keep her eyes open, or concentrate on how annoyed she was with them. So she handed the sheets and blankets to Simone, told her, “That would be great,” wished them both a good night, and stumbled out of the room to the living room, where she collapsed on the love seat and immediately fell asleep.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Markie sat, reluctantly, with Frédéric and Simone in the wood-paneled law office of Marvin Schanbaum. It was Sunday afternoon, and Frédéric had received a call from the lawyer that morning, asking him and Simone to come immediately. Markie wondered aloud if it weren’t permitted for the two of them to bury their dearest friend and sister before being summoned by her legal counsel, but Frédéric wanted to go, whispering to Markie that it would be good for the others if the meeting happened right away.
When he requested that she be the one to drive them to the lawyer’s office, she almost told him to ask Patty instead. She felt an increasing need to marshal and preserve the limited patience she had for Frédéric and Simone and their secret photographs and shared confidences and furtive embraces. But then she took in the noisy, overcrowded bungalow and pictured herself reading, alone, in the quiet of the lawyer’s waiting room, and she agreed to take them.
When they asked her to go with them into Mr. Schanbaum’s inner office rather than wait in the small lobby, she practically fought them off with her fists. She lost. She didn’t know why she was there, she told them all, as Mr. Schanbaum opened a file on his desk and flipped through it, stopping when he located a thick document, stapled at the top. LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF ANGELINE ST. DENIS, Markie made out from the top line on the first page. It made her even more anxious.
“I only came because I didn’t want Frédéric or Simone to have to drive,” she told Mr. Schanbaum. “Shouldn’t I be waiting out there?” She pointed through his office door to the small waiting area. “Surely she would have wanted you to discuss her personal affairs in private.”
“In fact, you are one of the individuals mentioned in her personal affairs,” he said. “This is why I asked Frédéric to bring you along.”
Markie turned, openmouthed, to Frédéric, who was suddenly too fascinated with the floor to acknowledge her. He sat on the other side of Simone, too far away for Markie to nudge with an elbow, so she moved her questioning gaze to Simone.
The older woman shrugged. “Do not ask it to me,” she said. “I was hardly the one my sister would have talked to about the contents of her will.”
Mrs. Saint was the owner of the bungalow.
She left it to Markie, free and clear, along with more than enough money to maintain it—and a college fund for Jesse.
Before Markie could get over the shock of her neighbor’s staggering generosity, Mr. Schanbaum read further, to the part where Mrs. Saint’s house went to Frédéric, along with enough money that he could easily rebuild it and still keep Ronda, Bruce, and Patty employed indefinitely.
And this is where Markie stopped feeling dumbfounded about Mrs. Saint’s generosity and started feeling something different, something far more negative, something in the gray, fuzzy spaces between resentment, confusion, and fury.
Because keeping Ronda, Bruce, and Patty on staff, and sufficiently occupied and out of trouble, wasn’t something Frédéric could pull off on his own. He was wonderful at helping the others, but he wasn’t inclined to direct them—Mrs. Saint had said it herself during one of her visits to Markie’s patio. And if ever there were a time when he might have been able to muster the energy to truly lead, it wasn’t now. Once upright and vigorous and surefooted, Frédéric now seemed as adrift as the others had always been.
Mrs. Saint had known, of course, that this was what would happen, that grief would knock the vitality out of him. That given his age and the fact that he had lost the love of his life, unrequited or not, his vigor might never return. That in the event he was left to carry on without her, an occasion she had clearly predicted, he would need someone younger and more capable to assist him. Someone to take over where Mrs. Saint had left off.
Someone who knew the Defectives already, who cared about them.
Someone who was located conveniently—and permanently, thanks to Mrs. Saint’s bequest—on the other side of the low wooden fence.
The bungalow wasn’t a gift, Markie now saw—it was a sentence. It wasn’t born of Mrs. Saint’s generosity but out of her unceasing desire to have things her own way. She wanted her beloved Defectives to stay together. To make that happen, they would need a place to gather, a yard and house that required their constant work and rework. So she had left her house to Frédéric.
They would need money to keep them from needing to find jobs elsewhere. So she had also left him enough cash to pay them.
And they would need a firm, capable leader. So she had arranged to have one installed next door, in exchange for the deed to the bungalow.
Markie almost laughed. She almost asked Mr. Schanbaum to read the part of the will that required her, as a condition of her new home ownership, to attend and supervise the morning meetings on the screened porch. To be sure to ask each of them what their plan was for the day, then offer suggestions for what they should do instead. To make a point of goading Lola into homework and bathing and getting more exercise. To ensure Frédéric drank an approved quantity of water each day and knocked off work precisely at four.