Blessings (30 page)

So there it was, the ghost of her mother and herself, the enforced mother, the unwanted child. The sadness she had felt after that day had prepared her for the sadness she felt now, as though she had lost something by inches. After the funeral she had arranged for all the books in that room to be sent to a used-book store in New York.

The real estate agent’s car came slowly down the drive. It was a nice car, nicer than Meredith’s, which was designed for dragging horse trailers and edging up a snowy drive. They always had nice cars, real estate agents, in the same way the prettiest house in town was always turned into the funeral home. The pond was illuminated now, and the windows so clear that the glare was terrible when the car lights struck it. Skip and Nadine had worked for a week together to leave the place like this. Even the garage was empty now. Eric had helped Skip with the logistics of having a great deal of cash and no knowledge of where to put it or invest it. It was more difficult than you might imagine, to bank that much money in old bills without someone making a fuss.

“They act as though the poor boy has discovered the Lindbergh ransom,” her husband had said, walking around the pond with her, holding her hand.

That was another thing she had known: that the money was there. She had known that that boy was a nice boy, but never more so than when he had come to her and told her, like a confession, about all those boxes filled with bills in the attic. “I assume that’s what she wanted you to have,” she’d said. “That, and the Cadillac.” Meredith had found those boxes herself when she was a child, found them on one of those days when Mrs. Foster had let her go up into the attic. But of course it wouldn’t do to say anything to her mother, because then there would be questions and accusations and Mrs. Foster would get into trouble and so would she. Meredith had discovered, when she married, that she was wealthy, and, after her grandparents died, that she was rich. Now,
of course, she was richer still. She wondered what would happen to all the money when she was gone, the last of the Blessings, the last of the Cartons. Perhaps she would leave some of it to Bertram’s, or the hospital in Mount Mason.

The real estate agent was carrying a clipboard and a leather briefcase with gold initials monogrammed on the flap. Her mother had always hated conspicuous monograms. “What sort of person needs to be reminded of his own name?” she always said. She’d tolerate initials embroidered on the cuffs of men’s shirts, and the monogram on her linens that was white on white. But gilt? Never.

“Gorgeous,” said the real estate agent, a blonde with the eyes and coloring of a brunette. “Absolutely gorgeous. A postcard.”

“It is,” Meredith said, and meant it. The white house, the striped awnings, the brown barn, the silvery water, the green hills. Everyone who’d ever visited Blessings had felt it was a place apart, including her. When she had scattered her mother’s ashes from the little boat in the middle of the pond, she had expected them to glitter in the air the way Sunny’s had. But night had fallen by the time she had finally steeled herself to open the box, and the ashes were almost invisible against the darkness as they floated on the surface of the pond, then slowly fell through the water. There had been a heron on the far bank, its blue-gray blending into the lowering night sky, and it had reached out its great strong wings, bent its head toward the earth, and then swept away into the dark. She had raised her head to look at it, and when she had looked back down, the surface of the pond was undisturbed.

“There’s no substitute for these mature plantings,” said the real estate agent, scanning the rows of chrysanthemums.

“Do you think we should take down the sign at the end of the driveway?” Meredith said to the woman as she opened the front door.

“Why?”

“Well, I’m assuming the place won’t be called Blessings anymore.”

“No,” the woman said. “Leave it where it is. People love the idea of a place with a name.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A
NNA
Q
UINDLEN
is the author of three bestselling novels,
Object Lessons, One True Thing,
and
Black and Blue.
Her
New York Times
column “Public & Private” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, and a selection of those columns was published as
Thinking Out Loud.
She is also the author of a collection of her “Life in the 30’s” columns,
Living Out Loud;
a book for the Library of Contemporary Thought,
How Reading Changed My Life;
the bestselling
A Short Guide to a Happy Life;
and two children’s books,
The Tree That Came to Stay
and
Happily Ever After.
She is currently a columnist for
Newsweek
and lives with her husband and children in New York City.