All the Dead Lie Down

by Mary Willis Walker

  The dog circled a few times and plunked down next to her.

  Molly used a letter opener to cut the tape sealing the box. Three years ago when Aunt Harriet moved—or, more accurately, when Molly had moved her—from the house she’d lived in for fifty-four years to the Regency Oaks Senior Care Center in Lubbock, Molly had been overwhelmed by the amount of stuff in the old frame house. It had been a battle royal to get Harriet to agree to the move in the first place. The addled old woman had been frantic about losing her home and her possessions, especially her file cabinets and boxes of accumulated Cates memorabilia. She was sure that Molly would throw something away, anxious not so much about the move to the nursing home as about keeping her archives intact.

  Molly had calmed her by striking a deal: Harriet would go peacefully to the nursing home in return for Molly’s vow to keep the archives in a safe place. Harriet had watched in high anxiety as Molly had the movers take it all away, and then she had gone to her fate so meekly that Molly had been overcome with regret.

  From all the items put in storage, Molly had brought home with her only one thing: a boxful of family photographs. She had intended to go through and label them and put them in albums. But she hadn’t done it, and now, in the cold shivery light of 3 A.M., she acknowledged to herself that she probably never would. It was one of those many chores, like cleaning out the garage, that she fully intended to do, but in the brutal triage of her work schedule, they simply didn’t have sufficient appeal to make the cut. When she died, or when, like Aunt Harriet, she was hauled off to some nursing home, those things would still be undone.

  The box was filled to the top with old albums and loose photos. Molly pulled them out in handfuls. She stretched out on her stomach and went through them one by one.

  An hour later, her eyelids beginning to droop, Molly had gone through them all and put them back in the carton—all except the two she had decided to keep out. Those she laid out in front of her on the rug. One, a crystal-clear black and white snapshot, showed the two Cates siblings, Harriet and Vernon, standing on the porch of the old ranch house near Lubbock, the house in which they had grown up, the house in which Molly had grown up for her first fourteen years. Written in faded blue ink on the back was the year—1943. Harriet Cates at twenty-two was raven-haired and slender, the sharpness of her wit and temper evident in the pointed chin and high arched eyebrows. Molly studied her aunt’s face with the mixture of love and resentment that baffled her as much now as it had when she was seventeen.

  This slip of a girl had grown into the formidable woman who had taken Molly on when her mother died, who had nurtured her and nagged her, doted on her and disapproved of her. She had tried her damnedest to impose on Molly her value system of churchgoing and white gloves and thank-you notes and gracious Southern behavior, but Molly had been the most unpromising raw material: a tomboy determined to live life on her own terms, a teenager bent on adventure and independence. They had clashed constantly and bitterly, but Molly had always known that when she was in trouble—and that had happened often enough—Harriet Cates was there to help. She had been present and involved, front and center, for all the joys and disasters of Molly’s life. And she had been a forceful, nurturing presence in Jo Beth’s life as well. The only one of Molly’s ancestors still above ground, the only one from that older generation still standing guard between Molly and eternity. Harriet wasn’t dead, but she wasn’t really alive either. She had been diagnosed five years ago with Alzheimer’s, and now she spent her days sitting in a wheelchair staring into space. Molly missed her like fury.

  Molly looked back at the photo. Slouching against the porch post next to his older sister, his long legs crossed, was Vernon Cates, Molly’s daddy, at eighteen. His dark hair was slicked back and his black almond-shaped eyes looked down his long straight arrogant nose at the camera with the assurance of a young princeling convinced of his own immortality.

  The other picture she’d selected was of a group of family and friends sitting on blankets, a lavish picnic spread out in front of them. There was no date written on it, but it must have been taken around 1958 because Molly, leaning against her father, looked to be around four. Her mother, Josephine, was smiling into the camera, unaware she had only five more years to live, only three more years before the lump growing in her breast made her life a misery. Molly’s Grandma Cates looked severe, as might be expected of a basically dour woman who had recently lost a husband. Harriet sat with her hands folded in her lap, next to her big, blond, cheerful husband, Donald Cavanaugh. Parnell, already in the state legislature by then, looked prosperous, as befitting a man who’d just inherited the Morrisey family ranch and fortune from his father. He looked on top of the world. Rose, leaning back against him, her face shaded by a wide-brimmed straw hat, was laughing and knitting. She had daisies stuck into her long, thick braid, which hung over one shoulder.

  Molly looked at the child she had been, her eyes closed against the sun, her head pressed against her father’s shoulder. You could see the faint half-moons of sweat under the arms of his white shirt. Lying here now, forty years later, the smell of him infused the air—that suggestion of sweat mixed with the bay rum aftershave he used and just a touch of whiskey.

  Daddy.

  Molly rested her head on the carpet and allowed the old litany to play through her head. A man does not kill himself when he’s just finishing the revisions on an article he has hopes of selling to a big national magazine, an article he’s spent two years investigating. A man does not kill himself when he’s two weeks away from getting married. And a man does not kill himself when he has a date the next day with his daughter, to watch her be inducted into the National Honor Society. She closed her eyes. It didn’t make any more sense now than it had twenty-eight years ago.

  Molly woke with the carpet rough against her cheek. Grady Traynor was standing in the office door, dressed and ready for work even though it was still dark outside. She looked up at him. “It can’t be six already?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He nodded toward where the dog was sleeping with his nose pressed against her hip. “I see you two made it up.”

  Molly patted the dog’s head. “He decided not to kill me after all. And I promised not to call him names.”

  “How about me?”

  “I won’t call you names either.”

  He hunkered down and kissed her cheek. “Good. Want me to feed him before I go?”

  “No, it’s okay. I’ll do it.” She reached out and took Grady’s head in her hands, burrowing her fingers deep into his thick white hair, restraining him from getting up. “And, Grady, the favor. Do it as soon as you get there and call me. Okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” His eyes shut for a moment. “At your service.”

  IF CHARNEL HOUSES AND OUR GRAVES MUST SEND

  THOSE THAT WE BURY BACK, OUR MONUMENTS

  SHALL BE THE MAWS OF KITES.

  —MACBETH

  Just as she’d suspected, the Quinlan house was one of the imposing mansions perched high above Lake Travis, its multi-levels dug into the bank like talons. Though she couldn’t see it as she pulled into the circular driveway, she knew there would be a dock with a power boat behind the house. It was exactly what a rich retired oil man from Lubbock would crave: a house high on a hill overlooking an expanse of blue water and green rolling hills—those things that couldn’t be bought in Lubbock for all the money in the world.

  She understood that craving for water and hills. When she and her father had moved from Lubbock, they, too, had settled on Lake Travis, but in a far lower rent district—at the seedier, wilder north end. Her daddy, after forty-five years in Lubbock, during which he always maintained he was meant to have been born on the Maine seacoast, adored everything about the lake. Not only did he rent them a small house right on the water, but he established his office in a houseboat docked at Old Gun Hollow just past Volente. Even now, whenever Molly made the half-hour drive from Austin to the lake, she felt her spirits rising with the
same lilt of holiday excitement she’d felt during the year they’d lived out here, the year before her daddy was killed and her life changed forever.

  But this trip to the lake had been different. Her stomach was roiling with apprehension as she parked in front of the pink brick mansion with the Palladian windows. It had taken Grady forty seconds to get Franny Lawrence Quinlan’s unlisted phone number and address, but it had taken Molly an hour to work up the nerve to make the call. She kept picking up the phone and putting it down without dialing, remembering each time how abysmally she had always treated Franny Lawrence, who had tried so sweetly and doggedly to befriend the teenaged Molly. Also, there was the issue of the Quinlan family and the accusations Molly had once made against them. She was afraid Franny would refuse to see her. And what if Frank Quinlan answered the phone and she had to identify herself? He would remember the name Molly Cates even though they had never met. No one ever forgot the kind of accusations she had made against the Quinlans.

  But eventually she’d dialed and a maid had answered and called Mrs. Quinlan to the phone. Franny had expressed delight to hear from her. Molly had said she’d like to come out right away. To Molly’s amazement, Franny had agreed with seeming enthusiasm and no awkward questions.

  From their first meeting twenty-nine years ago, when Franny Lawrence had taken Molly and her father to see the house they leased in Volente, Molly had loathed the woman. It was clear immediately, from the flush in Franny’s cheeks and the gleam in her eye when she looked at Vernon Cates, that her interest in him went way beyond renting him a house. Franny had been thirty-three then, a brand-new real estate broker, a divorcee with an eleven-year-old son. She had been a vivacious, sensual redhead, a vision right out of a Renoir painting.

  Molly was used to women looking at her daddy that way. Long before Franny came along, Molly had had to accept that her father, a handsome young widower, loved the company of women, and that women loved him back—fervently. But Franny Lawrence was different from the others because Molly could see that, for the first time, her father was emotionally swept away. There was no mistaking it: he was totally, joyously in love. Molly’s response had been to withdraw and be as sullen and uncommunicative and disapproving as possible. She had spoken to Franny only when absolutely necessary.

  And after her father was killed, she had rebuffed all Franny’s attempts to comfort her and to maintain contact with her. The last time she’d seen Franny had been at Vernon Cates’s funeral. Franny had put her arm around Molly’s shoulders and said she’d like to have some private time to talk, but Molly had disengaged herself as quickly as possible. Now, twenty-eight years later, it seemed that they were finally going to have that private conversation.

  Molly sat in the truck for a few moments to collect herself, then checked her face in the rearview mirror. Her bad night had etched itself into the skin around her eyes. She wondered if her nearly forty-five-year-old face would still be recognizable to someone who hadn’t seen her since she was sixteen. Slowly, she got out of the truck and walked up the stone path to the front door and rang the bell. A Hispanic-looking woman answered the door. She was holding the hand of a towheaded toddler who was wearing only a diaper.

  “Hi, I’m Molly Cates. I’m here to see Mrs. Quinlan.”

  “Sí. Sí. Come. I get her. One minute.” Pulling the child behind her, the woman walked off.

  The house was cool and airy with pale Saltillo tile floors and high vaulted ceilings. She wandered into the huge living room, where the simple furniture and lack of clutter seemed designed to focus attention on the view. She walked to the window that framed the lake and its grand white limestone cliffs. Today Travis was at its best: a sparkling Mediterranean blue, dotted with white sails.

  But under that blue water lay the consecrated ground of an old graveyard. They had cleared it away when the lake was made fifty-five years ago with the completion of the Mansfield dam. And in that same shining water every year people drowned while at play, snagged in the branches of old trees that reached up and pulled them to their watery deaths. In that very water her father had lain dead for five days before some early morning fishermen found him floating near shore, decomposing and fish-nibbled, with a bullet hole in his temple.

  Like a compass needle pointing north, Molly’s head turned in the direction of Volente, toward the house where she and her father had lived. You couldn’t see it from here because of the sinuous course of the lake that had once been a river, but as the crow flies, it wasn’t far.

  Molly heard quick, light footsteps behind her. “Molly, there you are, my dear. I’m so glad you’ve come to see me.”

  Molly turned, feeling breathless. Franny was an only slightly faded version of the Renoir vision she had been at thirty-three. Her reddish hair was artfully colored to keep it close to the original shade, and it was cut to take advantage of its natural curl. She wore a peach silk blouse and matching slacks on a body that seemed little changed—still small-waisted and voluptuous. She looked twenty years younger than her chronological age. So much for the wizened grandmother Molly had hoped to find.

  Franny embraced her with a long, warm hug, which Molly found herself returning. Then they both stood back and studied one another.

  “Franny, you look just wonderful,” Molly said honestly. The age gulf when she was sixteen and Franny was thirty-three had seemed insurmountable, but they were contemporaries now—both middle-aged women with lots of living behind them.

  “I have thought about you so often over the years,” Franny said.

  “Bad thoughts? I was such an unpleasant girl.” This was as close to an apology as Molly could bring herself. She hoped it would suffice.

  Franny laughed and tossed her red curls just the way she used to. “Come sit down. Would you like coffee? I’m going to have some.”

  “Thanks. Yes.”

  Franny walked out and had a conversation in Spanish with the maid, then came back. Molly sank into one of the big stuffed armchairs that was upholstered in a soft, taupe-colored chenille. Franny sat close to her, at the end of a long camelback sofa. “Frank’s out on the golf course, and Juanita’s taking care of the baby, so we can talk.”

  “Is that beautiful child related to you?” Molly asked.

  “He is gorgeous, isn’t he? My grandson, Alex. Kevin’s youngest. He’s with us for a week. His parents are going through a difficult divorce and …” She trailed off.

  “I’m sorry,” Molly said. “That must be hard to watch.”

  “To see your child suffer and not be able to help is the pits. But I hear you have a daughter, so you must know all about that.”

  Molly nodded. She was remembering Kevin Lawrence as a fat, freckled eleven-year-old with thick glasses. At sixteen, she had been appalled by the idea of having him as a stepbrother, of living in the same house with him, sharing a bathroom with him. She was not even remotely interested in what had become of him, but before she could get down to asking what she’d come for, there was a certain amount of small talk that had to be gotten through. “Where is Kevin living now?”

  “In Lubbock. He works for Quinlan Oil. He was with me in the real estate business for a while, but Frank made him a better offer and my business was in decline.”

  Franny leaned forward. “Molly, I read everything you write. I’ve been subscribing to Lone Star Monthly since you started there, even though I don’t care much for the magazine. But I love your articles. Your father would be so proud.”

  “Would he?”

  “Oh, my, yes. He loved you so, and was so proud of you back then—the Honor Society, and the tennis team and all. But to have you become a writer—that would have pleased him no end.”

  Molly found herself unexpectedly choked up. The power of parental approval. It outlived the grave and just about everything else. She said, “When I have problems with something I’m writing, which is all the time, I find myself imagining conversations with him.” She smiled to show she was only half serious. “He even gives me
advice sometimes.”

  “Yes. My dead mother constantly reminds me that nice girls don’t use profanity or carry a drink in public,” Franny said. “What are you working on now, Molly?”

  “I’ve been doing some research at the legislature on the concealed handgun bill. But my main thing right now is a piece on homeless women.”

  “Bag ladies?” Franny raised her eyebrows.

  “Yeah. I’ve done some interviews and we’ll talk with them over the course of a year and photograph them and see how their lives change. Or don’t change. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.”

  “Why?”

  Molly shrugged. “They fascinate me.”

  “Me too. Bag ladies appear in my nightmares.”

  “Yeah,” Molly said, “I’m discovering that’s pretty common among women.”

  Franny pulled her slender ankles up under her, as though settling in for some serious conversation. “When I was first divorced from Kevin’s father, I’d have these nightmares about being a bag lady and then I’d see them on the street and I couldn’t take my eyes off them.”

  “Same with me,” Molly said. “But I tend to be more extreme. I always wanted to follow them around and see what they do during the day, where they sleep, how they’re treated. And I wanted to look through their bags and find out all their secrets.”

  Franny smiled. “And now you get to do that.”

  “And get paid for it,” Molly said with enthusiasm. “It’s such a scam.”

  “You know, we don’t think about them as having anything to do with us until we go through some crisis. Then we see how easily it could happen to us.”

  “I’m still just two paychecks away from it,” Molly said.

  “So was I till I married Frank.” Franny surveyed her opulent living room. “I guess it could still happen since he’s got the money and I gave up my business when we got married.” She looked at Molly, and her full lips curved slowly upward into a rueful smile. The corners of her luminous hazel eyes crinkled good-naturedly. This was the woman her father had loved, had wanted to marry. And for the first time Molly allowed herself to see why.