Some days it was best to ignore everything Marina said. “I owe you one for taking the kids.” Thanks to Richard’s unpredictable boss, I suddenly had my children two weekends in a row. Any other time I would have been delighted, but this weekend was different. “I’ll call tonight at bedtime. Come give me a kiss, you two!” I called, pulling on my coat and picking up my purse. There was a long drive ahead, and time was ticking away.
“Don’t go, Beth.” Marina’s face was serious. “Let me go instead. This is all because of me, and I shouldn’t be letting you fight my battles.”
In some ways she was right, but in other ways she was very wrong. It wasn’t because of Marina’s death threats that I was abandoning Jenna and Oliver for half the weekend; it was because of Agnes.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.” Then I kissed my children and left.
Two hundred miles later, my cell phone rang. Normally I didn’t talk on the phone while driving, but since there were exactly zero cars to be seen on this particular stretch of U.S. 53, I decided to risk taking the call.
“Beth? This is Evan.” Static punctuated his words.
“If I hang up on you,” I said, “I didn’t hang up on you. There aren’t a lot of towers out here.”
“Where are you? Never mind,” he added quickly. “It doesn’t matter. I called because I want to apologize for the other day.”
“Apologize for what?”
“For acting as if I had any right to tell you what to do.”
“Ah.” Take that, Marina.
“You’re angry at me and I don’t blame you. We barely know each other, and I assumed control and did those guy things that make strong women want to swear off men forever.”
If he thought I was strong, he really didn’t know me at all.
“Let me make it up to you. How about dinner?” He named one of the fanciest restaurants in Madison. “Soft lights, a piano playing in the background, a bottle of wine. Just the two of us. What do you say?”
Or maybe it was time for the big test. “How about dinner at my house, instead?” I smiled, and warmth filled me from head to toe. “Just us—and my two children?”
Six hours after leaving Marina’s house, I was sitting in Gloria Kuri’s living room and sipping a mug of coffee strong enough to curl my toes—not my hair, though. Nothing was strong enough to curl those stick-straight tresses.
Gloria caught my glance at her living room decor. “I need to do something about them. Last week I got a new Oklahoma one and it’s messing up everything.”
None of Gloria’s furniture was placed against a wall; the couch, the overstuffed chairs, the coffee table, and the console television floated in the middle of the room. With the single exception of a wood fireplace burning bright, every bit of flat wall space was consumed by vintage postcards, and each one was mounted in the exact same type of frame.
“Got started collecting when I was a kid.” Gloria looked around. “That one there. The Wisconsin Dells ducks in 1954. You know about the ducks, right?”
I nodded. Once upon a time, my parents had trundled the whole family across Lake Michigan in a car ferry. My older teenaged sisters had been ostentatiously bored the entire trip, but my brother and I had loved the resort area and riding on the old army land-and-water vehicles.
“After the Dells, you branched out?” I asked.
Gloria laughed, a throaty smoker’s laugh. Her house didn’t smell a whit like cigarette smoke, though. Maybe she didn’t smoke in her house for the sake of the postcards. “You could say so,” she said. “If you’re buying Wisconsin cards, why not Minnesota?”
“Why not?” I agreed.
“Then Michigan, then Illinois, and then I figured I should get one from every state. Then I started for two for every state. I’m on seven.” She frowned. “But now I got this Oklahoma one. I gotta decide if I want to get rid of one of the old Oklahomas or start into the eights. And they don’t make these frames no more. I’d have to buy new ones. Eight times fifty of even a cheap frame is a lot of bucks.”
“What about putting one set in another room?” I suggested. “Then you’d have to buy only fifty frames.”
She stared at me. “They have to stay together.”
It occurred to me that Gloria and Agnes weren’t as different as I’d first thought. Whether from nature or nurture, both had the gift of making people feel stupid. With both hands I held out the cardboard box that had been sitting on my lap. “This is for you. From Agnes’s house.”
“Yeah?” Gloria put down her coffee and took the box from me. “Oof, that’s heavier than I thought. What’s in here, rocks?” She held it close to her ear and shook it back and forth.
“They were in her guest room.”
“Bet that got used a lot.” Gloria rolled her eyes. “Can’t imagine Aggie had a whole lot of friends staying over.”
Or relatives, I thought.
Gloria unstuck the tape and pulled back the flaps. “Books,” she said. “You brought me books.” She poked at them with her index finger. “Not even new ones.”
I was starting to understand why Agnes hadn’t often traveled to Superior. “No, they’re quite old—from the 1920s and 1930s. That’s one of the reasons I brought them up. Books that old should be in a regulated environment. And most of them are inscribed inside the front cover by Agnes Kuri.”
“These are Aunt Agnes’s books?” Gloria’s face hardened into stone. She picked the top book, Alice in Wonderland , from the box. “And my sister kept them all these years.” Gloria put the box on the table, picked up two books, and stood.
“You’re not going to—”
“You bet I am.” Gloria pushed the fireplace screen aside with her foot and pitched Alice into the flames, Fahrenheit 451 in heat and glowing life. In went Anne of Avonlea.
“If I were a nicer person,” she said, “I’d let my brothers and sisters take a turn.” A Girl of the Limberlost was committed to the flames. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz followed. “But I ain’t that nice.” Book after book went in. “There.” She dusted her hands and replaced the screen, then sat down and put her feet up on the coffee table, a wide grin on her face. “I ain’t had that much fun in years. Thanks.”
“You’re, um, welcome.” The fumes of burning glue stung my eyes.
Gloria laughed. “Let me tell you about my dear departed sister. My parents named her Agnes after my dad’s aunt. Dad loved his auntie Agnes. She lived with us for years, the old bat. Only one to have her own room, and we always had to run whenever she rang this dang bell.”
I wondered if Joanna was still ringing her bell to summon Mack.
“Anyway,” Gloria went on, “we waited on her hand and foot, and when she finally died, turns out she had enough money to buy this whole town ten times over. She’d hung on to her stocks during the Depression, and ended up making a killing. How did that old biddy know to pick up Xerox and IBM early? Coca-Cola, too, can you believe it?” Gloria’s cheeks were blotched with red indignation.
With the inevitability of an incipient train wreck observed from afar, I knew where this was going.
“Agnes ended up with everything.” She slouched low into the couch, shoulders slumping. “Who’d have thought a name would mean so much? It’s not like Agnes was going to carry on the family name. We had plenty of boys around to do that.
“Anyone else in the family would’ve shared.” Gloria’s face was etched with hostility. “Not my sister. She said she had things to do with that money.” Spittle flew out of Gloria’s mouth at every overpronounced consonant. “What could have been better than taking care of family? She had millions! It’s not like we asked for much. A nice house, a little income. Wouldn’t have made a dent in what she had.”