Lies in White Dresses

by Sofia Grant

It wasn’t until last night, when she’d actually seen the two men together for the first time, that she understood. Even separated by Alice’s preemptive seating arrangement, they had been connected by an invisible thread—when one spoke, the other hung on every word; when the basket of dinner rolls was set in front of Arthur, Bill passed him the butter without being asked. When Bill said something funny, Arthur grinned like a boy. And when Francie and Alice returned from the restroom, the two men were leaning close enough to whisper.

  The intimacy between them was something that she and Arthur had never had. Had it been up to her, she would have soldiered on with him for the rest of their lives and never felt that she’d missed anything. But now she felt almost as though she’d been cheated. She wasn’t jealous—how could one be jealous of a man like Bill?—but she was left with a hole inside her that was not the precise shape of Arthur’s absence.

  Chapter 46

  Charlie

  There’s the cemetery,” June said, pointing at the gravestones dotting the gentle hill that rose off to the left. The cemetery was small, a couple acres surrounded by a split-rail fence with a row of mature trees along two sides. “It’s really pretty when you get up near the top—you can see out over the whole valley. And the house is just above the far side. If there wasn’t a fence, you could drive right up the hill into the backyard.”

  Charlie felt a sense of anticipation building inside him. He’d been keeping his expectations deliberately low, reminding himself that many years had passed since his mother had set foot there. Unsupervised caretakers were likely to treat the place poorly, and since it had stood empty the past few years, it was probably choked with weeds, infested with rats, possibly vandalized. June had said it was “cute,” but she seemed determined to put a bright face on everything. Also, she might be concealing the worst of the damage from him out of concern for his feelings.

  The woman in the truck with him caused unexpectedly strong feelings in Charlie. When he’d pulled over to the side of the road to listen to her story, he’d been ready to turn the truck around and go after her worthless husband. Sucker-punching Charlie was bad enough, but any man who struck a woman should, in Charlie’s opinion, be made to feel just as powerless, as he was being beaten to within an inch of his life.

  But anger at her worthless husband wasn’t the only reason Charlie felt protective toward her. There was the matter of how she would provide for herself, raising a child alone with no means of support that Charlie could discern.

  On the rare occasions that his mother talked about her childhood in Reno he’d understood her family had been poor, but she described a life full of love and fun—she remembered a swing her father had hung from the tree in the backyard, or a duck she’d been given by the rancher down the road to raise as a pet.

  It had been a long time since she’d talked about the past. Now that Charlie knew the truth, he thought he understood her reasons for returning to the place she’d grown up.

  “Turn left,” June said, “and then see that mailbox up there on the right? Past the little red house? Turn in there but mind the ruts.”

  Charlie drove carefully, but the truck jounced across the hard earth. At some point, someone had driven after a rain when the ground was wet and left deep gashes in the earth; without them it would have been difficult to tell where the yard ended and the drive began, it was so choked with weeds.

  But despite that, the house was every bit as charming as his mother had described. It resembled a child’s drawing of a house, a little white box with a triangle of a roof, a door and two windows in the front. The siding had been painted recently enough that it still looked bright and fresh, and the shutters were a sunny yellow. The porch and steps were in good shape, and two brightly colored rag rugs hung over the rail.

  He felt June watching him as he parked the truck. He turned to her and smiled. “Shall I assume you were the one who hung the rugs there?”

  June blushed. “I took them out to beat them, and I thought a little air wouldn’t hurt. Besides, I want to scrub the floors before I put them back down. Do you want to go in?”

  That’s what they were here for, wasn’t it? And yet he could tell June was nervous, gauging his reaction every step of the way.

  “I tried to ask the neighbors if they knew anyone who could mow,” she said, “but no one was home, so I left a note. Over there, I thought we’d have the cars parked—I hired two fellows recommended by Mrs. Swanson. They’ll have to be careful, though, because there’s an old foundation under all those weeds.”

  As she chattered away, leading the way up onto the porch, Charlie tried to imagine his mother sitting there on a summer day sipping lemonade and playing with her cat. He had no pictures of her as a child, but he imagined her as wiry and active, skipping instead of walking, helping her mother without being asked—which was probably a load of crap, but he had nothing but his imagination to go on.

  June took a key from her pocket and unlocked the door, then hesitated. “I should give you this,” she said. “I found it hidden behind the porchlight. It’s yours now.”

  “You keep it, at least until this is all over with.”

  June nodded and dropped it back into her pocket. She opened the door, stepping out of the way so he could enter.

  The little front room was as neat as a pin, empty save for an upright piano. Lacy white curtains fluttered in the windows, and a broom and bucket sat in the corner.

  “I washed the walls and laundered and pressed the curtains,” June said. “Picture this room with little round tables with pretty tablecloths and flowers—the floral arrangements will make a big difference.”

  “June, it’s—it’s perfect just as it is,” Charlie said. He walked slowly through the room, pausing to open the door of a built-in cabinet, hoping to find . . . what? Anything that his mother had touched—any evidence of her presence: a hairpin, a pencil, a doll. But it was empty, the shelves lined with faded flowery paper.

  Past the front room was a hall with two small bedrooms on one side and a bath on the other, and then the kitchen at the back of the house and a screen porch out the back door. That was all.

  How odd it must have been for his mother to find herself in the mansion on Nob Hill after she married. His father loved to tell the story of how he’d leveraged himself to buy the house because it came with a title—the Brannan House, named for the man who built it, the founder of the first newspaper in the city. Harry never could resist a brush with fame, no matter how inconsequential.

  “I think this was her bedroom,” June said, leading him into the smaller of the two rooms. It was empty except for an old iron bed, a small pine desk, and a straight-backed chair next to the window. “See? She would have seen the tree every morning when she woke up.”

  Charlie put his hand on the bed frame, wishing for some sign from her . . . some signal of her presence. It was silly, of course—Charlie didn’t believe in an afterlife, something he’d never admitted to anyone—but he suddenly missed his mother so much it hurt.

  “You were with her on her last night,” he said haltingly. “I wish I had known . . . I wish I’d had a chance to say goodbye.”

  June looked stricken. “But then you would have tried to talk her out of it. She had to know that.”

  He cleared his throat. “I was wondering why, if she knew that she was going to take her life, she didn’t want to see this place one last time.”

  June moved closer to him. “I think I might know. She couldn’t be sure what shape the house was in, and it would have broken her heart to see it worn down or abandoned. But she still wanted to come home to die, to be laid to rest with her parents. And she knew that of all the people in the world, Francie was the one she could trust to make sure it was done.”

  Charlie rubbed his eyes. “Thank God for Francie,” he said hoarsely. “Now that I’m beginning to understand just how unhappy my mother was with Dad, I’m glad she had someone to talk to.”

  “I think Francie was more tha
n just someone to talk to. I think that other than you and your brother, Francie is the person your mother loved most in the world.”

  “You’re a perceptive person, June.” Charlie cleared his throat. “Well. We’re here to work, aren’t we? Put a broom in my hand and show me where to start.”

  For the next two hours they worked together. There was only one broom, so June swept and Charlie filled a bucket with water and a bit of soap and got on his hands and knees to scrub the floor. When the floors were so clean they gleamed, they brought in the rugs.

  Charlie found a toolbox in the shed and nailed down a loose step while June got to work on the kitchen, scrubbing the old counters until they shone. She showed him a window that wouldn’t stay open, a door that scraped the floor, a slow-draining sink—and Charlie fixed them all. It felt good to have tools in his hands; when the sink drain ran clear, Charlie felt a greater sense of accomplishment than any day on the job working for his father.

  “I’m surprised a fellow like you knows how to do that,” June observed, dumping dirty water out the backdoor. “I would have thought your family would hire people to take care of things.”

  Charlie laughed ruefully. “I’m sure my dad would have preferred that. But he always took me and Frank to work with him in the summers when we weren’t in school—he liked to take us to meetings and introduce us as his junior partners. He even had our mom buy us little jackets and ties. Frank loved it—but I was too shy to talk to the clients, and after a while Dad just let me stay back in the shop. We job it all out now, but back then Dad had a warehouse and half a dozen trucks and trailers and all kinds of equipment, and it all had to be maintained and repaired. He had an old man working for him. I never knew his real name but everyone called him China Joe. I’d known him all my life and he let me follow him around, and taught me how to fix things.”

  “What happened to him?” June asked.

  Charlie raised his eyebrows. “I find it interesting that’s the detail you’re curious about. Wouldn’t you rather know about the time I drove a front loader into the side of the building?”

  He didn’t want to tell her the truth—that China Joe didn’t show up for work one day, and rather than send someone to see if he was all right, his father cursed him for laziness. Three days later an old Chinese woman who spoke almost no English came to the warehouse to see his father and managed to communicate that China Joe was dead. His father gave her twenty dollars and sent her on her way.

  “I think we’ve done all we can, don’t you?” Charlie said, looking around the house. It smelled of bleach and furniture polish, and there wasn’t a speck of dirt anywhere. His father would probably have nothing good to say about having the reception here, but he hoped his mother would have been pleased.

  “I still want to wash the porch floor. And weed the garden bed—I’m going to have the gardener from the cemetery put in a few more flowers once he’s done planting around the graves.”

  “June—enough. You’ve gone over and above what anyone could have asked.”

  “But it has to be perfect,” she said. “I mean, for Vi, first of all, but for you and Frank, and all her friends, everyone she loved who she never got to show this place to. For Francie, because Francie loved her best, and now I’ve met Alice and I see how much she loved your mother too. I just thought—if I could make it the way she would have wanted—if she is looking down from heaven, I know she is at peace now with the Lord, but still—”

  Charlie stopped her by taking her hand. “That’s the most purehearted thing you could say,” he said gruffly, “but I must ask you to stop, or I’ll begin blubbering like a baby.”

  Charlie was doing his best to hold in his grief, but it threatened to force its way to the surface and burst free, and once he started it wouldn’t be over until all the pain inside him had poured out. June put her hand on top of his.

  “When my mother died, I went to work the day after the funeral and I didn’t cry,” she said softly. “I was working at a bakery and I had to get up at three o’clock to set the bread to rise, and then it was busy right through until the lunch rush was over, and I went home and did the chores and went to bed that night and I still didn’t cry, not for almost two whole weeks. And then one day one of my regular customers came in and handed me a four-leaf clover she’d ironed between two sheets of waxed paper. She said she thought it was a little message from my mother, telling me that she was at peace and to be happy, and I burst out crying and couldn’t stop. I went home and cried my eyes out, and there was no bread in the morning, and I nearly got myself fired, but I cried every time I looked at that little clover taped to the window so the sun shone through the paper. I kept it there until the day I got married. Oh, I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.”

  Charlie looked down at their hands joined together. And then he surprised himself by saying, “I got a letter from her doctor.”

  “Vi’s doctor?”

  “The day before I got the news that she’d died—the letter took a while to reach me because our mail was forwarded to the hotel in Vegas where Dad and Frank and I were staying.” Charlie withdrew his hand and seemed to shrink into himself. “He actually sent it the week before Mom and Francie left for Reno. If only I’d gotten it sooner—if I’d been home, instead of in the middle of the desert watching bombs go off, maybe I could have done something. I could have stopped her.”

  “What did the letter say, Charlie?”

  “She had cancer. Advanced—by the time the doctor found it, it was too late to save her, but he could have given her a little more time. He wanted her to come in immediately for radiation. He wanted to put her in the hospital, but she told him that she had to think about it. And in the letter, he, he—”

  June dug a handkerchief out of her purse and pressed it into his hand, and he swiped at his eyes.

  “He said that he’d written to me because my mother told him that she was closest to me. He knew about Dad—I mean, that he’d asked for a divorce, not that Mom had decided to give it to him. The doctor thought she was concerned that Dad wouldn’t pay, and he wanted me to talk to her, to convince her to take the treatment. He said if it had been him, he would have wanted all the time he could have with his family.”

  “Oh, Charlie—I’m so sorry,” June said. “But you couldn’t have known, and she made her decision . . . at least, that’s how it seems to me.”

  Charlie lifted his head and looked at her bleakly. “So you think she decided to give Dad his divorce, knowing she was going to come here and—and take her own life? I know it’s hard to draw any other conclusion, but, June, my mother was Catholic. She went to Mass every weekday morning, even though Dad never went and Frank and I stopped going in high school. It meant something to her.”

  “And suicide is a sin,” June said. “Is that what you’re thinking?”

  He nodded miserably. “I could understand her going against Dad. But what I can’t understand is her turning against God. She prayed every night of her life. And if she lost faith in Him in the end . . . then that would mean that she died truly alone. And—June, I don’t think I could bear it.”

  “No, wait, Charlie,” June said. “I admit I didn’t know her, not really, but—but I saw her, that night. I think I truly saw who she was. And maybe she was questioning—who wouldn’t? But she seemed strong. At dinner, we got to talking about what we would do differently, after—you know—once our divorces were final. And Francie said she would dye her hair red, and we laughed, but then your mother said—she said she’d done all she needed to do. And, Charlie, I could tell that she meant it. I think she’d made her peace and was saying goodbye, in her way, to her best friend. I don’t think she was scared at all, or that her faith had failed her. I think she’d made the best decision she knew how.”

  Charlie considered June’s words. “I want to believe that.”

  “I don’t know, but if it was me, I wouldn’t want Patty to see me sick and in pain—I wouldn’t want her to remember me t
hat way. I think Vi was brave. I think she knew what she was doing.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” Charlie sighed. “I guess we’ll never really know. The police are ruling it an accident. I haven’t told anyone about the letter—anyone but you. Frank, I don’t think he’d understand. And there’s no point telling Dad.”

  “If you keep this secret, you’ll have to carry it with you always,” June said, and Charlie realized that she was speaking from experience. How hard it must have been to see the same neighbors and friends day in and day out, hiding the horror that took place behind the closed doors of the house she shared with her tormentor. “But you don’t need to worry about me. I’ll never tell a soul.”

  “I appreciate that,” Charlie said. “I’m sorry to have burdened you—especially since you’ve done so much for our family already.”

  “Think nothing of it,” June said. “Honestly, it’s nice to have someone to talk to. I mean, Francie has been wonderful, but she has so much on her mind and—oh!—I’m sorry, of course you do too, I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  “It’s all right,” Charlie said gently. “But I’m afraid I need to be getting back. My father and brother will be here soon, and we need to stop by the mortuary. That is, if you’re still willing to go with me.”

  June smiled. “Of course. I’m happy to come. I know Francie wanted you to be able to make those decisions.”

  “Yes. Yes, that would be best, I suppose. I should change clothes before we go.”

  “Good heavens, me too!” June exclaimed. “Would you mind dropping me off so I can freshen up? I’ll be quick about it.”

  “Absolutely. If you promise not to laugh when you see me in my monkey suit.”

  “I have a feeling you clean up just fine. Why, to hear your mother talk, you were the handsomest child ever born, other than Frank, of course.”

  Charlie laughed—couldn’t help it. It seemed impossible to drown in his grief around this girl, with her earnest good intentions and her gentle reassurances—and that silly kerchief knotted around her hair, the blond curls peeking out from underneath.