Yet this niggled enough at him that he thought he had better raise the issue with Cassie. One night as they drew back the bedspread in what he still thought of as his parents’ bedroom, he said, ‘We don’t have to live in this house, you know.’
Cassie drew her white cotton nightgown down over her hips – he was happy to see she’d gained a little weight during the autumn. She climbed into bed, and picked up her book, an Anne Tyler novel, one of many paperbacks of hers that were slowly edging out his mother’s hardbacks on the little bedside bookstand. ‘I know that,’ she said.
‘I still don’t really understand why my father changed his will and left it to me. I thought maybe he was mad at Gary because of the dynamite, but if you’re mad at somebody, you don’t usually leave them a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in stock.’
‘He wasn’t mad at Gary.’
‘He might have been if he’d known about the gay thing.’
Cassie shook her head. ‘He wouldn’t have been surprised. I think he had an idea about that.’
‘Really?’
She nodded with certainty. ‘One night last year I went to the movies in Fennville and ran into Gary. The Jenkinses were there and seemed to think we’d gone to the movies together. When that old witch saw your father the next day she made some remark – you know, how maybe I was going out with another of his sons now. Apparently your father said, “Sorry, Gloria, you’ll have to find your gossip somewhere else. Gary’s not a going-out-with-women type.” ’
‘Really?’
‘Really. I don’t think his will change was about Gary at all.’
‘You mean it was about me?’
‘Could have been,’ said Cassie. She looked uncomfortable.
‘In what way? Just what are you trying to say?’
‘How can I put this? I know he was glad I was back because he said so. He came round one day just after Christmas last year.’
‘You never told me that.’
‘You never asked,’ she said easily. ‘Don’t pretend you’ve told me everything, either. Anyway, he seemed especially pleased when he learned I wasn’t with Ronald any more. He said you were single again, too. He didn’t say anything explicit, but I got the feeling he was hoping we’d get back together. And maybe that’s why he left you the house.’
Michael looked rueful. ‘I’m stumped. If that’s what he thought why didn’t he tell me?’ He thought of his father’s last letter and yet again regretted not replying to it. ‘I just don’t understand.’
‘Maybe he thought he’d tell you in person. He told me you were going to be here for a while in the summertime. You know, on vacation.’
‘He did?’ Michael was flabbergasted. And he was never able to discover why his father had said this, how he had known that Michael was planning to come and see him. I will never understand the man, he thought, but was determined at last to appreciate him. For in clearing up so many other mysteries, he had come to conclude, inevitably he discovered some new ones.
‘Anyway,’ he said, getting into bed himself, ‘you sure you like living in this house?’
‘You got somewhere else in mind where we could live?’
‘No, it’s just—’
‘Good,’ she said firmly. ‘Because I love this house and always have. As far as I’m concerned this is where we’re going to live. And raise our children.’
‘Our children?’
She looked at him with a warmth that touched his spine. ‘Don’t get your hopes up. I’m pretty old. But those two—’ and she pointed towards the hall, in the direction of the bedrooms, once Gary’s and Michael’s, where Jack and Sally were now sleeping – ‘are your children too now. They need a Daddy, you know.’
This helped him, for he had been wondering what role to assume in addition to that of their mother’s lover. Ancient family friend? Mild avuncular figure? Sally was precocious, and developing a fine line in sarcastic rebuke: for a brief while she perversely called him ‘Pop’ until Cassie managed to persuade her to desist. It was March before he knew she thought he was okay, and that only when she confided this to Nancy Sheringham’s youngest daughter.
As for Jack, Michael had interested him in fishing, and he planned to take him in summer up the north branch of the Still, wading on its soft, sandy bottom just up from the wooden bridge, now rebuilt, at Happy Valley. Jack knew now that his father had drowned – Cassie reasoned that if she didn’t tell him, a classmate at school would be bound to, or a nosy parker like Mrs Jenkins. Jack had not made the connection yet between his father’s death and the man who had been threatening Michael on the riverbank; this was one home truth that Michael and Cassie decided could wait a while.
With the boy, Michael tried always to be gentle, and he never lifted his hand to him: if Jack misbehaved he simply talked to him, firmly but without temper. And when Jack hit out – at him, or more often at his sister – Michael would envelop him in his arms until the boy’s anger turned.
Such episodes were becoming more infrequent, though when thwarted in some wish or other, Jack could still flare up, with a malign look that would surface in his eyes and seemed to Michael to be pure Duverson. There was hate there, then, of the kind that could kill a man. When he saw this, Michael would suppress his own memories, and his own internal shudder too. For the boy’s sake, for the sake of Cassie, and for what he figured was his own sake as well, he would try to love the boy as best he could.
Acknowledgements
THE AUTHOR WOULD like to thank Don Calvert, Pat Elder, Peter Keating and Candia McWilliam for advice and information.
Stillriver Page 44
