“What would I do with a billion dollars?” she said.
“You could start by getting Sonny out to pump the septic tank. I’ve been lying awake at night worrying about what’s in there. Has it ever been pumped?”
“It’s not a real septic tank. I think the owner made it out of boards and cement.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“The money is meaningless to me, Purity. It’s so meaningless that I’m beyond refusing it. It’s just — nothing to me.”
“My student debt isn’t nothing to me. And you’re the one who told me not to worry about the money.”
“Fine, then. You can ask the lawyer to pay your debt. I won’t stop you.”
“But it’s not my money. You have to be involved.”
“I can’t be. I never wanted it. It’s dirty money. It ruined my family. It killed my mother, it turned my father into a monster. Why would I bring all of that into my life now?”
“Because it’s real.”
“Nothing is real.”
“I’m real.”
Her mother nodded. “That’s true. You are real to me.”
“So here’s what I need.” Pip ticked off her demands with her fingers. “Student loan paid off in full. Four thousand more to pay off my credit-card debt. Eight hundred thousand to buy Dreyfuss’s house and give it back to him. Also, if you insist on staying here, we should buy the cabin and really fix it up. Grad-school tuition if I decide I want that. Monthly living expenses if you want to quit your job. And then maybe another fifty thousand in walking-around money while I try to start a career. The whole thing is less than three million. That’s like five percent of one year’s dividends.”
“From McCaskill, though. McCaskill.”
“Their business wasn’t only animals. There’s got to be at least three million you can take in good conscience.”
Her mother was becoming distressed. “Oh, why don’t you just take it? All of it! Just take it and leave me alone!”
“Because I’m not allowed to. It’s not in my name. As long as you’re alive, it’s just going to be great expectations for me.” Pip laughed. “Why did you start calling me Pip anyway? Was that something else you ‘knew all along’?”
“Oh, no, it wasn’t me,” her mother said eagerly. Pip’s childhood was her favorite topic. “It was in kindergarten. Mrs. Steinhauer must have given it to you. Some of the little kids had trouble pronouncing your real name. I guess she thought ‘Pip’ fit you. There’s something happy about the name, and you were always such a happy girl. Or maybe she asked you, and you volunteered it.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“I didn’t even know it was your nickname until we had a parent-teacher conference.”
“Well, anyway. Someday you’ll be gone, and the problem will be mine. But right now it’s your money.”
Her mother looked at her like a child seeking guidance. “Can’t I just give it all away?”
“No. The principal belongs to the trust, not you. You can only give away the dividends. We can find some good animal-welfare groups, responsible-farming groups, things you believe in.”
“Yes, that sounds good. Whatever you want.”
“Mom, it doesn’t matter what I want. This is your problem.”
“Oh, I don’t care, I don’t care,” her mother wailed. “I just want it to go away!”
Pip saw that bringing her mother back into firm contact with reality was going to be a long and possibly hopeless project. Nevertheless, she felt that progress had been made, if only in her mother’s willingness to take orders from her.
The rain went away, came back, and went away again. When Pip was alone in the cabin, she read books and texted Jason and talked to him on the phone. She liked to sit at the kitchen table so she could watch the pair of brown towhees in the side yard as they foraged in the wet tree litter or perched on fence posts for no apparent reason but to show off how splendid they were. To Pip, no bird could surpass the excellence of brown towhees; in their avian way, they were as excellent as Choco. They were a perfect medium size, more substantial than juncos, more modest than jays. They were neither too shy nor too forward. They liked to be around houses but retreated under shrubs if you disturbed them. They didn’t frighten anything except little bugs and her mother. They preferred hopping to flying. They took long and vigorous baths. Except under the tail, where the feathers were peach-colored, and around the face, where there were subtle gray streakings, their plumage was similar in color to Pip’s mother’s faded brown dress. They had the beauty of the second glance, the beauty that only revealed itself with intimacy. All Pip had ever heard a brown towhee say was Teek! But this they said often. The call was sharp and cheerful, like the squeak of a sneaker on a basketball court. It couldn’t have been simpler, and yet it seemed to express not only everything that a towhee would ever need to say but everything that really needed to be said by anyone. Teek! According to the Internet, brown towhees were rare outside California and unusual in being monogamous and mating for life. Supposedly (Pip had never witnessed this) the male and the female sang a more complicated song in breeding season, a duet that announced to other towhees that he and she were spoken for. Indeed, wherever you saw one towhee, you soon saw the other one. They stayed together in one spot year-round; were Californians. Pip could imagine a whole lot of worse ways of being to aspire to.
As the days went by and the reality of the money sank in, she began to catch glimmerings, in her mother, of the young woman she’d read about in Tom’s memoir, the rich girl whose vestigial hauteur was expressing itself again. One night she found her mother scowling at the tired dresses in the tiny closet on the sleeping porch. “I suppose it wouldn’t kill me to buy a few new clothes,” she said. “You say not all of the money is in McCaskill stock?”
And one morning at the kitchen window, glaring at her neighbor’s chicken coop: “Ha. Little does he know that I could not only buy his rooster, I could buy his whole house.”
And again one evening, returning from her shift at New Leaf: “They think I can’t afford to quit. But if I catch Serena rolling her eyes at me one more time, I might just do it. Who is she to roll her eyes at me? I don’t think she’s bathed in a week.”
But then, pensively, to Pip, at the dinner table: “How much of my father’s money did Tom take? Do you know? That has to be our absolute limit. Not even for you will I ever take more than he took.”
“I think it was twenty million dollars.”
“Hm. Now that I say that, I’m having new thoughts. I’m afraid I may not be able to take anything, pussycat. Even one dollar is too much. One dollar, twenty million dollars, it’s the same thing, morally.”
“Mom, we’ve been through this.”
“Maybe the lawyer can pay off your debt. He’s certainly done very well for himself.”
“You at least have to buy Dreyfuss’s house. That was a moral crime, too. A worse one, in my opinion.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. There is no afterlife. And yet, my father … The idea that he might somehow know … I need to think some more about this.”
“No, you don’t. You just need to do what I tell you.”
Her mother looked at her uncertainly. “You did always have good moral sense.”
“I got it from you,” Pip said. “So trust it.”
Jason was begging her to come home, but there was the pleasure of the mountain rain and the related pleasure of being on new, more honest terms with her mother. To the loving that had always been in Pip was coming a new and unexpected sense of liking. Anabel had been likable, at least to Tom, at least in the beginning, and now that her mother was allowed to be Anabel again, to acknowledge her old privilege and dip a toe in her new privilege, to have a bit of an edge, Pip could imagine how the two of them might actually be friends.