Something Rising (Light and Swift) (31 page)

“Sit down,” he said to Cassie and Edwin, gesturing to two moth-eaten armchairs. Harold wanted to look like Mark Twain, or
at least like Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain, but his white suit, his white hair and mustache, had all gone the yellow of liver failure, dissipation.

“Cassie,” he began, lighting a cigarette, “you know I despise that wastrel of a father of yours.”

“I don't have a father,” Cassie said, crossing her legs.

“I guess that's legally true. Your mother, however”—Harold leaned back and studied his filthy light fixture—“was another story. A rare, a wonderful woman.”

Edwin cleared his throat. “About the will, Harold. As you know, I was privy to the contents, but Cassie—”

“Your mother,” Harold continued, “was not only wonderful, she was
surprising
, wouldn't you say? Think about it, Cassie.”

Laura and Milkweed. Laura on the bus chasing Jimmy so long ago, because if you perceive something as holy, you will not let it go, you will not defile it; laughing through her wedding night. Laura pregnant, at the mercy of strangers, Laura chasing a tornado through the geometry of rural Indiana, carrying to her grave the memory of a woman who never quite met the horse walking toward her. Apples in her apron.

“Yes,” Cassie said. “She was.”

“You might be equally surprised by this.” Harold raised a pair of half-glasses, bifocals, and rested them on the beaky bridge of his yellow nose. He lifted his head slightly, focusing. “When your grandfather died, he left your mother the house and land in Roseville and all the contents therein. That house and land have been deeded over to you and Belle, and you have equal shares in it.” He took a long hit off his cigarette, blew it out through his nose. “Additionally, he left an insurance policy. Your mother was the sole beneficiary.”

Cassie uncrossed her legs, crossed them again.

“Your mother took that money and converted half of it into another life-insurance policy, in her name, with you and your sister as the beneficiaries, and she took the other half and invested it in the stock market.”

Cassie raised her eyebrows.

“Some of the investments she undertook on the advice of Edwin here, and they were very safe, and her return was small but guaranteed. But she also bought stocks and bonds under the tutelage of Ernest Pettigrew—”

“
Uncle Bud?”

“Yes, whose instincts ran closer to the margin, you might say. The bottom line, Cassie, is that if I liquidated your half of your mother's portfolio today, along with your half of the payout from the life-insurance policy, you have about three hundred thousand dollars, after taxes.”

Cassie blinked once. “Sell.”

Harold looked at her over his glasses. “Why don't we—”

Edwin said, “I really think you should consider—”

Cassie stood up, held her hand out to Harold. “Thank you very much for your representation. Please do as I have asked, and sell my shares.” She turned to Edwin, who was looking at her with great concern, a sort of worry he'd perfected over the course of his German life. “Edwin.” Cassie shocked him and surprised herself by resting her hands on his shoulders and leaning close to his face. He smelled dry, like Belle. “You are my brother. I never thought I'd have a brother.” They looked at each other. Edwin's eyes filled with tears. Then Cassie said, “But I'm leaving this state.”

After she had signed what she needed to sign and everything
was in order, Cassie and Edwin turned to leave. Cassie said to Harold, “Please call me as soon as the money is available. I want it in cash.”

When she got home, she called Jacob at the photography gallery in New Orleans; she called Gabe at Epistrophes on Royale. She told them she was looking for real estate, and they agreed on an old building in the Bywater district, the area of town where everything was moving. It had been a jazz club, and then a studio for a glassblower, and Cassie asked them to call the seller, and then she went to see Uncle Bud. She told him to sell everything, to sell it all and bring the Brunswick and the light with the red glass shade, because they were moving to New Orleans. He looked at her steadily, and she thought she could see him picturing the house he'd never finished, Railroad Street sinking further to seed, the glass room without Cassie in it, and then he nodded and called his attorney.

For days Belle sat at the kitchen table and cried, but at lunchtime Edwin came home from the hardware store, and she heated up soup in a pan, and they sat together at the table to eat it. He checked her arms for imaginary thorns and adjusted the dosage of her medicine, and found a special conditioner that made her hair look normal again. At night they slept in the same bed. Cassie drove in to Roseville and said good-bye to Emmy, who seemed irritated and distracted; Dylan had spilled a bowl of Cheerios the day before and hadn't told anyone. Now they were stuck like barnacles to the dining room floor. She repeatedly asked Cassie, “You're moving
where?
to do
what?”
And then later,
“Explain this to me again?” But at the door, as Cassie was leaving, Emmy threw her arms around her and cried some, saying that with Cassie gone, almost nothing of her past would remain. Cassie didn't say anything but wondered where Emmy had gotten the idea that anything of the past remained for anyone, ever. Then Cassie went to Puck's mother's house, and down into Puck's special finished basement, where she found him lying in bed watching cartoons. His computer was on in one corner of the room, displaying a constantly changing, garish configuration of what appeared to be electrical specs. The floor was covered with comic books and science-fiction novels and the artist's notebooks in which Puck worked on his own, never-ending “Saucy Little Broadcaster.” Cassie looked around, stunned by the profusion of disemboweled machines, machines connected to other machines, instruction manuals, pill bottles. She told Puck that she was leaving, then sat with him for an hour as he wept like a fool.

She got up very early and snuck down the stairs and made coffee quietly, then took it out to the porch and waited for the sun to come up. Sometimes, when you leave, you never make it home. You never see the place again. She studied the driveway, the yard, the road, the fencerow, the fields, the windbreaks, the power lines; Laura had drained these things of their resonance, or so she believed. It wasn't so for Cassie. The sight of the hawk circling its prey, the hawk's flight, the racing heart of the mouse, the vole, the rabbit—these things were perfectly real, they were everything. All. She had stood in the pouring rain that last day in New Orleans, had stood outside Saint Louis Cathedral as the bishop said the mass. He wore a small microphone on his collar, and the
homily was broadcast all through the square, to the people with umbrellas who had arrived late and couldn't get in, to the junkies and the homeless and the tourists and their children.
Why did He die?
the bishop asked.
Where is He now?

Cassie got in her truck. She didn't own much, but it was all there with her. A vintage Balabushka pool cue won fair and square; a backpack from a Boy Scout packed with Laura's letters.

A phone number in Biloxi. Her tools, her boots, her clothes, some books; she had a .22 pistol, a Ruger Single-Six, strapped to her ankle. She had three hundred thousand in cash in a metal box behind her seat.

She drove away.

For technical information about pool (particularly the things I wasn't able to learn in a pool hall), I owe a debt to Jeanette Lee, Ewa Mataya Laurance, and Philip B. Capelle, whose books I consulted daily. Writing about pool and writing a novel are two very different things, and I also learned invaluable lessons from David McCumber (
Playing Off the Rail
), and the incomparable Walter Tevis (
The Hustler, The Color of Money
). As Martin Amis once said of Elmore Leonard, Tevis is a writer free of false quantities, and I'm grateful for his fine, clean work.

Thanks to Joshua Mann Pailet, who lent me the perfect table, and Orri Putnam, for his exquisite taste in cars.

For a year I spent many nights in bars and pool halls, a condition my children accepted with their usual sangfroid. Thank you, thank you, to the Amazing Kat and Obadiah. Ben Kimmel was equally and always supportive and, along with Don Kimmel, bought me my own cue. (
Sweet
.) To the people who read the fledgling first draft and were generous with praise and suggestions,
I reserve special gratitude: Jody Leonard and Lisa Kelly, Deb Futter, Ben, Meg Kimmel, and my agent, Bill Clegg, who is a genius of kindness and professionalism. My mother, Delonda Hartmann, read an early draft and wrote me a letter I'll treasure for the rest of my days. My deepest thanks to the owners of independent bookstores around the country, without whom my books would languish in dank basements (thanks especially to Tom Campbell, John Valentine, Keebe Fitch, and Robert Segedy), and thanks also to the American booksellers, our unsung heroes. Ruth Liebmann, thank you. My deepest thanks to the poet Alan Shapiro. Rachel Pace, you were lovely. Thanks to all the bookclubs who read my first two books. Mary Herczog was with me at the genesis of this novel and let me spend weeks with her in New Orleans. For this and many other acts of generosity on her part, I am deeply in debt. Thanks to Katherine Williams, who lost a fight with a turkey buzzard. Thank you to Dominick Anfuso and Martha Levin at Free Press for your faith and vision, and thanks to Chris Litman. Beth Thomas copyedited the final manuscript brilliantly. There aren't sufficient words of gratitude and respect for Elizabeth Berg. And to my editor, Amy Scheibe: I'd follow you to the end. You are one of my great blessings.

Bud Rains provided me with a model of a really good man.

My nephew, Josh Golliher, first flew a snake kite with me. He is in this book in many ways.

To Bob Jarvis: without you, I'd never know how much a girl could love her father.

Finally, I'd like to thank the people who enliven this daily work: Augusten Burroughs, Lawrence Naumoff, Suzanne Finnamore, Steve Hochman, Patricia Morrison, Matt Piersol, Dorothy and Will
Kennedy, Beth Dalton, Jay Alevizon, Susan Naumoff, the beloved Maia Dery and Senga Carroll. I completed the last rewrite of this book at the home of Leslie Staub and Tim Sommer; they traded that week in New Orleans for my heart. And to John Svara, who stood still and studied grace with me.