“Oh, Lucy,” she said. “Hi there. Blake’s at work. I was just going over some papers. Come on down, if you want.”
The stairs were narrow, opening into a paneled room as compact and complete as a studio apartment, with a v-berth in the bow, a galley kitchen, a tiny bathroom, and a sitting area. I’d always marveled at how sparely furnished Blake’s life was. He didn’t care much for things; he liked the uncluttered feeling that came from owning very little. Avery moved some pillows to make room on the built-in sofa. The table was covered with drawings, and I recognized my mother’s drafting paper, her neat lines and handwriting.
“Want some iced tea?”
“I’d love some, thanks,” I said.
Avery moved as deftly in the narrow galley as she did in her restaurant. She piled up all the papers on the table and placed tall glasses of tea, with sprigs of fresh mint, on two bright yellow coasters she pulled from a drawer. I had to smile: never in a million years would it have crossed Blake’s mind to buy coasters. “Those are some sketches your mom did,” she said as she sat down. “They’re plans for organic vegetable gardens, actually. That’s my dream someday—to have organic gardens to supply the restaurant. I hate paying to ship all that stuff, using all that energy just to move produce around. She drew these up for me for my birthday last month. It was really nice of her.”
I sipped my tea: cold, faintly raspberry. I remembered Avery from high school as quiet, so shy she’d hardly spoken the few times we’d met before. But that was years ago, before she’d gone away to school, before she and Blake had ended their romance and started it again several times. She seemed so different now, confident and sure of what she wanted. She was at least two years younger than I, and yet she already had her own business and a baby on the way. I felt a pang of unexpected envy. Envy, and the feeling I’d had so often in Japan that despite my wild adventures, I’d really been circling around the same still point for years.
“I think you’re brave,” I said.
“What? Dating Blake?”
“Well, that, of course.” I laughed. “No—taking all this on, I mean.”
“I’m nuts, actually.” She laughed, too, relaxing back on the cushions. “Really nuts, I sometimes think. It’s exciting, sure, but there’s so much pressure. And it never ends. Still, I love working with food. I love it when the place is full and I look out and see everyone happy, eating healthy things.”
“My meal was so good.”
She grew serious. “Thanks, but it could have been better. If I had everything fresh, it would have been
tons
better. Your artichokes were canned, I don’t like that. We were hoping—Blake and I were hoping—that maybe we could get some acreage when the depot land is sold. Or else down the road, when your mother sells her place.”
I caught my breath a little to hear how far my mother’s plans had traveled, trying to sort out my complex feelings before I spoke. Loss, of course, and anger that I hadn’t known, and the feeling that I’d been left out, which wasn’t fair; I’d been gone for years, after all. Avery didn’t notice and went on speaking.
“Not the lake lots, of course. Too pricey. But that land is black earth, as rich as Iowa soil, and it used to all be farms, before all the bunkers and airstrips. There’s a black walnut tree just inside the depot gates—my great-grandfather planted that tree decades ago when that part of the land belonged to him. I’d like to get it back.”
There was wistfulness in her voice, and hard determination, too, and I thought about the day I’d arrived—was it only two days ago?—Pete leaning into the truck and saying,
You sure you don’t have a dog in this fight, Blake?
“Were you at the rally?” I asked.
She shook her head and gave a short laugh. “It seems I’m only ever at the restaurant anymore. But I heard about it—people came in for lunch after it was over. Were you?”
“I saw it, that’s all. Driving by with Blake the day I arrived.” The boat swayed gently with a wave; one of my mother’s drawings slipped from the table and I leaned over to pick it up. “So many people were there.”
“
So
many—it’s true. It’s a huge controversy. The wetlands people may be getting together with the white deer people, though. They had lunch together, anyway—eggplant soufflés and white wine.”
I thought of the deer emerging from the trees and moving like clouds against the sea of tall grass. My father used to tell us stories about them, growing up, and sometimes we’d go out in the evenings to search for them, driving slowly on the gravel roads around the depot. People came to school with stories of having glimpsed one standing in the road or disappearing into the trees, but that was rare, and in all our searching, we’d never seen one. I asked Avery if she had.
“Just once. A long time ago. We were on our way home early one morning when one leaped in front of our car. My father slammed on the brakes, barely missed it. We watched it disappear into the trees, and then five or six others followed, pure white. I was little, so they seemed magical, like unicorns or something. I remember we all just sat there, not speaking, for a long time. Even my dad.”
I sipped my tea and studied the three framed photos on the wall behind Avery. The first had been taken on the deck, Blake standing behind Avery with his arms around her waist. Her head was tipped back against his shoulder, she was laughing, and he was smiling down at her, the wind sweeping a piece of her hair across his cheek. The other two were more formal, the two of them standing side by side, smiling at the camera in front of a lighthouse, an anchor.
“Do you like those?” Avery asked, turning to look. “I just had them framed last week. Those two on the left are from the trip we took to Nova Scotia last spring.”
“You look so happy, both of you.” I was hoping she would tell me about the baby, so I could stop pretending that I didn’t know.
“We were. It was a good trip, mostly.” She paused, as if choosing her words. “Lucy, is Blake very much like your dad was?”
I thought about this. I never would have said so before, but knowing that Blake was working at Dream Master made me reconsider. He’d given me his reasons, and they made sense, but all the same I wondered if the lure of the past had something to do with it; he could have worked anywhere else in town. “I don’t know. In little ways, maybe. The same laugh, the same eyes, that sort of thing. But I can’t really say. Why?”
Avery sighed. “I guess I’m just trying to figure him out. Sometimes he just seems so far away. So lonely, somehow.”
I didn’t answer right away.
A very sad and lonely person
—those were Yoshi’s words to me. I liked to think that the past had no power over me, but maybe I was caught in it, too. Avery half-stood and reached to the counter for a bag of pistachios, and I glimpsed the faint swell of her stomach beneath the gauzy blouse, so slight I might not have noted it unless I already knew. When Blake had visited me in Indonesia, he and Avery had broken up, and one evening he’d struck up a deep flirtation with a woman at the next table. I wouldn’t have guessed then that he’d be here now, back with Avery, about to have a baby. The boat swayed gently, making little ripples in the iced tea, and I thought of the waves that had run through the earth, and of Yoshi’s hand running the length of my thigh as I woke amid the earthquakes. I thought of his kindness, and his kiss on the train platform, which seemed a very long time ago.
“Lucy?” Avery said, offering me the pistachios. “Earth to Lucy? Did you want some of these? Some more tea?”
“No, thanks.” I smiled. “Sorry to be so spacey. I guess I’m still a little jet-lagged. I should probably get going, actually.”
“Well, it’s good to see you. Can I give Blake a message?”
I shook my head, imagining the sort of message I could leave:
Discovered lost ancestor, please call ASAP
. “That’s okay. I’ll track him down eventually.”
Upstairs, I lingered on the deck, thinking about Yoshi, about loneliness, mine and Blake’s and maybe everyone’s. It was still a clear day, but low clouds were scattered on the horizon and the wind had come up; the lake was decorated now with whitecapped waves. The fire siren sounded; it was noon. Even though I didn’t want to go to Dream Master, I did want to tell Blake what I’d discovered, and so I left the pier and crossed the main road, following the outlet away from the center of town.
For all his talk of progress, Art had let Dream Master go quite a bit. The plate-glass windows were filmy, and one of the gutters on the third floor was hanging askew. The brick needed tuckpointing, too, and the grass in front was long. It struck me that maybe Art’s hiring of Blake was less an act of generosity than it was of desperation. There was something weirdly comforting about that thought—there seemed to be some sort of balance in the universe as long as Art was doing poorly—except that now Blake was involved. I took a deep breath, cut across the gravel parking lot, and climbed the concrete steps. A little bell rang when I opened the door, just as it had in my childhood. I paused on the threshold, taking in the scents of metal and paint and sawdust, the underlying odor of dust.
Aisles of locks and hardware and tools—hammers and saws, planes and screwdrivers—ran the length of the store. There were bins of nails in addition to the prepackaged kinds. Wooden rulers and yardsticks sat beside tape measures in their flashy yellow cases. Dozens of different light fixtures hung from the ceiling.
I took a step and called out, “Hello.” Nothing. “Hello?” I called again, louder, but no one came.
I walked up and down the aisles, noting the little changes. Art had put gray speckled linoleum down over the planked floor I remembered; he’d taken down the old flypaper strips, probably long ago. The offices were still there, though, off a corridor that ran behind the storefront, still paneled in dark wood. My father’s, at the end of the hall, was completely changed—the rolltop desk gone, the windows shaded with plastic blinds, and a new conference table set up in the middle of the room, shiny black laminate, with sleek black chairs around it. A nondescript gray carpet covered the floor. I looked hard for the room where I’d played with Blake and Joey, the room where my father had unlocked so many secrets, but I found no trace.
“Lucy?”
I hadn’t heard Art coming, and I started. Tall and broad-shouldered, he blocked much of the hall. Again, he looked so much like my father that I found it difficult to speak.
“I was looking for Blake,” I said.
“I sent him to take an order in Union Springs. He should be back pretty soon.”
“Oh. I see.” There was an awkward silence. “Do you have a minute, then?” I asked. I realized I hadn’t really spoken to Art in years—even at my father’s funeral we’d exchanged only the most formal of condolences—but maybe my mother was right and he’d be able to shed some light on the discoveries I’d made.
He glanced at his watch. “A few minutes,” he said. “I’ve got to meet with the zoning office. But come on in, why don’t you, and sit down.”
I sat in a leather chair with wooden arms. It would spin, I remembered; we used to play on it when we were kids.
“So, Lucy,” Art said. “It’s been a while. What’s on your mind?”
“It has been a long time, hasn’t it? Well, I guess I just had some questions.”
He put his elbows on the desk, made a tent with his fingers, and nodded.
“Happy to help if I can,” he said.
I was still carrying the papers from the church. Rose Jarrett would have been Art’s great-aunt; Iris would have been some kind of cousin. Yet I found myself reluctant to mention Rose, the discovery of her existence still too new for me to want to share it. Instead, I explained about the papers and pamphlets I’d found in the cupola and asked if he knew anything about them.
Art listened closely. “In the cupola, you say? What sort of papers?”
“Oh, a hodgepodge, really. Old newspaper articles, some magazines. I was interested in them because they looked like they had to do with the women’s suffrage movement. I thought they might be historical. I thought you might know.”
His lower lip jutted out slightly as he thought, and he shook his head. “Doesn’t sound at all familiar. Before my time, of course.”
“Right. I thought they might have belonged to my greatgrandmother—your grandmother. Cora, wasn’t that her name? The dates seem about right for that. I never knew her, of course. I don’t even remember hearing stories about her.”
I’d found the key; he relaxed back into his chair.
“My grandmother was a lovely person. At least as much as I remember her. I was only about ten when she died. She loved children, doted on us. She made beautiful pies, too; it seemed there was always a fresh one on her kitchen counter. That was in the house you lived in, which was where I grew up, too. We moved in after our grandfather died; Grandma Cora was a widow by then and not in good health. She slept in the big room at the front of the house—I think you’ve got the piano where her bed used to be—and my mother took care of her until she died. Now, my mother—your grandmother—she was a wonderful woman, too.”
I nodded, remembering the story my mother had told me about what had happened while my father was in Vietnam. My grandmother had died when I was seven, and all I could conjure of her was a fluttering sleeve of a polyester print dress, her eyebrows arching as she laughed, and the fleeting dark red color of her fingernails.
“She didn’t like to swim,” I remembered, suddenly.
“No, she did not. She made sure we learned, though, me and Marty.”
“You know, the strange thing is, there was a note with these articles. It seemed like it had been written by a member of the family—it was written to your grandfather, in fact—but it wasn’t signed. It was passionate, though. A note about a girl named Iris, being sent away.”
He didn’t answer for a moment, and when he spoke, it was slowly.
“Well, I suppose it’s no secret that every family has its skeletons; you know that by now. There was some sort of scandal, way back when. My grandmother’s sister, maybe? I’m just talking from what I’ve gleaned, growing up, overhearing a bit of this or that. It’s probably as much conjecture as truth. But something did happen that got hushed up. Had to be hushed up, that’s how I understood it, for the sake of the family. It never interested me much, to be honest. I’m much more concerned with the here and now, with what’s right in front of my face.”