Then she flew down to Tampa to spend time with her mother and brother while the horrible business was concluded.
"Of course I remember you! How are you?"
"Fine, thanks. I-"
"Looking good, yes, looking very good. But I can tell you haven't used your mousse today, have you? Tsk tsk tsk.*
"Well, that's the thing. I-"
'The thing? What thing, dear boy?"
"I'd like it back the way it was," Jeff said.
"What!"
"The color and the style."
"Not the way it was."
"Yes. Please."
"Color and style?"
"That's right."
"Are you sure you wouldn't like to think it over? Have a nice glass of iced Red Zinger and give it another little think. Hmm?"
"No, thanks. My mind's made up."
'You're sure you're sure?"
"Positive."
'All right, one Steve Garvey coming up."
After four weeks, Georgianne was ready to leave Florida. It was summer, the wrong time of the year, and the heat was even worse than she had expected. It felt far more oppressive than any heat wave she had ever experienced in New England.
Her mother lived in a "permanent mobile home" in a protected, self-contained community just outside Tampa. It looked like a real house, but smaller, and it was built with prefabricated sections on a concrete slab. Mrs. Slaton had her own little social set among the other older people who lived in similar houses on the "estate."
Georgianne's brother Donnie lived about eight miles away with his wife and two children. A teacher, he had the summer free, and Georgianne spent more time at his house than with her mother. The company of her family was a great help, not just in comforting her, but in restoring some sense of equilibrium.
After four weeks Georgianne wasn't ready to stop mourning, but she did want to take herself somewhere else. She thought of herself as morbid and depressed, and that was too much to continue to inflict on her family. They never complained, but she was sensitive to the likelihood that she was a disruption in the daily pattern of their lives. And they had done more than enough for her already.
One question plagued her: could she really have failed to notice the warning signs? She still wasn't sure, however much she scoured her memory, that Bonnie had shown any warning signs, but perhaps she had. It was a bitter, demoralizing thought that Georgianne must not have paid attention to her daughter's every word, phrase, and gesture. When depression got the upper hand, as it so often did, Georgians could barely stand herself. She should have been perpetually vigilant; instead, she'd begun to relax just a little in the spring months. She couldn't have anticipated her husband's murder; nor could she have done anything to prevent it. But Bonnie was different, and now she had to live with the terrible thought that she had failed her daughter in the most important test of all.
'I misunderstood you, all that time. I really underestimated you. I always liked you, but I never took you as seriously as I should have, and that was a mistake. We missed out on a lot-I can see that now, and it was my fault, not yours. You were always the quiet one, and I guess I thought that meant you weren't interested or that you were kind of dull. I should have seen it for what it really was--a sign of maturity and intelligence. It didn't mean you weren't capable of having fun. You did have fun, and so did I, but we should have been together, sharing it. I always knew you were a solid guy, safe to be with and dependable. But there's more to you, and I'm sorry I missed it for so long. It was my fault, really. But thank God it's not too late. There's plenty of time left, we're still young, and we won't waste a minute of it. I'm yours now, only yours. Do anything you want to me, Jeff. I love you," Diane told him.
"Why don't you stay on here for a while?" Jack asked. 'Mere are plenty of worse places in the world than Chicago. You don't like Florida enough to want to live there, and is there really anything for you back in Connecticut? You're going to carry a lot of memories around with you for the rest of your life-there's no need to live in a place that'll make it even harder to forget."
"I know," Georgianne admitted quietly.
'You can find work here. You can take courses here if you want. And there are a lot of beautiful old buildings in the city. Have you taken a look at the architec ture? Chicago is an interesting city, and if you started drawing it, I bet you'd never want to stop."
"Maybe."
"Winter's a bitch-I have to tell you that. But it's not much worse here than in Connecticut, and, like Connecticut, you do get four definite, real seasons."
Georgianne smiled. "I get the idea, Mr. Weatherman."
"You know you can stay here with us for as long as you want," he went on. "Take your time and find an apartment or a condo that you really like, in a good neighborhood. Anyhow, give it some thought, Sis, and don't be in any hurry to make up your mind. There's no need for that."
No there isn't, Georgianne agreed silently. Just as well, too. She didn't want to stay in Chicago, or anywhere, but neither did she want to leave. She had nowhere to go, nowhere else to be. She didn't want to do anything but drift along with the days, bother no one, and sleep as much as possible. She would stay until she began to feel awkward and then, perhaps, she would move on or try to make some definite plan for herself.
"Yes," she said finally. "I am thinking about it."
The day Georgianne returned to the cemetery was bright, clear, and crisp, the picture of early autumn. The grass was still a rich green but it wore a scattering of leaves, the first to mark the season's change. In less than a year, she had buried a husband and a daughter there. It seemed impossible. A family had ceased to exist. As simple as that. Both stones were in place now. The names and dates told everything, and nothing. Georgianne imagined someone stopping there a hundred years in the future. Would that person notice that the man had died young? That the woman had died still a girl, less than a year later? Would that person even wonder about it? A mystery. A story lost in time. The names would mean nothing, but would merely indicate two more human beings restored to the anonymity of the earth. Maybe that is the story, the only story. It hurt to think that if she lived out a normal life span, Georgianne would eventually be the odd one of the three buried there, and sometimes she wondered if it wouldn't be better to join them now. Get it over with, accept the last portion of an abrupt fate. But they wouldn't want her like that. She could almost see Sean and Bonnie shaking their heads, saying, No, stay away, live. Georgianne arranged the flowers she had brought and sat for a while on the grass, thinking about all the good days and nights, the years she'd had with Sean and Bonnie, telling herself that in spite of what had happened she had for a long time been very lucky.
Georgianne sipped the hot drink carefully. Exquisite. The glass held Irish whiskey, a slice of lemon, sugar, cloves, a silver spoon, and water that had just boiled. She wanted to let the liquor take hold of her and make her feel better. But it was like drinking after a funeral-it didn't quite work. She'd been trying, with Bobbie Maddox's help, for several days now. They'd gotten tipsy, they'd even fallen asleep drunk a couple of times, but it still didn't quite work. Nothing did, nothing ever would. Georgianne was beginning to reconcile herself to that. But drinking with a friend was a distraction at least, sometimes fun and occasionally enough to diffuse the pain a little.
She had concluded all her business in Foxrock that day. She'd kept a few trunks of personal items in storage in Danbury, but everything else that had been in her home on Indian Hill Road was sold and gone. The last of the bills were paid, the papers signed and filed away.
Georgianne had more money in her checking account than ever before, and much larger sums secure in certificates of deposit. Burt wanted her to see a friend of his about investment planning. Money, money, money-not a cent of which she wanted or knew how to spend. It gave her nothing but a spurious, meaningless freedom.