egg timer placed by the phone, called to thank her for being such a brick and to lay out her plans.
“Family is family!” Marjorie exclaimed. “I hate to take up time on an expensive call but you must hear me out. Your plan is absolutely daft. You’ll not make it even the first quarter of the way.”
“You don’t know me very well,” Phyllis retorted. “I’m determined to get there on my own. Texaco advertises friendly stations with clean restrooms never farther apart than forty miles or so and if I need a safe place, I’ll jolly well rely upon the Texaco Man Who Wears the Smile. I can’t see any other way.”
“I beg you not to do it. Just wait a few more months; they say it will all soon be over. You can then travel comfortably by train. Why won’t you please just wait a few months?”
“Because I’m planning to bicycle,” she replied. “If the war ended today, the trains would be even more jammed with the returning soldiers.” What choice did she really have? Hers was only an “A” sticker on the windshield of the Lincoln Zephyr and of course she had no access to public transport; she was a visiting civilian. Further, she had no contacts in the States other than Aunt Marjorie who had taken a position with a family, nannying their two adopted children.
That was the sum total of her choices.
Dawson Creek was a closed book.
“Certainly, your young niece may join you with the children!” merrily said their mother who was given to avoiding the nursery altogether. “You can all picnic at the beach.”
Phyllis had heard tales about this family and how comfortable the house was and how sadly plain the children were. Especially since the mother was a great beauty. It was quite a fright, really. Any reputable adoption agency would have taken pains to actually match the children to the parents. Surely, in the case of this family, a respectable agency would have seen fit to find children other than Little Dickie and Sally. But Marjorie had said that the family had scrimped by not going through an accredited agency and had dealt directly through a local lawyer. They had been too Scotch; they had been foolish. Cutting corners made things bleak, dreary. She was reminded again of Aberdeen.
“But come along, if you must. You’ll be taken with the weather and the place and, while the children are young, they have a certain appeal. They are obedient, and I for one will welcome the company. Here, we spend long hours at the beach.”
Then she added an abrupt reversal, “I’m returning to Aberdeen the very moment this bloody war is over. So do get here soon.”
“You are no longer concerned about Japanese submarines?”
“Certainly not. Not now!
Phyllis sighed and lit a cigarette. For the moment then Santa Barbara was as good a destination as any, so she packed only the necessities for the trip ahead, sadly lingering in the house on her last night. It was only meant to be their home during the winter—summers were to have been spent at Dawson Creek fishing and shooting in the cool air of the Peace River Valley, and now, sadly, spring was approaching. If Russell had lived, they’d be readying things for Canada. That choice had been preempted by Anissa.
Her passing moods insisted that the more she abhorred Florida, the more she was certain she would adore California, even if the children were deficient. And halfway between here and there lay Santa Fe, if one drew a reasonably straight line.
As she wandered through the house, badly needed rum in hand, she caressed the paperback mystery that still lay open on the dining room table where Russell had left it. She needed him. There had been so much that was wonderful about him.
She moved the book next to her rucksack to be packed. Her last shrine to him was now just his side of the double bed, where the crease of his head was still in the down pillow. If he were still alive, she maintained that she’d stay and never leave, but he wasn’t alive, and to be decent, she finished the work at his desk, paying an unpaid claim from the corner grocery store before she stashed the checks on top of his book near her rucksack.
Turning the bottle upside down, she sucked out the dregs of the rum, then launched on a nostalgic tour of the house once again. She had everything set out, including the paperback. She folded the death certificate and put it next to the checks. Now that everyone was made aware of her plans, she hoped to astonish the local wags with her arresting courage— setting out to bicycle her way 2,500 miles to be with her aging spinster aunt. She hoped her decision made them all feel bloody weak and uninteresting by comparison. And she had told them it was a charitable plan.
There had to be another bottle of rum on one of the shelves. Ahh. Next to a bottle with a few inches in it, she discovered several packs of Chesterfields.
The clothes she planned to take were Russell’s, left where Russell had hung them—his worn khaki shorts, a few matching shirts with pockets for coins, plus her lipstick and the zinc ointment, as well as ready cash for the first phase. She set out his pith helmet for protection from the sun. What she was not taking would be locked up and put away, but not for too long considering Florida’s mildew and how others were laying claims to everything she’d been awarded.
She poured herself the last of her new rum stash in a highball glass and dropped the bottle in the garbage. There was no ice left.
When she wasn’t being clawed over by the Palm Beach matrons, she was being hounded for money. Even the maid demanded severance just for coming once a week to wash up. She appeared after the funeral with her hand out, holding back her own key to the house as a form of ransom. Bloody woman had forced Phyllis to change the locks on the house, needing to safeguard Russell’s golf trophies and the carefully boxed collection of heirlooms. Things like a stein from Princeton and the photo albums of the three children from his first marriage to Jean, and diaries.
Later she might want to befriend his children whom she’d never met, using these heirlooms as bait. She would speak of how their marvelous father adored her; she would exonerate herself. She was not a cunning slut, she was an adventurer, and there was a difference. She had been cruelly misjudged and she would be vindicated—later, after the war.
After the war, she knew they’d all adore her.
She lit a Chesterfield and lowering herself into the chintz couch and continued talking to herself, making plans, memorizing the words of her script for a future spontaneous encounter.
“I can well imagine that you and your brother and sisters share a misconception about me.”
But she had taken the money, fair and square. She would have been a loving stepmother to them, had their dear father not died in the sudden and unfortunate accident. She wept at the poignancy as she pictured their stunned silence as they looked her over approvingly; she planned to wait a few seconds before resuming. “I’ve saved some precious items for you which I’d always planned to bring when the war was over.” It would certainly be a sad but rewarding scene.
She envisioned herself driving to them in her Lincoln Zephyr and personally presenting these gifts. Then, having been welcomed into their different homes, she’d return to Scotland and have the car shipped. Or France, she could go to France. She hoped she’d be able to manage all of this soon.
She polished off the last of the rum and lay on their double bed, weeping over the sheer heartrending picture of her being friendless and in an empty house. The clothes had been laid out, and when she shook herself awake the historic next morning she grasped his khaki shorts and tearfully climbed into them, right foot first. After
