The Dearly Departed (34 page)

“Not that I'm defending Emily Ann, but she wasn't gossiping per se. She thought she'd found the missing piece of the puzzle—that my father didn't tell me about his engagement . . . because he wasn't engaged.”

“That's great! So you and I were not out of the loop after all. We weren't the last to know. We weren't the total strangers to our parents that we thought we were.”

“Something like that,” said Fletcher.

Sunny got to her feet.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Home.”

“To do what?”

“I don't know—look around, pull out some drawers, look for signs.”

“Of what?”

“True love. Monogamy. Matrimony.”

“I think . . . wouldn't you have found that by now? Wouldn't there be some engraved invitations or caterers' menus or, at the very least, a list of deejays lying around?”

“Not if they were going to slip away and have a quiet ceremony before a justice of the peace. Just the two of them.”

“But wasn't your mother very social? Wouldn't she have wanted a big wedding, with all her friends and a party at the country club?”

Sunny returned to the green bench and sat down heavily. “That would be a little awkward, wouldn't it? Especially if she'd slept with every man on the guest list.”

“Whoa, Sun. C'mon. Don't believe everything you hear. Consider the source: Emily Ann Grandjean. Via me.
Me!
Deaf to nuance. I could have it all wrong. And Emily Ann is extremely literal. Probably this dame said something like, ‘Margaret was perfect for the lead in
Same Time Next Year,
' and Emily Ann took that to mean, Margaret herself was no stranger to adultery.”

“That's not being literal. That's the opposite of being literal. That's making a giant deductive, presumptuous, small-minded, puritanical, Republican leap.”

“Okay, bad example. I'm trying to unring the bell, as we spin doctors say.”

“Well, you're doing a shitty job of it. Emily Ann told you my mother was the town strumpet and you believed her, hook, line, and sinker.”

“Look, maybe I bought into Emily Ann's report, but that's because of her rhetorical skills. She's amazing at framing an issue and presenting the salient—”

“No she's not! All you ever complain about is what a dud she was on the stump.”

Fletcher sighed. He tried to put an arm around Sunny, but she moved away. “C'mon,” he said, “I thought we were a team. I thought we were in this together.”

Sunny turned squarely, unhappily, toward him. “Explain to me, please, how we're in this together.”

“Your mother. My father. They're buried in the same plot, for God's sake. Isn't that enough of a statement to the outside world? Isn't that the ultimate wedding ceremony?”

“That's what I don't understand. Even if my mother played the field—even if she slept with a couple of guys over the years—so what? Can't she have a past? She made a public commitment to Miles. Why didn't that put the rumors to rest?”

Fletcher rubbed his nose with his fist, repeatedly. Finally, he said, “Emily Ann's impression—and I'm paraphrasing here—was that Miles and Margaret . . . had sex with each other in a nonexclusive, recreational mode.”

“Which means what?”

“On and off. When they weren't getting it from other people.”

“I don't believe it,” said Sunny. “Not my mother. She was a little mouse. At best, a late bloomer. You heard the eulogies: Every single speaker raved about her generous heart and her open door. To know her was to love her.”

“Apparently so,” said Fletcher.

Sunny pulled her visor down over her eyes, slumped, and crossed her arms over her chest.

“You okay?” He jiggled her knee. “Sunny?”

“I give up. No wonder everyone's been so nice to me. The charity lives on. Poor Sunny. It's hard enough losing a mother in a freak accident, let alone one who was the town pump.”

Fletcher said, “Why did I open my big mouth? Now you'll think even less of me than you already did.”

“I'm going home,” she said. “By myself. Back the way I came.”

“Are you sure? Do you want me to take your clubs and drive them over?”

“I've got them,” said Sunny. She stopped after a few yards. “The DNA test. You wanted to get that over with.”

“Another time,” he said. “No hurry.”

“Since when?”

“Since I'm working overtime to dig myself out of the hole I've just dug.”

“Give me a day or two,” she said.

“Or longer. Whenever.” Doesn't matter, he thought, then repeated aloud, “Are we sure it matters?”

She didn't respond, except to walk away. He watched her cross the footbridge, trudging like a disgraced caddie in retreat, across one fairway, then another.

He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Call me,” he shouted, but she didn't stop. On a distant green, men nodded solemnly as she passed. It must have been the seventeenth hole and the shortcut home, because seconds later she was gone.

S
he hadn't yet opened the sealed manila envelope bearing the medical examiner's return address and containing the deceased's personal effects. Randy Pope had tracked it down, in person, and found it misfiled in Concord. Regina brought the envelope to Margaret's house, along with a carload of empty cartons. “I have two hours of child care,” she announced. “Where do I start?”

“It
would
be nice if I didn't have to face a full closet every morning,” said Sunny.

“Done. You tackle something easier,” said Regina. “How about her books?”

“Better still, her record collection,” said Sunny.

“Anything I think you'd use goes on the bed. But I'm ruthless. Especially clothes, which I'll have to approve of.”

“I know,” said Sunny. “That's why I hired you.”

“The wigs—all that First Lady stuff: Out, correct? To the dump?”

“Agreed,” said Sunny. “And anything too scandalous and skanky for the poor box.”

Regina walked out to the first step of the porch and addressed the clouds. “Mrs. Batten? It's okay. Sunny's a little upset because she was the last to know. But she'll come around. Some of us are happy you had a fruitful sex life.”

She turned back to the house, gave Sunny a playful swat, and said, “Leave everything to me.”

Sunny remained on the glider, the State of New Hampshire's official envelope on her knees. After a minute, she emptied the contents onto her lap. Out slid only the ancient, small-faced Speidel with its gold-filled bracelet, its chipped crystal, its safety chain. And the ring—misinterpreted by Joey as a token of Miles's intentions—was the same one her mother had worn all of Sunny's life, the forlorn engagement symbol that John Batten didn't want back.

Regina called her name, then appeared in the open front door holding a bulky white garment bag. “First thing I tackled,” she said. “Faye's Bridal Finery. Wherever that may be.”

“Under the circumstances,” said Sunny, “maybe Faye will take it back.”

“Not these,” said Regina. She unzipped the bag. Inside were five child-size dresses—some cross-stitched, some smocked, some trimmed with lace or edged with braid—the most labor-intensive of Margaret's projects. There was a taffeta plaid, an organdy pinafore over black velvet, a pinwale red corduroy, an organza party dress of lavender sprigs on pale gray, its starched sash still holding a majestic bow.

“What she
used
to do with her evenings,” said Sunny.

“Take that back,” said Regina. She touched the white plastic buttons decorating a pink gingham shirtwaist. “Look at these.”

Sunny smiled. “Golf balls. She thought they would make me wear it; thought they might do the trick.” She turned up its hem. “Six inches wide. Ever hopeful, she'd make them extra deep so she could let them down as I got taller. I have this mental picture of her sitting in front of the TV, wearing her thimble, biting off threads.” Sunny slipped the organza party dress off its hanger and held it to her. “I think I was in third grade for this one—eight or nine, and still cooperative.”

“You wore all of these,” said Regina. “I remember you at birthday parties. So don't you worry about how cooperative you were. You never gave her a moment's grief.”

Sunny put the flowered dress back on its hanger and zipped up the bag. “If Robert were a girl, I'd give them to you,” she said.

“I wouldn't take them,” said Regina. “These were saved. These are for
your
girl, Sun.”

Joey was on the phone and smiled when he looked up, mistaking her grim expression for a reluctance to interrupt. He scrawled on his memo pad,
A.G.'s office—the kid who shot me has chix pox!!

She took his pen and wrote underneath it,
How long have you known about my mother?

Joey's reaction—apparent incomprehension—gave Sunny hope that the grapevine hadn't reached every resident of King George. He held up one finger, then snapped into the phone, “Send me the papers. I'll look them over. It'll depend on what my town counsel advises and what kind of mood I'm in.”

He smiled at her then—her ancient blue jeans were rolled up at her ankles, and her faded gray
PROPERTY OF KGRHS ATHLETIC DEPT
. T-shirt might have fit her at fifteen—but she didn't smile back. When she continued to pace in front of his desk, he leaned over and caught her by the wrist.

What's wrong?
he mouthed, then said gruffly to the party on the phone, “I wouldn't give much of a flying fuck about that, would I? Let him rub on calamine lotion. Or give him some oatmeal. My mother used to give us oatmeal baths when we itched.”

She saw, just above his Adam's apple, a spot of tissue dried to a shaving nick. She could also see that it was her behavior and not the State of New Hampshire that had put this puzzled and anxious look on his face.

“What happened?” he asked her before the receiver was even in its cradle. “What
about
your mother?”

She stared at the poster behind his head—
NEW HAMPSHIRE
'
S TOP 20 CHILD SUPPORT SCOFFLAWS
—as she recited in an overly modulated voice, “Fran Pope told Emily Ann Grandjean, who told Fletcher, who told me, that my mother was, essentially, the King George Jezebel. From which I—not to mention Fletcher—have deduced that their double funeral was a sham.”

“How so?”

“Their alleged engagement.”

“And you're asking me what?”

“For some goddamn confirmation.”

The phone rang but he didn't answer it. His prerecorded voice advised the caller to try Chief Loach at home. At the same time, a man in a business suit stuck his head in the door and asked if this was where one obtained building permits.

“Upstairs,” said Joey. He waited until the man was gone and the woman on the phone finished describing the irregularities of her powder-room walls and inquiring as to whether or not Joey did marbling or other
faux
techniques.

“
Do
you?” asked Sunny.

He closed his eyes; opened them as if it took energy he didn't have. “Where are you going with this funeral-as-sham nonsense? And what ever happened to
rest in peace
?”

“In other words, I'm right,” she said. “You're confirming that Miles Finn, entombed at my mother's side for all eternity, was nothing more than a foot soldier in her sexual army.”

“Who said that?”

“I told you: Mrs. Pope told Emily Ann, who went running to the ever frank Fletcher—”

“So Fletcher's the one who got you worked up about this? The guy who brags about having no knowledge of his father's private life? And he's certainly no authority on King George mating habits.”

Sunny put one foot up on the visitor's bench and retied the laces of a threadbare sneaker. “That may be true,” she said over her shoulder, “but he was happy enough to pass on Mrs. Pope's hearsay. And Fran Pope certainly has no trouble posthumously besmirching my mother as the loosest woman in the Players.”

Joey grimaced and pressed his lips together.

“This isn't funny! I'm pretty sure everyone at the funeral was thinking, Poor Miles. Terrible timing. Lousy luck. And poor Sunny. Too bad she doesn't have a clue.”

“ ‘The loosest woman in the Players'? Everything is relative. They're all old bags. Your mother was single. She went on dates. Maybe she played the field.”

“What about Miles?”

“Miles got around.”

“But with my mother?”

“Sure. Definitely.”

“I can't seem to find any hard evidence that they were getting married.”

“I'm sure they were,” said Joey. “I used to see them at The Dot, and sometimes at the movies. And they always had their heads together. They looked like they were having fun.”