thanked her and headed down to the kitchen, where Athena was preparing a huge dish of spanikopita and studying pictures of carved corpses. She seemed quite happy with the outdated stove, the unstylish double-width white porcelain sink, the decades-old refrigerator, the shortage of cabinet space. The round oak table that had always been too big for the small kitchen still occupied its spot in front of the window overlooking the garden. As a little boy, Rebecca’s father had carved his name in the table, in the careful, awkward letters of a preschooler. Rebecca had watched her grandfather brush his fingertips across his only child’s efforts, just minutes before they were to bury Stephen Blackburn.
She grabbed the telephone.
“Rebecca,” Jenny Blackburn said, somewhat breathlessly, “why didn’t you warn me? I was buying groceries when I saw your picture. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Mother,” Rebecca replied, thinking about central Florida in late May, the smells, the flowers; it would be getting hot. But her mother wouldn’t notice. A handsome woman in her midfifties, with pale blue eyes and white-streaked dark hair, she had always loved the heat. Sinking into a chair, Rebecca added, “And I had no idea The Score was reprinting that picture or I’d have warned you. Have any reporters been bugging you?”
“A couple of local ones—young. I let them come over and look around the groves, and I answered their questions about what I’ve been doing for the past twenty-six years, which is raising children and citrus. I’ve found it’s easier to bore them than to tell them to go to hell.” She inhaled, then said, “Rebecca, I wish you’d just come home.”
She almost told her mother she had, but thought better of it. Maybe Florida, not Boston, was her home. Jennifer O’Keefe Blackburn made no secret of her disapproval of her only daughter and oldest child’s work and living habits, but she took a laissez-faire approach. “You’re an adult, Rebecca,” she would say, “and capable of making your own decisions.”
Ian O’Keefe—Rebecca’s maternal grandfather—had no such inhibitions. He’d kept his mouth shut thirty-six years ago when his one daughter had married a Boston Yankee, but no more. He didn’t approve of the way Rebecca just didn’t do things the way they were supposed to be done. In February when she’d visited him and her mother, he showed her his address book and pointed out how she’d messed up his B section with all her moving. True to his own convictions, he’d neatly printed each of her new addresses in ink. They were all there, from her first dormitory at Boston University to West Cedar Street. His ink was born of a stubborn adherence to his own ideas about what was right, but he never gave up on her. He’d run out of space under B two moves ago and had had to move into the C section. Rebecca’s five younger brothers had more or less given up trying to keep track of her; when they wanted to reach her, they just called Papa.
“I mean it,” her mother went on, and Rebecca could hear the rising tension in her voice. “You know I hate to interfere in my kids’ lives, but you’ve got no business being in Boston.”
Oh, so that was it, Rebecca thought. The pictures in The Score were her mother’s excuse for letting her daughter know how she felt about her being back on West Cedar Street. As if Rebecca couldn’t have guessed. She said patiently, “My being in Boston didn’t cause this thing in The Score. It was just a fluke—Jared being a hothead. It had nothing to do with me.”
“I hate Boston,” Jenny said.
“I realize that, Mom.”
“It’s that Blackburn pride of yours, isn’t it? You just had to go back. You can’t leave well enough alone. You always have to keep pushing and pushing.”
Rebecca resisted the urge to defend herself, knowing it would only fuel her mother’s frustration—and her worry. Boston hadn’t been an altogether lucky place for Jennifer Blackburn or her daughter.
“What do you hope to accomplish?” her mother asked wearily.
“Maybe,” Rebecca said, “I just think Grandfather shouldn’t have to die a lonely old man.”
It was a moment before Jennifer O’Keefe Blackburn said, “He deserves to,” and slammed down the phone.
Nine
Rebecca Blackburn received the news of her father’s death on a gray winter afternoon in early 1963. She was eight years old. It was Jared Sloan who came to her third-grade class at the private elementary school in Boston’s Back Bay to walk her and two of her younger brothers home. A car had already come for Quentin Reed, in the fifth grade.
“There’s a family emergency,” was all Jared would say.
Just thirteen himself, he took hold of Nate, seven, and five-year-old Taylor and let Rebecca trot along beside him. He had volunteered to collect them and, too distraught to think clearly, his mother, his Aunt Annette and Jennifer Blackburn had let him. Jared was familiar; he wouldn’t scare the Blackburns’ school-aged children.
Rebecca felt her face freezing in the stiff sea breeze. “Where’s Mother?”
“She had to stay with the little ones.”
There were three more brothers at home: Stephen, four, and Mark and Jacob, the two-year-old twins. Once, Rebecca had heard her paternal grandfather fussing to her father about having so many children. “People will think we’re running an orphanage here,” Grandfather had said. Her father, who, like Rebecca, never took Thomas’s grumblings seriously, had asked him since when did a Blackburn care what people thought? Thomas had strong opinions about everything, but Rebecca knew he loved her and her brothers. She remembered when he’d told them the best things came in sixes. When he was home, he liked to take her and her brothers to museums and old Boston cemeteries and let them throw rocks in the Charles River.
Not satisfied, Rebecca asked Jared, “Did something happen to Fred?” Fred was one of their cats. They had four. Grandfather complained about them, too; he said West Cedar Street wasn’t a barnyard.
Jared paled. “No, R.J., Fred’s fine.”
“Good.”
Her mother met them at the door of the Eliza Blackburn house on Beacon Hill. Away in Indochina so much, Thomas had insisted his son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren live there. Right away Rebecca knew something terrible had happened. Her mother’s face was very white and tear-streaked, and she jumped off the steps and gathered her and Nate and Taylor into her arms, choking back sobs. Rebecca tried to cling to Jared. She wished he’d take her down to Charles Street for hot cocoa or ice-skating on the Common, anywhere so long as she didn’t have to hear what her mother had to tell her.
But Jenny Blackburn, trying vainly to smile, thanked Jared and told him his mother was waiting for him at his aunt’s house on Mt. Vernon Street.
“Will you be all right going alone?” she asked him. After all, he had lost an uncle, and, in Stephen Blackburn, a man who had been like an uncle to him.
“You don’t have to worry about me, Mrs. Blackburn.”
Alone with her six children, Jenny told them their father had been killed in the war in South Vietnam, where he and their grandfather had gone to help bring peace. She got out Thomas’s musty globe and pointed to the country so far from Boston. Their father, she explained carefully, had gone with Benjamin Reed to a place called the Mekong Delta, and a group called Vietcong guerrillas had attacked them. Rebecca thought she meant gorillas.
