have the house now?”
Again, he’d caught her off guard. “Oh, no, Mom and Dad didn’t own the house. They rented it; remember? For fifty years, actually. Cassie and I’ve been packing it up. The landlord’s putting it on the market soon.”
“You kiddin’ me? They rented all those years? I guess I forgot that. What an amazin’ piece of property! That view! You lookin’ into it? What’s he wanna get for it?”
“$998,000. And the place is falling apart.”
“Sheesh! Crazy!” Kit shook his head. “Hey—have you got a few minutes? I wanna show you somethin’ I know would interest you, down at the dock.”
Gina’s heart raced the way it had at the funeral yesterday. It had been overwhelming, catching up with so many people on decades of life, meted out in little morsels. With Kit . . . she didn’t have the wherewithal to be anything but superficial, but he was her oldest friend.
She glanced at her car, calculating how quickly she’d be able to get to it. “Oh, I wish . . . I can’t though. I’ve got a dinner thing.” She was sure Kit could see the lie; she felt awful. But her body was telling her, bolt.
“No problem. Well, I gotta get some grub here before they close up. Come find me at the dock sometime if you’re around.”
Gina said she would, and Kit turned and walked away, a hint of hurt in his posture that she remembered well.
When she walked into the kitchen with her groceries, Gina startled a mouse who scampered into an impossibly small slot between the stove and the wall. She imagined her mother, reaching for a pot from the pot rack that was no longer there. She grabbed her phone, put in her earbuds, and played the last chapter of an audiobook while she cooked. When the novel ended, she moved on to an episode of This American Life that she’d downloaded. She maneuvered the few utensils and dishes they hadn’t given away, her hands robotically moving in front of her while her mind was basted with clever talk. She listened as she ate her omelet, and while washing the dishes, she switched to her playlist, singing along with Judy Collins’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” and Bob Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet.” She sang out loud and hard—“behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain”—someone else’s poetry, true, but the words spoke for her. No more muted feelings—tonight, if she couldn’t cry, she would at least sing down the house.
She dried her hands and walked through the living room, where she imagined her mother again, this time on the couch that had been taken away, holding a G and T, her legs curled under her. She was everywhere, the breath and heartbeat of the house. “Let me in,” she seemed to say now.
In the bathroom, Gina answered more emails as Blind Faith’s tender “Can’t Find My Way Home” poured into her head, nearly swallowing her up. She went into Cassie’s room at eleven, took out her headphones, undressed, and reached in her suitcase for her sleep shirt. As she pulled it out, the folded paper that held Martha Washington’s hair came with it and fluttered to the floor. Her heart pumped—the first president’s wife’s hair! In her carelessness, it could have disappeared, like those restaurant receipts and used bus tickets left in her purse until they turned to pulp.
She searched her belongings for something to put the hair in for the journey home and came up with a container of spare contact lenses. She shook out the lenses, slipped the wrapped hair inside the box, and shoved it into her toiletry kit.
When she finally crawled into bed and turned out the lights, she was still uneasy. Her head was so noisy that she reached to take out the earbuds that were no longer there. All at once, words spoken during the past few days rushed in: dangling conversations with old family friends at the funeral, Kit’s questions, Annie’s invitation to stay at Lily House. To everyone’s request wanting to help, to cook, to comfort, she’d smiled gratefully and said she was, “All set thank you.” Having kept herself unknown to people in Whit’s Point for so long, she felt undeserving of their kindness.
Death was everywhere in the dark tonight. It filled the place next to her where Cassie had slept and when it pressed its cold feet against her shins, Gina turned on the light and bolted out of bed. Grabbing the box of Martha Washington’s hair, she ran downstairs to the shed. Martha’s remains would have to spend the night on the shelf, next to the bag of birdseed. She locked the kitchen door tight.
Back in bed, she lay awake, wired and vigilant, not a drowsy bone in her body. She wasn’t Gina Gilbert—mother, wife and architect; she was Ginny Gilbert—colt-limbs curled, lonely, scared.
By ten o’clock the next morning, Gina had labeled all the boxes of her father’s photographs for Cassie to move to her garage, given the stove and refrigerator to Jake, the neighbor—tokens of appreciation for three years of mooching off his WiFi connection—and fastidiously scrubbed the bathroom in preparation for her Skype meeting with Jeff and Mitzi Stone. She left notes for Cassie, locked the windows, emptied the garbage, and turned off the furnace. She returned Martha’s hair to her toiletry kit. Finally, she took a screwdriver, removed the old brass Banton doorknocker from the front door and put it in her suitcase. She’d always liked how the claw clutching a ball had nested in her palm.
Her suitcase was packed and stood by the front door. There was no way she’d spend another sleepless night in the house; after her Skype meeting with the Stones, she’d drive Paul’s rental car to Logan Airport and stay at a hotel before catching her noon flight tomorrow.
She carried a box of books to the bathroom and spread the Stones’ drawings on top of it. At ten o’clock, she sat on the toilet lid and tilted her laptop screen so that Jeff and Mitzi hopefully wouldn’t see the tank.
When they were connected, Jeff’s face appeared against their kitchen cabinets; next to him, Mitzi had her cell phone pressed to her ear.
“How are you holding up?” Jeff asked, gesturing to Mitzi to get off the phone.
“Ma, I’ll call you back,” Mitzi said. “I’m just starting a meeting with my architect. Okay. I will, I will. I love you, too.”
Mitzi hung up and leaned into the screen, the symmetrical curves of her hair rocking against her cheeks.
“I’m okay, I think,” Gina said. “It’s been a rough week.”
“You poor thing,” Mitzi said. “Thanks so much for agreeing to talk today.” Thin and high-strung, she was dressed in an orange workout top and a Giants baseball cap. Her phone chimed with a text and when she picked it up to look at it, Jeff said, “Mitzi, put it away! That’s rude.”
Mitzi stuck out her tongue at Jeff and winked at Gina. “Is it true what they say—that remodeling destroys marriages?” She laughed as if such a thing could never happen to her.
Gina cringed, wondering if she’d be able to rise to the occasion this morning of being the Stones’ architect, a position she’d been navigating for over a year. The Stones had moved from St. Louis and bought a fifteen-thousand-square-foot Tudor Revival mansion in San Francisco that sat on a hill of solid rock, one-hundred-twenty feet back from the street. When Gina first toured the house, she’d been awed by its audacious expenditure of space, the colossal volumes that seemed to presume inhabitants who themselves were larger-than-life and had a royal-sized entitlement to earth and air. The walls of the main rooms were lined with low wainscots and pierced with mean little windows—like the eyes of a behemoth. Worn from neglect, the house was clunky and visually busy, with a tortuous floor plan.
A tear-down, Gina
