As Grace retreated again to the basement, Tess quipped, “When the apocalypse comes, I’ll be the only one left who can wipe her ass.” The gift presentations seemed to have exhausted her, and she leaned back into her chair with a deep sigh.
“You all right?” Cynthia asked.
“I’m peachy,” she said, then, as if she’d just remembered something, “Oh, I can’t believe it. I meant to buy some ice cream for Grace.”
“That’s okay,” Cynthia said. “We thought we’d take you out for dinner, anyway. How about Knickerbocker’s? You love the potato skins.”
“I don’t know,” Tess said. “I suppose I am a bit off today, tired. Why don’t we have dinner here? I have some things. But I really wanted some ice cream.”
“I can go,” I said. Tess lived closer to Derby than Milford, and I could drive up there and find a grocery store or a 7-Eleven.
“I could use a couple of other things,” Tess said. “Cynthia, maybe you should go, you know if we send him he’ll just get it all wrong.”
“I suppose,” Cynthia said.
“And there’s some things I’d like Terry to carry down to the basement from the garage while he’s here, if you don’t mind, Terry.”
I said sure. Tess made up a short list, handed it to Cynthia, who said she probably wouldn’t be gone more than thirty minutes. I wandered into the kitchen as Cynthia went out the door, glanced at the bulletin board next to the wall-mounted phone where Tess had pinned a picture of Grace taken at Disney World. I opened the freezer compartment of the refrigerator, looking for some ice to put in a glass of water.
In the front of the freezer was a container of chocolate ice cream. I took it out, pried off the lid. It had one scoop out of it. Getting a bit absentminded in her old age, I figured.
“Hey, Tess,” I said, “you’ve already got ice cream here.”
“Is that a fact,” she said from the living room.
I put the ice cream back, closed the freezer, and took a seat on the couch by Tess. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“I’ve been to the doctor,” Tess said.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“I’m dying, Terry.”
“What do you mean? What’s wrong?”
“Don’t worry, it’s not going to happen overnight. I might have six months, I might have a year. You never really know. Some people, they can hang on quite a while, but I’m not looking forward to some long, drawn-out kind of thing. That’s no way to go. Tell you the truth, I’d like to go fast, just like that, you know? Lot simpler that way.”
“Tess, tell me what’s wrong.”
She shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter. They’ve done some tests, they’ve got a couple more they have to do to be sure, but they’ll probably just tell me the same thing. The upshot is, I can see the finish line. And I wanted to tell you first, because Cynthia, she’s been going through a lot lately. Twenty-five years, the TV show.”
“There was an anonymous call the other day,” I said. “That shook her up pretty bad.”
Tess closed her eyes briefly and shook her head. “Nuts. They see something on TV, they get out the phone book.”
“That’s the way I figure it.”
“But Cynthia’s going to have to know eventually, that I’m not well. I guess it’s a matter of finding the right time.”
We heard noises on the stairs. Grace emerged from the basement, lugging her new book with both hands. “Did you know,” she said, “that even though the moon looks like it’s been hit with way more asteroids than the Earth, the Earth has probably been hit with just as many, but because the Earth has atmosphere, the atmosphere smoothes the land so you don’t see all the craters, but there’s not any air or anything on the moon, so when it gets hit by an asteroid, it just looks that way forever?”
“Good book, huh?” said Tess.
Grace nodded. “I’m hungry,” she said.
“Your mother has gone to pick up a few things,” I said.
“She’s not here?”
I shook my head. “She’ll be back soon. But there’s some ice cream in the freezer. Chocolate.”
“Why don’t you take the whole container downstairs,” Tess said. “And a spoon.”
“For real?” Grace asked. This violated every rule of etiquette she knew.
“Go for it,” I said.
She ran into the kitchen, dragged a chair over to reach the freezer compartment, grabbed the ice cream and a spoon from the drawer, and ran back downstairs.
Tess’s eyes were moist when I looked back at her.
I said, “I think you should be the one to tell Cynthia.”
She reached out and held my hand. “Oh, of course, I wouldn’t make you do that. I just needed to tell you first, so when I tell Cynthia, you’ll be ready to help her through it.”
I said, “She’ll have to help me through it, too.”
Tess grinned at that. “You turned out to be a pretty good catch for her. I wasn’t so sure at first, you know.”
“So you’ve said.” I smiled.
“You seemed a bit serious to me. Very earnest. But you turned out to be perfect. I’m so glad she found you, all the heartache she’s had.”
Then Tess looked away, but squeezed my hand a little harder. “There’s something else,” she said.
The way she said it, it was like what she still had to tell me was bigger than the fact that she was dying.
“There are some things I need to tell, while I’m still able to, to get it off my chest. You understand what I mean?”
“I suppose so.”
“And I’ve only got so much time left to tell it. What if something happens and I go tomorrow? What if I never get a chance to tell you what I know? Thing is, I don’t know whether Cynthia’s ready to hear all this, I don’t even know if it does her any service to know, because what I have to say only raises more questions than it answers. It may torment her more than help her.”
“Tess, what is it?”
“Just hold your horses and hear me out. You need to know this, because it might be an important piece of the puzzle someday. On its own, I don’t know what to make of it, but maybe, in the future, you’ll find out a bit more about what happened to my sister and her husband, to Todd. And if you do, this might be useful.”
I was breathing, but it felt as though I was holding my breath, waiting for Tess to say what she had to say.
“What?” Tess said, looking at me like I was stupid. “You don’t want to know?”
“Jesus Christ, Tess, I’m waiting.”
“It’s about the money,” she said.
“Money?”
Tess nodded tiredly. “There was money. It would just show up.”
“Money from where?”
Her eyebrows went up. “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Where was it coming from? Who was it coming from?”
I ran my hand over the top of my head, starting to feel exasperated. “Just start at the beginning.”
Tess breathed in slowly through her nose. “It wasn’t going to be easy, raising Cynthia. But like I said, I didn’t have any choice. There wasn’t any other choice I’d have wanted to make. She was my niece, my sister’s flesh and blood. I loved her like she was my own child, so when it happened, I took her in.
“She’d been a bit of a wild kid there, up until her folks up and vanished, and in some ways, that calmed her down. She started to get a little more serious about things, started paying attention at school. She had her moments, of course. The cops brought her home one night, found her with marijuana.”
“Really?” I said.
Tess smiled. “Let her off with a warning.” She put a finger to her lips. “Not a word.”
“Sure.”
“Anyway, a thing like that happens to you, losing your family, you think you’ve got license to do whatever the hell you want, to cut loose, stay out late, that you’re owed. You know?”