There was a woman in the lobby as Catherine left, a gray-haired woman roughly Gram Peggy’s age; she stepped forward and said, “I’m Nancy Horton—a friend of your grandmother’s. I just want to say how sorry I am.”
“Thank you,” Catherine said. Apparently death involved thanking people a lot.
“I knew Peggy from the shopping trips we took. She still drove, you see. I don’t drive if I can help it. She used to drive me down to the mall on the highway, Wednesday mornings usually. We’d talk. Though she was never a big talker. I liked her a lot, though. You must be Catherine.”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to be staying in the house?”
“Gram’s house? For a little while. Maybe for the summer.”
“Well, I’m not far away if you need anything.” She glanced at the urn in Catherine’s hand. “I don’t know about cremation. It seems—oh, I’m sorry! I shouldn’t be saying this, should I? But it seems like so little to leave behind.”
“That’s okay,” Catherine said. “This isn’t Gram Peggy. We talked about that before she died. These are just some ashes.”
“Of course,” Nancy Horton said. “Will you keep them? Oh, my curiosity! I’m sorry—”
“Gram loved the forest out in back of her property,” Catherine said. “She once asked me to scatter her ashes there.” She took the urn protectively into the crook of her left arm. “That’s what I’ll do.”
Of course, she couldn’t keep the house. It was a big old house up along the Post Road and a long way from anywhere Catherine wanted to live, as much as she sometimes liked Belltower. Once the will was probated, she would probably try to sell the property. She had said as much to Dick Parsons, who had given her the number of the local realty company. One of their agents was supposed to meet her outside the funeral home.
The agent turned out to be the man lounging against a mailbox by the front steps—he straightened up and announced himself as Doug Archer. Catherine smiled and shook his hand. “Everybody’s running against type,” she said. I m sorry?
“The funeral director doesn’t look like a funeral director. You don’t look much like a real estate agent.”
“I’ll take that as flattery,” Archer said.
But it was true, Catherine thought. He was a little too young, a little too careless about his clothes. He wore floppy high-top Reeboks tied too low, and he grinned like an eight-year-old. He said, “Are you still thinking about putting the house on the market?”
“It’s a firm decision,” Catherine said. “I’m just not sure about when. I’m thinking of spending the rest of the summer here.”
“It may not be a quick sale in any case. The market’s a little slow, and those houses out on the Post Road are kind of lonely. But I’m sure we can find a buyer for it.”
“I’m in no hurry. Dick Parsons said you’d probably want to look at the house?”
“It’ll help when we’re thinking about setting a price. If you want to make an appointment? Or I can drive out today—”
“Today is fine. I have to stop by Mr. Parsons’ office and pick up the keys, but you can come by later if you like.”
“If that’s all right.” He looked at his watch. “Around three?” Sure.
“I’m sorry about your grandmother, Miss Simmons. I handle a lot of those houses up the Post Road, so I had the occasion to meet her once or twice. She was a unique woman.”
Catherine smiled. “I don’t imagine she had much patience with real estate agents.”
“Not too damn much patience at all,” Doug Archer said.
Catherine picked up the keys, signed papers, said another round of thanks, then braced herself for the drive to Gram Peggy’s house.
The word “holiday,” in Catherine’s memory, was associated with this road. When she was little they would drive down from Bellingham in her father’s station wagon, circle through Belltower to the bottom of the Post Road hill, then up a long corridor of fragrant pines to the door of Gram Peggy’s house. Gram Peggy who cooked wonderful meals, who said wonderful and irreverent things, and whose presence imposed a magical truce between Catherine’s mother and father. At Gram Peggy’s house, nobody was allowed to smoke and nobody was allowed to fight. “Everything else is permitted. But I will not have the house stinking of tobacco smoke and I will not allow bickering—both of which poison the air. Isn’t that right, Catherine?”
The Post Road hadn’t changed much. It was still this green, dark, faintly magical corridor—the highway and the malls might have been a thousand miles away. Houses on the Post Road were barely more than outposts in the wilderness, Catherine thought, set in their little plots of landscape, some grand and many humble, but always overshadowed by the lush Douglas firs.
Gram Peggy’s house, at the crest of the hill, was the only one of these homes with a view. The house was an old and grandly Victorian wood frame structure, two stories high with a gabled attic above that. Gram Peggy had always been meticulous about having it painted and touched up; otherwise, she said, the weeds would think they had an open invitation. The house had been built by Gram Peggy’s father, a piano maker, whom Catherine had never met. The idea of selling the property—of never coming back here—felt like the worst kind of sacrilege. But of course she’d be lost in it herself.
She parked and unlocked the big front door. For now, she left her paints and supplies in the trunk of the Civic. If she stayed for the summer—the idea was steadily more attractive —she could set up a studio in the sunny room facing the woods out back. Or in the guest room, where the bay window allowed glimpses of the distant ocean.
But for now it was still Gram Peggy’s house, left untidied at the end of what must have been a tiring day. Crumbs on the kitchen counter, the ficus wilting in a dry pot. Catherine wandered aimlessly through some of these rooms, then dropped into the overstuffed sofa in front of the TV set. Gram Peggy’s TV Guide was splayed open on the side table —a week out of date.
Of course I’ll be here all summer, Catherine thought; it would take that long to sort out Gram Peggy’s possessions and arrange to have them sold. None of this had occurred to her. She had assumed, by some wordless logic, that Gram Peggy’s things would have vanished like Gram Peggy herself, into the urn now resting by the front door. But maybe this was where the real mourning started: the disposition of these letters, clocks, clothes, dentures—a last, brutal intimacy.
Catherine slipped off her shoes, reclined on the sofa, and napped until Doug Archer knocked at the door.
Before he left, Doug Archer said a strange thing.
His visit went well, otherwise. He was friendly and his interest seemed genuine, more than just businesslike. He asked about her work. Catherine was shy about her painting even though she had begun to earn some money through a couple of small Seattle galleries. She’d taken fine arts courses at college, but the work she produced was mainly intuitive, personal, meticulous. She worked with acrylics and sometimes with montage. Her subjects were usually small—a leaf, a water drop, a ladybug—but her canvases were large, impressionistic, and layered with bright acrylic washes. After her last show a Seattle newspaper critic said she “seemed to coax light out of paint,” which had pleased her. But she didn’t tell Archer that; only that she painted and that she was thinking of doing some work here during the summer. He said he’d love to see some of her work sometime. Catherine said she was flattered but there was nothing to show right now.
He was thorough about the house. He inspected the basement, the water heater and the furnace, the fuseboard and the window casements. Upstairs, he made a note about the oak floors and moldings. Lastly, he went outside and gazed up at the eaves. Catherine told him Gram Peggy had had the roof inspected every year.
She walked him to his car. “I suppose we’ll have to put it on the market pretty soon. I don’t even know what that involves. I guess people come to see it?”