embarrassed to say, I never remember accurately. I think my grandfather, who had a stroke at the age of fifty-six and didn’t speak for the next twenty years, is Audra Baron’s uncle. Before the stroke, my mother had also been unsure exactly how the Barons were related to us, and after the stroke she was too shy to ask Poppo to scrawl, on his little blackboard, the answer to the question: how are we related to the woman with the hair who threw herself on your chest and wept? I forgot.
The Barons owned one of those West Hills mansions whose grounds boasted 200 year-old trees. They had a foundation (the family, not the house, although obviously the house did too). They had hospital wings named after them. Why would Mary Rose be having Thanksgiving there? I don’t think Ward would mind my asking you … What was that about? Audra and Hank’s son, Ward, was one of those good-looking men—shoulders, jaw, a serious nose that takes your breath away—whose best qualities are visible at one hundred paces. Women see him, meet him, and know this instantly. But they are waylaid by his giddy jokes (“What’s the last thing that goes through a bug’s mind before he hits the windshield? His butt!”), thinking, hoping, that a third-grade sense of humor is an indicator of wit and character.
I decided that Audra and Big Hank were probably out of town, and Ward was having one of his parties. I remember having heard that he was living at home while his houseboat, moored ten miles west of our city in an anchorage full of artists, filmmakers, and nuts with money, was being refurbished.
It turned out to be nothing like that at all.
THE BARONS LIVED high in the West Hills on a ridge of rudely verdant forest. The house itself was a local curiosity; built in the 1920s with money pilfered from the government by the owner of our region’s largest shipyard, it was a three-story Mediterranean villa with raked concrete walls and a terra-cotta tile roof. From the front windows there was a view of three mountains, two rivers, and our lovely downtown.
The only other time I’d had Thanksgiving at the Barons’ was during the filming of my first movie, Romeo’s Dagger, ten years earlier, when Audra was infused with the extravagant feelings of connectedness that always go with making a movie, then dissipate the morning after the wrap party quicker than a throat full of helium sucked from a balloon. Since then, I had seen very little of them, although I occasionally ran into Audra around town.
When Mary Rose and I arrived a little after 4:00 on Thanksgiving Day, Audra gave Mary Rose, Stella, and me a big flapping-hand welcome, kissing the air beside our ears.
“Brooke, it’s been too long. And there’s that adorable baby. Are you sure Lyle doesn’t have any Asian in him anywhere? Little Stella looks as exotic as a little Tatar. Maybe it’s just that black hair. From what I remember of your mother’s side of the family they’re dishwater.” She swooped down on Stella and left an orange lipstick butterfly on her temple. Stella gave her that furrow-browed baby stare, the same one you see every day on displeased senators on CNN. I thought I would pop with pride. No one has more dignity than a six-month-old.
Audra was impressively slim, with thick, highly managed auburn hair. She was one of a vanishing breed, a Lady of the House, who has never held a paying job but has worked herself silly putting food on the table every night for a passel of ingrates. Most people look at this kind of old-fashioned American woman with scorn; they should try getting a meal for five on the table every night for forty years. Audra was in her sixties now, and seemed even more frantic than I remembered. Frantic to do things right. Frantic to amuse. Frantic, of course, to look young. I don’t think she understood that unless you could make yourself look twenty-four, the Herculean regimen and hocus-pocus involved in looking a mere ten years younger wasn’t worth giving up the pleasures of tanning and the occasional Twinkie. Or maybe she did understand. She had a waist, which she liked to emphasize by wearing wide, colorful belts.
“Where is the Sensitive Photocopier Repairman anyway?” Audra made her blue eyes twinkle. I felt my jaw clench.
The Sensitive Photocopier Repairman was Lyle. Or what I used to call Lyle behind his back, when my love for him felt as sturdy as one of the bottom members of a human pyramid. It was cute then, cute and teasingly half accurate. Drunken tiffs, flirtations bordering on infidelity, my backing his new truck into a phone pole, anything was a match for our love. We’d met just after Audra brought me the rights to the story that eventually became Romeo’s Dagger. My life was insane with possibility. My first feature and true love, all in the same month. That my new man was fastidious to the point of pathology mattered not. It was adorable. Then, as now, every morning he went to work in a bright white button-down broadcloth dress shirt and returned home after a day of messing around the insides of copiers with nary a smudge of toner or streak of grease anywhere on him. How the sensitive part got in there, I couldn’t remember. But I didn’t like Audra using it now; it wasn’t her joke to make.
“Lyle had to host a plague,” I said. “He’s one of the gamemasters on an online computer game and tonight they’re having a plague. The idea was to keep people off the game over the holiday, so they thought if they had an epidemic, people would spend time with their families instead of subjecting their characters to festering pustules and dementia. But the gamemasters still have to work.”
“Well, I hope he feels better,” said Audra.
I cut a glance at Mary Rose, who looked uncharacteristically meek. I had never seen her in a dress; this one was burgundy rayon that had “special occasion” written all over it. She tucked her hair behind her ears with the tips of her fingers over and over. What she does when she’s ready to tackle a big problem, like pulling out a hedge. This was not like her. This was not like her at all.
Somewhere around on the other side of the house, male voices could be heard, and a slapping sound, like someone beating out a wet carpet hung on the line.
“That game!” said Audra. “A Baron tradition. Every year the kids drink too much of their father’s single malt and play basketball in the rain.”
The kids were Little Hank, age forty-two, Ward, thirty-nine, and Dicky, thirty-three. My cousins. I think.
If Mary Rose and I were other women, or still ourselves at a different time in our lives, we would have been out there with them: playing, pretending to play as a way of aligning ourselves with the good-times-having men (instead of the marshmallow yams-baking women), or standing under the eaves sipping imported beer. But I was happy to sit and hold Stella on my lap, and Mary Rose wanted to talk. We allowed Audra to park us in the study while she hustled back to the kitchen. The study was a grand, clammy room where the green marble fireplace gave off charm but no heat, and the heavy green velvet swag curtains hung like dried seaweed from their gold rods. The woodsy smell of the fire couldn’t compete with lonely odor of dampness. It didn’t seem as if anyone else was home. There was certainly no party.
“Brooke,” spluttered Mary Rose. “I have something to tell you. Ward and I. We’re … ack! … I don’t want to jinx it.” She put her big hands to her face.
“You’re what. Not … that?”
“Not what?” said Mary Rose.
“There’s only one what that’s that,” I said. I felt suddenly as if I was channeling Dr. Seuss.
“Yes,” she said.
“No!” I said.
I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t wait to tell Lyle. Lyle once said Mary Rose was the last living valkyrie. I enthusiastically agreed, then went and looked up valkyrie in the dictionary. Mary Rose, with her own business, vacation time-share, financial portfolio. She even had a .25 Colt automatic slung in a tiny hammock behind
