“I think I might be sick,” I replied.
There was, however, the matter of Philip’s girlfriend, a woman named Natasha. My father referred to her as the Countess Rostova. My mother called her The Gorgeous One. Natasha was the reason the awful idea stayed in my mind. Once there’d been the talk of succession, of the land transfer, I’d realized that Natasha through marriage might someday own May Hill’s dirty little right-of-way to the apple barn. It was then that I’d felt remiss, that I tried to turn over the idea of the union with Philip in my mind. But it, the extreme altruism of my act, and he, the flesh-and-blood man, always repelled me, so that it wasn’t possible to concentrate on the concept of our business relationship.
The morning after homecoming my mother asked me how the dance was and if we’d had fun. I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember anything that had happened except for the moment on the driveway with May Hill and Philip.
For quite some time there had been no talk of the transfer of assets and I had come to believe that May Hill had changed her mind. Or anyway, surely the decision was far off. Certainly she would never make any legal alterations in apple season, not when we were all caught up in the harvest. It was something so futuristic and far-fetched there didn’t seem any need to try to bring up the subject with William. When you thought about it in a realistic way it made no sense that Philip “Plato” Lombard, the Renaissance man, was going to commit to a lifetime in our burg and our home.
I therefore wasn’t prepared down at the library one afternoon when Dolly came through the door. She didn’t so much approach the checkout desk as march up to it, the color in her cheeks unusually high. No doubt there was going to be a news flash about Adam, our cousin now at Pomona College in California. He’d gotten a full ride including a travel stipend. Surfing had become an interest. And whales. I was sitting at a nook nearby cleaning DVDs with a shammy cloth. Never had I seen Dolly look so well and so pretty. There was the girlish flush and the tinsel effect of the shiny threads of silver in her dark hair. I smiled eagerly at her but she paid no attention to me, standing firm at the counter.
“How are you, Mrs. Lombard?” my mother as always said so cheerfully to the relation.
“I’m not going to say my opinion.” That’s what Dolly said. No Amanda or Adam reports, no Muellenbach intelligence, nothing about the sisters’ diets or one of the husbands shooting his foot accidently.
My mother understood the topic. She spoke quietly. “I’m not sure anybody realizes how much of his strength Jim has lost in the last few years, Dolly. We need this change. We need it to be legally binding.”
Dolly began to hum. She had perhaps come into the library to complain and maybe hadn’t expected my mother to have a point of view.
“I’m saying something,” my mother said. Never before, as far as I knew, had she spoken to Dolly in that warning tone. “I’m telling you an important piece of information, Mrs. Lombard.”
“May Hill has no right to give up her property to that boy,” Dolly cried. “That boy could go off tomorrow, for all we know. He could sell it to someone else. He could lose interest. For all we know he could ruin us.”
Yes, yes, it was so.
And yet my mother said, “May Hill has every right to transfer her acres to Philip. She has every legal right.”
“No one cares about my opinion.” Dolly looked as if she might burst into tears. “No one. I’m nothing. All these years and no one listens to me.”
“That’s not true—”
“You sit up here in the library. What,” Dolly asked, “do you know?”
My mother was startled.
“You sit up here,” Dolly repeated.
“Excuse me?” my mother said, a foolish question, a nothing question.
Dolly muttered, “You don’t work in the business.”
That was a fact—what could my mother say?
“I know I don’t, Dolly,” she nonetheless said. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t understand the dynamics.”
“I’ve killed myself on that cold floor in the sorting shed. Standing for ten hours, day after day, season after season. Pret-near killed myself.”
“Everyone appreciates your work—”
“You,” Dolly said fiercely, “have no right to an opinion.”