Chapter 5 - The Master Plan of Lorraine and Ryan
While we were sitting in Paul Henderson’s office in Eatonton, three hundred miles to the north, Kevin and Lorraine Miller were boarding a flight at Newark Liberty International Airport.
I know this because my daughter Claire, unable to contain the architectural triumph of her social calendar, had posted the full itinerary to the Bennett family shared calendar two weeks earlier. Claire was a woman who scheduled her spontaneous moments in fifteen-minute increments.
July 2: Flight 1402 arrives ATL 11:45 AM. Ryan picks up Mom & Dad in the Suburban.
July 2: Stop at Whole Foods Buckhead for tenderloins and artisanal cheeses.
July 2: Drive to Oconee. Settle Kevin & Lorraine into Master Lakeside Suite.
July 3: Morning paddleboard session. Catered lunch on the deck. Dinner at the Club.
July 4: Boat rental arrives 9:00 AM. Fireworks display from the dock.
Noticeably absent from the calendar was any mention of Margaret Ellis. My name did not appear once, not even as an afterthought for Sunday brunch.
Ryan’s parents were not bad people in the way that criminals are bad people. They were simply people for whom other human beings existed as background scenery in the play of their own comfort.
Kevin Miller was a retired logistics executive who had spent forty years being driven to train stations in black town cars. He spoke in a flat, nasal rumble and possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of golf courses he had played once twenty-five years ago.
Lorraine was worse. Lorraine was five-foot-two of frosted blonde hair, gold bangles that clinked like wind chimes whenever she signaled a waiter, and an unshakeable conviction that the South was an unpaved wilderness inhabited by simpletons who required her northern sophistication to function.
Two summers before, when I had still been permitted to occupy my own guest room, Lorraine had spent three days explaining to me how to properly launder Egyptian cotton sheets.
“You see, Margaret,” she had said, leaning against the counter while I folded towels in the laundry room, “you Southerners just wash everything in hot water. It breaks the fibers. A six-hundred-thread-count sheet requires cold water and an enzyme-based detergent. Otherwise, you might as well be sleeping on burlap.”
I had continued folding the towels—towels I had bought with my own wages, washed in a machine I had purchased—while she sipped pinot grigio from one of my crystal glasses and criticized the water pressure in the downstairs bath.
“Ryan says you paid off the house with Thomas’s insurance,” she had remarked later that evening, looking out over the water from the porch swing. “That was smart. Of course, in this market, you really should have leveraged the equity. With interest rates where they were, you could have pulled out four hundred thousand and put it into a triple-net commercial lease in Alpharetta. Ryan could have managed it for you. You’re just letting the capital sit here in the mud.”
“The capital,” I had said from my rocking chair, “is where my husband wanted to sit.”
She had looked at me with that pitying, clinical gaze that comfortable people reserve for the financially unsophisticated. “Well, Thomas wasn't a finance man, was he? He worked for the state.”
Now, according to Claire’s calendar, Lorraine had decided that the master bedroom—the room with the pine tongue-and-groove ceiling, the sliding glass door that opened directly toward the sunset, and the private bath with the deep soaking tub I had installed for my arthritic knees—was to be her domain for the long weekend.
On Thursday morning, July 2nd, Claire sent me a group text that included her brother Daniel.
Hey everyone! Just landed at the lake with Kevin and Lorraine. Traffic on I-20 was awful, but the weather is gorgeous! Ryan is getting the boat ready. Daniel, are you coming down tomorrow? Let us know so we can plan the grocery run.
Daniel, who was clearing fallen timber on a ridge near Dahlonega, didn't reply for three hours. When he did, his response was three letters:
No.
Claire responded immediately: Why? There’s plenty of room if you take the sleeper sofa in the study!
Daniel called me instead of answering her.
“Ma,” his voice was raspy from cedar dust. “What’s Claire doing down at Oconee with Ryan’s folks?”
“They’re spending the Fourth there, Daniel,” I said, sitting at my kitchen table with my tea.
“Did you tell them they could have the whole place?”
“I didn't tell them anything, son.”
There was a long silence on the line. Daniel knew me better than Claire did. Claire took after my mother’s side—quick to speak, obsessed with social standing, easily blinded by shiny surfaces. Daniel had Thomas’s eyes and Thomas’s quiet, dangerous stillness.
“Ma,” he said slowly. “What did you do?”
“I didn't do anything illegal, Daniel.”
“That wasn't my question.”
“I leased the house to Colonel Harris, son. Effective July first.”
I heard the sound of Daniel’s chainsaw idling down on the mountain ridge. Then came a low, ragged sound that turned into a full-throated belly laugh that I hadn't heard from him since his father died.
“Oh, Jesus, Ma,” Daniel coughed, catching his breath. “The Colonel? The one who used to run the ranger battalion at Dahlonega?”
“The very same,” I said.
May you like
“Does Ryan know?”
“Ryan,” I said, checking the kitchen clock, “is currently stuck in traffic on Highway 44 near the golf course, with six ribeye steaks from Whole Foods in the back of his truck and his mother in the front passenger seat.”
