Chapter 6 - Blood vs. Paper
Eleanor Vance came to my apartment on a Sunday evening when the rain had finally stopped, leaving the brick walls of Fourth Street sweating with cold damp.
She didn't knock with her palm like Gerald. She didn't use the bell. She stood on the second-floor landing and scratched at the painted wood with her fingernails until I heard the sound from the sink where I was washing Maisie’s dinner plate.
*Scritch. Scritch.*
When I opened the door, she was standing there without an umbrella, her grey hair flattened against her forehead by the mist that hung between the buildings. She was wearing her good camel-hair coat—the one Arthur had bought her for their fortieth anniversary—but the hem was black with grease from the stairs, where she had brushed against the iron railing.
She looked seventy-five years old. In the two weeks since Christmas Eve, the skin under her chin had loosened, falling into two soft, crepe-like folds that trembled whenever she breathed.
“Leah,” she said.
She didn't wait for me to invite her in. She pushed past me, her body smelling of damp wool, sweet lavender water, and the sour, sharp tang of stomach acid.
She stopped in the center of the kitchen.
Her eyes went around the room with the frantic, predatory assessment of a woman who had spent forty years judging other people by the quality of their baseboards. She saw the two-burner hot plate on the counter. She saw the yellowed Formica table with the three mismatched vinyl chairs. She saw the clothesline strung between the window frame and the pantry hook, where two pairs of Maisie’s tights were dripping into an enamel basin.
“You live like this,” she whispered. It wasn't pity; it was horror. The horror of a Vance discovering that a member of her family had been reduced to the level of the people who cleaned the bank offices on Sunday nights.
“I live within my means, Mom,” I said, leaving the door six inches open behind me. “Which is what people do when they don't have an estate trust to steal from.”
She flinched. The word *steal* hit her like a wet towel across the mouth.
“Don't use that word,” she said, her voice dropping into a frantic, hissing whisper as she looked toward the small alcove where Maisie’s cot was curtained off by a floral sheet. “Is she back there?”
“Maisie is at Mrs. Henderson’s,” I said. “She’s helping her shell walnuts. She won't be back for an hour.”
Eleanor let out a long, ragged breath that sounded like water whistling through an old pipe. She sat down on the nearest chair—the one with the green vinyl seat that had been mended with silver duct tape—without taking off her coat.
“Your father had an incident on Thursday,” she said.
“An incident?”
“His pulse went up to one hundred and sixty. They had to take him to the emergency room in an ambulance with the siren on. All the neighbors were out on their porches, Leah. The Hendersons, the Griersons, the people who bought the Miller place... they all saw the red lights in our driveway.”
“Is that what bothered you?” I asked. “The neighbors saw the lights?”
“You don't understand,” she said, her fingers digging into the camel hair on her knees. “Arthur has spent thirty years building that bank’s reputation. He was on the hospital board. He was the chairman of the library committee. If this goes to a trial... if that woman from the Attorney General’s office puts his name in the *Corinth Gazette*...”
“His name is already in the court records, Mom.”
“You can stop it,” she said, leaning forward until I could see the tiny broken capillaries around her nostrils. “Frank Vance says that if you sign a notice of satisfaction—that’s what he called it, a notice of satisfaction—stating that the matter has been settled within the family, the judge will dismiss the petition. The state won't proceed if the beneficiary says there was no intent to defraud.”
I looked at her.
This was the woman who had inspected my fingernails every Sunday morning before Sunday school to make sure there was no garden dirt under them. This was the woman who had spent three weeks teaching Chelsea how to walk with a book on her head so her posture would look “distinguished” at the junior cotillion.
“And the money, Mom?” I asked. “The eight hundred thousand dollars Chelsea used to pay off her mortgage?”
“Chelsea will sign a promissory note,” Eleanor said, the words coming out fast, tumbling over each other like gravel sliding down a chute. “She and Greg will take out a second mortgage. They’ll pay you five hundred dollars a month. Every month, Leah. That’s six thousand dollars a year. You wouldn't have to work the night shifts at the clinic anymore. You could move out of this... this terrible place. You could get an apartment out by the bypass, near the good grocery store.”
I began to laugh.
I couldn't help it. The sound started in my ribs and came up through my throat, dry and hollow, until Eleanor shrank back against the duct-taped vinyl of the chair, her eyes wide with that ancient Vance fear of anything that couldn't be regulated by a committee.
“Five hundred dollars a month,” I said.
“It’s a great deal of money for someone in your position,” she whispered, her voice tightening with anger now that the pleading had failed.
“Five hundred dollars a month for eight hundred thousand dollars means Chelsea would finish paying me when Maisie is one hundred and forty-two years old,” I said.
“She’s your sister!” Eleanor stood up so quickly that the leg of the chair screeched against the linoleum. “She has two children! Poppy has an audition for the regional youth ballet in March! How is she supposed to pay for the coach if they’re in foreclosure? Do you want to ruin that little girl’s life because you’re jealous of her mother?”
The room went very cold. The wind from the landing blew the door open another three inches, the cold air sliding along the floorboards like an iron bar across my ankles.
“You didn't care about a little girl’s life on Christmas Eve,” I said.
Eleanor stopped. Her mouth remained slightly open, revealing the small gold filling in her lower left bicuspid.
“Arthur was upset,” she mumbled, her eyes dropping toward the enamel basin under the clothesline. “He has high blood pressure. He didn't mean it that way.”
“He looked at Maisie—a child who had spent two weeks making him a present with her own hands—and he told her she was a counterfeit coin,” I said, my voice steady, level, and louder than she had ever heard it in that house on Sycamore Crest. “And you didn't drop your fork. You told him not to make a scene before the ham was carved.”
“Leah—”
“You sat there for five years,” I continued, taking a step toward her, “and you watched me buy Maisie’s winter coats at the Salvation Army drop-off behind the railroad depot, while you were taking thirty thousand dollars of her trust fund to put brick pavers on your driveway so your bridge club wouldn't have to step on gravel.”
Eleanor raised her hand—not to strike me, but to cover her own face, as if she could keep the truth from entering her ears by pressing her fingers against her cheekbones.
“We did it for the family,” she sobbed. The tears were real now, small and greasy, running through the channels of her powder into the corners of her mouth. “Arthur said the family had to stay together. He said if the land was divided, the timber company would take the north parcel and we wouldn't have the buffer against the highway anymore. He did it for all of us.”
“No,” I said, reaching past her and pulling the apartment door all the way open until it hit the rubber stop on the baseboard. “He did it for Arthur. And you let him do it because you were afraid that if you looked at the bank statements, you might have to admit that the man you married was just a thief with a gold watch.”
She stood there for ten seconds, her camel-hair coat hanging loose around her shoulders, looking at the dark rectangle of the landing.
“If you do this,” she said, her voice dropping into a dry, flat monotone that sounded more like Arthur than she realized, “you will never see us again. None of us. Not Gerald. Not Linda. Not Chelsea. You will be alone in this town.”
“Mom,” I said, and for the first time in fifteen years, my chest didn't feel tight when I said the word. “I have been alone in this town since I was twelve years old. The only difference is that now, I have the deed.”
She didn't look at me as she went out.
May you like
She pulled her collar up around her neck, her heels clicking on the linoleum with that small, precise Vance rhythm—*tap, tap, tap*—until she reached the stairs, where the sound changed to the heavy, sliding scuff of an old woman who knew that the railing was the only thing keeping her from falling to the bottom.
***
