“A premonition. And stop.” I shrug her off. “Thanks for having me up here . . . Ms. Eugene.”
“Call me Lil. But I can’t talk too long—just popping in to feed the babies, and then I’m running out.” She strips out of her heavy winter coat. Underneath, she’s a sharp, thin woman nearly as colorless as her pets. Her short gray hair is a static halo around her face. She rolls up the sleeves of her shapeless gray sweater and studies me, and it strikes me that Lillian Eugene is not delighted by my presence. “You look like your father,” she says matter-of-factly. Her eyes flick down to my chin, like my mother’s, like Lil’s. She smiles in a strained kind of way.
“Yes, I think so too.”
We sit at the little plastic-topped kitchen table while she prepares the cats’ food. To our left is a window that looks out into a multistory parking garage, and on the sill, a little ceramic planter that must’ve held something green and alive once, but now it’s an empty socket, the soil inside filmed with dust. I squint in the headlights of a car as it parks directly across from us, its front bumper maybe ten feet from our chairs. “So this is a cute place,” Jessa manages.
I shiver, noticing just now how cold it is in Lil’s apartment.
“We get by here. Close to school, and enough room for me and my babies.” She sets five bowls down on the floor and the cats cease their whining, attacking their food as one. Satisfied, Lil backs up against the counter. Jessa and I occupy the only two chairs in the kitchen, one of which Lil dragged in from another room. “So how’d you look me up?” she asks.
“Some old paperwork. Stuff my dad left lying around.”
“He knows you’re here?”
“No one knows.” I keep it vague. I don’t yet have a reason to lie to my long-lost relative, but you never know when a reason will present itself. “You two haven’t talked in a while?”
“What, me and your dad? Jesus, no.” Lil plucks a piece of gray hair off her sweater—hers or her babies’, I can’t tell. “Not in forever. We fell out of touch. I fell out of touch with a lot of people after my divorce. That’s the way it happens.”
I don’t know what to say to this. Should you apologize for hearing someone’s ancient bad news, when by now they must be sick to death after years of hearing “I’m sorry”? “I guess Dad doesn’t really keep in touch with most of Mom’s family.”
“No, he hasn’t had much contact with us since your mama. Not that there’re many of us left.”
I can’t help but deflate a little. I’d hoped Dad and I were sniffing along the exact same trail. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a trail here. No one else can tell me what this woman can; no one else can tell me about her. Except my dad, and where is he? I fiddle with the charms on my borrowed necklace, fold my hands in my lap, crack my knuckles. “Who is left, then?”
“Not Sid’s parents. My parents moved down south for the heat, and they won’t be coming back. Can’t say I blame them.” Lil stoops and with a huff of pain, clumsily lowers her narrow body to the floor to sit among her cats, who drip over her like honey.
“Um, do you want my chair?” Jessa asks, red-faced, stroking her fingers through her hair furiously. “I can wait somewhere else.”
“Oh, no.” Lil shakes her head, smiling down on her pets. “I like it fine right here. What’s good enough for my babies is good enough for me.”
Jessa returns to staring nervously out the window into the parking garage, bouncing her leg under the table and chewing the inside of her lip.
“Is there any more of Mom’s family around here?” I ask, trying to steer us straight. “I’d love to meet them. Dad never really talks about you all. Or, you know, my mom. Do you? Ever talk to her?”
“Sid? Lord, no. Not in years and years.”
“How many? Would you say?”
“I guess five or six. The last time we talked I was still with Robert, but near the end. I remember, because he came down to my reading room in the old place, which he never came into, and said, ‘It’s one of your cousins on the phone for you,’ and I said, ‘I only have the one,’ and he said, ‘Yes, but didn’t she run off?’”
“What did she say to you?”
“She wasn’t saying too much. Sid and me were close once. When we were little in Fitchburg—I lived near the part I guess they don’t call Tar Hill anymore, but they used to. Her mama was my daddy’s sister. We were only kids, no other cousins around. I think there were more of our people out west, more Wards, but we never met them. I don’t know about her daddy’s side. Anyhow, her mom went off when Sid was young, and her daddy passed on when she was in high school, so Sid came and lived with us. Her daddy left a little insurance money for her, so when she graduated she took it and left to . . . what do you call it, study abroad? At a fancy art school in some country over there.”
“Switzerland?” I ask, recalling my bedtime story.
“I think Sweden. Whichever, she left, and I never heard a peep from her. Don’t think she meant to come back, till Siobhan died. That’s your grandmother.”