by Sofia Grant
The truck was moving again, Scarlett inching along the street at a snail’s pace, taking in the view. Katie wondered what she was remembering: coming here as a child, an adolescent, a teen; watching the once-grand neighborhood tumble further and further into disrepair.
Once they were parked in front of the house, Katie spotted a FedEx envelope propped against the front door, and felt a surge of relief. “Looks like the money my friend sent me came,” she said. “How about we go get a drink to celebrate? My treat.”
“I’d love to,” Scarlett said, avoiding her gaze. “But maybe not tonight? I need to, um, get back.”
“It’s totally fine,” Katie said. Another time, she’d find a way to talk to Scarlett about Merritt’s outsized influence on her decisions. “I’ll keep myself busy. I think I’ll start organizing things—that way we can both go through Margaret’s stuff and figure out what each of us wants to keep. I mean, I know that technically she left me the contents of the house, but I want you to have anything that’s special to you.”
“That would be great,” Scarlett said. “I’ll come back in the morning, okay?”
Katie hopped out of the car, then leaned against the open window. “Thanks for everything today.”
Only after Scarlett had driven away did Katie remember that she’d meant to give her some gas money from the cash Lolly had sent.
Katie wasn’t a religious sort of person—her mother’s Sunday traditions when she was growing up included bleaching her mustache and doing her nails—but a little prayer popped into her head, something one of her mother’s boyfriends had taught her in a misguided effort to prove his suitability to Georgina.
Bless my spirit as I roam
Help me find my way back home
Guide and guard me through the night
And bless me in the morning’s light.
“Safe home, Scarlett,” Katie whispered as she let herself into the house.
Chapter Twenty
November 1969
Margaret had been clutching the handles of her purse so hard that her fingers had gone numb.
“But surely—” she started, and then didn’t have any idea what to say. The bank manager—Edward Forbus, who had been a knock-kneed runt of an adolescent when she’d left for college—peered at his desk blotter, which was covered with little curlicues and stars and other doodlings. He had flushed in a way that was similar to how her father had looked when embarrassed, which made Margaret a little teary, because Hugh Pierson had been gone nearly two years now and she missed him every day.
Although it was her father who’d put her in this jam. Oh, why hadn’t he seen that his little ruse—to force her and her mother to get along, to ensure that Margaret took care of Caroline after he was gone—would never work? But that was how Hugh had always been: sweetly sentimental, ever hopeful, with an inextinguishable faith in other people. And for all those reasons, unable to help himself from loving the wife who married him for his money, and never loved him back.
It was too much to bear, at least for this hot, sticky afternoon that was sure to end in disappointment. But Margaret had to try:
“My father never meant for us to want for anything,” she pleaded, hating the tremor in her voice. “His will was supposed to ensure that we were provided for.”
“And so it has,” Edward (she’d always known him as Eddie, but that was a lifetime ago) said a bit primly. “At the rate that Mrs. Pierson has been making withdrawals, you and she just might be able to live out your lives in comfort. And, of course, there’s a nice nest egg for Georgina when she turns eighteen.”
Margaret really didn’t need to be reminded of that. When that day came, Georgina would inherit fifteen thousand dollars from her grandfather, who had adored her, naturally. Margaret was quite sure her father intended the money for Georgina’s education, but he’d been careless enough not to specify that in the will. As she approached her tenth birthday, Georgina had turned out to be even more willful, defiant, and headstrong than she’d been as a child, and how was Margaret supposed to ensure that her father’s wishes were honored if her daughter were allowed to squander the money?
And even though Margaret had understood her father’s wish to ensure that his wife and daughter’s increasingly fractious relationship didn’t disintegrate entirely by binding them together with money, it still galled that he’d left her nothing. The family’s fortunes had dwindled as the oil field had played out and the wells dried up—and Hugh’s increasing indifference hadn’t helped—so there wasn’t nearly the mountain of money she’d once assumed they’d always have.
The will specified that the money would pass to her when Caroline was gone, but that was cold comfort when Margaret had to ask her mother for money every time she went to buy groceries or put gas in the car she was forced to share with her. And heaven help her if she wanted to get her hair done or buy a lipstick or a ticket to the movies: her mother subjected her to a barrage of questions about whether she really needed whatever it was that she wanted the money for, if she’d shopped around and compared prices, if it would end up gathering dust in the attic like some of your other foolhardy notions.
“But all I’m asking is that you allow me to withdraw a little for myself. It won’t affect the total amount, because then I won’t have to bother my mother with these—these picayune details,” Margaret said. “Mother is well over sixty”—an exaggeration; Caroline was barely sixty-two—“and I feel it is neither kind nor prudent to expect her to manage the finances for all three of us.”
Edward sighed and stacked the papers on his desk, avoiding her gaze. “I do understand, and I’m not without sympathy, Mrs. Dial. But it’s out of my hands. It would not only be against the bank’s regulations, it would be against the law for me to violate the terms of your father’s trust.”
“Eddie,” Margaret said, glaring at him. “You really needn’t call me Mrs. Dial, considering that I once caught you and your friends trying to see into the girls’ locker room at the club.”
Edward turned an even more alarming shade of pink, and he ran his fingers through his hair. “Look, I am sorry. I can’t do anything about changing the will. But I have to ask you—have you ever read through it?”
Margaret blinked. It had never occurred to her to try—the documents were stored in her mother’s safety-deposit box, to which she alone had a key. “Can I?”
“Well, you’d have to ask your mother to show you, or talk to your father’s attorney if she won’t, but—yes, I believe that you’d be entitled. But the reason I ask is, it seems to me—that is, you’ve never mentioned, uh—”
“Spit it out, Eddie.”
“Well, I just wondered if you know about your father’s other bequests. To your cousins. Since it’s never come up.”
“My cousins?” Margaret was mystified—she’d seen Audrey last December, when she’d come for a brief visit with her family while on their way to her husband’s mother’s home for Christmas. She hadn’t mentioned a word about it. “Levander and Audrey?”
“No, no, your, ah, cousins on your mother’s side.” He pulled a sheet from the pile and read: “Lassiter Wooley, Amy Wooley, and Pamela Wooley McGovney. Euda Wooley, their mother, was your mother’s sister, I believe.”
“My father left them money?”
More squinting and frowning, then Edward said, “Yes, two thousand dollars each. You seem surprised . . . ?”
Margaret kept her face impassive. She didn’t know what to make of this information. Her mother hadn’t mentioned the Wooleys in years, and none of them had attended her father’s funeral.
“No, not at all,” she lied. Suddenly she just wanted to get out of the hot little office, with Eddie/Edward’s certifications and awards lining the walls. She stood up abruptly and gave him a stiff nod. “Well, then, thank you for your time.”
She didn’t wait to hear whatever namby-pamby response little Eddie Forbus came up with to finish dashing her hopes, but walked out of his office and through the
echoing marble bank lobby with her head held high. She remembered coming here with her father when she was a little girl; back then, everyone from the doorman to the tellers to the other customers smiled and greeted her father. And not just because he was the richest man in town, but because those were the days when oil paid for everything in New London, and her father was the biggest oilman around. At one point, he employed nearly seventy-five percent of the men in town, and he treated his workers well.
That’s what the old-timers told her, anyway. But the oil boom in East Texas had evaporated like the water in the bottom of a cattle trough, and with it, the town’s fortunes. Margaret was a thirty-one-year-old widow in a town that had long ago given up on dreams of grandeur and now eked out an existence mostly from the dirt, just as the original settlers had in the days before the Spindletop gusher. Even the value of her parents’ land had plummeted; if her parents had sold off the extra acreage years ago, before the field was played out, there would have been more than enough for her and her mother to live like royalty. As it was, her father had made some poor investments and worse decisions.
And for some reason, he’d squandered some of the money that was left on her mother’s estranged relatives who seemed to have meant nothing to her. Six thousand dollars in total—not exactly a king’s ransom, but certainly nothing to sneeze at.
If Margaret had been allowed to manage that money—which she was far more qualified to do than her mother (she had a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas, for heaven’s sake, and her mother had only finished grammar school)—she would use it to buy stock in the Xerox Corporation. The stock market had become a recent interest of Margaret’s, one she’d stumbled on in the periodical room at the library, having grown bored with Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and picked up the business section of the Morning Telegraph out of curiosity one day. As she read more and more, her interest grew, and she had even bought a few penny stocks, using money hoarded from her paltry allowance. Her stocks had earned a bit—she was up a total of almost thirty dollars—but she was certain she could do more, if only she had the chance! And instead, her dear father had given money to virtual strangers.
Margaret continued to fume all the way home, and it was with some surprise that she found herself at her own front porch, a bit out of breath and sweaty from the walk. She could hear the sound of her mother’s voice through the screen door, Georgina’s enthusiastic responses.
Margaret came into the kitchen and spied a box from the Levines department store on the table. Her mother was making lemonade, a pile of squeezed lemon halves on the counter, and Georgina was playing with a pile of red plastic hooks.
Margaret picked up one of the hooks and shook it. “Another new toy? Really, Mother? And what’s this?”
She tossed the bit of plastic on the table, and Georgina snatched it up with an exclamation while Margaret pulled the ribbon off the box and lifted the lid. Nestled in tissue paper was a wide-collared middy blouse with rickrack trim and white sailor pants with four gaily stitched buttons on each side.
“Another new outfit? Mother, Georgina needs this like a hole in the head.”
“I’m sitting right here,” Georgina piped up. “You don’t have to talk about me like I’m not.”
“Fine,” Margaret snapped, throwing the clothes back into the box. “You don’t need more new clothes, Georgina Dial. And you certainly don’t need—what on earth are those, anyway?”
“Monkeys!” Georgina held up a string of the hooks, which, on closer examination, did appear to be shaped like monkeys with their arms and tails dangling from each other. “Look, they’re called ‘Barrel of Monkeys.’”
She shoved a red plastic barrel across the table, and Margaret picked it up and peered inside: nothing but more monkeys. “What are you supposed to do with them? Never mind, forget I asked. Just how much did these set your grandmother back, I wonder?”
“For your information,” Caroline said coolly, “the clerk said that he can barely keep these in stock. They’re quite the sensation. We were lucky to get them.”
“Oh, Mother,” Margaret muttered. “You’d buy snow from an Eskimo in the middle of winter, as long as someone said it was in style.”
“What was that?”
“Never mind. Tell me this instead—why on earth did Dad leave your sister’s children money? And why didn’t you ever bother to tell me?”
Caroline froze, her back going rigid. She set down the wooden spoon slowly and turned, a grim expression on her face. “I don’t care to discuss that. Georgina, be a good girl and take your things to your room. Then you can help me get the sauce started.”
Georgina glanced from her grandmother to her mother. She was as indifferent to their squabbling as she was accustomed to it.
“Do as your grandmother said,” Margaret said automatically.
“I’m not going to discuss this, Margaret, I’m serious,” Caroline repeated once Georgina left the room. “You can pester me all you like, but I’m not going to back down.”
“Why ever . . . fine,” Margaret said. She snatched the keys to the Chevy, her father’s last car, which they were still driving almost ten years after he bought it, off the row of hooks by the back door. “I’ll just go find out myself.”
IT TOOK HALF an hour to drive to Archer, and another ten minutes for Margaret to park and find a telephone booth and look up her cousins’ names in the book. Only Pamela (McGovney, Mr. and Mrs. Robert) were listed. Margaret went into the pharmacy and bought a pack of gum and asked for directions, which turned out to be complicated enough that the clerk drew a map on the back of a place mat from the soda counter, with a T extending out from the main road past a squiggle that was supposed to be a stand of trees.
“It’s not really a proper road,” the clerk said apologetically. “There ain’t a sign or anything. The house is sort of green. Well, it was green, once, but . . . anyway, it’s the third on the left. You taking your little one for the treatment?”
Margaret blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Oh, er, never mind,” the clerk stammered. “I just thought . . .”
“Mrs. McGovney is my cousin,” Margaret said primly. “I am paying an unannounced visit.”
“Oh, I see. Good day, Miss, and stop in and see us again.”
Margaret found her cousin’s house, making frequent stops to consult the map, on the far edge of town on a dirt road that looked like a shantytown. The third house from the corner was green only in the sense that the paint that hadn’t flaked off was a faded shade of mint. Its porch seemed to be hanging on for dear life, and the only things growing in the yard were cheatgrass and carpetweed and a leggy rosebush that hadn’t received a proper pruning in years. Parked in front was a shiny newish Buick, looking quite out of place with its front tires sunk into the mud that had settled into the marshy low point in the street.
Margaret was almost to the steps when she noticed that there was someone sitting in the shade of the porch. A woman close to her own age, dressed in a bright cotton shift, her hair tied up in a fuchsia scarf, a paperback novel in her hand. At Margaret’s approach she closed the book on her finger, marking her page, and sat up straighter.
“Hello,” she said uncertainly.
“Hello . . . Pamela?”
“Excuse me?” The woman looked startled, setting the book down abruptly on an overturned bucket that apparently was used as an occasional table. She stood up, brushing off her skirt. “Oh, no no no, I’m just here . . . you know.”
“Oh,” Margaret said, confused. “Well, I’m Margaret Dial. Pamela is my, um, is who I’ve come to see.” She couldn’t quite bring herself to say cousin when the woman was practically a stranger.
“Are you here for—?” The woman made an odd little flapping-hand gesture, grimacing in the direction of the house. “I mean, I understand, that is, I’ve been told she’s the best. And really, Timothy—that’s my son, he’s nine—of course it wasn’t his fault. At all.” She leaned conspiratorially forwa
rd. “It’s those Mexicans. My husband says that all greasers carry diseases. They can’t help it, I suppose, but why must our children be made to suffer by going to school with them?”
“Oh,” Margaret said, utterly mystified. She was aware, of course, that there were immigrant children at Georgina’s school. Hank had served with a boy from Sonora, in the north, where he’d learned to play a little clay whistle that he carried with him everywhere—Hank would not allow any negative talk about Mexicans. Margaret was indifferent—back then, she’d been simply trying to keep her small family going, and she imagined that she understood what these miserable families had gone through.
But saying so was not going to win her a new friendship. Which worked just fine, because Margaret was not in the market for one anyway. “Well, I’ll just go on in, I suppose,” she said pleasantly. “It was so very nice to meet you.”
“Oh, of course! Of course,” the woman stammered, sitting abruptly back down. “It’s just . . . do you have children?”
It seemed an odd question, but Margaret smiled gamely. “I do. My daughter, Georgina, is ten.”
“Well, then you know how it is. I wonder . . . if I could ask you to keep this to yourself. Our chance meeting here.” Her face twisted into an uncomfortable, strained smile. “It’s just so awfully hard, you know, when certain people talk. I’m sure you understand.”
Margaret wondered if the woman was a bit batty. “Of course,” she said reassuringly. “I won’t tell a soul.”
She rapped on the door and then decided she might as well let herself in, twisting the old, tarnished knob—and finding herself in her cousin’s living room.
She let the door close behind her. The house was a simple four-square style, with a front room that led directly to the kitchen, two bedrooms up the stairs with a bathroom between them. But the front room had been awkwardly bisected by a curtain fashioned from yards of muslin rigged on lengths of copper pipe suspended from the ceiling. On the right side of the curtain, two towheaded children sat at a small table, heads bent over their schoolbooks. On the other side, a miserable-looking little boy was hunched on a stool with a plastic shower curtain fastened around him like a cape. Bent over him was a haggard-looking woman in a man’s chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up, her thin hair twisted on top of her head.
