“I hate it,” my mother said. “I could never live in one of these cracker boxes.”
It was their variation on Green Acres, if you know that TV show. Fresh air! No there there. But my father was too fair-minded to use “You are my wife” to clinch an argument.
Instead, he proposed a deal: “If I can find a house that you love, will you live here? I know what you like—something older, preferably made of stone, a house with character.” She said yes, probably assuming it couldn’t be done. He let the subject drop, and she thought she had triumphed. It was August now. The pregnancy was known, but only to them. They were keeping the news from her parents, whose house, large as it was, could not accommodate another grandchild.
Two weeks before Labor Day, my father took my mother to see a Revolutionary War–era tavern, eight miles north of Columbia on the road once known as the Columbia Pike. My mother had to admit she liked it, especially its tiny windows. She didn’t like light, my mother. That’s one of the things I know about her. She didn’t like light. She had grown up in a dark house, one where sunshine struggled through the amber and violet panes of stained glass. She considered shadows normal.
“The kitchen and bathrooms are hopeless,” she pointed out. “Too small, too out-of-date.”
“They can be redone,” my father promised. “I’ve found a contractor who has agreed to a rush job. Best of everything, in whatever colors you want. You can keep the wooden floors, which will be nice, I think. You never see wooden floors in a kitchen anymore. Why is that? If they’re sealed properly, they’re fine.”
“But it’s not in Columbia. It’s practically in Ellicott City.” Ellicott City was everything Columbia was not. The county seat, set in a valley alongside a cold, bright stream, filled with stone buildings dating back to the eighteenth century. “If you’re open to Ellicott City, why not Oella or Lawyers Hill?” my mother asked, then repeated, hopefully: “This isn’t in Columbia.”
“It will be,” my father said.
“Not on one of those rinky-dink lots. I couldn’t bear it.” She was grasping now. My mother had the intellect for law school, but no temperament for debate. She took things too personally.
“I found an irregular lot on the lakeside,” my father said. “It’s essentially a double. Once the plantings are mature, you’ll barely be able to see your neighbors.”
She was his wife. Good-bye, city life.
Two weeks later, that stone tavern was hoisted onto a flatbed truck and transferred, at a pace of one mile per hour—the journey took much of a Sunday evening into early Monday morning and required multiple permits—to one of the most desirable lots in Columbia, a double on the west shore of Wilde Lake. The move was covered by both the Baltimore and Washington papers. It marked the first time our family had been in the newspaper, literally announcing my father’s arrival on the local political scene. “The house will be home to Andrew J. Brant and family. Brant, a Baltimore attorney, hopes to be active in Howard County’s Democratic Party . . .”
My mother’s parents were angry. It had taken almost a decade, but the prince had gotten around the princess’s imperious parents, as the prince always does. They argued. They cajoled. They threatened to cut my parents off without a cent. They offered to pay the tuition to Gilman. But their lobbying campaign to keep them under their roof—my mother and AJ, really; they merely tolerated my father—only signaled to my father the urgency of leaving.
My parents used me as their trump card. As large as my grandparents’ house was, there was no bedroom available for another child. I broke the spell. I freed the princess from the castle, brought her to a new palace. I even freed Teensy, who had come to work for the Closter family when AJ was born and insisted on following us to Columbia, despite the fact that it meant an onerous commute for her every day.
Four months later, I was born, Seven days after, my mother died. It was a bitter winter. Everything froze. Wilde Lake froze. The improvements on the house, intended for her, stopped, suspended in time. Again, as in a fairy tale. Or, perhaps, a television show. I was your wife. Good-bye to my life.
JANUARY 7
“Happy birthday.” Andi, sailing into Lu’s office again. Not knocking. Again. Lu isn’t sure what to do about this. “You’ve got your first murder. If you want it.”
“My birthday was Friday. What kind of murder?”
Lu can tell that Andi is struggling with herself. If she makes the murder sound uninteresting, maybe she’ll catch it. But if it turns out to be the kind of case that Lu wants to try, all Andi will have achieved is a reputation for disloyalty and dishonesty.
“Middle-aged woman, killed in what appears to be a B and E. Could have been there for up to a week.”