by Robert Price
Chapter Six
The blue sweater brought out her eyes. The yellow sweater made her face appear pleasantly flushed. But the brown sweater fit snug and made her look alluring. This was the sweater that would turn some heads and perhaps land her in conversations instigated for no other reason than to flirt. Melanie tucked her black hair behind her ears. Pushing her shoulders back, her breasts firmly rose up under the tight sweater. “There. Perfect.”
In the mirror, Melanie could see over her shoulder and out the window. As a girl, and up until recently, that is before the acreage across the street sold, she had loved this particular reflection: In one view, she could see both her own face and the landscape—the road, the fields leading down to Parker River, the tree-lined river bank and beyond that, the hills of her hometown, Newbury.
But that pastoral landscape was gone now.
Melanie leaned closer to the mirror and smoothed her dark eyebrows. Out of the corner of her eye, and in the image of the window in the mirror, she watched a pickup truck wobble down a muddy makeshift driveway to the waiting foundation of the third house being built in the old field across the street. For some reason, when she had sold the field two years earlier, she never imagined that they would actually build on it.
At least I’m not as crazy as Auntie Casey, selling her land to that other even greedier builder. She smoothed the front of her sweater. Fifteen houses in a cul-de-sac!
Melanie’s aunt, Mrs. Hubbard, was her mother’s sister. These two sisters, with the maiden name of Quinn, were from one of the oldest families in town. In 1635, a young Puritan ancestor from Boston named Samuel Quinn paddled up Plum Island Sound with a handful of settlers to found the town of Newbury, Massachusetts. Since then, and until the Second World War, it seemed that either a Quinn or a Quinn relative owned most of the farmland around Newbury. Those days had passed. But still, Melanie’s mother, her aunt and cousin Billy’s father, Uncle William, each inherited sizable sections of the Quinn Farm when Melanie’s grandfather had died. Uncle William, the oldest, inherited the bulk of the farm. Aunt Casey, Mrs. Hubbard, the oldest daughter, inherited the family farmhouse and the haying fields, plus a smaller field along Quinns Way. Much to Mrs. Hubbard’s husband Edward’s chagrin, she deeded that field to Tom shortly after his birth.
Wonder what will happen to that last piece of land Auntie Casey had saved for Tom, Melanie thought as she slid on her shoes. It’s gotta be worth a bundle now.
Melanie’s mother, Barbara, the youngest Quinn of that generation, inherited the leftover property, the pieces below Old Town Hill and toward the Parker River. Then Melanie’s mother married Eugene Griffin, a man from another old Newbury farming family. The Griffins had a history of difficulties—alcohol, gambling and debts—that kept them from holding onto their land. Even with those losses, however, when Melanie’s mother married her father, they combined their landholdings and ended up with close to twenty acres, not enough to farm for a living, but not bad for 1960’s Newbury either. When Melanie and her brother Tony’s parents died—their father from drinking and their mother shortly thereafter from breast cancer—the bulk of the property went to Tony, the oldest male in the family. Like her mother had before her, Melanie got the leftovers; the old Griffin family house and four acres, three of which she had sold two years ago and were now being built upon.
Melanie turned to face the window and sighed at the sight of the new construction. She pulled the shade down and gave herself a short pep talk: “So what if they build. Tony and Billy were right—it was smart of me to sell that land. And like they said, I still have this place. Besides …” she said, turning back to the mirror, “I look great!” Satisfied, she now turned to survey the room and thought, I wonder if he’ll show up?
Although she felt that Julian had been out of line when she called to explain about Tom’s death—flirting the way he did—still, she blushed when she thought of it. She had always had a crush on him.
Melanie’s first memory of Julian was from ninth grade English class, when their tyrannical teacher, Mrs. Arnbuckel, scolded him for poking her cousin Tom in the back with a pencil. Julian, with dorky glasses and a flowery Southern-accent, was the new kid in town. As punishment for poking Tom and disrupting the class, Mrs. Arnbuckel brought Julian to the front of the room and had him read a Robert Frost poem aloud. When he read, Julian exaggerated his Southern accent to sound like a backwoods hillbilly. “Two roads diverge in a yeller ward.” Melanie fell for him right then and there.
She re-checked the sheets on the bed and smoothed a quilt over them.
Ten years ago, when Tom told her that Julian had married a foreign woman in a foreign country, she secretly hoped their marriage would fail. Then, five years later, she hosted a big Christmas party. Tom, who was visiting from Arlington, Virginia, and considering a move back to the Boston area, came to the party and invited his old high school friends, too. Julian arrived without his wife. Melanie made a move on him and drunkenly took him to bed that night. Two years ago, around the same time she had quit drinking alcohol, she heard that Julian’s wife had left him. Melanie called under the pretext of consoling him. That night began a series of long, sometimes quite personal, phone conversations—conversations that led nowhere.
The other morning, however, when she called to tell him about Tom’s death, she heard a genuine longing in his flirtatious voice. After he asked what she was wearing—and after she ignored the question—he whispered that he remembered the scent of her perfume.
Melanie touched a fingertip of rose oil behind each ear before returning the small, round glass bottle to the top of the dresser. Her cell phone chirped from under a pile of folded clothes on the chair next to the bed. Julian? She had asked him to call with his plans. But he hadn’t. He’s an artist, she reasoned. They’re all a little flakey. Unfamiliar with the number on the caller ID, she picked up the cell phone and, flipping her hair back, answered singing, “Hello, this is Mel.”
“Mel, why are you still home?” her cousin, Billy Quinn, yelled.
She held the phone away from her ear. “Billy, where are you calling from?” Both Billy and his wife, Jeannine, annoyed her. And she thought they spoiled their three young daughters.
“We’re just turning up Quinns Way now.”
On the other hand, Melanie knew Billy and Jeannine felt a sense of responsibility toward her, and that was helpful at times. Since the death of her mother, shortly after graduating from high school, Billy, Jeannine and Melanie’s brother, Tony, had watched with fear as Melanie slowly descended into the isolated and unmanageable life of an alcoholic. They bailed her out of jail after being arrested for fighting with another woman in a bar. They hired lawyers to defend her in court in a drunken driving case. And when she finally lost her license for over a year for a second DUI conviction, they shared the burden of carting her around town when she needed a ride. Later, it was Billy and Tony who found her at the end of her last binge, hiding in her upstairs bedroom, unable to function, afraid to descend the stairs, surrounded by empty bottles and pots and pans full of her own pee. They dragged her to Baldpate Hospital for detox. And when she was finally dried out, it was Billy and Tony who sifted through her affairs and discovered the financial wreckage. They convinced her that her debts were so extreme that the only way to pay her back taxes, keep the old house and hold onto a bit of family heritage was to sell the land across the street.
“Whose phone is this?” If she had known it was going to be Billy, she would have let it ring. Now sober for two years, she was tired of him always watching over her.
“It’s Jeannine’s, for Christ’s sake. Listen, are you coming or what?”
“I’m just leaving. Did you bring the kids with you?”
“No, Jeannine’s parents are bringing them by later. We didn’t want them at the funeral.”
Melanie heard Jeannine gasp in the background.
“Holy shit ...” Billy swerved his huge silver pickup to avoid hitting a woman who was reaching
into the open back door of her car. He drove straight through a deep puddle and sent a spray of water flying in the woman’s direction.
“What happened?”
“You’ll be there, right?” Billy barked, issuing an order.
“I’m leaving riii …”
Without waiting for an answer he snapped his phone shut.
This was another reason why Melanie tried to avoid Billy’s calls. Like Tony, he would call, tell her what to do, and then hang up. The hopeful mood she had enjoyed before the call now sank. She hated being treated like one of his employees. His voice ringing in her ear—You’ll be there, right?—awakened her insecurities as well as a feeling of guilt for having avoided her aunt, both during the past months and now, most recently, in the days after Tom’s death. She would go to the house and face her aunt, stomach full of butterflies. As she pulled on a tweed blazer, she felt like a nervous actor called out to center stage.
