Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (13 page)

"Convenient? Of course, it's convenient, but you can't come all that way for a day or two," Brad insisted. "We hope you'll stay for as long as you want. When did you want to come? Although any time is fine with us. Any time at all. Just tell us when and we'll come into Dulles and pick you up."

Dulles was one of the airports outside Washington, D.C. Jill wasn't sure, but she thought it was a couple hours' drive from the Valley. "You don't need to do that. I'll rent a car."

Louise's voice chimed in again. "Tell her she can stay here."

"You can stay here," Brad echoed. "We have plenty of room now that the girls and Randy are on their own."

"No, no," Jill protested. "I'm sure I'll be comfortable in a hotel."

"She wants to stay in a hotel," Brad said to Louise.

"She can't stay in a hotel," Louise answered back.

"You can't stay in a hotel," Brad said into the phone.

What followed was a little nightmare. Brad and Louise were determined to do everything they could for her—pick her up at the airport, put her up at their house, feed her three meals a day with a snack at eleven and tea at four. Jill was equally determined to stop them from doing that.

A year ago she would have wanted to keep everyone from going to so much trouble on her behalf. But now her motives were cleaner. She really did want to stay in a hotel. This visit might be unbearable; she wanted a sanctuary, a refuge from her refuge, so to speak. She held firm, willing to compromise on the car, but not the hotel.

"Tell her we don't have any hotels in this part of the Valley," Louise said.

"We don't have any hotels in this part of the Valley," Brad said.

"Nothing at all?" Jill asked.

"Just the Best Western off the Interstate, but it's a motel."

Jill spoke quickly, wanting to get in before Louise did. "A motel is fine. It will be perfect. I know it will."

At last he had to give in, and she promised to call him back the next day with her exact plans.

Then he spoke, clearing his throat awkwardly. "I hope you know how pleased the whole family will be."

Jill muttered something and after the phone was safely back in its cradle, she buried her face in her hands.

What had she
gotten
herself into? How had a straightforward, understandable interest in a piece of film history led to this, her meeting a group of people who thought of her as "Aunt Jill"? She knew nothing about being an aunt to thirteen children. Except she wasn't their aunt. She was— Heaven forbid—their
great-aunt.

She felt dizzy, yet blank and flattened. You slap a lid on a grease fire and for a moment the fire stills burns under the lid, out of sight, sucking up the last bits of oxygen, but still there. This was how her mother must have felt when she reached for the Valium.

So far no one had had heart failure, but the Caslers certainly were humming with excitement over Jill's coming. Doug watched it all with great amusement. The old house that he and Randy lived in had one black rotary-dial phone sitting on a shelf in the aging kitchen. It rang more during the next week than it had over the last two months. Randy's mother and sisters called to schedule family events and then reschedule them.

First there was to be a barbecue on Saturday. Then someone remembered that Sunday was Mother's Day. The family always had a barbecue on Mother's Day. Then someone else remembered the Civil War re-enactment at New Market and wondered if Jill might like to see that. So the barbecue was put off to Sunday and a picnic at the battlefield scheduled for Saturday.

Randy was designated to pick Jill up at the airport on Friday since he went into Washington for the farmer's market Friday morning. Then his father, Brad, decided that, as the family's senior male, he should meet her, so he was going to drive in with Randy. Then Louise said that Jill might not be used to riding in pickups. Randy offered to take his new truck instead of the old one. That wasn't good enough. So Brad and Louise were going to drive in to get her in their Lincoln.

Dave's wife, Ginny, then got mad at Louise because Louise wouldn't bring Jill over to Dave and Ginny's for dinner on Friday night. Louise told her if she really felt that welcoming, she and Dave shouldn't go to their duplicate bridge club that was meeting Saturday night.

Randy's sisters couldn't agree about the picnic on Saturday. Carolyn, the eldest, decided it should be potluck. She had made up a list, telling each family what they should bring. Christa and Stacey thought each family should bring all their own food. Taffy thought everyone should bring their own main course and then one dish to share, but that Carolyn shouldn't always hog the dessert, which always got its baker all kinds of attention and praise.

And what should they do about church on Sunday? Did anyone know if she would expect to be taken to church? And what about Monday? She was staying through to Tuesday morning. What should they do with her on Monday? The men would all be back at work.

By and large, the Caslers got along very well. That they weren't at the moment suggested how important Jill's visit was to them.

When they spoke about the visit—and Doug was starting to think of it in capital letters: The Visit—they sounded a little patronizing. How nice it was going to be for Jill to be coming home, to see the Valley where her ancestors had lived for seven generations. How much she must be missing because of being cut off from her heritage, how empty her life must be without family. They were prepared to be generous and supportive. They would rally round and show her the sights.

Yet, for all this gracious talk, they were worried, intimidated, borderline terrified. No one was admitting it, but Doug sensed the repressed anxiety. She might be a very difficult guest—smug, superior, condescending. She was rich, a creature completely different from you and me, a creature completely uninterested in you and me.

He found himself in the unhappy position of being the one person who knew why she was really coming—to meet his Uncle Charles. Charles lived in Winchester with his mother, Doug's grandmother. Doug had his grandmother call Louise Casler to say that Charles wanted to meet Jill; could she come up to Winchester for one dinner? Louise hadn't much liked the idea, but she grudgingly agreed to let the Ringlings have Jill on Monday evening, her last night in the Valley.

Then Doug's sisters got in on things. Like Randy, Doug had four of them, and they were every bit as susceptible to Jill's glamour as were the Caslers. When the four Ringling girls—as they were still known, even though they were all married—heard that their grandmother was having this incredibly rich person to dinner, each one called to invite her husband and herself. Finally Gran realized that she was going to be cooking Thanksgiving dinner in May, which she did not feel like doing, so she disinvited the whole lot, including Doug's parents, even though they only lived across the street.

As two of the Ringling sisters had invitations to the ladies' bridge luncheon now scheduled for Monday, they accepted their exile in reasonably good grace. "You have to tell us exactly what she's wearing," Doug's sister Anne told him over the phone.

"No. I won't. Not one word." Doug knew all there was to know about dealing with sisters. "You'll only end up mad at me. I'm going to say that her skirt was blue, and you'll ask if it was lapis or periwinkle, and I'm not going to know. Hide out at Mom and Dad's and peek through the Venetian blinds. I'll park on that side of the street so you can see better."

The night before her arrival Doug had dinner with his parents. "That poor girl," his father said. "Does she know the number of fatted calves being killed this week?"

"No. She doesn't know anything about the 'Aunt Jill' myth. She honestly thought that she could come see Charles and no one would know about it."

"Your sisters are wondering," his father said—both Doug and his father knew that there was one advantage to living with five women; you could always blame your curiosity on one of them—"if she is coming out to see you."

"To see me?" Doug shook his head. "I wish."

"Now, don't be so sure," said his mother loyally. "You are a very attractive young man."

"So was Uncle Bix."

He didn't have to say more. His parents understood.

It had started when he was young:
my word, he looks so much like Bix... doesn't it send chills down your spine... dear boy, you can't know...
He had been mystified. He couldn't see any resemblance between his skinny self and the grown man in an army uniform whose picture his grandmother had on her bureau.

At fourteen he started to see the resemblance, but, alas, it didn't get him any points with the girls. They had all known him since first grade. They were used to what he looked like and were, for the most part, sick of hearing their parents gush about it. Doug had done all right in high school; rarely did he get turned down for a date. But that was because he was captain of the basketball team, not because he looked like his uncle.

Then came college. He was leaving Virginia, and his father had warned him. "You're going to surprise a lot of people, and you need to decide, when it comes to girls, if you want to take what's really being offered to a character in a movie."

Doug had been an eighteen-year-old male with an eighteen-year-old male's testosterone levels. He didn't do a great job of taking his father's advice. Frankly, he had not cared why what was being offered was being offered. The rigors of practice and classes had inclined him to be faithful to one young lady at a time, but none of the relationships ever led to anything permanent.

As he matured he understood why. His father had been right. If a girl—a woman—was expecting him to be Phillip Wayland, she was going to be disappointed. Phillip was a creature of the nineteenth century. Doug could, if pressed, manage to open car doors and relay a woman's dinner order to the waiter, but Phillip's elaborate gallantry wasn't possible anymore. Not many women these days needed to be protected from Sheridan's hard-riding, battle-worn Yankees. And how would Doug have done it... with a basketball?

But his face set up certain expectations, expectations that eventually cursed a relationship. Not all women had as strong a reaction as Jill Casler—in fact, Doug couldn't remember any woman ever having as strong a reaction as she had—but it was a rare one who didn't notice.

He wondered if Jill's reaction was going to be an issue when she came out to the Valley. Probably not. She wasn't coming to see him.

On the other hand, she was going to be overwhelmed by this family of hers and their barbecues and potlucks and bridge luncheons. She might well need to be rescued, and he had a pretty good idea whom she would turn to when she did—

Phillip Wayland.

CHAPTER 6

Jill slid up the stiff little shade covering the airplane window. As if it were the first flight of her life, she watched the plane take off. The runway sped beneath her gaze, then grew more distant, the view widening to take in the terminal, then streets and houses, the ribbons and cloverleafs of the freeways. The window turned smoky white as the plane passed though the cloud cover. Jill, who almost never initiated conversations on airplanes, turned in her wide first-class seat, wanting to chat with her seatmate, a businessman who did not want to chat.

For the first time in recent memory she ate the airline meal, every bite of it. She paged through the in-flight magazine and went to the bathroom three times, each trip disrupting this unhappy businessman who had used a Frequent Flyer upgrade because he wanted to get some work done. The third time she came out of the tiny cubicle she saw that he had changed seats. That was unusual. Men did not usually run away from Jill Casler and her gorgeous chorus-girl legs.

She sat back down, refastened her seatbelt, and twisted sideways in the seat, resting her cheek on the little white bib draped over the headrest. Beyond the double plastic window the sky was blue with little puffs of clouds.

What was she afraid of?

It was true that she didn't like confrontation, but there wasn't going to be any on this trip. What did she and her two brothers have to quarrel about? Whatever their mother had thought of her mother, it wasn't likely that Brad and Dave thought of her as white trash. It was almost a shame; she would have found that funny.

So there was nothing to worry about. Perhaps they would all be stiff and uncomfortable, but that was hardly a problem. Jill was used to people being stiff and uncomfortable around her; it was one price of being wealthy.

She landed at Dulles and rode the boxcar-like people-mover to the main terminal. She recognized Brad immediately, something that she had not been taking for granted. He stepped forward, took her carry-on bag, and introduced her to his wife Louise. He ascertained that she had not checked other bags and led the way out of the terminal. Outside he suggested that the ladies wait while he got the car. Jill never minded walking, but obediently she stopped at the curb and waited with Louise.

Her brother's wife was a thin woman in her early fifties, dressed in a pleasantly upper-middle-class style. She was wearing a pale blue polo dress with neat, tight stitching and a scrolling logo on the breast pocket that Jill did not recognize, although she supposed that her mother would.

"We made a reservation for you at the nearest motel," she said to Jill. "It's only a Best Western. I don't imagine it's what you're used to."

"I'm not fussy," Jill said. "Really, I'm not."

Louise raised her eyebrows.
Then why are you insisting on staying in a motel?
she seemed to say. "It's clean, very clean, I can say that for it. We went over and looked at one of the rooms. We had to as I don't think I know a soul who has ever stayed there. Even at Carolyn's wedding, with all Brian's family in from Newport News, we were able to put everyone up. But we didn't mind inspecting the motel for you. The manager was very pleasant."

Apparently she had minded a great deal indeed. Housing the entire population of Newport News—wherever that was—had been less of a burden than this trip to the Best Western.