There wasn't, Zina was convinced. Not with her. But as much as she hated to admit it, she was convinced that there was something wrong with Zack. If there weren't, he would be using that inheritance to buy a house and fill it with family.
Poor
Zack
...
She opened a cage and
lifted out an especially loud-
purring cat
who
was rubbing her cheek along the inside of the cage grid, begging for affection.
Lifting the animal gently, Zina carried her over to a vinyl-covered armchair in the get-acquainted room next to the one in which the cats were kept caged. She sat with the peach-and-gray cat in her lap, petting and stroking and reassuring it.
"I'll bet you're the one who always got to sit on the old man's lap, aren't you?" she murmured. "Your pu
rr
is too loud for anyone to ignore you. Poor little baby," she said, stroking the calico's chin. "Don't you know that cats are supposed to be detached and aloof? What's the matter with you?" she teased in her most melodious voice. "Do you want to ruin everyone else's reputation?"
She continued murmuring silly things, trying to soothe the achingly affectionate animal. The cat's purr was even louder than Cassie's, no small feat. Zina began to think of Cassie, and of Zack who wouldn't take Cassie, and in her revery she forgot to continue stroking the cat in her lap. The pale gray calico became impatient; she turned and nipped Zina's finger in an exquisitely tender reminder to keep on doing what she'd been doing.
"Well! Excuse
me,"
said Zina, smiling, and she resumed her stroking.
And then she stopped.
Stopped and heard, not the loud, rhythmic purring of the cat, but the sudden, wrenching pounding of her heart, banging against her rib cage.
D
é
ja vu.
She was experiencing d
é
ja vu.
Zina had had moments like this one before in her life, and she had always given them her absolute attention, because she believed that not all knowledge came from facts and figures and the observable world. Sometimes revelations flew fast and in a straight line just below the radar screen, or they hovered somewhere on the periphery, like a buoy on a foggy ocean.
This particular revelation came to Zina straight and fast, and it shot right through her heart.
Through the haze of her personal history, she remembered being perhaps four years old and sitting in her mother's rocking chair, the one that now sat in her own living room. She had a cat on her lap. The cat was purring and Zina was petting it, marveling at its soft fur. She wanted to keep it for her own, but it belonged to the old—very, very old—lady who sat on the sofa across from her, watching her with dark, beady eyes.
She remembered feeling brave enough to ask the lady, "Can Ginger stay here? She could sleep in my bed."
And she remembered her mother, pretty in bright blue, saying quickly, "Oh, honey, no, the cat won't be able to stay over for a visit. Aunt Louise is going back home to
Omaha
, far, far away, and she's taking Ginger with her. They're going on the train tomorrow, back to their home in
Omaha
."
"I don't want Ginger to go," Zina remembered saying. "She likes me."
Four-year-old Zina had stopped petting the cat while she argued her case, and Ginger, loud-purring Ginger, had suddenly turned her head and nipped Zina on her forefinger, exactly the way the gray calico had done a minute ago.
And the very, very old lady called Aunt Louise had smiled and said to a startled four-year-old Zina, "She likes you, Zina."
And her seven-year-old brother, fidgeting in the easy chair next to the sofa, had said, "Well, that's a stupid way to show it."
And her mother had told Zack to be quiet and to stop pounding his hands on the arms of the chair.
Zina. Zack. And Aunt Louise. They had been in a room together once, all three of them. So Aunt Louise, or Cousin Louise or whoever she was, had to have known that Zina existed.
So why was Zack so convinced that she hadn't? Could he simply have been trying to justify giving Zina half of an inheritance that was specifically meant for him? Very possibly; that would be like Zack.
Or maybe by the time that Aunt Louise changed her will, she wasn't as sharp as she once had been; she might have
been fuzzy about everything but her hostility toward her nephew.
Maybe.
Maybe she had nurtured old feelings of jealousy because her beloved Ginger had taken such a shine to young Zina.
Ridiculous.
Maybe she simply had wanted to substitute one male heir, any male heir, for the other, despised one. But hadn't she been a suffragist?
Maybe she just hadn't cared.
Maybe she just hadn't been able to remember Zina's name.
Maybe there was no inheritance.
Zina lifted her chin and stared straight ahead, seeing nothing, seeing everything. There was money, but maybe it wasn't from an inheritance.
Oh, my God.
What were the lawyers' names?
Oh, my God.
She placed her hand over her pounding heart; she felt as if she'd been shot.
Oh, my God.
Smith, Reston, and Upton.
"Wendy Hodene, you are completely insane if you move back to the old house after this."
"How can you say that, Char? That house was built by our great-grandparents with their own bare hands. All of our memories are there—yours, mine, everyone's. Someone has to hold on to it," Wendy explained as she opened the windows all the way to the cool sea breeze. "It might as well be me."
Wendy's older sister, eight months pregnant, was touring the beach house for the first time.
Charlotte
lived in rural Saunderstown at the southern end of the state. A typical Rhode Islander, she acted as if she lived on the far side of the moon and hadn't been able to make it up to Providence, much less Barrington, until the afternoon of the actual birthday party.
Like everyone else, she was charmed by the view of the whitecapped bay and by the boats pulled up and tied to the wild rosebushes on the beach. Like everyone else, she thought the house was perfect and her sister was out of her mind.
"No. I'm sorry,"
Charlotte
said, honestly at a loss. "Why would you go back, even with the extra room, if you can live here instead?"
Wendy patted her sister's belly as she passed her and said, "Because the old house makes me happy in a more familiar way, that's why. Why can't anyone understand that?"
She threw a second window all the way open to the warm, salty, southwest flow of air. It really was a perfect day, with the promise of summer a full-blown reality. All of the visitors and guests were present and accounted for, and all of them had easily managed to fit. Spirits were high, partly because everyone's elbows hadn't been in everyone else's faces all day. This was going to work, and Wendy was as amazed as she was pleased. Fantasies rarely turned out to be true.
"So what's the deal with Mom?"
Charlotte
asked with a glance at the hall beyond the door of the master bedroom. "Why was she sniffling when we arrived?"
"Oh, she just got a little weepy when she went into the pantry and saw the sixty-five candles on the sheet cake. You can have the energy of a forty-year-old, and you can look like a fifty-year-old, but you can't really argue with a candle. Plus now I hear it's bugging her that she'll be
a
n official senior citizen more than a year before Dad."
"Only Mom," said
Charlotte
, shaking her head. "Does she think Dad's going to
run off with some young sixty-
four-year-old arm candy?"
"Who knows?
I
say, never marry a man younger than you are, even by two minutes, if something like that matters so much."
"Yeah
... trouble is, you don't realize it's going to matter until later."
"I disagree," Wendy said, because she'd been thinking about it a lot. "When you look at a guy as husband material, you should walk yourself through a bunch of different scenarios. You should say,'What's the worst thing that can happen? I'll be sixty-five a year before he will. Can I live with that? Yes.' You move on to the next question. 'What's the worst thing that can happen? He'll forget our anniversaries. Can I live with that? Yes.' Next question. 'Will he leave his dirty underwear on the floor?' I mean, it's not all that complicated to figure out what you can stand and what you can't."
"Gee,"
Charlotte
said in a voice like unbuttered toast, "now you tell me."
"At least you saw your mistake with Derek and you cut your losses," Wendy said quickly. "And anyway," she added, rubbing a smudge from the white woodwork with a wet finger, "I was only sixteen when you eloped. I hadn't worked out a system yet."
Charlotte
wasn't buying it. "You talk so rational, but you're the most sentimental one in the family. Oh, hell," she said, interrupting herself. "I have to pee. Again." She went into the master bathroom and left the door open so that they could continue their conversation. "What about Jim? Did you walk through a set of hypotheticals before you married him?"
Wendy sat on the bed while she waited. "Of course. I said, 'He's hot. Mom hates him. What's
the worst she could do to me?'
"
From the bathroom she heard her sister laugh and then say a little ruefully, "And now he's h
er favorite son-in-
law."
Of only two. Wendy went over to the bathroom doorway so that she could say directly to her sister, "Give it time,
Charlotte
. She'll come around."
"I've been married to John for eight years, Wendy. I have a kid, another almost here. No, she won't come around. Not unless Derek gets run over by a bus. That's the only way my present marriage will become legitimate in her eyes. The way it is now, she looks at me as if I'm a
... a bigamist."
"That's an exaggeration."
"Just barely."
"It could be worse. Take Dave—"
"And do what with him?" asked her brother. He was in the hall and he detoured into the bedroom when he heard his name mentioned.
Wendy closed the door on
Charlotte
and said to him, "Is there an age limit for applying to the priesthood? Because Mom's getting a little impatient waiting for you to turn your life around, little brother."
"Mm. Looks like I should've brought Noreen," he said, looking gravely pensive. "Mom would've taken one look at her tattoos and disowned me. Problem solved."
"Baloney," Wendy said. "You didn't bring Noreen because you're bored with Noreen. You've been seeing her for, what, two
whole
months? Oh, yeah. You're bored."
"No I'm not. This time it's real."
"Baloney bullshit."
Dave was ready to change the subject. Winking at Wendy as he walked past, he went up to the bathroom door and began banging on it with both hands. "How long you gonna be in there, for cryin' out loud?" he yelled. "Stop hogging! I'm gonna be late for school and it'll be all your fault! What good is lipstick gonna do, cowface? You'll still be ugly. Hurry up or I'm tellin'!"
The door opened and Charlotte, the prettiest woman in the house, gave her brother a withering look, just the way she used to do when she was fifteen and Dave was eight.
"If you tease me, I'll cry," she promised with sweet sarcasm. "My hormones are all
fuh
—"
Dave sucked in his breath, scandalized. "I'm
tellin'
."
He threw his arm around his older sister and kissed her on her cheek and said, "You're naming him after me, right?"
"Just what we need: another David. Besides, who says it's going to be a boy?"
"You
know?"
"I'm not tellin', nyah, nyah,"
Charlotte
said with a snippy smile.
They walked out together ahead of a happy, grinning Wendy and she thought
,
I can't ask for more than this. It's all I've ever wanted, to have us all together and getting along.
Family was everywhere, grown-ups sprinkled liberally with children. The men were being primitive, hovering with their beers around the coals that Jim had fanned into something just short of a bonfire. The women were being—well, domestic, cooing over the delightful fabrics and furnishings, drifting from one thing to another with expressions of surprise and pleasure.
Because nothing actually belonged to Wendy and Jim, no one was tempted to be jealous. They could all admire the owners' keen eye without wanting to poke out Wendy's, and she was grateful for that. It added another layer of happiness to a day she knew she would always remember.
The updated kitchen was still on the small side, crowded with cooks and assemblers. Since Mark's wife, Marianne, was a nutritionist in a hospital, it conferred a halo of authority on her. She commandeered the kitchen, and that was fine with Wendy; she preferred to wander and visit and take it all in. Her brother Frank and his wife hadn't been east for a year; their once
-colicky baby was now a not-so-
terrible two who liked being around people and noise. Wendy adored her and held her every chance she got.