At nine, Hollis came with Dalton. “Have you decided where you want your pictures?”
“Not yet. I was waiting for you.”
“Procrastinating again?”
“I wasn’t procrastinating, I was delaying the decision.”
“Like there’s a difference.”
“There is,” Katharine assured her. “Delay is putting something off until you need to do it. Procrastination is putting it off past the time it needs to be done. I was delaying until you got here, because I knew you’d have firm opinions about the matter.”
“Good distinction,” Dalton said. They were the only two words she heard him utter.
She and Hollis spent half an hour deciding where each picture should go. Dalton spent the next two hours on a ladder, taking orders from Hollis. While they were working, Katharine washed the things they had bought in the mountains. She tried calling the Weidenauer home several times, but got only voice mail. She didn’t feel she knew Bara well enough to ask her to call back, and couldn’t think of a tactful way to ask on a machine if she was all right, so she didn’t leave messages.
At ten she called the upholsterer to see when she should expect the furniture.
His accent was as country as Kenny’s, but with the broader tones of South Georgia. “I’m sorry, Miz Murray, we’re running a tad behind, but I may be able to bring some of it out Monday. I’ll have the rest for sure by the middle of next week.”
“You promised it for today,” Katharine reminded him.
“I know I did, but my mother-in-law got sick and we had to run down to Valdosta for a few days, then one of my workers up and had a baby. That’s put us pretty far behind.”
Katharine itched to remind him that he’d had several months to get in a substitute to cope with the new mother’s leave of absence, but she dared not be rude to a man who held all her furniture hostage.
“Your dining-room chairs are done, the two plaid chairs are done, the couches are nearly finished, and I’m fixing to start on the living-room chairs this very morning,” he boasted.
“Start?” Katharine heard Aunt Sara Claire’s disapproval in her tone of voice. She took a deep breath and said, as levelly as she could, “I’m very sorry about your mother-in-law. Is she doing better?”
“She’s gonna be fine. But like I said, that and the new baby’s put me a little behind.”
“But you do remember that I have to have that furniture early next week, right? I’m having a party here, and need couches and chairs.”
She didn’t mention that the party wasn’t until Saturday and would be held outdoors even in the unlikely case of rain. Tom had ordered a tent with transparent sides and sufficient chairs and small tables to accommodate the guests. A firm that was already behind and had absolutely promised delivery for Thursday ought to be able to deliver by the following Tuesday.
“Wednesday at the very latest,” he assured her as if reading her thoughts.
She wished she believed him.
Tom called at noon and said in a rush, “I’ve got bad news, hon.”
She steeled herself to hear that he’d have to stay in Washington all weekend. She’d had that kind of disappointment before.
The news wasn’t that bad. “I probably won’t be able to fly out today. It’s raining frogs and newts up here and they are predicting things will get worse. That tropical depression has come up the East Coast and stalled out off Maryland, blanketing everything between here and New York with sheets of rain. I’ll get home as soon as I can, and I have cleared the decks here to stay down there all next week, but it’s unlikely planes will go out today.”
When Katharine didn’t speak immediately, he said, “Let me guess. You haven’t read the paper or looked at television news since I left, so you didn’t know about the tropical depression.”
“I’ve been busy.”
Tom, who was becoming more of a Washingtonian by the year, couldn’t conceive of being too busy to keep up with news about the nation’s capital. “Katharine! The country could be on a red terrorist alert and you wouldn’t have a clue until terrorists came rolling up the drive.”
“How much sooner would I need to know? There wouldn’t be a dadgum thing I could do about it. But don’t worry about coming in today. I’ve got things under control.” How many times had she reassured him with those words in the past twenty-five years? As usual, it happened to be true. “Hollis is hanging pictures on our newly painted walls, and later we’re going to place stuff we bought in antique stores yesterday.”
“What kind of stuff?” Tom sounded wary. In his experience, antiques were pricey tables and rugs, and represented a major investment.
“Relax. We didn’t break the bank. We just bought some little things to set around on tables and mantelpieces for the party. You can help me decide later what to keep and what to get rid of. Hollis claimed that without them the house looked like a developer’s model home.”
“It is a model home—to your efficiency and good taste.”
“Hold your vote on my good taste until you see the stuff. But Hollis has done a marvelous job. She’s been worth every penny.”
“She’s not really hanging pictures, is she? Should she be on ladders?”
“She’s supervising. The work is being done by a silent young man named Dalton.”
“Blue hair?”
“Purple streaks this time. Otherwise, very like the others.”
“And the furniture comes today?”
“No, but the man says Wednesday, at the latest.” She couldn’t keep doubt from her voice.
“If it doesn’t come, I’ll head over there with a shotgun and sit on a stump watching while they finish it up. He will not mess up our party.”
“Right. By the way, can we buy a car on Saturday? The rental is nice, but I’d like to get one of my own.”
“No problem. See you when I can. I love you.”
“Love you, too.” As she hung up, she prayed, “Let that storm move north,” then was instantly contrite. If New England flooded, she would feel very guilty. Her mother used to say that guilt was what women do best.
Speaking of guilt, she might as well deal with yesterday’s calls.
She returned them in order of least likely to yell at her. Posey was at aerobics. Ann Rose was sympathetic and concerned for Bara. Rita Louise was chilly, Murdoch annoyed. To each she said basically the same thing: “I simply researched the medals. I cannot imagine what more I could do. I don’t know Bara well enough to have any influence over her.”
Finally she took a deep breath and called Bara’s daughter.
Payne answered the phone with a wary, “Hello?” As soon as she recognized Katharine’s voice, dismay and relief flowed out in a torrent. “Oh, Katharine, I’m so glad it’s you. My phone has been ringing off the hook. Mama has gone crazy, and I don’t mean maybe. After you dug up all that stuff about Granddaddy’s medals, she visited everybody she knows, saying the most gosh-awful things about Nana. I doubt if Aunt Rita Louise will ever speak to either one of us again, and Murdoch called me this morning to remind me she’s leaving town this evening and to tell me to keep Mama away from Aunt Eloise while she’s gone. An aide at the nursing home told Uncle Scotty that Mama went to the nursing home and ranted like a banshee. Murdoch says he is livid. Can you calm Mama down?”
“I don’t know what I can do,” Katharine replied, when Payne paused for breath.
“You started it all.” Payne sounded no older than Chip. “You have to stop her.”
“All I did was identify your grandfather’s medals and print out the citation for his Medal of Honor.” Katharine kept her voice reasonable, trying to interject some sanity into the conversation.
“That’s what’s got her so riled up. I must have had ten calls from irate women. Yesterday Mama went to see every close friend my grandmother ever had, claiming that she knows good and well Nana slept with somebody while Winnie was away at war, and she’s going to find out who it was, so they might as w
ell tell her. She has accused half the men in Buckhead who were in Winnie’s generation. Their widows and sisters are furious. She even came over here this morning, asking Hamilton if his granddaddy went to the war or stayed home. When Hamilton realized she was asking whether Dr. Oscar could have been her daddy, he ordered her out of our house. You have to stop her, Katharine. You have to!”
“I don’t know what I can do. I don’t know your mother well—”
“Good thing. Otherwise, she’d be calling to accuse your granddaddy of being her daddy.”
“It wouldn’t do her any good. For one thing, it would have been my daddy. Daddy was forty-five when I was born. But he was also a New Yorker. He didn’t move down south until after the war.”
“Lucky you. If Miss Sara Claire were alive, poor Mr. Walter would have been a prime candidate. You don’t reckon he could have been, do you?” Payne sounded hopeful.
Katharine could guess why. A dead adulterer with a dead wife was far better than an adulterer, dead or alive, with a wife Payne would have to encounter at future events.
Katharine almost hated to dash the young woman’s hopes. “Not a chance. Uncle Walter had mumps right after they got married, which was before the war. They made him sterile.”
When Katharine’s mother had privately told her that fact when she was fourteen, Katharine had asked, “Was Aunt Sara Claire terribly disappointed? Is that why she is the way she is—all prickly and pruney?”
Her mother had laughed. “Heavens no. Sara Claire has always been fastidious. Children would have driven her wild. Now she doesn’t have to put up with them and it’s all Walter’s fault. She couldn’t have arranged it better herself.”
Payne spent the next five minutes trying to persuade Katharine to calm her mother, but Katharine remained firm.
“I’m sorry. I wish I could help,” she concluded. She knew her response was more manners than truth, but she hung up determined not to let Bara Weidenauer become her problem.
After all the pictures were hung, Hollis took a look around and asked, “What’s still missing? Even when we place the stuff we bought yesterday, there’s something—what did you used to have over there?” She pointed to a corner of the hall.
“A big ficus,” Katharine told her. “They smashed all my plants.”
“Of course. You had plants all over the place. Go to a nursery and buy some. I’ll arrange the things we bought yesterday.”
Katharine started to tell Hollis to go buy plants herself, that she’d like to arrange her own things, thank you very much, but she didn’t want somebody else choosing her plants, either. She could move things if she didn’t like where Hollis put them.
She spent a pleasant couple of hours wandering around the nursery, one of very few people there, since severe watering restrictions during the drought were discouraging most people from planting. She got home with her rental car full of ferns, hanging baskets, two topiaries, various small potted plants, and five African violets for the bay window in the breakfast room. She staggered into the kitchen with arms full of foliage and found Hollis eating a carton of yogurt at the breakfast table. “I don’t suppose Dalton is still here?”
“Nope, he’s been gone for ages.” Hollis continued to eat her way through the yogurt while Katharine carried in plants.
“That’s all?” Hollis asked. “I thought you were getting some trees. What are we going to put in the hall?”
Katharine took a moment to catch her breath. “The nursery will deliver five trees tomorrow morning. Here’s a list of what they are bringing. Help me decide which goes where.”
“First, I want you to see how great the stuff we bought looks, now that it’s in place. Come on!”
Katharine admired Hollis’s placement of their “stuff,” and they discussed where the plants should go. She waited until Hollis left, then spent an hour rearranging her new possessions—trying not to regret the ones they were replacing and thinking up reasons to justify to Hollis the changes she was making. “Because it’s my house and I can do what I want to,” she finally said aloud.
As she moved around various rooms, exchanging a figurine for a plate, candlesticks with a pitcher, she remembered something her mother used to say as she went about the house tweaking things after guests had left: “I’m reclaiming my nest.”
She had an evening meeting, and when she got home, she filled a big bowl with butter-pecan ice cream and carried it upstairs. It wasn’t yet ten, but she deserved an early evening with ice cream and a good book.
From the landing she looked down with satisfaction. For the first time since the break-in, the house looked and felt like home. Even without tall plants and upholstered furniture, her nest felt reclaimed.
What will you do now?
The question settled around her in the stillness.
“Get on with my life,” she answered aloud.
What life?
Whose voice was that? She suspected it was her own fears.
“I’m going to research my family history and find out about my grandparents and great-grandparents,” she replied. “I’m going to construct my family tree and maybe Tom’s, as well. Posey won’t do theirs, and while Susan, Jon, and Posey’s girls may not care now, they may later. And,” she added as she went into her bedroom and placed a chair under her doorknob, “this weekend, after Tom gets home, we are going to buy me a car.” She gave a happy little skip as she headed to bed.
She climbed under the sheet, ate ice cream, and enjoyed her book. Her world was once again in order.
She had no premonition it was about to fall apart.
Chapter 21
While Katharine was deciding where to hang pictures, arguing with the upholsterer, and wandering around the nursery, Bara was having a frustrating day.
She spent the morning making fruitless visits to more friends of her mother. All grew almost as icy as Rita Louise when she explained what she wanted. Some, forewarned, refused to let her in their homes. Others asked her in and heard her out, then requested her to leave. Only one, who had always been sharper than her mother’s inner circle, was any help. She met Bara on her front porch and announced, “I don’t have a thing to tell you, honey, but have you looked at your birth certificate? Maybe it will tell you what you want to know.”
What a brilliant idea. Why hadn’t she thought of that before?
Maybe because she couldn’t recall ever having seen her birth certificate. Did she have a copy? She’d gotten her first passport when she was twelve, so Winnie or Nettie must have shown it to somebody—or had they? When she had gotten her driver’s license, Nettie had taken her down and simply signed a paper stating that Bara was her daughter, born in New York on September 5, 1945. That was sufficient then if you were white and affluent. When Bara renewed her passport a few years later, her old passport and a driver’s license had been identification enough. Things used to be so simple.
She had no idea how she had gotten her Social Security number. She had never seen a card, or needed one, since she had never worked. But the number appeared on her legal documents, so it had to have come from somewhere. Winnie took care of things like that.
Oh, Winnie! Her love for him was becoming mixed with anger, disgust, and bursts of hatred.
She spent an hour going through her files looking for a birth certificate, then wasted a couple more hours going through Winnie’s papers in the storeroom, trying to find a copy. She found a little more money, but no certificate. By then, the storeroom was beginning to look as chaotic as her house, and sitting in Winnie’s big chair surrounded by his possessions no longer felt comforting, as it used to. Her life had been irreparably split into Before and After.
In the parking lot she saw an employee, who said, “Hey, you aren’t living here, are you? I keep seeing you around.”
She said, “No, I keep needing things that are stored out here. Today I was looking for my birth certificate. Can’t find the danged thing.”
He said, “You can get a copy. Just call
down to the state offices.”
Why hadn’t she known that?
She sat in the parking lot and wondered what other simple facts of daily living the rest of the world knew and she didn’t. She called New York from her car. After speaking to half the citizens of the state, and having to plug in the cell phone and keep her motor running to keep from running down the phone battery, she eventually found someone who could give her information about what she’d have to do to obtain a duplicate birth certificate. As they hung up, the woman said, “You need to know that we’re real backed up here, though. Go ahead and request it, but I wouldn’t count on it reaching Georgia in your lifetime.”
By that time it was nearly four, and Bara hadn’t eaten all day. She hadn’t had a drink, either. She considered stopping at a restaurant, but Winnie’s money wouldn’t last forever, and besides, she had all that food she’d bought. Ann Rose had sent Francie over with it late Monday,
That had been an enlightening experience. Francie had asked all sorts of questions, starting with, “Where do you want me to put these things?”
“Put everything in the refrigerator,” Bara had told her with a wave of her hand.
“Everything doesn’t go in the refrigerator, honey.” Then Francie and she began a litany.
“Where is your fruit bowl?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you keep your bread in the refrigerator?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want both the chicken and the pork chops in the freezer, or are you going to use one of them in the next day or two?”
“I have no idea.”
Bara had never known food required so many decisions.
She had no idea where Francie had put most of the stuff, either, but she had seen the pork chops in the refrigerator that morning and remembered a cantaloupe on the counter. Surely she could grill a pork chop and slice a cantaloupe.
Feeling halfway competent at the notion of cooking a real meal, she remembered to lock the door between her house and garage and to arm the security system. She found a shelf of cookbooks and looked up pork chops, but the recipes were all a column long and used words like braise that she didn’t understand. They also required things she didn’t have or know where to find if she did have them. In a movie she’d watched as a kid, she had seen a cowboy throw a chop into a frying pan over an open fire and cook it. How hard could that be?
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