Henderson, I was certain, did, too. "Clare, you've gone to such trouble to heat it up," he said. "The least I can do is run to the deli down the street and get some vanilla ice cream. It'll be three minutes. You all start. Just save me a piece."
"It's not necessary," Clare said. "I'd hate to-"
"In my family it's sacrilege to eat naked apple pie. Besides, I'm going on a serious diet as soon as I finish this meal, and I want to go out with a bang." And he was gone from the room and through the foyer, leaving me to ride these rough seas alone. I heard the front door click shut. Andy returned to the table, Susanna held out her arms to her child, and the rest of us poured milk and sugar into our coffee. Clare, the mother superior, was the only one who didn't know which confidences had been breached.
"Sophy, will you wait for ice cream or-"
"I'll have a piece now," I said.
"Me too," Ginny said, coming to an awkward full stop, aware that she and her sister might have said too much.
"I'll wait," Susanna said, with that same nervous full stop after her order.
"I'll have a piece now and a piece with ice cream," affable Andy said, and pasted on a showy smile for Clare.
"Sophy, while the pie was heating up," Clare said, cutting seven neat pieces, "I was remembering the first time I met Will, and I wondered what your first memory of him was."
"Honeysuckle Road, out on the West End of the island. In Blueberry Parfait. I was hitchhiking, and he picked me up in the old Bug. What's yours?"
"Mom, we told Sophy what Daddy's lawyer said this morning," Ginny said, "that we should give her a gift. That you came up with the idea about the house."
All we heard for a while was two or three people sipping coffee, noisily rearranging spoons on saucers. I could have made the silence vanish by telling them what my lawyer had told me-that my winning wasn't certain-or even that I was not inclined to file a claim, but I enjoyed seeing Clare squirm. Her smile had turned to stone, her nostalgia to dust, and her apple pie had been ruined by unsavory revelations. Worst of all, her daughters were wavering in their loyalty. Or so it must have seemed. She gaped at Ginny and would not meet my eye. I figured Ginny was getting back at Clare for her earlier rudeness. Maybe Ginny and Susanna really did want to lay everything on the table and do what was right by me. Or maybe they wanted to do everything they could to avoid a struggle over the estate.
"Mom, don't make a production out of it," Ginny said. "We're not fighting over the future of Microsoft."
But the gravity of the next silence made it feel as if we were.
"Maybe the best thing," Andy said finally, Andy who cared nothing for money and things, who had no use for phones or electricity, whose love of nature wasn't a matter of seasonal good taste, a vase of wildflowers on the dining room table, and a copy of Thoreau's Cape Cod in the bathroom, Andy, who had said almost nothing for the last two days and now piped up at the most awkward moment. "Maybe the best thing would be to ask Sophy what she thinks is fair, instead of playing some fucked-up chess game with her that she doesn't even know she's playing. She was the one still married to him."
The fucked-up chess game was a particularly nice touch; I wished Henderson was there to hear it and to see Clare wince, her lips pucker as if she'd sucked a lemon. But I hoped she wouldn't ask me right away, because I had no idea what would be fair.
"For God's sake, Mom, lighten up," said Ginny, herself not always as light as meringue.
"Maybe Sophy hasn't thought about the legal stuff yet," Susanna said. "Have you, Soph?" Dear, sweet, guileless Susanna, who lived like Goldilocks in the woods without a microwave or a modem.
"I'm in the middle of a divorce," I said, but not unkindly, "and some of this has crossed my mind. And my lawyer's mind." Clare was staring at me as if I held a dagger in my hand, instead of a forkful of apple pie. "She's doing some research, and I'll talk to her in the next few days."
"That makes a world of sense to me," Clare said. I knew she didn't mean it; I knew she'd rather hear that I was as naive as Susanna and content with no more than the house for the summer.
"To me too," I said.
All of us were still, so when we heard the front door open and Henderson call out, "The Good Humor Man is back," the dining room filled with relief, with oxygen, with another subject than this. "They were all out of vanilla," Henderson said at the entranceway, "so I ended up with Chunky Monkey and Wavy Gravy."
"I'm afraid I've lost my appetite," Clare announced and got up from the table with a sigh, a baroque display of regret, Clinton rising from the table at which Barak and Arafat had failed to make peace, and brushed past Henderson toward the foyer. We said nothing as we listened to hear where she was going next. Up the stairs, down the hallway. A door clicked shut somewhere.
"What did I miss?" Henderson said.
"We sent her to her room for some 'time out,'" Andy said, and we laughed and then tried to stifle our laughter and then quit trying. It was a great relief to give in to it, after days of pent-up grief and guilt and reasonably good behavior. It felt delicious, this sudden chorus of hilarity, laughing before long at our laughing. I was afraid the raucousness would bring Clare downstairs and we would have to explain what was so funny.
But she did not appear. We settled down and ate most of the pie and all the ice cream, and I told the girls what I had not wanted to say in front of Clare. "I'd like to stay in the house."
"Good."
"The more difficult subject-" I stopped and began again, properly this time. "You'd have no way of knowing this, but I agreed to leave the marriage with nothing, because I didn't want to make the separation any more painful for your father than it already was. But I never imagined we'd end up in permanent legal limbo, almost married and almost divorced. I'm not eager to file a claim against the estate, but I can't walk away from this with my dollar and"-I started to say "let bygones be bygones"-when Ginny interrupted.
"We didn't know any of this," she said, "but we were planning to give you some of the insurance money when it comes. Mommy wanted us to start with the house for the summer and see how you felt about that."
I was too surprised to say anything, surprised by the stand I'd taken, by the rush of words that had come out of my mouth on my behalf. And surprised that my stepdaughters were going to defy their father's will-and probably their mother's-and give me a share of their inheritance.
This was not exactly a happy ending, but it soothed me as nothing had before. Not the money, mind you-I didn't care how much it was-but the thought. The thought that I hadn't been dismissed, discarded, nullified by all of them.
I said thank you too many times, but only because I didn't want to say more and end up sounding sappy, too Tuesday Mornings with Morrie, because I knew their good will and their consideration would help me get through tomorrow. I would need everything I could summon of myself to wake up tomorrow and go to Will's funeral, and, when it was over, to my lawyer, and later in the week, to see Daniel and his children without the comfort of my old costumes. Then I knew I had to sit down and write the story I have just told you, and I was growing more certain that the best place to begin it, and the only place it made sense for me to dwell right now, was the house I had fled three months before.
That night, when Henderson and I returned to the Lighthouse Motel and adjourned to our adjoining rooms, I sat at the Formica table and turned on Will's tangerine laptop, a simple gesture, though it felt like opening a coffin lid. The diary contained no suicide plan. I knew I didn't need to fear finding that. Then why subject myself to more of it? Because I intended to give the computer to his daughters the following day and had to decide how candid to be about the diary; I was the one who knew the password, after all. I wanted to know what else was there before I let them have it; whether he had written anything upsetting about the two of them.