“What did Miss Maude mean, saying it was a sign?”
“She’s been thinking about moving. I guess this will settle it for her. Although that’s a very silly way to be, Lu. To place emphasis on portents. Or horoscopes, or any of that stuff. She left a candle burning and her draperies caught fire.”
“I read my horoscope every day,” I reminded him.
“I know,” he said. “You read it out loud to me.”
“That’s because it’s yours, too.”
“Yes, and do you really think that you and I have the same day every day, that what’s recommended for you applies to me?”
I did.
Miss Maude never spent another night in that house. It was razed a few months later, and the lot stood empty for years, which delighted AJ and me as it became our unofficial territory. That spring, glorious flowers came to life, peeping through the overgrown grass, the result of Miss Maude’s meticulous preparation in her first few weeks, her only weeks, in the house. They never bloomed again.
I was fifteen or sixteen before I realized that my father’s shoes were in Miss Maude’s house when it started to burn. As was my father. My father was shoeless in Miss Maude’s house, and they weren’t in the living room when that candle in the old Chianti bottle caught the drapes, or they might have had a chance to put it out. They had gone upstairs. Together.
I called my brother, in law school at the time. I assumed he had figured it out before I did, but I held on to the hope that I might, just once, tell AJ something he didn’t already know.
Of course he had pieced together far more than I had.
“It didn’t start that night, Lu. He’d been going over there since mid-December, after you were asleep and I was in my room. He’d tell me he was going outside to smoke his pipe-he knew you didn’t approve of him smoking and would give him hell if you picked up the scent of his tobacco in the house-but he didn’t come back for hours. Then one night I saw him leaving her house, and I knew.”
“Eeeeew,” I said.
“That’s how I felt then.” That’s how I felt when I was your age. I thought, So infuriating. “Now I’m happy for him. Although-you know, she wasn’t a widow.”
“What do you mean? She lied about being married?”
“She lied about her husband being dead. He was at Walter Reed, a double amputee.”
“But Daddy didn’t know that. He couldn’t have.”
AJ sighed over the line. It was the mid-1980s. A long-distance call was still something of import, minutes gobbling up money the way the still-novel Pac-Man ate his power pills, although my father never objected to me calling AJ. He wanted us to be close. He had encouraged the ritual of our weekly Sunday call and even allowed me to call before rates dropped if I had important news. However, he probably would have been appalled if he had known what we were discussing on this particular Sunday.
“How do you think I know, Lu? He told me so himself.”
“Uh-huh. No way. Daddy never would have been with a married woman. Besides, why would he tell you?”
AJ’s laugh was raw and sad. “I guess he wanted to warn me that everyone screws up sometime. Even our saintly father. He said she was a de facto widow-wouldn’t divorce her husband out of principle, but he was never going to come home, be her husband again.”
“So he argued against his adultery on the basis of a technicality?”
“Other way around. He insisted that he was guilty of adultery despite her situation. But he cared about her, in his way, although he was never going to get serious with any woman. At any rate, she saw the fire as a judgment and left.” A pause. “Miss Maude wasn’t the only one, over the years. There were others. Lu, did you really think our father, who was not quite forty when our mother died, went the rest of his life without female companionship?”
I did. And I still believe that he did not have a single lady friend during the eight-year stretch when it was just the two of us, after AJ left for college. By the time I was in my teens, I was on the alert for love and sex, imagining it everywhere, so how could I not have noticed if it were there?
Then again, how did I not pick up the scent of my father’s pipe tobacco?
Perhaps my adolescent self simply balked at that threshold of my father’s bedroom, as most teenagers do. I hope so. Now I want to believe that my father found a way to meet his needs, that he had a rich and thrilling secret life.
After all, I did, at least for a time.
JANUARY 10
“Your first murder,” Lu’s father says, opening a bottle of wine, one of the better ones in his “cellar”-a corner of the kitchen that now includes two wine refrigerators, one for whites, and one that keeps reds at a steady sixty-four degrees. “Sort of like living in San Francisco,” AJ observed on his last visit, which provoked a pedantic observation from his wife, Lauranne, that San Francisco is not, in fact, sixty-four degrees year-round. Lauranne still doesn’t have a handle on the Brant sense of humor.
Lu glances at the price tag, which her father has forgotten to scrape off. $39.99, some Australian red with a silly name. And it’s just a Saturday night dinner at home, nothing innately special, although they are expecting AJ and that is always a cause to celebrate. AJ lives less than twenty miles away, but his work-his ministry, as Lu likes to tease him, knowing that the term provokes him on several levels-means he’s on the road, on the go, all the time.
“Not my first murder by a long shot,” Lu reminds her father. “My first as state’s attorney. I did several as a deputy. You know, not everyone gets appointed to the state’s attorney’s office. Some of us actually have to run.”
He decants the wine, putting out stemless wineglasses for the adults, heavy tumblers for the twins. Andrew Brant, almost forty when Lu was born, had been considered an “old” father and he remains undeniably old-fashioned. He believes that children should learn to negotiate the adult world, that plastic cups with lids only retard their progress. To his credit, he never gets angry over spills or breakage. Teensy is the one who mourns the destruction of the Brants’ material possessions. But then-she’s the one who has been cleaning them for two generations. When Lu moved back in with her father, she was amazed to realize how little he knows about domestic arrangements. He cannot scramble eggs or make a bed. Or maybe he just doesn’t. He will buy groceries for special occasions-steaks, homemade ice cream, sushi-grade tuna from Wegman’s-but it would never occur to him to go to Giant or Target for everyday things like paper towels and detergent. Teensy does his laundry and ironing. Only his, she made clear to Lu with Teensy-ian logic. “You and the children have so many bright-colored things,” she said. “I can’t mix them with Mr. Brant’s.” How many Andrew Brants does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Lu has never been able to nail the precise punch line, but it would probably have to do with him not needing to change the lightbulb. He could just sit in the glow of his own saintly perfection.
The twins helped her finish setting the table, and with only a minimum of nagging. They look forward to their uncle’s visits as well. He plays with Justin and is fatherly with Penelope. Lu gazes with satisfaction at the inviting room. Winter is the house’s best season. With the trees bare, the lake is in full view from three sides. Hard to remember now the raw, immature landscaping that legendarily offended Adele Brant more than forty years ago. Lu always thought trees took centuries to reach maturity, yet now they are huge and she is still not old. Forty-five isn’t old, right? Especially when one is beginning a new, big job. Lu likes to joke that her midlife crisis was postponed because widowhood was more pressing. What would a midlife crisis even look like for a single mother of two? Some people might point to the one part of her life that she keeps rigidly compartmentalized, but no one knows about it, so no one can cite it.