“You’ve heard of her?” Colleen’s father asked.
Genevieve nodded. “The taste level is remarkable for the price point. And she has everything made in America. That is important to her.”
Colleen had not known that.
“Her name is Autumn?” Colleen’s father said.
There was something stiff in his tone. Colleen could hear Grannor’s sniff. Autumn? We do not know people with names like that.
Colleen suddenly wanted to defend the woman. She didn’t name herself. Her parents did, the parents who pushed her to make money for them. Wasn’t “Autumn” the sort of name people like that might name a baby?
“There’s no point in discussing this,” he said firmly. “Your mother and I promised that we would never attempt to discover anything about your origins, and I’m going to honor that promise to my grave, just as your mother did.”
Wasn’t that the sort of pledge that a celebrity family would demand? “But, Dad, it was her parents who insisted on the secrecy, not her. She was only fourteen.”
He stared down at his hands. They were a dentist’s hands, long-fingered and deft, nothing like the hands of any of his three children. “The Bannings are very good people.”
Where had that come from? “Yes, they are.”
“But we had to share the boys. They’ve even settled close to them.”
No, they settled near the O’Connells, Colleen wanted to say. They met Patty and Liz while visiting Grammy and Grampy. They like the Bannings, but they love the O’Connells.
“We made it work,” her father continued, “but it was such a relief not to have to face that with any other family for you. You felt more like ours because that’s what you were—ours. That’s why you and your mother were so close, that’s why you and she had a special bond.”
I was the only girl. That’s why we were close. Mary Pat had taught Colleen to cook, garden, and sew. She had been Colleen’s Girl Scout leader; she had helped her decide what to wear for homecoming and prom. They had been—they still were—mother and daughter. Nothing, nothing, could ever change that.
“To engage in such a search,” he continued, “would be a dishonor to her memory.”
“Dad, I don’t know. This is all so new. I’ve never thought about looking before.”
“We promised that we wouldn’t. We wouldn’t have gotten you if we hadn’t made that promise.”
This was the voice he had used when he had had to lay down the law with Sean or Finn. “I do not care what your friends are doing. In this family we do not do it.”
He had never had to use this voice with Colleen. So why was he acting as if she wanted to stay out past curfew riding motorcycles? She was not a child anymore.
What was the danger? Even if she had found a birth mother, weren’t she and her brothers gifts from God? What could ever change that?
Once when she had been growing up, she had suddenly been upset by the thought that she could have been raised in another home. She knew how the Bannings had called concerning their younger daughter’s pregnancy after an agreement had already been reached about the baby who would become Colleen.
“Of course we wanted him,” her mother had said, “but it only took us two seconds to know that we wanted you too. Even though neither of you were born yet, we wanted you both.”
Two seconds? Sometimes Colleen had counted it out, one one-thousand, two one-thousand, to see how long two seconds was.
She never questioned that this was her true home, that this was where she belonged. If she had gone to another family, it would have been a kidnapping. She would have been a foundling, a stolen child.
But it could have happened. One one-thousand, two one-thousand.
“So you could have said no?” she asked her mother once.
Her mother had heard the fear in her voice. “No, no, we couldn’t have. Jesus wouldn’t have let that happen.”
“But what if He was busy that day? What if He forgot? Daddy gets busy sometimes and forgets about things.”
“Jesus is never too busy to care about us. And don’t forget He had a mother. Mary was watching over us. She would have never let you go to another family.”
As an adult Colleen believed in free will, that people made their own choices. But she also believed that grace and faith put goodness in your heart and gave you the strength to follow wherever that goodness led, even when it meant, as it had for her parents, having two newborns less than six months apart.
Maybe that was enough, knowing that, being so sure of it. Maybe there was no reason to be wondering about herself as a fetus. What she had was enough. Even with her father and brothers having new wives, it was enough.
On the other hand—and wasn’t there always another hand?—if she believed with all her heart that her parents were her parents and nothing would ever change that, what was the harm in opening this door?
She didn’t know the answer.
Chapter 8
The family was staying a second night in Carlsville because Norton thought that they should gather at the old house to have Grannor’s will read. Having learned that inheritances were not considered part of community property in a divorce settlement, Norton was far less grief-stricken over his mother’s death than he might have been otherwise.
After another motel-provided cold breakfast, they drove to the part of town where the trees were the tallest. The largest car that her father had been able to rent had six seat belts. Now that Genevieve, her brothers, and their wives were here, Colleen had to ride in her uncle’s car, sitting in the back seat between her two cousins with Aunt Laura in the front passenger seat.
The Ridge family house was an imposing Federal structure built of red brick with white columns supporting a deep front porch. Everything about it was symmetrical. The broad steps were in the middle of the porch; the double front doors were in the middle of the façade, with two pairs of identically spaced windows on either side of it.
“What do you think that fence is worth?” Aunt Laura asked as the car pulled up to the curb.
The property was surrounded by an intricate wrought-iron fence, full of scrolls and swirls, a design that was repeated in the massive driveway gates at the side of the house.
“Close to six figures, I’d guess,” Norton answered. “I’m surprised no one’s tried to steal it.”
Ben’s father was waiting at the curb to open the car door for Aunt Laura. Still as trim as Ryan and Ben, he was wearing a classic Southern blue seersucker suit; his shirt was white; his bow tie had a navy and pink stripe.
Colleen’s cousin Will got out of the car. She started to hitch her way across the seat, but in an instant, a hand was there to help her, allowing her to slide easily across the seat and pivot into standing.
But it wasn’t Will. It was Ben who had his hand out. He was in a tan gabardine suit, made less formal by a silky black T-shirt. Yesterday he, like the rest of the men in his family, had worn a dark suit. He had only brought a carry-on bag down from Charlottesville with him. He must keep clothes at his parents’ house. Or he had borrowed from his brother. They were close in size.
All the girl cousins on her mother’s side had sisters, and they were always borrowing clothes and shoes from one another. There was no one in Colleen’s family whom she could borrow from. She was too short; her shoulders were too narrow; her feet were too small.
She was adopted.
She needed a friend. She needed to talk to someone about this. She supposed that would annoy Ben, the way she needed to talk to people about things. He was so self-reliant.
Were you jealous of all my friends back then? He shouldn’t have been.
She thanked him for helping her out of the car. “I wasn’t expecting to see you.”
“I wasn’t expecting to come.”
“But?”
“First Dad asked me if
I was coming, then five minutes later Ryan did, so I figured that I’d better turn up.”
Compared to the fence, the porch railing was simple with softly shaped white pickets supporting a continuous top cap. It was the porch where her parents had seen her for the first time.
She had heard the story over and over. If Sean had been a girl, her parents would have named the baby after the two grandmothers, “Eleanor Eileen.” When he had turned out to be a boy, they had held on to the name, hoping for more children.
As soon as they had gotten the call that the second child was born, they had scooped up Sean and flown down to Georgia. A priest and a nurse were bringing the baby to Carlsville. The family didn’t want the Ridges to know even what state the baby had been born in.
The message only said that the baby was healthy. Her parents had to wait, not knowing if they had an Eleanor Eileen or a Phineas Burchell. When they heard a much-awaited car stop in front of the house, both had hurried out the front door.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” her father had called out from this porch.
“You’ve got yourselves one fine little colleen,” the priest had answered.
Any plans to name her “Eleanor Eileen” instantly vanished. She was to be Colleen.
Colleen Marie Ridge. That’s who she had always been, who she was supposed to be.
But her life hadn’t begun on this porch. For a day or so she had been with other people. Did that other family regret having to give her up, or had they considered her a badge of shame and disgrace?
Why would anyone ever be ashamed of me?
One end of the porch was shadowed by climbing roses supported on a white trellis. Colleen had never seen the roses in full bloom; during her family’s spring visits the woody canes were sprouting new, tightly furled, light green leaves. She had heard how fragrant the roses were in the summer. “It’s like you’re walking through a cloud of perfume,” Nancy, Grannor’s longtime maid, used to say. The greenery was now covered with pink buds and small, half-opened frills of color, and as she climbed the porch steps, Colleen got a hint of a sweet spice. She wanted to go bury her face in the roses, but she heard a sharp rapping from inside one of the dining room windows. It was Aunt Laura, holding the heavy draperies aside with one hand, gesturing with the other, demanding that Colleen come inside.
Why couldn’t she stay out here? The morning sun was warm on the fading white floorboards, and the porch ceiling was painted sky blue. Ben was testing the chains on the porch swing, tugging at them, then gripping them and lifting his feet off the ground. They were still solid. She could sit there and swing, learning how roses smelled in early summer.
He came back to her side. “Go on in.” He motioned toward the door, but didn’t touch her. His hands were dusty from the chains of the swing. “Everything will be fine.”
Why had he felt that he needed to say that? What did he know? “Aren’t you coming?”
“No. I’ll be out here. You need to go in.”
The front doors were inset with long ovals of frosted glass. Beyond them was the wide center hall with an imperial staircase. Two separate flights of stairs descended from each side of the second floor, meeting at a half-landing, then flowing majestically downward in a broadening mahogany sweep. Although Grannor had hired a caretaker to check on the place, the house had a sad, musty smell. Colleen could hear the rattle of the old window air-conditioning units that sprouted irregularly from the windows on the sides and back of the house.
The carpet was gone from the dining room, but the rest of the furniture was still there. Fourteen chairs sat around the table, six chairs on either side, one at the head of the table, one at the foot. The set was too massive to have been shipped to the lake.
“Don’t get up, don’t get up,” Laura ordered the men who had started to rise when Colleen came in. Uncle Norton was at the head, Mr. Healy at the foot. Her family was sitting on the far side of the table. Six chairs, three couples. Once again there was no place for her.
Finn, dear Finn, her almost-twin, noticed and started to stand. She motioned for him to stay where he was. Ryan Healy was holding out the chair next to his own.
Why had she ever thought he and Ben looked alike? Ben’s features were more crisp, his cheekbones more clearly defined, and his eyes were wider. Ryan was a good-looking man, but no one had ever paid him to model clothes. The camera loved Ben.
As had she.
On the walls above the chair rail were hand-painted chinoiserie silk panels, water lilies and dragonflies on a yellow background. In a niche carved into the wall between the windows there had always been a three-foot-high blue-and-white Chinese jar. In the spring the jar would be filled with freshly cut forsythia branches. The niche was now empty, and the shelf was dusty.
Tim Healy cleared his throat to speak over the sound of the air conditioner. “So, everyone is here except Miss Davenport, is that correct?”
Aunt Laura fussed, trying to excuse her daughter.
“We did not write Mrs. Ridge’s will,” Mr. Healy continued. “After her husband died, we had her consult with a firm in Atlanta that specializes in estates with family properties.”
Colleen was only half-listening. She tilted her head back. The crystal chandelier had five branching arms hung with teardrop prisms and pendants. The electrified candles rose up from ornate bobeches, and there were swags of beads and other embellishments that Colleen didn’t know the names of. She thought it was ugly, but since it was made of hand-cut Czech crystal, it was probably very valuable.
“When the estate-tax law changed, we encouraged her to rethink everything, but she refused. So, except for token bequests, everything is going directly to the six grandchildren.”
“What?” Norton and Laura spoke at once.
Colleen was listening now.
“That’s fine with me,” Colleen’s father said.
“So we aren’t getting anything?” Laura demanded.
“Mrs. Ridge felt that you were adequately provided for by your father’s will.”
“But that was years ago.” Clearly Laura had exhausted whatever resources she had inherited then. “It is going per stirpes, isn’t it? Kim is getting one-third, isn’t she?”
Colleen looked at her. That phrase had rolled right off her tongue. So Jason wasn’t the only one who knew about this.
“What’s per stirpes?” Finn asked.
Ryan Healy’s explanation was similar to what Jason’s had been. Basically the difference was whether Kim would get one-third of the estate and Colleen and her brothers each would get one-ninth, or whether every grandchild would get one-sixth.
“Her will is not per stirpes. Mr. Will, as the oldest grandson, inherits the family Bible, all the family’s military decorations, and a set of sterling flatware that was buried in the apple orchard during the Civil War. The two granddaughters are the only ones with an interest in the jewelry and one silver coffee service that was also in the orchard. Other than that, Mrs. Ridge intended that her assets be divided among the six equally. The specific distribution is complex, but that is the intention.”
“That’s not right. It’s simply not right,” Laura snapped. “I’m going to challenge that. You can contest a will, can’t you?”
“Of course, Mrs. Davenport, and you should consult your own counsel, but I caution you that this will was very carefully drafted.”
“But—”
“Stow it, Laura,” Norton ordered. The one thing that made him happy about this will was the fact that his sister was unhappy. “It is what it is. The only difference is that the one-third would have given Kim a few more years before she runs herself into the ground. And she’ll be getting half the jewelry. That has to be worth a bundle.”
“Why don’t you let me continue?” Mr. Healy said. “Except for the jewelry, the estate is to be divided into three pots. In the first pot are this house and all
the silver, china, and art specified in various inventories. Everything that came down through the families is in that pot. All of that is to be appraised and an equivalent amount of more liquid assets, the cash, stocks, and securities, is to be placed in the second pot. The remaining, the third pot, is the residual estate.”
“If they are all inheriting equally,” Colleen’s father asked, “why this business of three pots?”
“Because”—Mr. Healy paused, looking around the table—“the beneficiaries of the first pot are William, Jeffrey, and Kimberly, and the second, which I assure you will be of equal monetary value, goes to Sean, Colleen, and Finn. The residual estate is divided equally.”
Colleen was puzzled. What was in the first pot? She couldn’t remember.
Mr. Healy continued, “Will, Jeff, and Kim will receive the real property and tangible personal property that Mr. and Mrs. Ridge inherited from the Ridge and Burchell families while Sean, Finn, and Colleen will get a monetary equivalent.”
Everything inherited from the families? This house, the silver, the china, the crystal…were she and her brothers to get none of that? She must not be understanding this right.
“Is that what the business with group A and group B are about?” she asked. “What’s the difference between groups and pots?”
“It is a little confusing,” Mr. Healy said, “and ‘pot’ is my term. The articles in the Group A inventory, the family heirlooms, are the first pot along with this house. They are all to be appraised and divided among Will, Jeff, and Kim. The second pot will have the liquid equivalent of appraisal, and you and your brothers will split that. Then the items in the Group B inventory and any remaining money will become a part of the residual estate which all six of you will share.”
So Group A had been all the items Ben and Leilah had put on the dining room table. There had been platters and bowls, pitchers and tea urns, most of it sterling, swirling with Victorian embellishments or elegant with Federal lines. Group B had been more contemporary and had had many, many fewer items.
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