“I’m always making mistakes in what I’m not supposed to say,” Beth said. “Remember when I gave her a makeup kit? I knew when she wasn’t wearing makeup on her birthday, when we first walked in, that I’d made a mistake.” She relinquished one of the beer bottles to him. “I hope she used the lotion,” she said.
“I don’t really know if she used it,” he said.
“I like you,” Beth said. “That’s a good answer.” She fingered the silver choker. “She was very kind to remember me,” she said. “Is this something that has a history in the family? I asked Gordon, but according to him, he doesn’t remember anything.”
“The necklace?” he said, following her back outside.
She nodded.
“You mean it’s Evie’s?”
“Yes,” she said, a little put out. “You don’t remember it either?”
“I’m not the right person to ask. I don’t notice things like jewelry, usually.”
“Well, that makes two of you. You and your brother.”
She sat on the black iron bench. He sat in a chair. In the distance, he heard a dog yapping. A plane passing overhead.
“When did Evie give you the necklace?” he said.
She fingered it. “When she died. There was a nurse friend of hers who packaged some things from her room and sent them to us. I hope I haven’t said something I shouldn’t have said. This nurse said she was supposed to pass on things to both you and Gordon. She said Evie reminded her all the time, and they had a joke: the nurse would pretend to scold her, saying, ‘Is that the only thing you keep forgetting? You mean that’s the one and only thing you’re senile about?’ She’d promised her a hundred times she’d do it, she said.” She sipped her beer. “She seemed quite nice on the phone,” she said.
“Yes. I know who you mean. She was very nice. She did bring us things, come to think of it, on the day of the funeral.”
“I feel bad we didn’t come to Evie’s funeral,” Beth said.
He shrugged. “To come all that way for someone you didn’t really know,” he said.
“I know, but I was surprised Gordon didn’t go. He went and sat on the floor of the ocean. That’s what he spent the day doing.”
“Well,” he said, “that would have been a long way to come just for the funeral.”
“He doesn’t like to face some things,” she said.
“No, I suppose none of us do,” he said.
“But he just doesn’t do it. I had a lump in my breast biopsied last year. Everything was fine, but the day he was supposed to go to the doctor’s office — we weren’t even going to hear right then, it was just a biopsy — he had somebody call from work to say he’d gotten tied up. He didn’t even call me himself!”
“That’s unfortunate,” Marshall said.
“It is unfortunate. He has more capabilities than he calls on.”
Marshall nodded. He would just as soon not hear these things about Gordon.
“Maybe a lot was expected of him when he was young,” Beth said. “It was that way with my older brother. I have an older brother, too. He works for a conservation group in Africa. He’d do anything for an animal, but he doesn’t even send my mother a birthday card. Sometimes a postcard, but there’s never much information on it. She was going to visit him once, and he told her there were too many diseases, not to come.”
“He was probably telling her for her own sake,” Marshall said.
“Men stick together, they really do.” She sighed. “I don’t even believe that you believe that.”
“I don’t,” Marshall said.
“I like you,” she said again. She looked around. “I was thinking about getting a few ficus, or something like that. Do you think there’s enough greenery, or would more look nice?”
“It looks perfect to me, but I’m not very good at envisioning things when they aren’t in place.”
“Hmm,” she said. “Gordon’s very good at that, usually. You know what he does? He gets a piece of paper and he draws polka dots on it. He says doing that allows him to envision what things will look like before he breaks his back moving everything.”
He nodded.
“Did he tell you about the letters?”
“Letters?” He had been thinking about ficus trees. Were ficus the ones with small, wrinkly leaves? The ones they sold sometimes in the supermarket in New Hampshire?
“He didn’t tell you,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I don’t suppose I thought he really had.” She slid forward, placing her feet together, the beer bottle half-empty. “Don’t tell him I told you,” she said.
“What about letters?” he said.
“The nurse. That woman, who was so nice. She called to say they’d be coming. I really shouldn’t tell you this, because you almost got the letters. Evie was going to give them to Sonja and you until just before she died. She changed her mind, the nurse said, and wanted them to be sent to me and Gordon. I hardly knew her, so she was sending them to Gordon, not to me.”
He frowned.
“Don’t tell him,” she said again.
“Okay,” he said.
“Well, she called to say how sorry she was, but to say she’d heard from the nurses at the hospital that she didn’t die a painful death, and all of that. Gordon told her we’d see her at the funeral. I was going to go. If he went, I was going to go with him. Anyway, the nurse was calling to say she was sending the things by Federal Express, because she didn’t feel right about putting jewelry in the mail and just mailing it. I told Gordon he should send some money to reimburse her, that that was probably what she was hinting about. Well, she did send it. This necklace was in its original box, from a jewelry store in Boston. I kept the box, because it’s beautiful too. I started to read the letters, but I didn’t understand anything in them. Sort of business letters, about somebody’s delayed arrival. They were boring, to tell you the truth. I put them aside and thought maybe I’d look at them again some other time, and then Gordon got home from work and started reading them. They were in three packages, tied with ribbon. He read about half of one pack and then he said, ‘You know, the truth of the matter is, I don’t much like surprises.’ He doesn’t, either. He likes to know in advance what I’m getting him for his birthday. He told me right out, when I hardly knew him, that if I ever gave him a surprise party, he’d never speak to me again. I wish you’d gotten the letters, because then I could find out if that stuff meant anything. I saw them and they didn’t look like love letters. I think he was just teasing. But he didn’t like having them, so do you know what he did? He took them with him when he made a night dive. He and his buddy went out together, and when he went down he tucked the whole pile of them under a rock on the bottom of the ocean. Littering the Atlantic! At first I thought he was kidding me, but then it turns out to be true. He took a bunch of her old letters and drowned them.”
“Jesus,” Marshall said. He remembered, now, the box the nurse had brought with her to the house the day of the funeral. With the exception of the necklace, Evie had given Sonja the entire contents of her jewel box. His father’s pocket watch had been in there. Sonja had given that to him. It seemed almost obscene that Tony Hembley had looked at it admiringly — that he had stood in the living room, joining the little cluster of Sonja and Marshall and the nurse, and peered into the pink satin jewel box and looked appreciatively at the watch Sonja drew out, his father’s octagonal watch dangling from its platinum watch fob. The nurse had done just what Evie had asked. Her timing might have been better, but he supposed that if someone other than Tony had gazed in, he wouldn’t feel so cantankerous. It was hardly a private matter, really: a box filled with an old lady’s brooches and rings, bracelets and necklaces, costume jewelry with only a few precious stones dropped in among the tangle, Sonja had told him later. It wasn’t as if the Hope diamond were hiding in there.