What She Inherits

by Diane V. Mulligan

  Chapter 23

  Devil’s Back Island, Maine

  When at last Casey locked the café at four and began cleaning up for the night, she had run entirely through her second and third winds and was weary to her core. She believed in the importance of doing a thorough job with the cleaning, hoisting the chairs onto the tables, sweeping and mopping the floor, wiping down the counter and leaving the glass front of the pastry case spotless, the handprints of children all erased until tomorrow. But at the moment, she felt unsteady on her feet. Kim hadn’t been able to come rescue her that afternoon, and she hadn’t even called Barb, because Barb babysat her grandchildren on her free days. Now she looked at the sticky table tops and the crumbs on the floor and felt like crying.

  It could wait until the morning while the scones were in the oven. She didn’t need to do it now. She climbed the stairs to her apartment, pulling herself along the banister, praying that Jason was not there. She didn’t think he was. She hadn’t heard footsteps overhead for a while, and besides, he and his brother probably had loads of landscaping to get caught up on now that the rain had stopped.

  She threw open the door to the living room and stepped inside. The scent of all-purpose cleaner was overwhelming. She looked around and noticed that the coffee table was spotless, the TV screen was streaky, as if it had been inexpertly dusted, and there were vacuum lines across the rug. She walked into the kitchen to see that there were no dishes in the sink, no messes on the counter, no shoes piled near the door. Apparently, some elf had come to clean her apartment when she wasn’t looking. She wondered what favors said elf would expect in return.

  In the bathroom, the vanity was wiped down, there was no toothpaste in the sink, no stray hairs near the drain. The toilet bowl was blue with cleaner, as if to ensure that she noticed it had been cleaned. She flushed it and the blue lines where the cleaner had dripped into the water remained.

  In her bedroom, the bed had been made up, the pillows propped carefully along the headboard. Everything on top of her bureau had been moved slightly and the surface was dust-free. She hated dusting. She almost never bothered.

  If this was Jason’s way of saying he was sorry, he’d done good. She pulled back the comforter, ready to call it a day even though it wasn’t even five o’clock. The mattress was bare. No sheets.

  He had gone so far as to take her sheets to wash them. That meant he’d be back tonight. She climbed under the blankets anyway and closed her eyes for a moment, but then she thought of something and bolted upright. She glanced toward the hamper in the corner. The lid was shut. She never left the lid shut because she was always dangling things like damp wash cloths over the edge to dry so they wouldn’t turn all her laundry musty. There was nothing dangling over the edge at the moment. She leapt from the bed and whipped open the hamper. Empty.

  It wasn’t fear that he’d shrink her shirts or turn her whites pink that worried her. Had he thought to empty her pockets? That was what she needed to know. And if he had emptied her pockets and found the letter that she stupidly left in the butt pocket of her jeans the night before when she’d so foolishly agreed to a stoned evening of delirious sex, had he read it? And if he hadn’t emptied her pockets and the letter had gone through the wash... well, it wasn’t like a dollar bill. It was more like tissue. It would be an illegible clump of paper at best, a thousand tiny bits of paper stuck all over all her clothing at worse.

  She dropped onto the bed and covered her face with her hands, picturing the blue ink, the swooping script in which her mother wrote. She could quote verses from it: I’m sorry I didn’t tell you in person. After all this time, I couldn’t face you, but I want to make amends. I want my soul to rest in heaven.

  It doesn’t matter, she told herself. She should have thrown the letter out weeks ago. She was only torturing herself by hanging onto it. If it was gone—and it was, because what man thought to check pockets—he had done her a bigger favor than he’d realized. Now she could stop obsessing about the letter, stop reading and rereading it, stop deliberating. Now she could pretend she’d never received it, and she could stop fearing Rosetta would somehow see it.

  She curled up on her side and took a deep breath. She was asleep before she could count to five.

  When Casey awoke, it was dark in her room, and Jason was sitting on the edge of her bed smiling at her.

  “Hey,” she said, blinking. Her mouth was dry and her eyes felt scratchy.

  “Hey,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t get this stuff back sooner. Mike had me working till it got dark. Want me to make the bed?”

  Casey glanced at the dark outline of the laundry basket on the floor beside the bed, remembered the letter, and felt a flutter of panic. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said, sitting up, tugging the elastic from her hopelessly disheveled braid, trying to wrestle her hair off her face.

  “What time did you get up this morning?” he asked.

  “Usual time,” she said, rearranging her hair into a quick, sloppy ponytail, and reaching to turn on the light on her bedside table.

  “Liar.”

  Casey sighed.

  “Have you eaten?” he asked.

  Her stomach answered for her with a loud rumble.

  “Come on, let’s get a bite and then you can go back to bed on your fresh, clean sheets.”

  He stood up and held out a hand to her. He was being way too nice. She got up and followed him to the kitchen.

  “Let’s see,” he said. He opened the fridge and came up with a block of cheese. “I make a mean grilled cheese. Actually, that’s the only thing I make, but it’ll be good.”

  Casey sat at the kitchen table, watching him wordlessly. He knew. He had to know. He was being too sweet. He wasn’t the sweet type. It was one of the things she liked about him.

  “Did you wash the jeans I was wearing yesterday?” she asked, watching his back as he buttered bread on the kitchen counter.

  “Yeah, I grabbed everything. Don’t worry. I’m good at laundry. It’s one of those things my mama taught me.”

  “Oh. Okay. Thanks.” Then surely his mother had taught him to always check the pockets. If he knew her secret, that turned this casual sex arrangement into something more serious, and she didn’t want it to be serious. She didn’t want him to know her secrets. She didn’t want anyone to know her secrets.

  The butter sizzled on the hot skillet. Jason took a pot lid from the cabinet and placed it on top of the sandwiches. “The secret,” he said, and she felt her heart skip a beat. Was the kid a mind reader? But then he went on, “is you have to cover it so the cheese can really melt without the outside getting burnt,” he said.

  “Right. Makes sense,” she said. She began to bite her fingernail and tried not to meet his eyes.

  “Are you okay? You seem a little, I don’t know, tense.”

  “Did you happen to check my pockets before you did the wash?” she asked, trying to sound casual.

  “Shit, should I have? I mean, I know my mom always told me to, but I figured you’re a girl, and girls think of things like emptying their pockets before they toss stuff in the hamper.”

  And as he babbled, she knew he was lying. He had checked her pockets, but he was going to pretend he hadn’t. Which meant that he had read the letter.

  “No worries. I doubt there was anything important,” she said, standing up. “I’ll just go check.”

  In the bedroom, she upended the basket of sloppily folded laundry and grabbed her jeans. She reached into the back pocket and felt the soft square of paper. She took it out and looked at it. She doubted she could unfold it. It had melded together from a normal sheet of paper into a small square of soft, linty meaninglessness. So he hadn’t emptied her pockets. She put the now-ruined letter in the top draw of her dresser and went back to the kitchen, feeling shaky and weary.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah, great. It was really thoughtful of you to do all that,” she said, forcing herself to smile.

 
He set the sandwich in front of her.

  “Looks good.”

  “Okay, well, I guess I should go,” he said.

  “Go?”

  “Yeah, you were right last night. You deserve a good night’s sleep, and I’m not much help with that.”

  All of this sudden deference was beginning to grate on Casey. Why didn’t he just come out and say what he was thinking?

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “You don’t have to go.”

  He looked her in the eye and then took the key to her apartment, the one she’d given him, and placed it on the table. With one finger he pushed it toward her. “I should go,” he said.

  Was he breaking up with her? After cleaning her apartment and washing her laundry and making her dinner, he was breaking up with her? He was dumping her? Of course, they weren’t really dating, so it wasn’t like he was really breaking up with her, and yes, she regretted giving him that key and would be happy to have it back, but still, what was going on?

  “Jason,” she said.

  He raised a hand. “It’s cool. I was taking advantage of you, and I think it’s pretty obvious that we want different things.”

  He was? They wanted different things? She had assumed he wanted the same thing she wanted—sex.

  “We’re just in really different places in our lives,” he went on, and she felt her suspicion once again confirmed that he had read the letter. He had read the letter and then tried to cover up the fact by ruining it. She felt a tide of anger rising in her stomach.

  “I don’t want Rosetta to know,” Casey said, interrupting him. “I certainly never planned to tell you.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean to find out,” he said defensively. “I was trying to do you a favor.”

  “You put the letter through the wash!” she said, her voice rising.

  “I didn’t know what to do! Here I am, trying to be the good guy, and I reach into your pocket and I pull out this letter, and I really think you should listen to her. You need to go get the test. What if you have it?”

  “It was private!” How dare he give her advice. He knew nothing about her. Nothing about her, nothing about her mother, nothing about anything.

  “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I knew you wouldn’t want me to have read it, and I thought that if I just pretended—”

  “You would be the world’s shittiest poker player,” Casey said.

  “I should go,” he said, but he didn’t move.

  “No, we need to talk about this. Or something. I don’t know. I mean, what are you going to do? I don’t know if I can trust you.”

  “Well, there’s not much I can do about that. Unless you’re planning to murder me,” he said.

  Casey rested her face in her hands. She heard Jason pulling out the other kitchen chair and sitting across from her.

  “You know, I really like you,” he said.

  She looked up at him, her eyes rimmed with red, her lower lip quivering. “You don’t even know me.”

  “You’re right. I mean, I thought I did, and then I read that letter, and realized that I really don’t know you. Apparently, no one knows you.”

  He was right. She didn’t let people in. Even Rosetta didn’t really know her. Rosetta knew her minus a gap of about twelve years that she wished had never happened between that day her mother kicked her out and the day Rosetta had dragged her unwillingly away from New York and back to Devil’s Back. She didn’t need people knowing her secrets, knowing about her past, knowing how much her foolish youth still hurt her every day. She didn’t need or want pity. The last thing in the world she wanted was to hear people say, “I totally understand,” or to tell their own tragic stories as if somehow sharing suffering alleviated suffering.

  “I could be here for you, if you let me,” he said, reaching out and touching her arm on the table.

  “You are a very nice, very attractive kid, and you deserve to be happy.”

  “But with you,” he said.

  “I can’t make you happy.”

  “No one can make anyone else happy,” he said. “You call me a kid, but if you believe that anyone can control someone else’s happiness, maybe you’re the one who needs to grow up.”

  “No one can make someone else happy, but one person can definitely make another miserable.” She crossed her arms and pushed her chair away from the table.

  “Look, I didn’t mean to make you—”

  “I know. I’m not saying you made me miserable. I’m saying that I would make you miserable. And I’m not up for it.”

  “Great. So you don’t want to be with me, but you also don’t want me to leave because you can’t trust me.”

  “Please just promise you will not tell anyone. Not one single person. Not your brother, not Rosetta. No one.”

  He looked at her as if she’d slapped him. “Of course I won’t tell anyone. I care about you.”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise.”

  Casey nodded. She took the key from the table and closed her fist around it. Jason stood up and walked to the door.

  “This could have been something good,” he said, before he walked out.

  No it couldn’t, thought Casey.

  Chapter 24

  St. Nabor Island, South Carolina

  Tuesday evening, she and Randy drove together to the house. Randy had borrowed some equipment from Bill so that he could monitor everything himself. As Angela helped him set up cameras and roll out wires, a thought occurred to her.

  “If the ghost is smart enough to flee when someone other than me steps into the hall, aren’t all these things going to tip it off that’s something’s up?” she asked, watching Randy position a camera in her mother’s study.

  He stopped and looked at her, considering, and then went back to fiddling. When he was done, he said, “I don’t think that’s how it works.”

  Angela had no idea what that meant, but he sounded offended, so she didn’t push. Instead, she walked over to the desk and ran a hand along the roll-top. She slid it back in its track and ran her hand over the small, locked drawers.

  “You still didn’t get this thing open yet?” Randy asked.

  Angela shook her head. She’d had other things on her mind.

  “And that key definitely doesn’t open it?”

  Another little shake of the head.

  He came over and tried a few of the drawers again. Then he squatted down to peer under it, and slid it forward to look at the back.

  “And you don’t think your mom used to keep it locked?”

  “I haven’t tried to open it years, but when I was a kid I would play in here, and I definitely remember being able to open the drawers.”

  “But as you got older, she might have started locking it, right? I mean, if your parents were keeping a whole bunch of relatives secret, there might have been stuff in here they didn’t want you to read?”

  Angela conceded that this seemed likely.

  “I think we should pay extra attention to this tonight,” Randy said.

  Once they had everything set up, this time with the command center in Angela’s bedroom so they could both sit in there and wait for the footsteps in the hall, there was nothing to do but watch the clock tick.

  Randy had brought a Scrabble set and he beat Angela soundly in back-to-back games before she gave up. Cute and smart. She liked him. No doubt about it.

  “How come you don’t have a girlfriend?” Angela asked, gathering up Scrabble tiles and returning them to the little velvet pouch.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Haven’t found the right girl yet,” he said.

  “Oh,” Angela said, and then, “Describe the right girl in two sentences or less,” and she laughed.

  “Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “I didn’t really like college guys, I guess. But you,” she said, playfully, tugging his arm and arranging it around her shoulders, “are not a college guy.”

  “Look,” he said, “I like y
ou.” He paused, withdrew his arm from around her shoulder and reached down for her hand, lacing her fingers through his. Then he went on, “But I also get that this is a terrible time for you, so I’m here for you, as a friend. That’s all. No pressure. No drama. Just friends.”

  But I don’t want to be just friends, Angela thought, looking at his hand in hers. She wanted him to hold her, and kiss her, and sleep next to her at night, and tell her everything was going to be all right.

  He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her fingers gently. Then he let go.

  “I like you, too,” she said.

  He smiled sadly. “That’s good, but here’s the thing. I’m not sure you’re thinking straight these days, and to be honest, I’m afraid if we act on those feelings right now, I’m going to end up pretty brokenhearted.”

  “Oh.” He liked her enough to fear a broken heart? And here she had thought it was probably just lust. In her brief experience of relationships, lust generally came first, not the sort of deep emotions that could end with a broken heart. But then again, if they were just friends, and she showed up tomorrow with some other guy, wouldn’t that also break his heart? Why not just risk it? Life was short, too short to wait around with a head full of what ifs.

  She said, “That sounds really pragmatic, but also, I think you’re wrong.”

  “I wish I were.”

  “Not acting because you think that’s the best way to prevent heartache is actually the surest way to end up heartbroken. That’s what I think,” Angela said. Then she leaned forward to kiss him, and he met her halfway.

  They fooled around in an innocent way, kissing, groping one another over their clothes, nothing more.