Chapter 4 - The Boxing Day Summons
December twenty-sixth arrived with that pale, curdled sky that usually follows a blizzard. The town of Corinth didn’t wake up so much as it emerged from under a grey pelt of frozen slush.
My apartment on Fourth Street was cold. The building was an old three-story brick pile that had once housed workers from the textile mill down by the canal; the windows were single-pane, their weights rotted away inside the casings, so that every December I had to wedge folded cardboard under the sashes to keep the northern draft from fluttering the curtains.
Maisie was sitting on the floor by the radiator, wearing three layers of clothes—a thermal undershirt, her school sweatshirt, and a quilted vest that had belonged to me when I was twelve. She was drawing on a pad of rough newsprint with a box of twelve crayons I had bought at the corner market.
She wasn't drawing houses or horses. She was drawing trees—thick, black trunks with massive roots that spread out like fingers through the lower half of the page, digging into the margins where the paper was torn.
The knock on the door came at eight-fifteen.
It wasn't the tentative tap of the mail carrier or the three rapid raps Mrs. Henderson used when she brought up a loaf of zucchini bread. It was the heavy, flat thud of an open palm against the center panel.
*Thud. Thud. Thud.*
Maisie didn't look up from her tree. She had already learned that loud noises on our landing usually meant someone had come to collect something we didn't have.
I went to the door, left the brass chain on the track, and pulled the leaf inward two inches.
Uncle Gerald was standing on the landing.
He was wearing his brown shearling coat—the one he had bought when he retired from the school board—and his ears were bright magenta from the wind that whipped up the stairwell from the unlatched street door. Behind him, three steps down, stood Aunt Linda, her hands shoved deep into the pockets of a quilted parka, her breath rising in short, white puffs that smelled faintly of menthol cigarettes.
“Open the door, Leah,” Gerald said. He didn't look angry; he looked exhausted, the way men look when they have been sent on an errand they know is useless by someone they are too frightened to disobey.
“Maisie’s eating her breakfast, Gerald,” I said through the crack. “Say what you have to say from the stairs.”
“Leah, don't be like this,” Linda said, leaning forward until her nose almost touched the chain. Her eyes were rimmed with red, whether from the cold or from forty-eight hours of Vance family telephone diplomacy, I couldn't tell. “Your mother hasn't slept two hours since Christmas Eve. Her blood pressure is two hundred over something. We had to have Dr. Miller come out to the house yesterday afternoon to give her an injection.”
“Then Dr. Miller should tell Arthur to stop lying to her,” I said.
“You’re killing her,” Linda hissed. “You’re killing your own mother over some money that Thomas was too senile to know what he was doing with anyway.”
I reached up and unlatched the chain.
Gerald’s face relaxed slightly—that small, pathetic twitch of relief that men get when they think a woman is about to be reasonable. He reached for the handle.
I didn't open the door wider. I stepped out onto the cold linoleum of the landing, pulled the door shut behind me until the latch clicked, and stood between them and the lock.
“Thomas Vance was not senile,” I said. My voice was very low, but the stairwell was an echo chamber of bare plaster and pine risers. “Thomas Vance knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote that deed. He knew Arthur had mortgaged the north sixty acres to pay for Chelsea’s wedding. He knew Arthur had taken twenty thousand dollars out of the orchard maintenance fund to cover his margin call when the grain futures collapsed in 2017.”
Gerald’s mouth opened, then closed again. His eyes flicked toward Linda, then back to my coat.
“How do you know about the margin call?” he asked.
“Because it’s in the court file, Gerald. Which you would know if you had read the papers instead of just listening to Arthur roar in the parlor.”
“Leah,” Gerald said, his voice dropping into that pleading, avuncular tone he had used when I was seven and had scraped my knee on his boat dock. “You have to drop the injunction. Even if... even if Arthur made mistakes with the paperwork—”
“Mistakes?” I laughed. The sound was sharp enough to make a pigeon flutter on the sill of the landing window. “He swore under oath that I was dead or missing. He told a circuit court judge that he couldn't find me, while his own granddaughter was sitting in the public library four blocks from his office every Tuesday afternoon.”
“If the bank sees that injunction on Monday morning,” Gerald said, his fingers tightening on the lapels of his shearling coat, “they’ll call the commercial line on the lumberyard. You know that. Arthur’s entire credit facility is tied to the Corinth acreage. If the court freezes the title, he can't roll over the paper on the mill.”
“Then the mill goes under,” I said.
“Your father will lose his pension!” Linda cried, her voice cracking into that thin, shrill register that had terrified me when I was a child. “He’ll be seventy-two years old and bankrupt! Is that what you want? To see your father on county assistance? To see Chelsea lose her home?”
“Chelsea has four bathrooms and an indoor pool,” I said. “I have one radiator that works when the wind isn't coming from the north, and my daughter slept in her coat last night because the oil delivery was three days late. Don't talk to me about Chelsea’s home.”
“She’s your sister!”
“She sat at that table,” I said, pointing my finger toward the street, toward the hill three miles away where the white lights were probably still blinking on the eaves of Sycamore Crest, “and she watched an old man tell a nine-year-old girl that she didn't exist. She didn't drop her fork. She didn't move her hand. She checked her text messages.”
I took one step down the stairs toward them.
Gerald stepped back instinctively, his heel catching on the metal nosing of the top riser. He had always been a soft man, a man who survived by being Arthur’s echo, the person who seconded the motion at the board meeting and took twenty percent of the insurance business that Arthur steered his way from the bank.
“Tell Arthur three things,” I said.
“Leah, please—”
“First: Rebecca Shaw will not speak to him on the phone. Any communication goes through her office in writing. Second: if Chelsea comes within fifty feet of this building or Maisie’s school, I’m filing an emergency order of protection based on the harassment clause in the probate summons. And third...”
I paused. From behind the door of my apartment, I could hear the faint, hollow clanking of the water pipe inside the wall—the old cast iron shivering as the heat tried to climb from the basement.
“Tell him that Maisie has the bookmark,” I said. “He’ll know what it means.”
“He doesn't know what it means,” Linda spat, her face dark with rage. “He doesn't care about your little girl’s art projects! He’s trying to save this family!”
“He didn't save it,” I said. “He spent it.”
I turned, opened my door, stepped inside, and threw the deadbolt.
I didn't wait to hear their boots on the stairs. I walked over to the radiator where Maisie was still drawing.
The tree was finished now. Around the roots, she had drawn three small figures with silver crayon—the ink had finally given out completely, leaving only a faint, waxy indentation on the rough paper that caught the grey light from the window like a watermark.
“Was that Uncle Gerald?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Did he bring my coat from Grandma’s?”
I looked at the peg behind the door where her red wool coat was missing—the one we had left hanging on the third peg in the hall at Sycamore Crest when the world broke in two.
May you like
“No, baby,” I said, sitting down beside her on the floor and pulling the edge of the blanket over her knees. “We’re getting you a new one tomorrow. A blue one. With real down inside so you won't even feel the wind.”
***
