“But they were not Mama and the Aunts,” Viktor interrupted. “They were the Sunshine Sisters. Even Wanda sang.”
Janie nodded. “We added Wanda when she was six, but poor Kenny couldn’t carry a tune. Nobody can understand it. I guess he takes after Jake.”
“He is too embarrassed,” Viktor declared. “When his Mama sings in public, he goes all pink and wishes he could sink into the earth.”
“And he’s mortified by our name,” Janie added, “especially since it was all his fault. One day when he was four, we were rehearsing and Kenny was coloring out in the auditorium—like he had to do a lot, poor thing. A man came up to him and said, ‘Aren’t they really hot?’ and Kenny heaved this tremendous sigh and said, ‘They’re not so hot. They’re just Mama and the aunts.’ The man turned out to be an agent scouting us, and he loved the name, so that’s who we became. He took us international, so poor Kenny spent his whole life being dragged from one gig to another. We home schooled him—or on-the-road schooled him, I guess would be more accurate—until high school, when he pitched a fit and said he wanted a normal life for a change. He moved in with Daddy and Mama and he’s lived here ever since. Won’t even sleep over at Melinda and Jake’s. Says it feels like it’s a museum.”
“Kenny has not suffered,” Vik protested. “Some boys spend their childhood wondering where they will get their next meal. When I grew up—”
“Katharine was reading up on Slovenia last night,” Janie interrupted.
“It sounds lovely.” Katharine agreed with Janie that the afternoon was too peaceful for a recital of sad childhoods. “I think I’d like to visit.”
“It is wonderful,” he agreed. “The Alps in the north, the Adriatic to the southwest, and beautiful vineyards and orchards in between. You would like it there.”
“Do you know the town of…” Katharine struggled to remember where Anton Molnar had come from. “Something like ‘Valentine’?”
“Velenje? My family’s home city, up in the Alps. Famous for coal mining. I still have cousins there, but our branch of the family moved down to more fertile soil and started a vineyard a while ago.” He sounded as if it had happened in his childhood, not two hundred years before.
“Would you be able to locate the family of a man who came from there to America back in 1959?”
“A defector.” Viktor said it fiercely and did not make it a question.
Katharine remembered that he had been born in Yugoslavia during the Communist years, and appreciated the patriotism that kept him loyal to the country he still loved. “I’m afraid so, but he was killed in Atlanta before he could enjoy his freedom. I found the story last night in some old clippings, and wondered whether his family ever knew what happened to him. His name was Anton Molnar.”
Viktor drew his bushy brows together. “Why does the name sound familiar? He is not part of our family, I don’t think. Perhaps he is from a branch family for one of my many cousins. Write down his name and I will try to find out about him. I have several cousins in Velenje with whom I correspond by e-mail.”
She found a pen in her purse, but not paper. He reached in his pants pocket and pulled out two business cards. “Write his name and your e-mail on the back of one and keep the other. Ellijay is not so far from Atlanta. If you get yourself a good European car, bring it to me to fix. I do not work on anything else.”
She pocketed the card. “I’ll keep that in mind. I need to buy one soon. What kind would you recommend?”
He frowned at her rental. “What is the matter with that one?”
“It belongs to Enterprise. My car got totaled last month.”
“Ah.” He sounded relieved. “As a mechanic, I would recommend a Saab. They are wonderful to drive and”—he winked—“they often need repairs. However, if I were your husband, I would buy you a Volvo, for they are very safe. And if I were your lover? I would recommend that you drive several cars until you feel about one the way you feel about me. But as a new friend? Let me think.”
As if drawn by a magnet, Kenny’s uncles and Lamar came up on the porch to join in the automobile discussion. Even the aunts perched on the steps and added comments and objections. Buddy and Jake were in a heated discussion about American versus Japanese when they heard galloping hooves. Hollis raced across the pasture, followed by Kenny shouting something at her.
“Don’t look like a friendly race to me,” Floyd said. They watched Hollis kick her feet free from the stirrups, lie sideways across her saddle, and slide to the ground.
“Odd way to dismount,” said Floyd.
“She got shot in the chest a month back,” Lamar told him. Katharine wondered what else Kenny might have told his grandfather about their family.
“Smart way to get down, then,” said Beau.
They all watched Hollis lead her horse toward the barn while Kenny slid to a stop behind her, still shouting.
Lamar pulled himself to his feet from where he’d been perched on the top step, playing with the ears of one of the red-and-white spaniels. “Maybe I ought to go check on them.”
Katharine stood, too. “I’ll drive you down. It’s time we were going, anyway.”
Beau joined them. “I’ll rub down Hollis’s horse so you can be getting on your way. Traffic gets heavy heading into town if you wait much longer.”
“I will check on Anton Molnar and let you know,” Vik called after Katharine.
They pulled up in front of the barn in time to hear Hollis yell over her shoulder, “I don’t care, you don’t need to talk like trailer trash!”
Kenny pulled his horse into the barn after her, his voice high and strident. “I may be trailer trash, but I’m not a drunk or a drug addict!”
“Whoa boy, whoa boy!” Lamar crossed the space from car to barn quicker than Katharine would have believed, and laid a hand on Kenny’s shoulder. “You got no call to talk that way to a guest.”
Kenny grew red and froze up. Hollis rubbed her horse furiously.
Beau took the curry comb. “Let me do that. Don’t want you rubbing a hole in my horse.”
“Sorry,” Hollis muttered. “She’s a wonderful horse.”
“Come ride her anytime, but I think your aunt is ready to go now. I’ll finish up for you.”
“Thanks.” Katharine gave Beau a grateful smile.
He grinned back. “Tell Tom I said hello. My invitation is for you all, too. Come back anytime. We’d love to have you.”
“You know him?” Hollis asked as they got in their car.
“Years ago. He used to live in Buckhead.” Katharine pulled onto the gravel road. Gravel crunched under their tires as she headed uphill toward the ridge.
“Really? Weird.” Hollis looked over her shoulder at the cove they were leaving. “It’s a weird family.”
“Maybe so, but what on earth—?”
Hollis held up one hand. “I do not want to discuss it. In fact, I do not want to hear Kenny Todd’s name again in my lifetime. Is that understood? If not, I’ll get out right here and walk to Atlanta.”
Her eyes were bright and she looked feverish, but Katharine knew it was anger, not drugs or alcohol. Hollis seldom drank, and since middle school she had been vociferous about the stupidity of using drugs. Nor had Katharine seen any of the signs parents are taught to look for that Hollis was a closet alcoholic or addict. Was that the “problem” Kenny had referred to? What had given him that idea?
As darkness shut down around them, she decided to ask. “That was a weird thing he-who-shall-not-be-named yelled at you this afternoon—that he isn’t an alcoholic or a drug addict. Had you said he was?”
“Um, no.”
“Had he said you were?”
Hollis didn’t reply for so long that Katharine thought she was being snubbed. Then, out of the darkness, Hollis asked in a small voice, “Did you ever do one really dumb thing that haunted you for the rest of your entire life?”
Katharine thought it over, in order to answer honestly. The first that came to mind was
breaking off with a boy she had really loved in high school over a stupid quarrel on graduation night. She had refused his calls, returned his letters, and driven him away before she had realized what a mistake that was. When she had met Tom, she’d thought that was behind her—until she had run into Hobart Hastings again at the Atlanta History Center the previous June. They were currently trying to work out what it might mean to be friends after all that history.
However, Hollis had seen them lunching together that same day and had worried ever since that Hasty might be replacing Tom in her aunt’s affections. He wasn’t—they had become two different people since high school—but Katharine decided that wasn’t the example she was looking for. Hasty was up in Michigan visiting his estranged wife and daughter. She had no desire to drag him into the current conversation.
“I’ve done my share of dumb things,” she said, “but most of them eventually got worked out. You know what your Uncle Tom says, don’t you? ‘Nothing becomes too big to handle if you deal with it when it’s small enough to contain.’ Or something like that.”
“Yeah, but some things get big real fast.” Hollis rode for another half mile in silence, then admitted, “One time when I was back in Atlanta during college, I went to a party with Jon and some of his friends. Kenny was there, too. We kind of enjoyed each other, even though I thought he talked weird and dressed funny. The party, though, was duller than dishwater, so when some guys I knew from high school asked us to go to another party, I said ‘great!’ Kenny said he thought it would be rude to leave one party to go to another. I said that was silly, we could go wherever we liked, and I went without him. At the other party somebody handed me a drink, but you know I don’t like to drink, so I only drank a few sips and then poured the rest down a potted palm. Still, I began to feel odd, and when I saw some of the girls passing out, I realized somebody might be putting date-rape drugs in the drinks. I was looking for a glass of water when a guy I sort of knew came over with some punch and said, “This is mild.” It tasted like lemonade. I drank two glasses and was feeling woozy when I heard one of the guys bragging to another that chemistry majors had made the punch with hundred-proof alcohol. By then I could hardly walk, but I knew I needed to get out of there. Guys were dragging girls to back rooms all the time. I staggered out to the street and called Jon, because we had a deal that if either of us ever got drunk, we’d call to be picked up.”
Katharine didn’t have time to process that. Hollis was already moving ahead.
“I sat down next to a tree and waited for Jon to come, but he had loaned somebody his car, so Kenny brought him. By the time they got there, I was sick as a dog. I threw up all over both of them and Kenny’s car. Kenny was utterly disgusted. I don’t know how he ever got the smell out of his upholstery, and Jon said later that Kenny asked several times about his ‘weird druggie cousin.’ That’s all he’ll ever see when he looks at me.”
“I’m not sure that’s true,” Katharine said cautiously. “He looked pretty happy to see you this morning. Have you ever told him what really happened?”
“I hadn’t seen him again until your house. I thought about telling him this afternoon, we were having such a good time. The view was gorgeous from up on top of the ridge, and those horses were wonderful. He’s a good rider, too. I never knew he liked to ride. But he has no idea how to take a compliment. When I told him he was a better rider than I am, he said you learn to ride, growing up in a barn. I was so tired of him acting like a hayseed when he isn’t one that I said some things I shouldn’t have, then he said some really spiteful things back. I don’t care if I never speak to him again!”
They had arrived at her house by that time. Hollis got out and slammed the car door so hard that Katharine hoped she hadn’t done permanent damage to the rental vehicle.
Chapter 30
Monday
Ann Rose called early Monday morning. “I went through Oscar’s albums, and I’ve found something interesting about Bara that you need to see. Can you come over?”
Katharine consulted the to-do list on her counter, decided it was still in the “delay” stage rather than the “procrastination” zone, and agreed she could be there in fifteen minutes. On the way over, however, she reflected that one week earlier, she had scarcely known Bara Weidenauer. Since then, the woman and her problems had co-opted her life.
Ann Rose led her directly to Oscar’s library at the back of the house, a comfortable, cluttered room with shelves overflowing with books and a large leather desk chair shaped to fit Oscar’s considerable bulk.
“Look.” Ann Rose lifted a brown cardboard album covered to look like leather—very like those Katharine’s Aunt Lucy had filled back in the thirties and forties. Ann Rose opened it across the desk. “This one is mostly Oscar’s high school and college days, but it includes the war years. I don’t think they could get much film, because there aren’t many pictures from then. Here he and Winnie are in high school.”
Katharine peered down at a small sepia picture with scalloped edges, in which two boys in leather helmets and jackets clowned for the camera next to a small plane. No one would have predicted that the lanky boy on the right would grow into a prosperous architect, or that the skinny one on the left would become a stout doctor.
Ann Rose flipped over two pages, hunting for a particular picture. “Here! This is the one I was looking for. See?”
A man and a woman stood beside a large bush. She was handing him a round hydrangea blossom while he faced directly into the camera. Katharine had no trouble recognizing Nettie and Winnie Holcomb. Winnie was already striking, if not traditionally handsome, and Nettie already had the look of a bad-tempered but highly bred horse, which grew more pronounced over the years. Beneath the picture was written in block letters, FAREWELL NETTIE AND WINNIE, HAVE FUN IN NEW YORK!
“If Oscar wrote that, he writes better than most doctors I know,” Katharine commented.
“He went to Tech to study engineering. He didn’t decide to become a doctor until he served in the ambulance corps. He and Winnie both changed professions as a result of the war. But what do you notice about the picture?”
Katharine studied the picture carefully. “It had to have been taken in summertime. The hydrangea is in full bloom.”
“Right. And this is the section of pictures Oscar took in 1945, after he got home from Europe.”
“But Nettie—” Katharine peered down in surprise at the slender woman standing with her side to the camera. “She doesn’t look the least bit pregnant!”
“That’s what I noticed, too. If Bara was born in September…”
“She must have been adopted.” Katharine was so surprised, she sat in the nearest chair. “I wonder why they never told her.”
“People didn’t, back then. They kept it a deep, dark secret so children wouldn’t get traumatized.” Ann Rose sounded as angry with Winnie and Nettie as Katharine felt.
“So instead, she gets traumatized when it’s too late to ask the questions she’d like to ask.”
Ann Rose closed the album and rested her hand on it. “Do you think we should tell Bara? Or show her this and let her draw her own conclusions?”
“I don’t know. She’s not in the best shape right now to get hit with it, but maybe it would cheer her to know Nettie wasn’t her blood kin.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, neither wiser than the other about what to do with what they knew.
“Can you ask Oscar the next time he calls?”
“Yes, but that will be a while. I spoke with Jeffers Saturday and told him about Bara.”
“Rita Louise knows something, but I don’t know if she’d tell what she knows.” Katharine related what had happened at the cathedral.
“Eloise might tell us something, as well. She’s two daisies short of a bouquet where the present is concerned, but she sometimes talks quite clearly about the past.”
How like Ann Rose, Katharine thought, with all she has to do, to still take time to visit a woman
who won’t remember she’s been there.
One word caught her attention. “You said ‘us.’ Would you talk to Rita Louise and Eloise for Bara?”
“No, but I will go with you,” Ann Rose consulted her watch, “if we go now. Chip won’t get back until nearly noon. I think I must go, don’t you? After all, I was the one who found the picture, and it was at my house that Bara first asked you to look into these medals. You shouldn’t have to shoulder this alone.”
I shouldn’t have to shoulder it at all, Katharine mused while Francie helped Ann Rose figure out where she had dropped her purse when she last came in the house.
“She’s having a better day today,” the aide said as they signed in at the desk. “Her sugar was so out of whack yesterday, we were afraid we’d have to call the doctor. We finally got it under control, but we think her husband has been sneaking her sweets again.”
“Is she diabetic?” Katharine asked Ann Rose as they walked down the long hall to Eloise’s room.
“Apparently so. I didn’t know.” Ann Rose looked ruefully at a bag Francie had sent, filled with petit fours and éclairs left over from the party. “I think we’ll leave these at the nurses’ station, don’t you?”
Eloise Payne sat beside the window, looking up at the sky. Katharine wondered what she was seeing. If Eloise had lowered her gaze she could have seen trees and shrubs on the nursing-home grounds with the smudge of Atlanta’s skyline on the horizon. Instead, since the sky was a gray heat haze, she seemed mesmerized by nothing.
Katharine was grateful that her parents had not outlived their minds.
“Hello.” Eloise welcomed them with a smile. “How nice of you to come.” She was neat and pretty, her hair freshly set and her nails manicured. Only if you looked into her eyes did you see that there was nobody home.
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