soft tap on the door interrupted her reflections, and looking up she realized that it was already eleven-thirty and John must be home from Starbucks. He came in hard on the heels of his knock and hurried over to kiss her cheek and give her a quick squeeze about the shoulders. “Mama said that Aunt Evelyn has died!” he cried. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry. You loved her so much. Tell me.” He curled up at her feet, resting his chin and arm on her knees.
Lizzy smiled at the “Tell me” which had been the opening for so many comfortable exchanges with her favorite sibling. He always knew when she needed him to be the big brother. She stroked his hair, still cold from the bus ride home. “I’m so glad you’re here, John. We got a letter from a lawyer saying that she died just after Christmas. They enclosed a letter she wrote for me, too.”
She paused, realizing that for the first time in her life, she could not tell even John about her dilemma. To do as her aunt asked would mean leaving her dearest remaining friend in the dark. But while she was making up her mind, she could still talk to John about things that mattered. “The moment I knew she was gone I saw how much I’ve missed her. I guess she was always in my mind, and it had become such a habit for me to hold mental conversations with her that I didn’t fully realize how long it’s been since I really saw her, or had an actual conversation with her. I could see from the signatures on her letters that she was getting shaky, but it never really occurred to me that she could be seriously ill! She never said anything!”
“I suppose she didn’t want you to worry about her when you couldn’t do anything to help. She probably realized that no normal girl in her twenties would leap to the conclusion that someone was going to die—you just wouldn’t think that way.”
“And now I’ll never see her again!”
John smiled. “You can still have those mental conversations.”
“But somehow it’s different—they would seem less real.”
“That you’ll have to work on,” John agreed.
“It’s just—I learned so much from her—not so much facts as ways to understand the world—ways to be in the world. She lived with a kind of grace that I always wanted to imitate. And she had a gift for being friends, real friends, with people. I wish you’d known her too.”
“Oh, I think I knew her a little bit—at least through the ways you changed each time you came back from visiting her. She always brought out the best in you, you know.”
After a bit Lizzy said, “She wants me to go to Lambtown. She wants me to do some work for her there. It would take months, maybe a year or more.”
John thought about that for a moment. “No doubt she had her reasons. If you want my advice, I think you should do as she says. She was good for you, Lizzy, and there’s no reason she shouldn’t continue to be. And getting away couldn’t do you any harm. I know you’ve got your business going here, but you could garden for people in California, too—and all year round, not just seasonally! Do you really see yourself staying in Columbus all your life? In this house all your life? You could do so much more.”
“But I’d be away from you! And Dad, and all the family, of course.”
“Well, and what of it?” John said cheerfully. “This isn’t the nineteenth century—we’ve got phones, and e-mail, and I’ve even heard of these devices called airplanes! We wouldn’t forget about you. And you’d let me come visit you out there on the western frontier, I hope.”
“Try to keep me from sending you a ticket!”
“In fact, Mama may be so curious about Aunt Evelyn’s life that she might insist on us all going out there.”
Lizzy grimaced. “You mean, she’s so curious about Aunt Evelyn’s supposed fortune. Oh, goodness, you don’t think so, do you?”
But as usual, John was right.
Chapter Three
“Created a nonprofit foundation? What was she thinking? What about her family? She can’t have been in her right mind. Nobody in their right mind would give their money to some charity—and not even a real charity, one she made up herself!—while ignoring their own family. It can’t be legal, we must have a claim. It’s clear what must be done, Mr. B: we’ll all go to California and challenge the will. Those lawyers will understand when they see how many children we have, and how needy we are. What about Lydon? Married, with a wife to support, and who knows when a baby will be on the way! What will become of all of us? We must do something! We have to go there and see this lawyer, and stay till we get justice!” Mrs. Bennet, in full cry over the breakfast table.
Mr. Bennet, hiding behind the newspaper, made no reply. John and Lizzy endeavored to explain to their mother that Aunt Evelyn had every right to do as she pleased with her own money, that she had been perfectly clear-headed and knew her own wishes.
“But it wasn’t her own money,” protested Mrs. Bennet, “it was Uncle Adolphus’s money! If you had only contested his will years ago, Mr. B, we wouldn’t find ourselves in this fix now! I hold you responsible for this. How she could have been happy all these years with money that wasn’t rightfully hers I will never understand, and now we have to go to all this trouble to get it back.”
Accustomed to his wife’s outbursts, Mr. Bennet continued to read. But the idea of going to California was fast becoming fixed in her mind, and soon she was to receive support from an unexpected source.
Her younger son and favorite child, Lydon, had recently been persuaded to marry the eighteen-year-old daughter of a brigadier general in charge of a hush-hush space project at the nearby Rickenbacker Air Force Base, after the general had found Lydon drunk and in bed with his equally inebriated daughter. Brigadier General Cromwell Hughes was not the sort of man to brook such an insult to his daughter’s virtue, no matter how frequently it might be offered nor with what complaisance it might have been received. His first idea was to beat the young man to a pulp and arrange for him to be shanghaied to some hot and dusty foreign land, but inquiries into Lydon’s family and background had induced him to think again. The Bennets might not be well off and they appeared to be a cohort of civilian slackers, but the family name was old, and they did own a beautiful Victorian house near Short North. General Hughes was a practical man, and he was aware of the limits of what could reasonably be expected from his daughter Jenny. A marriage took place.
When Jenny and Lydon brought him the news about Aunt Evelyn and her will, they found the general in his study, examining a map. This being nothing unusual, they launched into their tale without preliminaries. The general only half attended to them until they reached the point of explaining that Aunt Evelyn had lived in Lambtown, California, and that Mrs. Bennet hoped to pursue her fortune there.
“Stop—did you say Lambtown, California?”
Lydon and Jenny were startled by this sudden interest in their narrative, for they were accustomed to talking in the general’s presence only for the pleasure of hearing themselves speak. But they dutifully repeated the location and then, as the general appeared to have nothing more to add, continued with their tale. They did not realize—because the general did not feel obliged to share his concerns with two such useless people—that they were offering him the solution to a dilemma. General Hughes had recently been informed by Space Command that he was being transferred to Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California to oversee the testing phase of the rocket project. He liked to keep Jenny and, of necessity, Lydon under his eye, having no confidence
