“No it isn’t. You have to take charge for her now. It’s time. Ask yourself, how many sets of stairs are in that house? Do you want her to spend the last year or two of her life in traction? In miserable pain from a broken hip? She can’t stay there. It’s simple if you ask yourself the right questions.” I’d thought I wanted Rachel’s certainty, but she was as hard and sharp as those black letters on the website. She advanced inexorably, too. My pencil scratched across the paper, shading. “Are you still there?” she asked.
“I’m here, but I don’t think family things get simpler if you ask the right questions,” I said. I made sure there was no snipe or snark in my voice as I added, “Could the right question simplify what’s happening with Jake?”
Now it was Rachel’s turn for silence. I started drawing a second eyeless boogery monster. Violence Versus the Lewy Bodies.
“Point taken,” Rachel said at last, her voice tight. “Just promise me you’ll keep your eyes open. Those little old ladies have been lying to you. They’ll fool you if you let them. The way you’re talking, I think you really, really want to get fooled.”
“I promise, but how are things with you? Have you heard from Jake?”
“No,” Rachel said, suddenly brisk. “I need to go start dinner.”
Which was code for, Mind your own damn business, Leia, because she was just going to nuke a Lean Cuisine. Lav was with me, Jake was in the wind, and she never cooked for only herself.
I unpacked and took a shower, trying to wash the road and a little of my mingled grief and anger off me. Rachel had a point, but was it wrong to want a single, peaceful evening? The smell of roasting hens, peppery and succulent, wafted up the stairs as I got dressed, like a sensory argument for respite. Birchie would serve them with fat slices of the summer’s first heirloom tomatoes from the back garden and her famous cornbread. To make it, she saved bacon drippings in a coffee can by the stove, and she’d put some of that grease into the cast-iron skillet and set it in the oven. She’d make batter while the rendered fat got so hot that it was close to smoking. The sizzle of the batter landing in that pan was the kitchen soundtrack of my youth.
I didn’t know if the urge for peace came from sweetness or from being scared, though. Was it cowardice to enjoy one dinner in the company of my favorite niece, my only living Birch relative, and my much-loved Wattie? Surely it was my best self that was saying I could start spying and deciding tomorrow.
But the voice of Rachel in my head was asking, could Birchie still make her cornbread? There was no written recipe. Did she remember? Maybe she was standing in the kitchen as blank as a sheet of brand-new paper while Wattie made it as part of their ongoing little-old-lady conspiracy.
I was too disheartened for any more conversations, so I sent brief updating e-mails to Mom and Keith and my friend Margot, who was feeding my feral cat. At six I tapped on the adjoining door that linked my bedroom to Lav’s room in the turret. She was sprawled on the daybed, deeply immersed in the mysteries of her cell phone. There was no dresser in the round room, but I saw Lavender’s shorts and T-shirts stacked neatly, color-coded, in the shelving. Four pairs of shoes and her rain boots stood in a tidy row on the floor.
“Dinnertime,” I said, and she got up and followed me out and down the stairs, texting and talking to me at the same time.
“How long do you think we’re going to be here?”
She didn’t sound as aggrieved as she had on the drive, probably because she’d hung around outside with the Darian boys until their cell phones had beeped to call them home. That was new and yet the same; Birchville was so small, so known and safe, that kids still roamed at will.
When I was Lav’s age, most of my summer friends’ mothers hollered their names in long pig calls to retrieve them. The well-off ones sent their housekeepers out to do it. Birchie rang a distinctive brass bell from the porch. It could be heard from anyplace on the square, and woe betide me if I did not come at once. Birchie rang it herself; she was above pig calls, and she hadn’t kept a housekeeper since her father died. She was famous for it. She’d come home from Charleston in mourning clothes, but a week later she’d traded them for bridal white and married her greengrocer, Floyd Briggs. Then she’d offered Vina, Wattie’s mother, a fat pension so she could retire. Vina had worked for the Birches from sunup to suppertime, six days a week, for most of her life. She’d more than earned it.
Birchie “did for herself” after that, even the year she was pregnant. Her father had been a proud man, more revered than beloved. He’d been “Mr. Birch”—never “Ellis”—to every single person in town. My grandmother wanted it known that the new reigning Birch was not too uppity to keep her own floors clean.
In recent years I’d insisted on hiring a rotating cast of local girls to help her with the heavy work and laundry, but she still cooked and kept her garden. Although now, having seen her planting Tic Tacs, I guessed Wattie was doing more and more of those things.
“We’ll need to stay a week or two at least,” I told Lavender. I wasn’t sure of anything, including how bad off Birchie truly was. How long could they have been lying to me?
On the way through the parlor, my Rachel-sharpened gaze caught on the two upholstered chairs, sitting side by side facing out the big front window, so close their arms touched. It made me stop short, noticing the Victorian love seats, facing each other in front of the fireplace.
Lavender rammed into my back.
“What?” she said, but she didn’t look up from her phone.
“Nothing,” I said. The love seat on the left had matching tables at each end, one stacked with Birchie’s bookmarked Phyllis Tickle book and several novels, the other holding Wattie’s giant King James Bible and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Nearby the tiny round coffee table on the wide end of the wraparound porch had its two chairs pulled around to one side, backs against the wall of the house, ostensibly so they could both have a clear view of the square.
All the furniture in the house had been reangled and rearranged so Birchie and Wattie could sit like honeymooners crowding in on one side of a restaurant booth. It hadn’t always been that way. It had happened in gradual steps, though, so I hadn’t noticed from visit to visit. These days, even when they were standing, Wattie’s bad knees and Birchie’s poor vision kept them arm in arm, giving Wattie near-constant access to the best of Birchie’s two good ears. How deeply did the Lewy bodies have their hooked claws in Birchie’s brain?
I took a long, slow breath, trying to lower my heart rate. My pregnancy handbook had a judgey tone and quite a lot to say about the effect of stress upon poor Digby. I doubted it would recommend barraging him with oscillating grief and anger hormones.
We went into the kitchen through the dining-room door. Birchie and Wattie were at the stove, loading up the plates. By the back door, a recessed nook held a narrow rectangular table. It was set for dinner, telling me the same story as all the other furniture: I always sat on the built-in bench seat under the window, while Birchie and Wattie sat side by side, looking out over their backyard garden. But not this time.