Isabella Moon (43 page)

“Why are you such a bitch?”

“I’m just trying to return the favor, lover. You should listen to me because you’re certifiable,” she said. “You need someone who understands.”

“Francie understands me,” he said. Such an early confrontation was going to ruin his whole day, or what was left of it anyway. And from Lillian’s funeral to the late night romp with a newly invigorated Janet, the previous thirty-six hours had wrecked him. He was also out of coke.

“You just stick with that story,” Janet said. “I’ll be back tonight and I’ll bring some dinner.” She smiled gently, pityingly. He didn’t think he liked Janet in a pitying mood. The incongruity of it frightened him.

As she left the room, she said over her shoulder, “I’m calling my house-cleaning girl, too. Stay out of her way, okay?”

Paxton made himself some coffee and retreated back into the guest room. Every so often Janet’s nasty little dog came snuffling at the door, but he ignored it. He could hear the cleaning woman cursing quietly to herself as she made her way up and down the hallway. Janet must have told her someone was there because she didn’t even bother rattling the doorknob.

He lay on the bed, flipping through cable channels. There was nothing on but late afternoon soap operas and Jerry Springer, then Oprah, on whose show some underwear model-cum-actress was hawking her new organic frozen food line. The boredom made him grateful for his own work. There were probably fifty things he needed to deal with in his own office. But the farm and breeding operation would do okay without him for a few days more. Francie needed his full attention.

He called her cell phone twice and got her voice mail. Each time it picked up, he was almost fooled that it was her and his stomach lurched. He knew her mother’s number by heart as well. But he’d lost his nerve. He couldn’t bear to call her there.

After a couple of hours he heard the back door slam behind the unseen cleaning lady. For the first time in a long time he was unbearably lonesome. Hunger gnawed at his stomach. Except for those few bites of ice cream, he couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten. He knew that Janet would be back soon and that she would bring food. But he didn’t want to see her again. At least not anytime soon. While he was no longer worried that she was going to fall apart, he did have some concern that she might start working on him again, making him some kind of project, like her house and her insurance company and her high-maintenance wardrobe.

In the end, after foraging for food in Janet’s kitchen and finding nothing worth eating, he decided to call his mother and let her know he was on his way home, no matter what he might find there.

46

AS FAR AS
Freida Birkenshaw knew, she had been the only one in her small group of friends who had married for love. Betsey Talbot and Mary George Watterson had been her closest friends, the ones with whom she’d grown up in the valley. Neither one had even ever met her other girlhood friends, the overbred Europeans she’d spent two stressful years with at finishing school in Montreaux. She hadn’t known and hadn’t cared what tatty royalty that bunch eventually sold themselves to. But she had walked down the aisle ahead of Mary George as she was delivered into the gnarled and liver-spotted hands of one of Saul Watterson’s biggest creditors, and had wept with Betsey at the doctor’s office up in Lexington when she found out she was pregnant by a feed salesman who made regular calls at her uncle’s store.

The finishing school, with its classes in flower-arranging and French and party-hosting, was supposed to be (along with her family’s money) Freida’s ticket out of the valley. And her mother had almost convinced her that it was her duty to find herself some impoverished count or crusty diplomat who would whisk her out of their backward little valley and off to some damp, romantic county seat or town house on a crumbling European square. But Freida had been home for Easter break that second spring and helped a suntanned and grinning Millar Paxton Birkenshaw unload a temperamental roan stallion that her father had bought at auction. The next week, her mother had to threaten her with another year at the school to get her to stay through graduation.

Undistinguished but smart, Millar was making a name for himself in the horse breeding business. He wasn’t interested in racing horses, just breeding and selling. Freida knew that he reminded her mother too much of the origins of her own family, and the smear of commercialism that had kept her out of the upper echelons of Carystown society all her life. She’d wanted Freida to overcome the prejudice that she couldn’t. Of course, Freida eventually did, but it was on her own terms.

Freida and Millar had spent a childless twenty years together at Bonterre when she found herself pregnant. The night she passed a squalling, blanket-wrapped M. Paxton Birkenshaw, Junior, into his father’s arms and saw the delight in his eyes, she was filled with a kind of happiness that she had never known she could experience. But it was the explosive and finite kind; somehow, she had recognized it as the last truly happy moment in her life.

Gone were the silent, lovely nights with Millar’s body spooned tightly against hers. Gone were her solitary walks over the pastures and the weeklong trips to the city. No longer was she the only one Millar sought out when he came in, dead-tired, from the work he loved to do on the farm.

All these years, she had tried to love the boy as much as she loved his father. And she had almost succeeded. Now, standing in her kitchen, dropping eggs and chicken livers into the mouth of the blender for the pâtélike custard that Paxton loved, her hips and lower back screaming with pain, she felt that her life had been filled with almosts: her son was
almost
normal, her husband had
almost
lived long enough to turn the troubled boy into a decent man, she and Millar had
almost
doubled her family’s fortune, she had
almost
made the Birkenshaw name the most respected name in the valley, she had
almost
saved her beautiful boy.

She never cried anymore the way she had in that doctor’s office with Betsey Talbot, whose baby had been a girl and was now in Maryland, married with two teenage children of her own. Freida never spoke of her shame at her son’s failures. She had just thrown one more luncheon or spent more time around the stables, where she made the grooms nervous. Millar had never known how his son turned out. He hadn’t been with her to hand over that ridiculous check to the family of the girl who claimed that Paxton had raped her, or held Paxton in his arms as he begged forgiveness for “the last time, I promise.” She had been left to deal with the destruction all alone.

How long had it been since she had cooked a meal for herself or anyone else? Flora made her simple meals now—light custards and plain chicken and soups whose savors were lost on her useless taste buds and constantly sour stomach—but there had been years and years of dinner parties and picnics and incidental celebrations. She didn’t miss the company, the men and women who came to the farm to cajole her to buy or sell horseflesh, and she had little desire to see friends from town or state politicians who came to eat her food and attempt to curry her favor and thus fill their pockets with her money. But she did miss the thrill of composing a meal as though it were her own precious symphony. Her two years in Europe had given her a taste for real food, and she had been a careful student. Millar had joshed her about showing off her “fancy French ways,” but of course he had eaten every bite that was put in front of him, and more. The doctor had been too obsequious to warn him away from Freida’s béchamel sauces and custards and thick, butter-sautéed beefsteaks sawn from the several local steers they had slaughtered each year. Between the truck farmers and her own gardens, she had surrounded herself with an abundance of food. Now, many of those farmers were long dead and she was dying of not only emphysema, but a pernicious, painful cancer that should have finished her off long ago.

As she hobbled about the kitchen assembling the meal, she felt a surge of new purpose, or old purpose, really. It seemed to her as though she’d been on a long, long trip and had only just returned to find everything where she’d left it: the ramekins on a high upper shelf of the dish pantry, the shaky stepping stool she’d meant to replace five years ago (how had Flora put up with it for so long?), the drawer filled only with whisks and spatulas of every size, the sturdy KitchenAid mixer that Millar had bought for her sitting beneath its quilted hood, the bank of cabinets filled with cast-iron and porcelain cookware that she’d ordered from France back when it first became fashionable in the sixties. It was all there, waiting for her.

Flora had had no objections to being sent off for the rest of the day. She had taken the grocery list to the store, brought back the things Freida requested, and gone out again, mumbling about her niece needing some looking after. Freida waited to see if she would say anything about the sheriff’s search of the house, but Flora had remained her stubborn, reticent self. The subject of Paxton had become like a wall between them. Flora had never criticized her for the way she’d raised Paxton, probably because she was just as responsible, and they both knew it. Freida knew that Flora had probably hidden the scarf, but it didn’t matter.

After three agonizing hours, Freida’s work was done. It went slowly because she had to stop several times for oxygen and hadn’t taken any of the Oxycodone drops she usually took in the afternoon, because she wanted to be sharp for the cooking of Paxton’s supper. It wasn’t an evening for mistakes. The peppered beef tenderloin section rested beneath a towel beside the oven, the mashed potatoes sat waiting to be refreshed with garlic sauce just before she served them, the ingredients for the spinach soufflé were ready to be assembled, and the chicken liver timbales had begun to bake. The only shortcut she’d taken was with the bread. Her hands—her poor, lovely hands that Millar had often lifted to his lips and kissed so passionately, so teasingly—no longer had the strength to knead and form bread dough, so she’d used the vile Japanese bread machine that Paxton bought her two Christmases previous. And dessert? Peaches (alas, canned) with raspberry puree. Though she didn’t know if they would get to dessert.

When she was finished, she took the elevator upstairs, anxious as always that the thing would stop mysteriously and she would suffocate and die without anyone knowing where she was. The contractor had assured her many times that the tiny elevator was well-ventilated, so suffocation was impossible, but, still, the claustrophobic space unnerved her.

She lay down on her bed and closed her eyes, meaning only to take a brief nap to calm the frantic beating of her heart. She slept deeply, dreaming of her mother, who looked achingly young and lovely in a pale blue frock that Freida remembered from her mother’s wardrobe. But her mother was angry, her olive skin flushed with heat so that she seemed to Freida to glisten and sparkle in the spreading moonlight. The very sky seemed to be filled with her mother’s shouts, and Freida could see her father, looking like a shadow in the moonlight, walking across the hill behind the house. Freida called to him, but he didn’t turn their way. In frustration, she lay on the ground, inching her body in her father’s direction. Finally, she was able to push off with her toes and leave her mother shouting after her as she sped along the ground feeling every undulation of the land, every pebble and rock and mole depression beneath her. As she picked up speed, her hair flew behind her like a tattered flag and her cheeks burned. When she crested the second hill, she saw her father again in the distance. Now there was another little girl at his side, and Freida felt a stab of jealousy. There should be no other little girls in her father’s life, no other small hand in his! And it was here that the sleeping Freida began to be afraid and the dream-Freida stopped just over the hill’s crest. She didn’t want to get any closer to her father, but especially not the little girl, whose bright yellow coat was like a patch of sunshine against the murky sky. Above the two of them, the moon began to rise quickly. Now the moon sagged above her, so heavy with light that it was like a pure clear liquid over everything it touched. The light was cold on her skin, and she curled herself into a ball for warmth, and when the sleeping Freida awoke, her body was stiff and the room, so warmed by sunlight in the afternoon, had grown cold with the dropping of the sun behind the hills.

Freida stretched out her limbs one at a time and rose from the bed with some difficulty. But before she could make her way over to the closet to find something suitable to wear for dinner, the telephone rang.

“Mama,” Paxton said.

What she heard in his voice broke her heart for the thousandth time.

“Come home, Paxton,” she said. Her hand shook as she hung up the phone.

47

“
YOU THINK WE’VE GOT ENOUGH
to pick up Birkenshaw?” Mitch asked in between bites of the burger they’d picked up at a drive-through.

Bill wasn’t hungry. His own stomach was nervous, but he hadn’t minded getting Mitch some food. In fact, he considered the restaurant stop a kind of charity.

“I expect that it won’t be too difficult. The judge won’t be too happy to see us again, though.”

“That’s what money will do for you,” Mitch said.

“It’s not the be-all and end-all,” Bill said. “There are other things a man needs.”

Mitch shrugged. Most things did seem to come easily to Mitch, Bill thought. The job wasn’t too tough or routinely dangerous, he had decent kids that he didn’t have to spend much time or thought on, and he was like candy to women. But, of course, there was that whole bit about walking in another man’s shoes.