I rolled my toothpick to my other cheek. “Sixty-four’s not too late to learn things,” I said. “How old was Louise?”
I felt my face drain. “I mean how old is she? I mean, was she when you met her.”
George didn’t notice. “Oh. She’s been managing the cottages for…oh, maybe twenty-five years. More. I don’t even know. Since my folks died. But I guess you’d better ask her that question…. I’m not telling a woman’s age on her. I may be old, but I’m not a fool.”
George got up then, and I followed him to the door. And then I realized something important. “My mother stayed here for two years, about twenty years ago. She was about eight or nine. Do you remember her?”
“Twenty years is a long time ago,” George said, leaning against the door frame and squinting into the sun. “I was lobstering then—gone a lot. Sorry.”
He really did look sorry about that, so I smiled at him again. “That’s okay. Well, back to work.” I started across the lawn.
George called out. “Wait, now. Kind of a hellion, always in trouble? But she had a soft heart, always carting around some baby animal she’d rescued. Your mother?”
I turned back. “You remember her?”
“Not much, really. But I do remember complaining to Louise one summer. This kid was supposed to be helping, but she went around with a twig springing every mousetrap I set. I finally gave up.” He laughed at the memory, then cocked his head and eyed me. “Your mother. Yeah. Now I see it.”
I walked back to Sandpiper glowing with the things I could tell my mother when she called. “George remembers you. We opened the cottages—you did that, too. Remember the mousetraps?”
I stood on the step of Sandpiper—my cottage—and squared my shoulders and took a deep breath. And then I got to work. I prepared that little house with affection and all my skill, as if the president of the United States himself was going to pull in here a week from now. When I was finished, I looked around at what I had done and my heart just about burst from pride. The cottage seemed to smile back at me, as if it was proud, too. I walked around, putting on the final touches: I pushed the kitchen curtains open a little more to give a better view, shifted the kitchen chairs out so they’d seem more welcoming to tired travelers, and turned down the beds. Then I locked the door and left.
In Plover, I found Angel sitting on one of the twin beds, tangled in sheets.
“I can’t…. It’s all…uuggghhh!” she groaned.
I picked up the knot of sheets. “Do you want to go? George is setting up the grills. He won’t know. I could still say you had to visit a friend, and I just found her….”
“No.” Angel stood up and found a pillowcase and stuffed a pillow into it. Sideways. “Just help me.”
We were hosing off the picnic tables when George came over. He took out a pocketknife and scraped at some hard green stuff on the boards. “Frass.” The way he said it, it sounded like a swear. “Darned gypsy moths, droppings everywhere.” Then he looked at his watch.
“Almost three,” he said. “I gotta be at the boatyard. We’re done for the day anyway. You did a good job, girls. Go get yourselves some lunch and have Louise give me a call tonight.” Then he whistled for Treb, who was napping in Plover’s shade, and climbed into his truck. We walked back to the house but didn’t go in. We sank to the brick steps together and watched his pickup grow smaller, until it disappeared.
“I feel bad for him,” I said. “Pretty soon, he’ll find out. First he’ll be sad, because I think they’re sort of friends. And then it’ll hit him that he’s got nobody to run this place.” I braced myself, realizing I had just committed the giant sin of talking to Angel.
But Angel just leaned over her knees and picked a chip of mortar off the step. She slid a glance at me through her hair. “Or not.”
“Of course he’ll find out. The police will call him first thing.”
“No, I mean…” Angel tucked her hair behind her ear to look at me hard, as if she was trying to decide something. “What if we did it? Took care of things here for a while?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You heard him. Fifteen or twenty dollars each cottage, each week. I need money. I need three hundred fifty dollars for…well, I just need it. I could earn it here. And I wouldn’t have to go to another dumb foster home while my aunt’s getting a place….”
I couldn’t say the obvious, but I didn’t have to.
“I know,” said Angel. “We couldn’t do it. I was just wishing.” She flicked the mortar chip into the roses and wrapped her arms around her knees.
I looked over at the horseshoe of cottages, thinking about how welcoming we’d left them, how happy the families arriving next Saturday were going to be. And suddenly I found myself wishing we could stay, too. Not for the money, but because I wanted to see those families pile in. And because I wanted to spend a little more time where my mother had been.
But then I remembered what was in the den. “No,” I said, “we couldn’t do it.”
“Never,” Angel agreed. “Stupid idea.”
We sat there for a minute, looking down the empty road. Angel was probably thinking, In a few minutes I’m on my way. I was thinking that I kind of liked this new Angel, the girl who talked to me. And that in a few minutes I would be left alone. With…
“Because it would be too hard,” Angel said.
“Impossible.”
“I mean, I didn’t even understand half of what he was saying, never mind be able to do it.”
I turned to Angel. “Who? Do what?”
Angel stared at me. “George! Run the cottages. Do all that changeover stuff he was talking about?”
It was my turn to stare. “No, Angel, that part would be easy. It’s…” I waved my hands behind me.
“Louise? Oh, Louise just needs to be buried. We had to bury a goat once. It wasn’t even ours—it just wandered into our yard and died. Are you serious about us being able to do it, run things?”
“She’s not a goat, Angel! She’s my great-aunt!”
“I know that. I’m just saying, you dig a big hole…”
I jumped up and brushed the brick grit from the backs of my thighs. “You’re crazy. It’s time. I’m going to call the police, so you’d better get going.”
Angel got up, too. “Right, okay. I’ll get my stuff.”
Angel went in, but I didn’t follow her. I didn’t like watching people leave.
I fingered the master key in my pocket, and then I walked back over to the cottages. One by one, I opened them up. In each, I took a knife from the silverware drawer, crawled under the kitchen and the bathroom sinks, and sprang the mousetraps.
And then I closed up all the cottages, each lock snapping shut with a satisfying double clink: “There, yes.” “There, yes.” As I walked down the driveway, I noticed what a nice sound that was, too: the bleached white shells crunching under my sandals. I stopped. I had been here only eight weeks, but I suddenly knew that I would miss this place. Louise’s house, a little worn-down maybe, but always clean and orderly, like my grandmother’s had been. The four Lucky Charms cottages, nestled under the oaks and pines. Through the trees, in the distance, the Mill River winding like a silver ribbon through the marsh that had turned so green in the past month, it could hurt your eyes. Beyond that, the ocean, dark blue as rinsed jeans today. The air was salty and sweet—seaweed and honeysuckle. How had I never noticed all this before? I locked it all into place so I could visit it whenever I needed to, like my icebergs.
I let myself in the kitchen door, but before I picked up the phone to call the police, I sat down at the table with a sheet of paper, a ruler, and a pencil. Another few minutes wouldn’t matter, I figured. I drew an eight-inch square. At a half inch to a foot, I copied the floor plan of those cottages: the two-inch-wide bathroom lying snugly against the three-inch-wide bedrooms, the kitchen area on the right, the living room on the left.
Everything fitted.
I brought the drawi
ng up to my room and tucked it into my Hints folder. As I was about to go back downstairs to make the call, I heard a crash from Louise’s bedroom. The door was open. Angel was pulling things down from the closet shelf.
“I thought you were gone.”
“Almost. I’m looking for something.” She tossed out a stuffed garbage bag.
I stepped into the room. I’d never been inside before, only stood in the doorway a few times, talking to Louise. It was dark—the curtains were drawn—and too flowery: flowered drapes, flowered bedspread, flowered robe on the hook. The flowers looked wilted somehow—as if without Louise to tend them, they were dying.
Another garbage bag went sailing out. “Two bags of old panty hose,” Angel’s voice followed. “Gross.”
I ran my fingers over the photographs lined up on the bureau. Louise at different ages, posing with different people. One in a worn silver frame showed her at about ten, with her arms around a little girl in red shorts sitting beside her. The little girl was holding a book on her lap, a finger slipped inside to hold a page. I picked up the photo. It was my grandmother, I knew.
“There must be fifty pairs of shoes in here,” Angel said. “And all she ever wore were those sneakers with the toes out! There are a hundred dresses, and what did she wear every day? That ratty bathrobe!”
I rubbed my thumb over the tarnished frame. All it needed was a little toothpaste to bring the shine back—I suddenly could see that hint in my folder. The folder I’d inherited from my grandmother. My grandmother who was the little girl with Louise in the photo in the tarnished silver frame. Another triple tie. I sank to the bed, anchored with the good weight of it.
Angel came back with her arms full and sat down beside me. “Who has eighteen pocketbooks?” she said. “With, like, twelve cents in each?”
I stared at the photo and wondered what book my grandmother had been reading that day.
“It’s not stealing, you know. She’s been paid all this money to feed me and stuff.” Angel dumped out a purse beside me. “Well, I guess most of it is yours, actually.”
“Were there any photo albums in the closet, Angel?” I asked.
Angel pushed a big straw bag over to me. “I mean, it’s your inheritance, right? You and your mother are going to get all her stuff. And the house, right? Um…Stella?”
“What?” I said, tearing my gaze from my grandmother’s little-girl face.
“This house. If you don’t have any other relatives, then neither does she. You and your mother are going to inherit it.”
The meaning of her words took shape in slow motion.
We were going to inherit this house.
Move into it and live here.
Not have to leave it.
Everything clicked into place like abacus beads. Until the final bead: my mother.
And then my movie rolled out. I’d been making it up for the past two years.
In it, my mother walks into our kitchen. I don’t recognize the kitchen, but I know it’s ours. It’s bright in there, and clean, and everything is neat and in its place. It smells really good—even in my movie you can tell somehow—because I’m cooking something nice. My mother walks in, and she smiles. She takes off her jacket and hangs it over a chair, and she leans over to see what’s in the pot I’m cooking. In my movie, my mother looks so peaceful to be there. She’s not pacing around, she’s not darting looks out the window like she’s getting that itch to be somewhere else. She sighs, she’s so peaceful. And then she looks over at me as if she can’t believe how lucky she is. As if she’s just won the Mega-Jackpot in the lottery of daughters. “Hey, Stella,” she says, in an amazed voice. An amazed but peaceful voice. A not-going-anywhere voice. “Hey, Stella, we’re home.”
And then my mother looks at me harder. She sees that I am almost twelve. I can take care of myself, and her, too, now. She can tell I could make us a home now, easy.
I’d never known the kitchen in my movie, but now I did—Louise’s, right downstairs. Ours. I’d never known the opening scene of my movie, how we got this house, but now I did—I was meant to keep our home for my mother, to prove to her that I could, until she came back. We were meant to live here.
I stood, my legs shaking a little. Not from fear this time, but from all the hope that had suddenly welled up. I lifted the pocketbook from Angel’s lap and tossed it onto the sea of lipstick tubes, candy wrappers, and crumpled tissues.
“Angel,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
CHAPTER 6
“For real?”
“For real.”
“How come?”
I took a deep breath, thinking. “Because you’re right. My mother’s going to inherit this place. And that’s great—except she’s not here.”
“So call her.”
“I can’t. She’s…traveling.” And of course she never could keep a cell phone. The truth was, I didn’t know where she was. She’d called last Saturday, halfway to California. A job working with horses, she said. Actually, she’d said a possible job. That “possible” had worried me.
“Well, so what? They’re not going to give it to somebody else.”
I walked over to the corner window and pushed the curtains open. I rested my fingertips and my forehead on the panes. The last time I hadn’t felt the world was made of glass and it was my job to keep it from shattering had been when we’d lived in a house a lot like this. My mother had let that house go, but somehow it felt like it was my fault. Now I needed a home to prove that I wouldn’t make the same mistakes again, whatever they were. I couldn’t tell Angel any of this, though.
I looked over the cottages. Here were five homes to prove myself on. Below, in our backyard, were Louise’s blueberry bushes. My mother’s blueberry bushes. Mine, too, now. I felt a good iron-bone, lead-blood heaviness settle me into the floorboards. I couldn’t tell Angel any of this, either.
I turned. “Because, this place?” I said instead. “I’m not leaving it.”
The first thing, of course, was Louise.
We opened the door of the den cautiously. Angel threw her arms across her face and staggered back. “She stinks.”
“I know,” I said.
“No, I mean she really stinks.”
“I know, Angel. She’s dead. She can’t help it.”
“Well, does Heloise have any good hints about that?”
I was all ready to give Angel the fight she was looking for, but then I realized she was actually on the right track. “Be right back,” I told her. In the laundry I found what I needed. “Febreze,” I explained, spraying a good blast into the den. A cloud of flies buzzed up from Louise’s corpse in irritation. “Eliminates odors for a freshness that fills your home.”
“Well, we’re still going to have to bury her now. Where do you think?”
“In her garden,” I said right away. “She’d like to be out there, I think. And there’s an empty row in the back she was saving for the late lettuces. But—”
“Let’s get digging, then.”
“No. We have to…get her ready or something.”
“You’re right. When my dog Max died, we put on his rhinestone collar.”
“She’s not a dog, Angel. She’s not a dog and she’s not a goat.”
“I know. But I bet she’d want to be dressed up. I bet she wouldn’t want to spend forever in that ratty robe.”
Angel left the room and came back with her palms dripping with sparkling jewelry. “The Home Shopping Channel is really going to miss your great-aunt.”
I lifted the pieces, trying to remember anything that seemed special. “I never saw her wear any of this. I don’t know which she’d choose.”
“Choose? We’ll put it all on. This is a special occasion.”
When it came to doing it, though, we couldn’t. Neither one of us could touch Louise’s neck or ears or wrists. In the end, we just tossed everything over her robe and then jumped back to the doorway. Her lap looked like a pirate’s treasure chest, with necklaces and bracelets
spilling all over her, and I thought, who wouldn’t like that?
“Okay then,” Angel said. “Let’s get digging.”
“Wait,” I said. “You can’t just dump a person in the ground….”
“Why not? I bet there are dozens of people buried right in that backyard.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Fifth-grade history. The Wampanoag Indians were here on Cape Cod hundreds of years before any Pilgrims ever landed. You think the Wampanoags or the Pilgrims called up the undertaker and said, ‘Come and get him!’ whenever one of them died? Nope, straight in the ground.”
“She’s Louise, Angel! She’s not a dog and she’s not a goat and she’s not a Pilgrim and she’s not a Wampanoag.” I folded my arms across my chest and narrowed my eyes, to show her I meant business.
Angel shook her head like I was the sorriest person she’d ever met. Then she made a big show of huffing off into the kitchen and pulling out the phone book. I followed her because I wanted to know who she was calling. Also, because the Febreze was wearing off.
“Yes, hello…Bradford Funeral Home? I’d like some information,” Angel said in a voice I’d never heard her use before. It was the voice of someone who actually could be named Angel. “It’s for a history report. I’m researching how bodies were prepared for burial on Cape Cod in the olden times. Before undertakers.” She shot me a look. “Not Wampanoag Indians and not the Pilgrims, though. Other people.” Then she listened and said, “I see,” and “Fascinating!” a couple of times. Finally she said, “Okay, thanks. I bet I’m going to get an A on my report!” and flipped off the phone.
“Well…?” I asked.
“We have to bury her deep,” Angel said firmly.
“All that? That was their advice?”
“No that’s my advice. We had to bury that goat twice. The first time, it wasn’t deep enough and the neighborhood dogs got to it. What a mess, parts all over—”
“Angel! What did they say?”
“Who? The funeral home? Nothing. They weren’t there—it was just a message machine. Now let’s go bury her!”
Summer of the Gypsy Moths Page 4
