blasted apart the one bridge she’d want to travel again, and so because she wanted to keep Savannah’s life stable and she and Brian were as compatible as she needed them to be, she stayed.
Standing, she reached down for the notebooks and felt her left knee begin to buckle. She caught herself with one hand on the sofa’s arm. ‘Getting old, girl,’ she said, shaking her head.
Brian’s voice, persuasive and firm as he talked on the phone, resounded as she passed the kitchen. He was fixing a snack while he talked – warming up brownies, from the smell of it. He’d add vanilla ice cream and chocolate syrup, which illustrated why she’d had to take his suits in for alteration despite his playing some twenty hours of golf a week. That was the other curse of middle age: a slowing metabolism. Keeping in shape was harder all the time – and she’d skipped her workouts more than she wanted to admit, these months since her mother’s death. There never seemed to be time for exercise; the number of hours in her day had shriveled like an unpicked orange, and she was just too tired to wedge in anything she could excuse as nonessential.
In the master bathroom, she set down the note-books and turned on the shower. While it warmed, she rifled through a drawer for the pair of tiny scissors she used to trim her pubic hair. Brian preferred her trimmed, almost hairless, except for the hair on her head, which he liked long, and the coppery down of her arms. How long since she’d bothered to trim herself up? She didn’t even shave her legs weekly anymore. They hadn’t made love in … what was this? April? Two months. Not since Valentine’s Day, and even then it had been more of an expected gesture, a guilty ought-to rather than an anticipated finally, which, honestly, hadn’t occurred even in the first months – for her, anyway. As steam drifted around her like unsettled ghosts, she took the scissors and cut the notebooks’ binding string, expecting that when she cracked open the first of them, she’d find blank pages filled with nothing more than pale blue preprinted lines.
What she found instead came as such a surprise that she reached into the shower and turned the water off.
A quick perusal showed that each book was filled with neat pages of her mother’s calculations and observations on the status of the farm, the weather, the horses’ health – interspersed, it seemed, with similar comments about Meg and her sisters and father, all done in fine blue or black felt-tip ink. Seeing the curves and loops made by her mother’s hand weakened Meg; she sank to the thick cotton rug and spread the books around her.
Had her father known he’d given her these? These twelve diaries, as in essence they were, spanned close to two decades, ending the day before he woke on a Sunday morning last September and found his wife had slipped away in the night, leaving behind her stilled body … and these words. Of gossip? Of wisdom?
If she had known ahead of time that the notebooks were diaries, she never would have opened a single cover. Why invite pain? Now, she didn’t know what she would do with them. She didn’t want to read them. She didn’t want not to.
A knock on the door startled her. ‘What?’
‘Mom, I need you to sign a thing so I can do the end-of-year field trip.’
‘Can’t Dad do it?’
‘He’s on the phone.’
Meg piled up the notebooks and stashed them in the vanity cabinet. ‘I’ll be right out.’
Meg sat in the kitchen Saturday morning, coffee in hand, notebooks stacked on the table before her. Brian had gone for his usual Saturday breakfast with his cronies, first dropping Savannah at Rachel’s so they could go … someplace; Savannah had told her, but Meg, distracted by the diaries and her ambivalence about reading them, had passed Savannah off to Brian and thought no more about her plans.
The house was peaceful now, which made it easier to decide to try reading an entry or two. Just to prove to herself that they were frivolous, that she could throw the whole lot away without regret.
She paged through, sampling the entries, surprisingly compelled to turn the pages. Even the shortest of her mother’s comments revealed pieces of her past – their past – she hadn’t seen before.
June 8, 1985
Meggie’s been hired on at the bank. We need her here, but we need her there, too. Or somewhere that pays good. The Lord knows the money will be useful! We had to let our health insurance lapse, so I just pray none of us takes sick. Blessed Mother, watch over us all.
So they’d gone without insurance; the very thought of it was frightening, even long after the fact. She remembered her mother’s pinched face from back then, the worry lines ringing her mouth and wrinkling her forehead. It hadn’t mattered how early Meg got up in the morning, her mother was always up before her. No matter how late she stayed up, her mother was still up too. Little wonder her mother’s blood pressure was high.
‘June eighth …’ she said. The day she met Brian.
Her first day of work at Hamilton Savings and Loan. Her training was set to begin at ten, but first she was required to meet her boss – Brian, who was the owner’s son, only six years older than herself. Belinda Cordero, head teller, led her to his office doorway and disappeared, leaving her feeling self-conscious and somehow wrong for this moment in time, as if she’d been dropped into the scene by mistake. Her real life was waiting in the paddocks – horses that needed to be exercised, tack that awaited repair. She wanted to bolt.
Brian was sitting at a desk that looked older and more distinguished than he was. He wore an off-white linen jacket and a pastel pink shirt, à la Sonny Crockett from Miami Vice. His hair was longish and styled just right, meant to dazzle all the women and show the men he was on top of the trends.
He sat back and waved her in. ‘Hi, come on in, Meg. I’m Brian Hamilton.’
She took three small steps and stopped. His office smelled of old leather and young ambition, embodied by an expensive cologne she would forever associate with him. She took one more step and stopped.
Brian folded his hands behind his head. ‘Welcome. We’re glad to have you as part of the Hamilton team. Eileen tells me you’re a rising senior at North Marion High?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Good in math?’
She nodded. She did her best to keep eye contact, the way her father had told her she should, but it was hard. Brian kept smiling at her as if he knew that her black polyester skirt and ruffled brown blouse came from a thrift shop. Her shoes, too – though she hoped he couldn’t see them while she stood there in front of his desk. It was the same outfit she’d worn for her interview the week before, and she suspected Ms Guillen had told him everything.
She’d gotten the job out of sympathy, she was sure. Everyone in Ocala seemed to know how tenuous things were for the Powells; her father broadcasted his failures as loudly as his successes, afternoons at the co-op. She had applied for a position with the janitorial staff, the job advertised in the Ocala Star-Banner, but during her interview with Eileen Guillen, director of human resources, she’d talked about her plan to study accounting after she graduated. Because of that, instead of cleaning floors and toilets in the historic building that Adair Hamilton had rebuilt right after the 1883 fire, Meg would become a part-time teller. ‘We like
