pair—and their party drinks: Annie—gin and tonic, Lester—Michelob beer. They’d loved her father’s puns and her mother’s cheese soufflé. Their two sons, now in Alaska and Boston, were quite a bit older than Gina and hadn’t been around much when she was growing up.
“Dearies, how’s everything going over there?” Annie asked when she returned with the wine. “You poor things. Is everything set for the funeral? What can we do to help?”
“It’s an unholy mess!” Cassie said. She described the house cleaning in detail, including the adventures with the dead skunk, but not, Gina noted, the discovery of Martha Washington’s hair or George’s cloak piece. While Cassie chattered, uneasiness rolled through Gina as she imagined memories, nested wasp-like in these walls, ready to swarm.
“Gina?”
Annie stood over her with a wine bottle. Gina looked at her wine goblet and seeing it was empty said, “No, thank you.” Annie refilled Cassie’s glass.
“There’s something different about this room,” Gina said.
“Wow, the architect speaks!” Lester laughed. “You don’t miss a trick. We moved the piano some. In the summer, the sun coming in that window was murder on the instrument.”
Below the bookshelves, under the piano, were panels that Gina knew were actually secret cabinets where toys had always been kept. She thought about those toys now: wooden animals, small sailboat models, an old doll with one arm missing; her fingers itched to touch them. She stood, realizing the alcohol had gone to her head. “Would it be okay if I ...” she laughed. “I just can’t resist.” She ducked under the piano and slid on her knees to the wall where the panels were. She knew just how to press them to make them slide open.
“What the heck, Gina?” Cassie said. “Oh, are you looking for the toys?”
Gina opened each of the three doors and peeked inside: empty. “They’re not there,” she said, feeling ridiculous.
“Your ancestor Banton was a secretive guy,” Lester said. “That’s not the only hiding place he had.”
Cassie gasped and jumped from her chair. “Did you find the Washington letters?” she shouted.
Mortified, Gina crawled out from under the piano, bumping her head as she tried to stand. Did Annie and Lester know about the Washington letters? she wondered. Their mother had always told them they were a secret. As George Washington’s private secretary, Sidney Banton had supposedly hidden some important letters of the first president’s in Lily House.
“No, no,” Annie said. “Good heavens! You’ll be the first to know if we find the Washington letters.”
Cassie’s flushed face sagged with disappointment. As if possessed, she walked the perimeter of the room, pressing on the panels of the wainscoting.
“Over here,” Lester said, squeezing behind the piano bench. “Take a look.” Placing both palms on one of the wall panels, he easily slid it to the side, revealing a cavity about eighteen inches wide.
Cassie and Gina peered into the compartment. “This must’ve been where Sidney Banton hid all the important stuff he had of George Washington’s,” Cassie said when Lester had closed the panel. “How come Mom never told us about it?”
“She said she didn’t know it was there,” Lester explained. “I think it must’ve been because the piano was up against it all those years. The Historical Society people knew about it, though.”
“And Sid dropped in maybe six months ago, and he knew about it,” Annie added.
“Sid Banton?
Sid, Fran’s son, was Gina and Cassie’s only cousin, eight years Gina’s senior.
“He’s thinking of moving back to Whit’s Point. I would imagine he was interested in checking in on the house where he grew up.”
Gina detected sarcasm in Lester’s remark, and no wonder. She and Cassie must have seemed more than a little drunk—off the wall. In the awkward silence that followed, the angry voices of Gina’s mother, Sid, and Fran pushed into Gina’s head; she nearly turned to see if they’d come into the room.
“Fran and Sid must’ve taken everything in that hiding place,” Cassie said, as if she, too, had heard ghosts. “Including the Washington letters.”
Lester smiled. “Well, now that’s funny, because Sid thinks you two must have those letters,” he said.
“What?” Cassie’s face looked ready to pop. “He’s so full of it! The Bantons were all liars and loose cannons!”
Gina touched Cassie’s arm to stop her from unleashing more. She felt the constriction of memories, of night pressing in, of wishing and wanting for things that couldn’t be had.
“Will you stay and have some leftover chicken?” Annie asked.
Gina raced Cassie to answer. “Thank you, Annie, but we’ve got a lot to do at the house before the funeral and should get going.”
As the four of them walked to the front door, Cassie’s eyes swept over the room and she sighed. “Mom always wanted to live here,” she said.
“Oh no,” Annie said. “I don’t think that’s true. Not always.”
Lester opened the door, and Cassie and Gina stepped out. “Listen, you two,” Annie said, “I want you to come back, anytime. Don’t be strangers.”
In the driveway, Gina took the car keys from Cassie and had the thought that this was another last: the last time she’d be at Lily House. Like all the other lasts this week, she put it in a box that would sit until she dared to open it.
When they got back to the house, Gina put some water on to boil for pasta, and they went back to work, numbly sorting through the things from the attic.
“Did you see Sid’s stuff?” Cassie pointed at a box, and Gina reached over and pulled out a model airplane labeled “WW2 P 51.” Underneath it were more boy toys—a book about military uniforms, a filthy baseball, and a photograph of their mother beaming at a young Sid, holding the tiller of their O Boat. In his smiling boyish face, she saw the flash of hurt she remembered about him, the long dark eyebrows so arched they could suspend a bridge. She held up the picture for Cassie to see.
“Mom was obsessed with him,” Cassie sneered.
Gina knew that after a couple of drinks, Cassie wouldn’t be able to let the subject of Sid drop; she couldn’t stand him. Their mother had adored Sid as a little boy. He was two when she became pregnant with Cassie, and she was so sure she was carrying a boy that she’d never picked out a girl’s name. She let this bit of information slip in front of Cassie when she was thirteen, establishing a life-long resentment.
“Sid lived with us for a while, you know,” Cassie said. “But Mom never told us why. She taught him to sail, not me, because he was a boy.”
“Cass, he looks like he was about nine. She taught him and not you because you were, like, six.”
“Right.
