“Lise,” Henry said. “It’s good to see you.” His voice sounded false even to him and he winced as she helped Brendan over the threshold and into the house without another glance at him. Bongo hurled himself at Henry’s knees, sixty pounds of spotted mutt with a floppy pink tongue, and Henry scratched Bongo’s ears as Lise and Brendan chatted. Then Lise called, “Grunkie’s here!” as if Henry didn’t exist. Henry’s heart shrank and withered and burned.
“Lise,” he said again, but she looked at him scornfully and moved away. When she was a tiny, bony child, she had sometimes looked at him in just that fashion. She went to her room and hid in the back of her closet whenever he punished her, and when he went up later to coax her out, her eyes glittered so coldly that he found himself apologizing and forgetting her misdeeds. She stood at the shelves near the staircase now, slamming books into boxes. The floor was littered with them, he saw — boxes of books, of pictures, of crystal and china and clothes. He had thought Kitty still had a few weeks before she had to move.
Kitty came out of the kitchen, wrapping a goblet in white paper and saying, “Brendan! What in the world …?” in the low, rich radio voice she’d developed when she went to work at the PBS station. Henry could remember when her voice had sounded like anyone else’s. One afternoon, during the summer that he’d turned twenty and had been working with a construction crew, he’d looked down from the roof of a cottage on Canandaigua Lake and seen on the beach below him a young woman with two little girls in tow. The girls were blond; the woman, hardly more than a girl herself, was black haired, creamy skinned, delicately boned. She looked like Henry’s mother, whom Henry could hardly remember. She spread out a blanket, settled the girls and the dolls they’d brought with them, and arranged a meticulous picnic: sandwiches cut neatly in half, grapes and peaches wrapped in a napkin, homemade cookies in a lidded box, and miniature versions of everything for the dolls. A baby-sitter, he’d decided, watching as she solemnly poured liquid into the dolls’ cups. Working for one of the wealthy summer families. The charmed circle she and the girls had formed on the sand looked like everything he’d missed in his own life. He had climbed down from the roof and dropped his hammer and told his foreman he was taking a break. Drawn by an envy so strong that it was already almost love, he had introduced himself to Kitty and her charges.
“Is that your house?” she’d asked, and he would have given anything to have been able to say yes. The sweet, bland surface of her life enchanted him. She had two parents, two brothers, a dog and a cat; as he courted her, with a frenzy that excluded both his sister and his ailing grandparents, he saw a chance that he could escape his ragged childhood and make a stable family for himself. His dreams had worked out just the way he’d wanted. He’d married her and moved into the city and left Coreopsis behind; they’d raised two daughters and had picnics on beaches and vacations in the mountains. All along, until that wretched radio station had captured her, he’d thought she shared his contentment.
And then one year, when the girls were half-grown and he was working day and night building the fortune he’d thought they both wanted, she’d signed up for some night courses and made friends with a group of women he disliked. She’d started volunteering at the radio station when Lise entered high school, and then somehow, when his back was turned, she’d become a stranger with a tangle of black hair and too much eye makeup and this voice — this husky, rippling voice — that rained over the city five times a week.
There’d been times, in the last few years, when he’d been driving along the back roads searching for land and had heard her voice purring from the radio. Then he’d imagined that he didn’t know her at all and that he could go home and fall into bed with this frightening, exciting stranger. He’d imagined creeping up the stairs and coming upon her damp from her shower, her hair glistening with steam and her voice caressing him. But she kissed him absently when he approached her and then put a load of laundry in the drier or a chicken in the oven. She set her glasses on her nose and said she had papers to read, or she complained about his friends or his hours or his bills. When he made love to her, she looked out the window or twined her fingers in the fur of Bongo, who came and stood by them and sniffed and whined. She had pushed him away — on purpose? By accident? He’d never been sure — and then used the women to whom he’d gone for comfort as an excuse to push him out.
Her face soured when she caught sight of him. “Oh,” she said. “You.”
“Kitty,” he said. She looked dry, self-possessed, incapable of yielding. And yet he could remember a time, before the voice, when she’d lain down with him in the fields of Coreopsis.
“Are you here for a reason?” she said.
He stood behind Brendan’s chair and waved his hands over Brendan’s head, meaning, Don’t humiliate me. Don’t do this in front of my uncle; feeling, behind his hope, the weight of all the hard words she’d heaped on him the past six months.
“We’re busy,” she said, disappointing but not surprising him. “We have things to do. I’m moving, in case you’ve forgotten.”
Brendan cut smoothly and gently into her angry speech: “Where to?” he asked. He might have been talking, Henry thought, to one of the strangers at his stoplight.
“Where to?” Kitty said mockingly. “Lise was able to find me an apartment in her complex. Two stories, a little patio with a bit of grass all my own. I’m sure I’ll be very comfortable.”
“Twin Oaks?” Henry said. “You’re moving there?”
“You have a better idea?”
“Let’s go in the kitchen,” Henry said. “Please? We need to talk.”
He strode off, hoping Kitty would follow. Behind him Brendan said, “Henry? You know we ought to get going,” and then, as Henry turned the corner, “We can go in a minute, I guess. I’ll just sit here and talk to Lise …”
Kitty followed Henry. “What are you doing here?” she said. “I asked you not to come … and what in the world are you doing with Brendan?”
Her voice was so biting that he realized he couldn’t safely tell her the truth about anything. She twisted his words; she twisted his every move. She hates me, he thought with surprise. He couldn’t remember anyone ever hating him before.
“I’m bringing him over to Wiloma’s,” he lied. “She and the kids wanted to see him. Then we’re all going out to dinner. The Home loaned us the van.” He hoped Kitty wouldn’t remember that he wasn’t supposed to be driving. She glared at him, waiting for something more. “I thought I’d just swing by here, since I was out,” he said lamely. “I need to pick up a couple of things, some extra blankets, some clothes I forgot …”
Kitty wrapped glasses silently. She had always been able to wait him out, wait until his nervous voice filled the silence and he hung himself. He forced himself to change the subject: “How are the girls?”
“Like you care.”
“You know I do — you know this is killing me. You think I like seeing you forced out of our house?”
“Your house,” Kitty said bitterly. “Your house, your development, your stupid, stupid projects — when was any of it ever ours? When did you ever think about what the girls and I might want?”
This was so manifestly unjust that Henry stared at her. He had always, always, done everything for her and the girls — all his work, all his buildings and projects and plans and dreams. “That’s not fair,” he said. “If Coreopsis Heights hadn’t failed — I was trying to make something for all of us, make enough money so that you and the girls would be really secure, so you could do whatever you wanted.” He had said this before, he thought. Or something like this — he had told his sister, years ago, that he couldn’t stay in Coreopsis while Da was sick because he had to go make enough money to save them all.