Evenfall (3 page)

Her aunt is standing there, a dishrag over her shoulder.

“I was just looking for a place to put my things,” Andie tells her. She holds up her transparent bag for emphasis.

“Lord, what fancy soap—I can smell it from here,” Aunt Gert says.

When Andie doesn’t answer, her aunt goes on. “I thought we’d have a meat loaf for dinner. I started it, but then I thought, living in a foreign country for so long, you might not eat meat anymore.”

“Italy has meat, plenty of it,” Andie reassures her. “And I do eat it, just not very often.” Actually, for the last six months Andie has been a virtual vegetarian, but going down that conversational path with Gert, who firmly believes red meat is necessary for health, can only lead to trouble.

“Good,” her aunt says. “The potatoes are in, and I’ll finish the meat loaf. We’ll eat at six.” Andie glances at her watch. It’s barely four p.m. now.

The two women squeeze past each other in the hall, Gert toward the kitchen, Andie toward her bedroom. She starts with her shoes, unzipping each pair from their compartment in her garment bag and lining them against the wall. When she takes out a pair of pale pink leather flats, she holds them up to the window, looking for scuff marks. The color reminds her of her favorite shoes when she was six, a pair of pink high-tops her father gave her when she was spending her first full summer at the farm. For two weeks, she wore them everywhere, and then they disappeared. She cried so hard Uncle Frank drove her into town to buy another pair. A week later the original ones turned up, unearthed from the depths of her closet at the big house.

The memory gives her an inspiration, and she hurries out to the kitchen, where Gert is beating an egg. Unbidden, Andie opens the old creaky hutch where the china is stored, and begins setting the table.

“Don’t forget the place mats,” her aunt reminds her, and Andie pulls out two faded squares of blue cotton, well-laundered, and matching napkins. She folds the napkins in half, smoothing out the creases, and carefully places them to the left of the plates, with a fork on top of each. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches her aunt’s quick nod of approval. It gives her the courage to speak.

“Aunt Gert, I was thinking,” she begins.

“No charge for that.”

Andie plows on. “The cottage isn’t really big enough for both of us, not if I’m going to stay awhile. There’s no place for me to spread out my paints, and barely space enough for my clothes. We’re stumbling over each other as it is, and I haven’t even unpacked.”

“Maybe you need fewer things.”

Andie ignores this. “What I was thinking is, why not move into the big house? It has room enough for both of us. We’re going to be spending lots of time there anyhow, sorting through stuff.”

“No,” says Gert. She turns away and rummages in the vegetable bin of the refrigerator.

“But why not?” Andie persists. “It makes sense.”

Gert selects an onion, wipes it off with her apron, and carries it to the cutting board at the side of the sink, where she peels off the outer layer with a knife.

“Because this is my home, that’s why.” The skin removed, she chops the onion vigorously.

“You stayed at the big house when you were nursing Uncle Frank, didn’t you?”

“I did not. It wouldn’t have been seemly.”

Her aunt’s eyes are red from the onion, and the corners are beginning to tear by the time she dumps the minced pieces into the bowl. Gert is usually the most practical person Andie knows, so she can’t understand her answer, but she lets it go. Part of it, anyway.

“Well, if you don’t mind, I’m going to move over there. It will give both of us a little more room.”

“You’re of age. Do as you like.”

The day is getting cooler, so Andie retreats to her bedroom to change. She pulls on a pair of jeans, packs up her shoes, and stretches out on the bed, careful to keep her feet off the white spread. She hates fighting with Gert, whose icy anger is worse than any hot-blooded rage. Even as a child, the two of them butted heads so hard Andie was often left reeling.

The problem, according to Uncle Frank, is that the oldest and youngest Murphy women are cut from the same cloth, both too proud and too stubborn to sugarcoat the truth, or at least their version of it. Andie never had that difficulty with Clara, who somehow had the knack of coaxing a stubborn nine-year-old to eat her vegetables and go to bed, all the while making it seem like it was Andie’s own idea.

Andie sighs. More than once she’s wished she had Clara’s talent, particularly when it comes to men. If she’s honest,
she’s not here just to help Gert out. She’s put a whole continent between herself and Neal, a man she swears she loves but who drives her to dish-breaking fury and tears. Andie’s not sure the distance is enough.

But love affairs gone wrong are hardly a dinner table topic in the Murphy household. Andie can’t once remember her aunt talking about old boyfriends, although there must have been some. Even in her late seventies, Gert retains the high cheekbones and glamour girl legs of her youth. It strikes Andie suddenly how little she knows of her aunt’s life.

She’s still musing on this when Gert calls her to dinner. Her plate is filled with green beans, a potato, and a blackish slice of meat loaf. Store bought white bread sits on its own dish, next to a beaded glass of ice water.

Andie slides in to her seat, and Gert immediately bows her head.

“We thank thee Lord for this our daily bread and all other blessings. Amen.”

“Amen,” Andie echoes. Gert looks sharply at her but says nothing.

Dinner is a quiet affair. Gert has never encouraged conversation at the table, believing it hinders digestion. Besides, choking down the meat loaf takes most of Andie’s concentration. She fervently misses Max, Frank’s old black Lab who spent many meals curled at her feet, his pink mouth open and waiting.

When she’s consumed as much as possible, she sits back. Gert looks at her niece’s plate and snorts.

“You didn’t eat much.”

“I’m not that hungry. It’s probably jet lag.” She yawns, covers her mouth. Suddenly she really is bone-tired.

“All those Italian fashion models have anorexia, you know.”

Andie stands to clear the table, but Gert waves her away and carries the plates to the sink herself.

“Are your things all packed?”

“I guess so.” An image of her aunt sleeping alone, her breathing the only sound in the cottage, fills Andie’s head, and abruptly she changes her mind. “Aunt Gert, I think…”

“Well, then, let’s go before it gets dark,” Gert says. She unties her apron from around her neck, tossing it over a chair.

“You’re coming with me?”

“Not to stay—just to get you settled. You can’t carry everything yourself, can you?”

Gert’s leaving the dinner dishes unwashed is as close to an apology as she can give for her contrariness, and Andie accepts by not mentioning it. Instead, she goes down the hall to her room and fetches her suitcase and the wooden box that holds her paints and easel. When she returns, Gert is standing by the door, a canvas bag in her hand. Moths cling to the screen, their furry bellies exposed, and Gert flicks them off one by one before opening the door.

Together, they step out into the evening. It’s not dark yet, and still warm enough that the air has a liquid quality. When Andie was little, she, Frank, and Clara would eat ice-cream sandwiches on the porch, watching the sun go down and
waiting for the first lightning bugs to wink out their secret messages.

Watching her aunt’s straight back move away from her in the twilight, Andie wonders how Gert spent those same evenings. It’s not a question she expects to have answered, so she lets it go. Instead, she concentrates on the sound of pine needles crunching underfoot, releasing their faint scent of winter, and the feeling of night air on her skin. Above her, a mockingbird trills a long, impassioned plea for love, then falls silent.

The house looms at the end of the trail like a large white ghost in the twilight. The two women cut under the grape arbor, their feet crunching on gravel. At the door, Gert fumbles the key out of her pocket, pressing it into Andie’s hand.

“You might as well keep this for now. I have an extra at the cottage.”

“You’re not coming in?”

Gert looks up at the house and shakes her head.

“Here. Some fresh sheets and food in case you get hungry. Tomorrow we can go shopping and get you established.”

Andie takes the bag her aunt proffers. She reaches for her aunt and they hug awkwardly, Gert pulling away first.

“I’ll see you in the morning. And, Andie…” She hesitates, gives a quick glance up at the house. “I’ll leave the cottage open in case you change your mind.”

“Thanks. See you tomorrow.”

Andie unlocks the door, and when she turns around, Gert is already walking away, her white shirt growing dim
in the falling light. At the woods’ edge she turns, cups her hands around her mouth, and calls “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite!”

It’s the phrase Gert always used to tuck her into bed. Andie smiles and waves in response, but Gert has disappeared into the forest.

Andie steps inside, closing the heavy door behind her, and immediately her body relaxes. It’s as if the house itself were embracing her in welcome. She walks through the lower level, listening to the drip of the kitchen faucet, the quiet hum of the refrigerator, the silence in the parlor.

The exhaustion she’d felt at Gert’s house returns. She cuts her exploration short and climbs the stairs, fingers trailing along the banister. She stops at the back bedroom, the one she’s always called hers, even though she’d only been able to claim it a few months out of the year. Inside Gert’s bag are soft white bed linens, and when Andie unfolds them, the scent of lavender wafts through the room.

As soon as the bed is made, she strips off her jeans and crawls between the sheets, the cotton cool against her skin. In the instant before unconsciousness, she thinks she hears a voice saying her name. The voice, dry and soft, is oddly familiar. “Night, doodlebug,” it whispers. Before she can respond, she’s asleep.

WHEN Andie wakes, sunlight is streaming through the windows. She yawns, wiggling her toes at the end of the bed. It feels like the first day of summer vacation, when she’d slip
into shorts and a T-shirt—heaven after a school year of plaid jumpers—and run outside, ignoring Clara’s call to breakfast.

She couldn’t wait to feel grass tickling her feet and legs, to splash in the cool water of the creek. Like a puppy confined for too long, she used that first morning to burn off energy, racing about the farm for the sheer joy of it.

Uncle Frank usually found her about the time she’d thrown herself down on the bank of the creek to rest. He’d settle beside her, all elbows and knees, resembling nothing so much as one of the long-legged water beetles that skimmed the creek’s surface. He’d draw a foil-wrapped package out of his shirt pocket, and the two of them would munch in companionable silence on strawberry Pop-Tarts.

Thinking of food reminds Andie of her dream. She’d been sitting at the kitchen table with Gert. At the center of the table was a blue bowl, banded by a ring of silver. It was piled high with apples, and when Andie reached past Gert to take one, the bowl shattered. The falling blue pieces became the cool rushing waters of the creek. It swirled through the room, stranding a school of little silver fish at Gert’s feet.

Andie frowns, stretches again. There’s something she’s forgetting, but the dream won’t come back to her, so she lets it go, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. Sitting there, she’s eyeball to eyeball with the pictures lining the dresser. She knows them by heart—they’ve sat there since she was a child—but today they’re covered with a slight fur of dust.

She picks up the first frame and gently polishes it with the hem of her shirt. The photo inside is of her mother, fragile and lovely in her wedding dress. Growing up, Andie
studied it so often she knew the tiniest details: the way her mother’s veil twists slightly near its end, the way her eyes shine and her slender fingers are wrapped tight around the bouquet, the way the flowers are positioned to hide her stomach. Seeing the picture now, what Andie notices most is how young her mother was. A baby, really, a whole decade younger than Andie is now, forever frozen in time at the age of twenty-three.

When the frame is clean, she replaces it on the dresser, then picks up the next photo. In it, her father, looking as if he could use a cigarette and a drink, cradles Andie, who is pink and wrinkled and wrapped in a pale blue blanket. Andie remembers the blanket. It had a satin edging, and she carried it with her from New Hampshire to New York to Florida and back again, following her father, who was following the ponies in their endless cycle. The satin edge wore out, rubbed between her fingers until it was threadbare, but the blanket went with her to college, stuffed in the back of her underwear drawer.

The third photo is the most recent, although it’s more than ten years old. Taken at her graduation from boarding school, it shows an eighteen-year-old Andie with big hair and dramatic eye makeup. Clara’s hugging her on one side, Gert has an arm about her shoulder on the other, and Frank stands behind all three of them, his head just above Andie’s. All four wear broad grins. Her father is to the left and slightly blurry, just beyond the camera’s focus, though Andie can picture his expression perfectly well. She puts the photo down.

As she’s rummaging in her suitcase, she hears a voice outside her window. Quickly she strips, pulls a clean white T-shirt over her head, yanks on the same jeans from yesterday, and looks outside. There’s no one there.

An instant later, a power mower roars into being. It’s coming from the front of the house, and Andie can’t see it from her room. She hurries to the bathroom and brushes her teeth, then heads downstairs.

The scent of fresh-mown grass reaches her even before she’s outside, a smell so sweet and rich it clogs her throat and makes her head ache. She has to wait a moment before she can open the door, and when she does the scent is stronger. It crowds about her like a ghost, bringing with it the memories of all the other days that started just like this, with an open door and the summer stretching before her.