He did not know what to do next. Should he follow her? Stand here and wait? Or should he head through the far door, which led to the kitchen where Aunt Maria was to be found for much of every day?
He did not have to make a decision. Another woman appeared from the door that Dawn had entered. She was not Aunt Maria. She was, so far as Josh could tell, a total stranger, with pale, severe features and a glory of golden-yellow hair that put even Mother’s shining locks to shame.
She came to stand in front of Josh and placed her hands on her slim hips. Her lips, bright with fresh lipstick, pursed. Like Dawn, she gave him a detailed head-to-toe inspection, though in her case she was very much looking at him.
“Well,” she said at last. She was frowning. “I didn’t believe Ryan, but he was right. She’s dumped you on us. I suppose you’d better come on in.”
Chapter Two
Like the outside of Burnt Willow Farm, the inside seemed to Josh’s eye both changed and unchanged. The sitting room that the woman led him to was the old familiar shape, but it had somehow become smaller. The furniture and drapes were surely new. He never noticed colors much, but it seemed to him that the room was both lighter and brighter.
“Sit down there.” Acting like she owned the place, the golden-haired woman pointed to an uncomfortable-looking chair with a cane seat and straight cane back. “I’ll go and get Ryan.”
She was heading out, but Josh couldn’t wait any longer. He blurted out, “Where’s Aunt Maria?”
For the first time, the woman’s frowning expression was replaced by something like surprise. “You don’t know?” she said. “I guess Lucy Kerrigan didn’t bother to tell you much, any more than she told us. Or maybe she didn’t know herself. Ryan hadn’t heard a word from her until a week ago. She certainly wasn’t one to call or write, judging from the past year and a half. Her sister—your aunt—died near that long back. You didn’t know?” She had picked up on Josh’s look of sudden astonishment. “Maria is dead. I’m your Aunt Stacy, Uncle Ryan’s wife. We were married two months ago. I’m still trying to get this place in shape. Believe me, it isn’t easy.”
As she went out toward the back of the farmhouse, Dawn peered in from the other door. She nodded her head and said, “Josh—u—a.”
“I’m really sorry,” he blurted out. “I mean, about your mother—I didn’t know. I’m sure Mother didn’t know about Aunt Maria, either, or she would have told me.”
Dawn came forward and perched on the chair opposite Josh. It had a transparent plastic cover that squeaked as she leaned back on it. He noticed for the first time that Dawn was barefoot. She looked through him again as though he was not there. He waited, but after that single statement of his name, she said nothing.
“If Mother had known, I don’t think she’d have sent me here to Burnt Willow Farm.” With Dawn silent, Josh felt forced to fill the gap. “It may have been hard for Uncle Ryan and—and—” He could not think of what to call the woman he had just met. Not Aunt Stacy, not yet, even if she was Uncle Ryan’s wife. What did Dawn call her? Mother? Dawn was just sitting there, wiggling her bare toes. “It must have been hard for you to reach us,” he went on. “You see, with Mother having the job she did, we were on the move a lot. We were all over the place, from New York to Atlanta to Boston. Sometimes we’d have to leave a place in a real hurry, and Mother wouldn’t leave a forwarding address.”
“Ryan will be here in a minute.” Stacy had come back in while Josh was floundering along with his explanations. “He was out back and he has to wash up. You’re wasting your time with her, you know. Dawn doesn’t understand more than two words in a row. I thought you’d been to the farm and you’d met her before.”
Wondering if he had missed something, Josh glanced from Aunt Stacy to Dawn. His cousin was not looking at her stepmother. Her eyes remained fixed on something far away, with an intense, unwinking stare that he remembered from when he was six years old. She was smiling.
“I was here eight years ago,” he said at last.
“Then you must know that she doesn’t talk, not that anybody can understand.” Aunt Stacy spoke as though the girl were not in the room with them. “Dawn is retarded. Badly retarded. She’s fourteen, but witless. Quite hopeless around the house, too, though Lord knows I’ve tried. There’s no more sense to her than to a fence post.”
Josh, looking again at his cousin, was not so sure. She had stopped smiling. There was a strange expression of misery in those distant brown eyes. And then, before he could say or do anything, she had moved off her chair and was on her knees in front of him. She lifted his left foot and gently removed his shoe.
“Well, there’s a first!” Aunt Stacy said. “Maybe with you here she’ll learn a bit of sense. She has it right, nobody wears outside shoes in my house. Its slippers, or clean bare feet. I won’t have people traipsing dirt in all over my polished floors. ’Specially her, always round the animals. It took forever to drum that into her thick head, but it looks like she’s finally learned.”
Dawn had taken off Josh’s other shoe. She gazed up for a moment, then suddenly she was on her feet and turning toward the back door in a single fluid movement. Someone was coming into the room.
Josh knew that it must be Uncle Ryan, but he could hardly believe what he saw. If Dawn hadn’t changed at all, Uncle Ryan had changed enormously. Josh remembered a big-framed, pudgily fat man, tall enough that he had to stoop when he came into a room. He had always been casually dressed, jeans and tartan shirt or leather jacket, and he had clumped around in huge black studded boots that told you by their sound exactly where he was in the house at any time.
Now the stoop seemed permanent. Uncle Ryan had lost sixty or seventy pounds, which made his face careworn and a lot older. The clothes were more formal, a well-fitting dark blue shirt with black string tie and dark-gray pants of pleated corduroy. No boots. He was in his stockinged feet, padding softly—it seemed to Josh, apologetically—over the polished hardwood floor.
“Now, here’s the man,” he said. “Hello, Joshua my boy, how are you?” But instead of approaching where Josh was sitting, he went across to Aunt Stacy and leaned over to give her a hug. “Now,” he continued to Josh, “isn’t she just the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in your whole life?”
The sincerity in his voice was obvious. Josh thought that her nose was big and she was too thin, but he wasn’t about to say that. He was relieved when Dawn went over to her father’s side. Ryan put his other arm around her. “You’ve grown a lot, Josh,” he said. “It’s nice to see you again.”
“Didn’t Mother call you, and talk about my coming here?” Josh had to ask it. He felt totally unwelcome. The problem wasn’t Uncle Ryan or the silent Dawn, it was Aunt Stacy, staring at him with a cool and evaluating eye. He might not have recognized the look, except that he had seen Mother rehearsing for a thousand parts and portraying a hundred different emotions. She would say, “Here we are: Betrayed! By the very man who promised me everything!” And she would put on a certain forlorn expression and stance. Or it was, “Guilty secret,” and she showed by the downcast gaze and the swiveling of one foot on the floor that she had something to hide.
The look on Aunt Stacy’s face was in Lucy Kerrigan’s lexicon on expressions. It said, “I don’t like this, but maybe if I play my cards right it can become an opportunity.”
An opportunity for what?
Well, Josh could play that game, too. He would lie low, be nice to everyone, and wait and see.
His aunt was standing up and brushing off Uncle Ryan’s embrace. “Another mouth to feed, so I’d best get to it,” she said tartly. “It’s not going to be easy, Ryan, I’ll tell you that. I’ll leave you to explain why.”