What She Inherits

by Diane V. Mulligan

  “Well, suit yourself,” he said, lighting the joint and taking a long drag.

  Casey glanced over her shoulder out the window to the deserted lane below. Who would care if she smoked a little pot? Who, beside Jason, would even know? It wouldn’t hurt anyone, and the last time she probably felt cranky after because she was getting her period. She sighed.

  “All right,” she said, moving back to the couch.

  “’Atta girl,” he said, handing it to her.

  She took a drag, held it as long as she could, exhaled, coughing like a tuberculosis patient, and then burst into a fit of giggles like a fifteen-year-old girl. Well, not like the girl she had been at fifteen, but the way she thought a fifteen-year-old ought to act. She wondered where she’d be now if she’d had a normal childhood. She doubted she’d have her own café, and she liked having a café, so she had that to be thankful for. Living here on Devil’s Back, the café, those things were definitely good. This situation with Jason. This was not so good.

  She twisted sideways on the futon and put her legs across Jason’s lap. She leaned back against the armrest and had the distinct impression that her head was floating over her shoulders like a balloon. After how tense she’d been all day, it was a wonderful sensation. She closed her eyes and let herself sink down into the futon mattress. She felt Jason pick up her legs and set them back on the futon, and she opened one eye to see him pulling his t-shirt over his head. One look at his firm, youthful body, and she was ready and willing for almost anything. She smiled, closed her eyes, and folded her arms behind her head, as if to say, “I’m yours. Have your way with me.”

  The futon creaked as he slid one knee in between her legs and the back of the mattress. She felt his hands opening her jeans, and lifted her hips to help him pull them off. His touch on her hips and thighs was electric. He put his lips on her navel and inched her tank top up with his hands as he kissed her stomach, her ribs, the lacy edge of her bra. She leaned forward and tugged her shirt over her head, dropping it on the floor. To his delight, she was wearing a bra that opened in the front. He didn’t waste much time with the preliminaries, which was fine by Casey. She liked the salty taste of his sweat as she kissed his neck.

  It was late when Casey finally managed to extricate herself from Jason’s grasp and get in the shower. Her limbs felt heavy and loose. She was pretty sure she’d pulled some muscles in her groin and her lower back, and as enjoyable as the whole thing had been, she really wished he’d go home so she could have the bed to herself. After all, she had to be downstairs in the café by five-thirty.

  For a man who was truly skilled in matters of sex, he was appallingly bad at sharing a bed. He tossed and turned and wound the covers so tightly around himself that she couldn’t get them back once he inevitably stole them.

  When she came out of the shower wrapped in her big fluffy robe with a towel over her head, he was stretched out in bed, smiling up at her.

  “Um, I think maybe I’ll sleep on the futon tonight,” she said, removing the towel and shaking out her hair.

  His expression went from puppy-dog happy to rejected five-year-old.

  “It’s just that if I’m only going to get a few hours’ sleep, I need to actually sleep. Comfortably.”

  “Well, if you want me to leave,” he said, launching himself from the bed, his naked body still beautiful but now somewhat ridiculous too. Big, strong men were not supposed to pout.

  He pulled on his boxers and jeans, and Casey knew she was supposed to object. But he had stayed over five of the past seven nights. They weren’t even actually dating. They were sleeping together. She’d been very clear on this, and he had said it was cool with him (And why wouldn’t it be? Wasn’t it every man’s dream for a woman to offer a sweet arrangement like this?). And then she thought of his brother and sister-in-law and their three whining, screaming, terrifying little children waking up in the middle of the night to the noise of him banging into the house—and he didn’t know how to move quietly, so he would definitely wake them—and her resolve wilted.

  “No, I don’t want you to leave. I wish I had a bigger bed.”

  “Hey, no, whatever, I mean, we just had mind-blowing sex, like we do, and you’re not the snuggling type, so, whatever,” he said. He slid his t-shirt over his head and his beautiful, strong back disappeared from her sight.

  “Look, I don’t want you going home and waking up your family and everything. I mean, it’s really late, and you should stay here, of course.”

  “I’m not going to stay where I’m not wanted.”

  Casey wished he had some more of that weed. He got so sulky when his high faded. She got up and put her hands on his shoulders. She pressed her face between his shoulder blades and said, “Please stay.”

  He turned around and eyed her, his perfect jaw set and his lips pressed together into a thin line. Then his face broke into a smile. “Oh you want me to stay, do you? Because I’m about ready to go again.”

  Go again they did, and when they were done, Jason fell asleep in two seconds flat, pulling the blankets with him and leaving Casey a small corner of mattress for herself. At four o’clock, she gave up pretending to sleep. She got dressed and went down to the café. She’d make cinnamon buns. Those took hours of rising that she normally couldn’t be bothered with, but if she wasn’t going to sleep, something nice might as well come out of it.

  Chapter 18

  St. Nabor Island, South Carolina

  Back at Grace’s condo, Angela crawled under the covers, but she felt wide awake. Her mind was racing from the events of the previous night; there was no way she could sleep. Even with all their high-tech, super-sensitive equipment, the ghost hunters had detected nothing at her mother’s house, and yet she had heard it, again, as she had every night that she’d spent in that house since her mother’s funeral. First the footsteps that seemed to summon her to the hallway, then the voice that told her to go to sleep. It made no sense. Why would her mother wake her only to tell her to go to bed? Why was her mother angry? Or was it all in Angela’s head, like Nicole and Molly had thought?

  She’d been avoiding their phone calls since they went back to school. It was funny, really, to consider ghosting them—disappearing from their lives—when the issue that was making her avoid them was their refusal to even consider the possibility that her mother’s spirit was trying to communicate with her.

  Tossing and turning, Angela tried to think of things that might disturb her mother’s peace and prevent her spirit from going wherever spirits go after the body dies. Her mother lived such a straightforward, upper-middle-class existence. Sure, there were complications—she lost her first born child when he was seventeen. That had to leave a mark on a person’s soul, but wouldn’t her soul seek his and not linger here? And then there was her husband, Angela’s father, whose early-onset Alzheimer’s had effectively taken him from her years too soon. Maybe this all had something to do with him. That seemed as likely as anything.

  Angela tossed the covers from the bed. She would visit her father. Maybe he’d have a lucid moment, which she realized was not very likely, but maybe he’d reveal something nonetheless. Maybe today he’d be caught in a moment of his life that could help her.

  When Angela visited her father when she first got home the week before, he hadn’t known her. He had shouted and carried on when she walked into his room, refusing to let her near him, refusing to let her even talk to him. She had had visits like this with him before, but it hurt more than ever at that moment, as she had realized she was an orphan now, even though her father was still breathing.

  In truth, Angela felt like she had never known her father. She had only been 10 when he began to experience symptoms, and by the time she was 15, he had to be put in the home. Her feelings toward him were a complicated tangle. She had no idea, really, what sort of father he might have been had he been well, no idea what sort of father he had been to Ryan before her. There were pictures of her father and brother at baseball games, on
fishing trips, and other guy things. Ryan had had a father for all of his seventeen years, but she had only had him for 10, and he hadn’t been especially involved. She suspected it was because she was a girl. He lost a cherished son who couldn’t be replaced by a little girl who was decidedly girly. In the photos of her with her father, his smile always looked forced to her, an uneasy mask.

  Maybe it hadn’t been her gender that caused him to hold back but his own age. After all, when she was born, he was old enough to be her grandfather.

  She picked up a cup of coffee on the way and fifteen minutes later she was signing in at the front of desk of her father’s nursing home. She found him in his room, in a chair by the window. Angela’s first thought on seeing him was how unfair that he had outlived his wife. Mentally, he had been lost to this world for a very long time, and yet his heart ticked on. Her second thought was that she’d never visited him alone before her mother died.

  “Dad?” Angela said, rapping lightly on the doorframe.

  He turned stiffly in his chair to face her, and then he frowned. “Me?” he asked.

  “Hi, dad, it’s me, Angela, your daughter,” she said, nervously stepping into the room.

  “Angela.” He said her name like he had never put those syllables together before and was testing them for the first time. “I don’t remember you.”

  “I know, it’s okay.” She took another step toward him. This was better than last time. He was confused, but he didn’t seem angry.

  “Your mother is Deborah?” he asked.

  She nodded. In another circumstance this would almost be amusing. She was tempted to ask what other woman might possibly be her mother.

  “Deborah was here,” he said, and he looked around as if Deborah might still be there, might have ducked behind the bed to hide and play a trick on him. He was forming words well today, though, and that was good. Some days when she visited him, he could barely speak, at least in words she could understand.

  “She was?” Angela asked, another half step toward him.

  “I don’t know you. I have one son. That’s all.”

  “That’s right, you had a son named Ryan, and me, too. I’m your daughter.”

  “I never had a daughter,” he insisted. “You’re a liar. Who are you? Did you come to steal from me?”

  Now he was growing agitated. Angela stopped moving toward him and raised her hands as if she were under arrest. She didn’t want to upset him. This would be a pointless visit if all that happened was she upset him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “My mistake. I’m... I’m a visitor. I thought you might like someone to talk to.”

  He shifted away from her and gazed out the window again.

  “I’d love to hear about your son, though, if you felt like talking about him,” Angela said.

  He glanced back over at her and made a tsk sound. “You’re too young. What do you know about being a parent?” He sighed and then looked at her again. “You have kids?”

  Angela shook her head.

  “All kids do is break your heart,” he said.

  “May I sit down?” Angela asked, gesturing to the chair beside his.

  “This place is full of thieves,” he said. “You aren’t a thief?”

  Angela assured him she was not, and he nodded toward the chair.

  “Did Ryan break your heart, d—” She stopped herself from calling him “dad” again, but only just.

  “Ryan? Ryan is a good boy. Nice day today. I might go to his baseball game.”

  So today was one of the days when talking to her father would involve time travel. That might be a good thing, Angela thought. She said, “You love him very much, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do. He’s my son.”

  “Did you ever want to have more kids?” Angela asked.

  “Oh sure. Grew up in a big family, always thought I’d have a house full, but my wife is right. One is enough.”

  Angela’s heart thudded in her chest. What did he mean he grew up in a big family? He had one older brother who died before Ryan was born, and that was it. He didn’t usually invent a history for himself. “Did you have a lot of cousins around you growing up?” Angela asked, trying to puzzle out what he meant.

  “Two sisters and three brothers,” he said. “Tons of cousins, too.”

  “Oh!” Angela said, her surprise genuine. He seemed certain, but he was wrong.

  “Marty, he died back in ’72, but the rest are all still around, got their own kids, too.”

  Marty died in 1972 in Vietnam. That was true. Angela had seen his picture and even his obituary, which her mother had saved in a family scrapbook. But where was he coming up with the rest of this stuff?

  “They live around here?” Angela asked, her voice trembling.

  “All but Mary. Everyone else stayed, though.”

  “Stayed in Massachusetts?” Angela asked.

  “Of course.”

  But Angela’s parents always told her they had no family. All of her grandparents died before she was born, a sad downside of being born to older parents, her father’s only brother died in Vietnam, and her mother was an only child. That was what they told her. Although she knew her parents lived in Massachusetts before she was born, and that they raised Ryan there, they never took her there to visit because, they had told her, there was no one there for them to visit. But what if that had been a lie?

  “Are you the youngest?” Angela asked, thinking that maybe his other siblings, like Marty, were dead, and that was why her parents never mentioned them. How many dead family members could you burden a child with?

  “Second oldest.”

  Angela was formulating another question, trying to find a question that would help her determine if he was telling the truth or if all of this was some elaborate fiction of his broken mind, when he said, “Who are you?”

  “No one, a friendly visitor,” she said, standing up. She reached over to pat his hand, longing to be able to embrace him, to have the reassuring arms of a father around her to comfort her. “I’ll see you again another time.”

  As she drove back toward Grace’s, she replayed the conversation over and over again in her mind. He hadn’t known her, hadn’t known where he was, hadn’t seemed to know that Ryan was dead, so why should she trust anything he said? And yet, if he thought Ryan was still alive, if he thought he might go see Ryan’s baseball game that very afternoon, then it was as if she had dropped in on him in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and why wouldn’t he be telling the truth about his life? But why would her parents have lied to her for all these years? Why deny the existence of family?

  It would be easy enough to Google a few things and see if she could find anyone who might be an aunt or uncle. She had two names, Martin and Helen. That should be enough to get her started.

  As she was pulling into Grace’s driveway, her phone rang. Randy.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked, sounding chipper.

  Her head still full of her conversation with her father, Angela wasn’t sure she even wanted to think about the previous night’s experience. Distractedly, she mumbled that she was tired.

  “Do you want to have dinner? I think we should debrief,” he said.

  Her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t eaten all day. “I don’t know. It’s so difficult.”

  “Talking it through might help.”

  “To be honest, I kind of want to forget the whole thing. I mean, it’s obviously in my head. No one else has heard it.”

  “Okay, but I think I found something,” he said.

  Angela’s pulse quickened. “What is it?”

  “Let’s talk over dinner.” Randy said. “How about Antonio’s, 7:00?”

  “How about now? I can’t wait that long,” Angela said, pulling into the parking lot of a gas station to change directions. If she had to wait until 7, she’d lose her mind.

  Chapter 19

  Devil’s Back Island, Maine

  By eight, Casey was on her fourth cup of coffee
. It would have been more, but she forced herself to keep it to a cup an hour. The warm cinnamon smell of her morning baking was heavy in the air, and outside the sun was shining in a cloudless sky, sunlight sparkling on the raindrops still clinging to the trees and grass from the previous day’s drizzle. Tendrils of flame-red hair escaped her sloppy French braid and curled around her face in the hot kitchen.

  Normally on a day that warm, she would have done the absolute minimum baking to keep the café a reasonable temperature. After the lousy weather of the past week, she hadn’t expected it to be so nice. More proof of that old New England saying: You like the weather? Wait a minute. Rainy and sixty degrees one day, sunny and eight-five the next.

  She hastily opened all the windows, turned on the ceiling fan, and unlocked the front door, flipping the sign to “Open.” She stood in the doorway enjoying the breeze for a moment, and then she heard the horn of the ferry. Right on time. She shielded her eyes from the sun and peered out to see a small crowd on the deck. If the morning ferry had that many passengers, the afternoon boat was likely to be completely booked. Hallelujah, finally some customers.

  Casey returned to her place behind the counter, forced herself to drink some water instead of more coffee, and waited. Within minutes, the first customers of the day were crossing the threshold, unable to resist the smell of the cinnamon rolls wafting out onto the lane. Despite her exhaustion, Casey couldn’t help but think it would be a good day.

  Around eleven, though, her mood soured a little when Brett came in, a laptop case slung over his shoulder. He was impeccably dressed again, this time in Nantucket red slacks and a crisp, pale blue, oxford shirt, the sleeves rolled to his elbows. He looked like he had gotten the recommended eight hours of sleep and was ready to take on the world. Despite the humidity and rapidly warming day, he looked cool and fresh.