The Plot

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Jerry shook his head. “Don’t mean to be cavalier. He was in recovery for a long time, but obviously he picked up again. Lot of people were surprised. I mean, some addicts, every day you think, Wonder if today’s the day. Others, they’re getting up and going to work, taking care of business, so it seems more like out of nowhere. But this place wasn’t doing all that great, I happen to know. And he told some people he was trying to sell his house, get some money into the business.” He shrugged.

  “He heard Parker was writing a novel when he died,” Sally informed her brother-in-law.

  “That so? Fictional novel?”

  Sadly not, thought Jake. If only Evan Parker’s novel had been fictional, but unfortunately it was quite real.

  “I wonder what it was about?” Jake said aloud.

  “Why do you care?” Sally said. She had turned some corner into belligerence. “You didn’t even know the guy.”

  He lifted up his mug. “You’re absolutely right.”

  “What were you asking about the parents?” Jerry said. “They died.”

  “I know they died,” Sally said with luxuriant sarcasm. “Wasn’t it like a gas leak at the house or something?”

  “Not a gas leak. Carbon monoxide. From the furnace.” Over Sally’s head he was giving the bartender a discreet hand gesture, which meant—if Jake was interpreting it correctly—no more for this one. “You know the house I’m talking about?” he asked Jake.

  “How’s he supposed to know?” Sally rolled her eyes. “You ever seen this guy before tonight?”

  “I’m not from here,” Jake confirmed.

  “Right. Well, big house in West Rutland. Like, a hundred years old. Right near the quarry on Marble Street.”

  “Across from the Agway,” said Sally, obviously forgetting the point she, herself, had just made.

  “Okay,” said Jake.

  “We were still in high school. Wait, maybe Evan was out already, but the sister was your class, wasn’t she?”

  Sally nodded. “Bitch,” she said distinctly.

  Jake tried hard to stifle his natural reaction.

  But Jerry was laughing. “You did not like that girl.”

  “She was a piece of work.”

  “So, wait,” said Jake, “the parents died in their home but the daughter didn’t?”

  “Bitch,” said Sally again.

  This time Jake couldn’t help staring at her. Were they not discussing a young person whose parents had both died while she was in high school? And in their own home? Which would also have been her own home?

  “Like I said.” Her brother-in-law grinned at Jake. “She did not like that girl.”

  “Nobody liked her,” Sally said. She sounded glum now. Maybe it had gotten through to her that she’d been cut off at the bar.

  “She died too,” Jerry told Jake. “Parker’s sister. A few years ago.”

  “Burned up,” said Sally.

  He wasn’t sure he’d heard that accurately. He asked her to repeat it.

  “I said, she burned up.”

  “Oh,” Jake said. “Wow.”

  “What I heard.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  And it was, it obviously was, but even so, Jake couldn’t muster more than baseline human empathy for these ancillary members of Evan Parker’s family, not just because he didn’t truly care about any of these people, but because none of the events under discussion—a sister’s premature and apparently grisly death, a carbon monoxide poisoning in an old house, decades ago, even, at the end of the day, Evan Parker’s own opiate overdose—had any real bearing on his own very current, very pressing concerns. And also, none of this was exactly new information. Predeceased by both parents and a sister had been right there in Evan Parker’s online obituary, which he’d read years ago at his own desk in Cobleskill, New York, before a single word of Crib had been written.

  Actually, he was more than ready to leave the Parker Tavern. He was exhausted, a tiny bit drunk, and his situation had not been helped—nor his life in any way improved—by anything Jerry or Sally had told him. Besides, the two of them now had their heads together and seemed to be discussing some private matter, animatedly and with clear mutual antipathy. Jake tried to reach back to the last topic they’d shared—Evan Parker’s sister, a piece of work—just so he could say something vaguely on topic before he left, but it all felt very distant and utterly irrelevant. Slowly got to his feet and extracted his wallet, then he put a twenty on the counter.

  “Well, it’s sad,” he said to the back of Sally’s head. “Isn’t it? The whole family’s gone.”

  “Except for the sister’s kid,” he heard her say.

  “What?”

  “You said, boo hoo, so sad, the whole family’s gone.”

  He doubted he’d used these exact words, but it didn’t seem an important point at the moment.

  “The kid,” Sally said with great exasperation. “But she was like, out of there. She left home the minute she could. Who could blame her, with a mother like that? I don’t think she even waited to graduate from high school. Don’t let the door hit ya!”

  And then, as if to echo this dismissal, Sally turned away. He saw now that her brother-in-law had departed, and that she had made a new friend on the next bar stool over. Wait, he said, but actually he couldn’t have said that out loud because neither of them appeared to notice. So he had to say it again: “Wait.”

  Sally turned back to look at him. She seemed to require a moment to get her bearings, or possibly to remember who he was. “Wait what?” she said, with real hostility.

  Wait. Evan Parker’s only living relative. That was what.

  “Where does his niece live?” Jake managed to say.

  She pinned him with a look of extravagant contempt. “How the fuck would I know?” she said. And that really was the end of their conversation.

  CRIB

  BY JACOB FINCH BONNER

  Macmillan, New York, 2017, pages 146–47

  The conventional wisdom was that they were alike, mother and daughter: both smart, both feisty, both highly intent on not spending their lives in Earlville, New York, and incidentally so physically similar—narrow and tall, with thin dark hair and a definite tendency to slouch—that Samantha struggled to see Dan Weybridge anywhere at all in the girl. But watching Maria grow up—and Samantha did watch, that was pretty much all she did—a few key differences gradually came into focus. Maria, in marked contrast to her mother’s fervid planning for departure, seemed to waft toward this goal without much obvious effort, and even less in the way of apparent concern. She lacked even Samantha’s small inclination to placate (let alone capitulate to) others, declined to grub for favors of any kind, and could not have cared less that there were adults in her life (notably those in her school life) who wanted to encourage her and ease her way forward. Where Samantha had been diligent with schoolwork and careful not to mess up (one significant exception there!), Maria turned in homework when she felt like it, departed from assignments if they failed to interest her, and disparaged her teachers when she thought they’d misunderstood (translation: were too stupid to understand) the material.

  Also, Maria was a lesbian, which meant that whatever else might happen, she was hardly going to drop the ball just short of the goalpost, the way her mother had.

  Her classmates included the children of Colgate professors and the children of Colgate grads who’d settled in the area (mostly organic farming or making art) alongside the children of the county’s oldest families (dairy farmers, county employees, plain old upstate hermits), but they broke down along another divide: those determined to make high school the best time of their lives and those who expected to move on to far more interesting experiences. Maria, it was obvious to all, was just passing through. She drifted between cliques, unconcerned by a party she hadn’t heard about or some rift in the social fabric of her class, even if she was one of the parties involved. Twice she shed her entire friend group, leaving people mystified
and wounded. (About these social acts Samantha was completely unaware, until somebody’s mother called her to complain.) And once she stopped speaking to a girl who’d been coming around to the house for years, a rupture so obvious that even Samantha knew about it without being told. Maria, when asked, simply said: “I just can’t anymore, with a person like that.”

  When she was thirteen she taught herself to drive in the new Subaru (a replacement for her grandfather’s, which had finally given up the ghost), and in fact drove herself to the DMV office in Norwich to pick up her learner’s permit. When she was fifteen she made out with a senior named Lara in the lighting booth during a rehearsal for Legally Blonde. It was a relief and a thrill. And when Lara graduated a few months later and immediately moved to Florida, Maria spent most of that summer moping. Or at least until she met Gab at the bookstore in Hamilton. She didn’t mope after that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Hospitality

  Late the next morning he drove west on Route 4 with the Taconic Range ahead and the Green Mountains in his rearview mirror, intent on finding the house where Evan Parker’s family had lived. Without an exact address he wasn’t sure how difficult it was going to be, but once he turned off at the West Rutland exit he discovered that the town didn’t have much of a there there; certainly less of a there than most New England towns with their classic squares and village greens. Jake easily found Marble Street just beyond the old brick town hall, and he drove past automotive shops and supermarkets and the old quarry itself, which was now an arts center. A mile later he spotted the Agway, and slowed down. The house, just past it on the right, turned out to be impossible to miss. He pulled over and leaned forward in his seat to take it in.

  It was a massive three-story Italianate with a marble base, set back from the road and frankly stunning: large, clean, freshly painted yellow, and surrounded by intentional plantings, an encouraging offset to some of the architectural decay he’d seen over the weekend. Whoever lived there now had carefully trimmed the hedges, and Jake could see the outline of a formal garden just behind the building. He was attempting to align the relative splendor of what he was seeing with Evan Parker’s reported money woes when a green Volvo slowed beside him and turned in to the driveway. Jake grabbed for the key and turned it in the ignition, but already the driver had climbed out and was giving him an unequivocally friendly wave. She was a woman about his own age with a long and very red braid down her back. Despite the baggy coat she wore, it was obvious that she was rail thin. She was calling something. He rolled down his window.

  “I’m sorry?” he said.

  Now she was walking toward his car, and the New Yorker in Jake cringed: Who took this kind of a chance with a total stranger parked outside your home? Evidently, a Vermonter did. She came closer. Jake began grasping for some explanation of why he was here, but he couldn’t think of anything, which was probably why he ended up with a version of the truth.

  “I’m so sorry. I think I knew somebody who once lived here.”

  “Oh yeah? Had to be a Parker.”

  “Yes. He was. Evan Parker.”

  “Sure.” The woman nodded. “You know, he passed away.”

  “I heard. Anyway, sorry to bother you. I was just driving through town and I thought, you know, I’d pay my respects.”

  “We didn’t know him,” the woman said. “Sorry for your loss.”

  The irony of that, of being offered condolences for Evan Parker, nearly made him confess right there. But he produced the required noises. “Thanks. I was his teacher, actually.”

  “Oh yeah?” she said again. “In the high school?”

  “No, no. It was a writing program. Up at Ripley? In the Northeast Kingdom.”

  “Ayuh,” she said, like a true Vermonter.

  “My name’s Jake. Your house is gorgeous.”

  At this, she grinned. She had distinctly gray teeth, he noticed. Cigarettes or tetracycline.

  “I’m trying to get my partner to repaint the trim. I don’t like that green. I think we need to go darker.”

  It took him a moment to understand that she actually wanted him to weigh in on this issue. “You could go darker,” he said finally. It seemed to be the right answer.

  “I know! My partner, she hired the painter one weekend I was out of town. She pulled a fast one on me.” The woman grinned at this. She wasn’t holding much of a grudge, in other words. “My name’s Betty. You like to see the inside?”

  “What? Really?”

  “Why not? You’re not an ax murderer, are you?”

  The blood rushed to Jake’s head. For the briefest moment he wondered if he was.

  “No. I’m a writer. That’s what I taught up at Ripley.”

  “Yeah? Have you published anything?”

  He turned off the car and slowly stepped out. “A couple of books, yeah. I wrote a book called Crib?”

  Her eyes widened. “Seriously? I got that out of the library. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m going to.”

  He held out his hand and she shook it. “That’s great. I hope you like it.”

  “Oh my god, my sister’s gonna lose her shit. She said I had to read it. She said I wouldn’t see the twist coming. ’Cause I’m the person who leans over in the movie and tells you, five minutes in, what’s gonna happen. It’s like a curse.” She laughed.

  “That is a curse,” Jake agreed. “Hey, it’s really nice of you to invite me in. I mean, I’d love to see it. Are you sure?”

  “Sure! I wish I didn’t just have a library copy! If I had my own copy you could sign it.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll send you a signed copy when I get home.”

  She looked at him as if he’d promised her a Shakespeare First Folio.

  He followed her up the tidy driveway and through the large wooden front door. Betty, as she opened the door, prepared the way by calling: “Sylvie? I’ve got a guest.”

  He could hear a radio going off somewhere in the back of the house. Betty reached down to scoop up an enormous gray cat and turned back to Jake. “Give me a sec,” she said, and went down the hall. He was trying to take it all in, greedily recording details. There was a wide wooden staircase ascending from a very grand central hallway that had been painted a fairly stomach-churning pink. To his right, a large parlor visible through an open door, and to his left, an even more formal living room through an open archway. The dimensions and the details—dentil crown molding, high baseboards—were a highly intentional display of wealth, but Betty and Sylvia had pretty much bludgeoned any trace of grandeur to death with folksy signs: ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE … AND A CAT! and CRAZY CAT LADY lined the wall up the stairs, and visible above the parlor mantelpiece was LOVE IS LOVE). There was also a cacophony of too-bright area rugs, all but obliterating the wooden floorboards, and everywhere Jake looked, too much of everything: tables covered with knickknacks and vases of flowers too healthy and bright to be real, and so many chairs pulled into a circle it looked as if a group was expected, or had recently left. He tried to imagine his former student here: descending this staircase, following Betty’s steps into the kitchen he assumed was at the end of the hall. He couldn’t do it. The women had placed a kitsch-encrusted barrier between whatever had been here before and what was here now.

  Betty returned, without the cat but with a stout dark woman in a batik headscarf. “Sylvia, my partner,” she said.

  “Oh my god,” said Sylvia. “I can’t believe this. A famous author.”

  “Famous author is an oxymoron,” said Jake. It was his go-to assertion of personal modesty.

  “Oh my god,” said Sylvia again.

  “Your house is just beautiful. Inside and out. How long have you been here?”

  “Just a couple of years,” said Betty. “It was so run-down when we moved in, you wouldn’t believe it. We had to replace every damn thing.”

  “Some of them twice,” said Sylvia. “Come on back, have some coffee.”

  The kitchen had its own complement of signage: S
YLVIA’S KITCHEN (SEASONED WITH LOVE) over the stove, HAPPINESS IS HOMEMADE above the table, which was itself covered with a bright blue cat-festooned glazed cloth. “Do you like hazelnut? It’s all we drink.”

  Jake, who loathed all flavored coffees, attested that he did.

  “Sylvie, where’s that library book?”

  “I haven’t seen it,” said Sylvia. “Cream?”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  She brought him the mug. It was white with a black line drawing of a cat on it, and the words “Feline Good.”

  “There’s donuts,” said Betty. “That’s where I was coming from. You know Jones’ Donuts in town?”

  “Well, no,” he said. “I don’t know the town at all. I was really just driving through. I wasn’t expecting all this Vermont hospitality!”

  “I have to admit,” said Sylvia, who came bearing a plate of oversized glazed donuts, “I sneaked a look at Google on my phone. You’re obviously who you said you are. If not I’d be out back calling the troopers. In case you thought we’re all hospitality and no common sense.”

  “Oh.” Jake nodded. “Good.” He was relieved he hadn’t lied, out in the car. He was relieved that his recent proclivity for lying hadn’t fully replaced a default instinct to tell the truth.

  “I can’t believe this place used to be run-down. You could never tell that, now!”

  “I know, right? But trust me, the whole first year we were spackling and painting, peeling off old wallpaper. There hadn’t been any serious upkeep in years. Which shouldn’t have surprised us. People actually died in this house because of bad maintenance.”

  “No maintenance,” Betty said. She had returned, bringing her own coffee.

  “What do you mean? Like a fire?”

  “No. Carbon monoxide leak. From the oil furnace.”

  “Really!”

  The enormous gray cat had trailed Betty into the kitchen. Now he leapt into her lap and settled himself down.

  “Does that weird you out?” She looked at Jake. “House this old, it stands to reason people have died in it. Home births, home deaths. Just how things were done back then.”