Sins of the Fathers (2 page)

After the call, she sipped the lukewarm brew and considered the invitation.
I could buy lamps today and go tomorrow
.
Nonsense. You’ll never finish the house if you put things off. And who would really care if the house was never finished?

To still her internal debate, she rose to check out the fridge to see if anything exciting for breakfast had crept in overnight. Nope. Same old same old. “Fix a bagel,” she instructed herself. “Bagels take your mind off anything. You need all your concentration to chew and swallow them.”

“Breakfast for one coming up,” she told the pig as she carried a bagel to the toaster. “Sorry you can’t join me.” She fetched cream cheese and jam and reached through a hole in the formerly glass-fronted cupboard doors for a plate. “If that glazier doesn’t get around to repairing the doors pretty soon,” she warned, “I may leave them like this. They are a lot handier.”

As she brought down the plate, her mood plummeted again. Her hands shook so badly, she barely landed the dish safely on the countertop. “You like these dishes. You do!” she told herself as she traced the pattern with one finger. “You picked them out.”

Only because I couldn’t get the ones we had before—the ones we bought in Italy last summer and loved.

She clenched one fist and pounded the countertop. “Deal with it, sweetie!”

She took three more deep cleansing breaths, but how clean can one set of lungs get? By now, hers would probably squeak if you rubbed them.

She placed both hands on her kitchen counter and announced to the pig, “This has got to stop.
Anything
would be better than this.”

The pig smiled in sunny agreement. Perhaps he, like Katharine, failed to comprehend how much “anything” can cover.

“I’m going,” she told him. “I’m going with Dr. Flo!”

What she pictured was not Dr. Flo’s granddaddy’s grave. What she pictured was herself floating on wide Atlantic swells, away from decisions and choices and chaos. Excitement rose in her like bubbles in ginger ale. She had grown up in Miami and adored the sea.

She dialed Dr. Flo’s number. “I’ll go with you on one condition. I’d hate to get that close to salt water without eating seafood, swimming in the ocean, and walking on the beach. If I can get my husband’s sister to let us use her cottage down on Jekyll Island, would you be willing to stay a couple of nights?” She held her breath.

“We’re in the middle of a record heat wave,” the professor pointed out. “You won’t want to be out on the beach much. It was a hundred down there yesterday. I checked.”

“We can look at the ocean from her air-conditioned living room, we can swim in the morning and just before the sun goes down, and we can take long walks on the beach after dark while sipping chilled wine. I’ll furnish the wine.”

Dr. Flo hesitated for so long that Katharine thought she was going to refuse, but when she spoke, her voice throbbed with pleasure. “That would be marvelous. I no longer swim, but I love being near the sea.”

“Bring your suit just in case,” Katharine advised. “The ocean should be like bathwater by now. You may get tempted.”

Dr. Flo’s rich chuckle flowed down the line. “Warm or not, I don’t want to drown in it. I’ve had my three-score-and ten, but I still hope to live a few years longer.”

Neither of them had any idea at the time how difficult that was going to be.

“Buiton’s res-i-dence.” The maid gave the last word its full three syllables, accenting the third.

“Hey, Julia,” Katharine greeted her. “Is Posey there?”

Julia’s voice dropped from formal to family in one second flat. “Hey, Miss Kat. She’s just leaving for her class. Lemme see can I catch her.” The phone hit the kitchen counter with a click. Katharine heard her booming voice progressing across the kitchen: “Miss Posey, oh, Miss Posey, Miss Kat’s on the line.”

She got immediate results. “Sorry, I was already in the garage. I can’t talk but a minute. I’ll be late to class.”

That didn’t worry Katharine. Her sister-in-law was invariably late, and she wouldn’t get out of shape missing an exercise or two. She went to aerobics every day, wearing a series of pastel spandex outfits with matching shoes. She even had matching headbands to hold back her lacquered blond curls. Exercise and Botox kept her looking a lot younger than her fifty-plus years, and people who met her were in danger of dismissing her as a pretty but aging bimbo unless they got a good look at her shrewd blue eyes.

“The way Julia says, ‘She’s just leaving for her class,’ a stranger might think you’re a doctoral candidate instead of an aerobics fanatic,” Katharine teased, “but this won’t take but a minute. Is your beach cottage free for a couple of days? I’d like to go down tomorrow and take Dr. Flo Gadney.” Because they used it so seldom, the Buitons let a realtor rent out the house whenever he could.

“Oooh-la-la. How’d you get so chummy with Dr. Flo?” Posey wasn’t an intellectual, but she appreciated Dr. Flo’s influence in Atlanta’s social and civic circles. She would enjoy dropping the information at various venues, “My sister-in-law is down at our place on Jekyll this week with Dr. Flo Gadney.”

“We aren’t chummy, but she’s invited me to drive to the coast with her tomorrow. She has business down there and wants my advice on something.” Katharine dropped a modest boast of her own, then grinned at her silliness. “I thought when we were done with business, we could go to Jekyll for a couple of nights, if the cottage is free.”

“I don’t know, but you can call and ask. Would you like me to do it?”

“No, I will. I mostly wanted permission to use it.”

“Of course. You know you don’t have to ask.”

Katharine knew she didn’t, just as Posey knew she always would. Like good sisters, she and her sister-in-law preserved certain courtesies between them.

“Do you still have your key?” When Katharine hesitated, Posey apologized in an embarrassed rush. “I keep forgetting what a mess those thieves made.”

It was Katharine’s turn to be embarrassed. “They took all the keys from our key board, too. Tom changed our locks, but I didn’t think about your keys being on the board.” Not only the Jekyll cottage key, but keys to the Buiton’s sprawling home.

“If they haven’t used the keys by now, chances are they won’t, but I’ll mention it to Wrens. He’ll probably want to change our locks. You know how he is.”

Yes, Katharine knew how Posey’s big, placid husband was—too easygoing to worry about keys that had disappeared a month before when he had an excellent security system in the house and lived close enough to the governor to get a quick response if anybody did break in, but he was so devoted to his wife that he’d change every lock just to please her.

“Hold on a minute.” Posey put her on hold. Katharine presumed she was taking another call until she came back on the line. “The cottage is free and I told the realtor you’re coming, so she’ll air the place. The hidden keys are in their usual places. Stay as long as you like. They don’t have anybody coming in for two weeks. But next time you want to go down, let me know ahead and I’ll go with you. I could use time on the beach. Tanning beds make me look sallow.”

“It’s a deal. And thank you from the bottom of my soul. A few days at the beach ought to help me recuperate from shopping and redecorating. Which reminds me. Do you know if Hollis is home? I’ll need to cancel our shopping this week.” Katharine danced a private little jig as she said those words. She loathed shopping.

Posey’s sigh came from the toes of her exercise shoes. “Oh, yes, she’s up in that poky little apartment running the sewing machine. I heard it going when I went out to the car. Why that child won’t come downstairs and live with us, I don’t know. We’ve got the whole blooming house…”

Hollis, Posey’s youngest daughter, had recently graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design and had asked to live in her family’s carriage-house apartment, which had once housed a former family’s chauffeur. The apartment was far from the hovel Posey pretended. For one thing, it sprawled over the Buitons’ four-car garage and had more square feet than Katharine and two roommates had shared one summer during her college years. For another, since Wrens doted on his three daughters as much as he doted on his wife, the apartment gleamed with fresh paint, Ikea furniture, new appliances, refinished oak floors, and Hollis’s own quirky taste in fabrics and paint. Unlike Katharine, none of the female Buitons disliked shopping, so they had completed the redecoration of the apartment in record time.

Hollis, who had studied textiles and fibers, was helping Katharine redecorate her house after the break-in. Katharine wasn’t enjoying the shopping, but she was enjoying spending time with her newly adult niece.

“Don’t knock her for using the sewing machine,” Katharine told Hollis’s mother. “She may be sewing drapery for my dining room.”

“I wish she’d get a real job.”

“Talk to Tom about how real Hollis’s job is after he’s paid her bill. You could be astonished at how well she’s doing.”

“Maybe so,” Posey sounded dubious, “but her taste in men hasn’t improved. Last night she brought a young man in for a drink, and he had the grossest ring in his nostril. I kept wanting to lead him around by it. And he sat right here in our home and told us he is a great admirer of Lenin. I thought Wrens would die.”

Katharine suspected that Wrens’s blood pressure hadn’t gone up a single point. He was accustomed to Hollis’s need to shock her parents. She also suspected the young man had been talking about Lennon, the deceased Beatle, not the Russian politician. Most of all, she suspected Hollis was once again jerking Posey’s chain, as Katharine had jerked her Aunt Sara Claire’s chain back when Sara Claire considered herself one of Buckhead’s foremost aristocrats. Hollis could count on the fact that her mother would have a spasm every time she brought home another strange young man.

“So far Hollis has shown the good sense not to get seriously involved with any of them,” Katharine pointed out. One of the reasons Posey complained to her about Hollis was to be reassured that the child wasn’t fit to be locked up.

“Thank the good Lord for that. Do you want me to call her to the phone?”

“No, I’ll call on her cell phone. You go on to class. And thanks again for the use of the cottage. You may have saved my sanity.”

Hollis was, indeed, working on Katharine’s dining room drapery. “Are you out shopping for lamps?” she demanded.

“Careful,” Katharine warned, “or you are going to start sounding like Aunt Sara Claire. Remember how bossy she was?” She laughed to show she was teasing. She was very fond of Posey’s small, dark daughter, who looked far more like her uncle, Tom, and her cousin, Susan, than she did her large blond sisters. Molly and Lolly were traditional products of Buckhead: beautifully groomed young women who devoted their lives to good works, exercise, and reproducing themselves in their own image. Hollis—who since college had refused to be the Holly in that trio of names—accepted no social barriers and few social conventions, and knew every trick in the book to irritate her mother. Katharine found her insightful comments on society and her wide range of interests and friends refreshing. Posey found them infuriating. Of course, as Posey kept pointing out, nobody would ever blame Katharine for the way Hollis turned out.

“I’m not at all like Mrs. Everanes,” Hollis objected. “I wasn’t trying to boss you. I thought you might be calling to ask my advice about a lampshade or something.”

“No, I’m calling to tell you I’m going out of town tomorrow for a few days, so you can take time off. We’ll look for stuff for Susan’s room later.”

“I could look while you’re gone.”

“You’re a glutton for punishment, but I’d be delighted. Go ahead and buy whatever you think will work. But remember, nothing too girly.”

“I don’t do girly,” Hollis informed her with offended dignity.

Katharine was immediately contrite. “Of course you don’t. You’ve done a marvelous job on everything else, and you probably know Susan’s tastes better than I do.”

“It’s not Susan’s room anymore,” Hollis reminded her with the bluntness that Posey found so mortifying. “We ought to fix it up as a guest room.”

Katharine felt like she’d been hit between the shoulder blades. “I guess so,” she managed. “Surprise me.” She hung up glad she’d be in the ocean by the next day. She needed one thing in her life that hadn’t changed.

The red Jeep in her driveway later that afternoon meant nothing but trouble, so why did Katharine’s foot relax on the gas pedal and a little bubble of happiness well up inside her when she turned in her drive and found it there? As soon as she realized her SUV was slowing down, she pressed on the gas to shoot up the hill to the garage.

She had just stopped the car when she heard a shout. “Hey! Just because you drive a Cadillac doesn’t mean you
have
to be rude.”

She let out a huff that was a mixture of exasperation, resignation, and amusement, then grabbed her purse and refreshed her lipstick.

Hobart Hasting’s face appeared at her car window, hazel eyes blazing. He was so winded from running up the hill that Katharine felt a momentary pang. He was her age, after all, and shouldn’t be running in that heat. Still, even winded and pink, age suited him. Back in high school, Katharine’s fingers had known every line of that face and each wave in that dark hair. Thirty years later his hair was grizzled at the temples and his glasses had been exchanged for bifocals, but the adult was even handsomer than the boy had been.

Which didn’t change the fact that they had each married somebody else.

Katharine lowered her window and pulled her sunglasses down on her nose so she could look over them. “What are you doing here?”

He grabbed on to the car and feigned desperate gasps of distress. “Dying, at the moment. What about, ‘How are you, Hasty? Haven’t seen you for over three weeks. Have you been out of town?’ Do you realize I’ve been sitting out there roasting for half an hour, waiting for you to get home?”

How like Hasty to blame her that he’d had to wait when he hadn’t bothered to let her know he was coming.

She cut the motor. “Do you know I’ve been shopping for five straight hours and might not have come home for another four?”

“I thought you hated shopping.”

“I loathe it.” She pulled off her sunglasses and secured them in her purse. Then she opened her door, forcing him to step back, and swung down from her perch in the big SUV. “I’m glad you’re here. You can help me carry in lamps.”

“Lamps?”

“Lamps. Lamps for the living room, lamps for the den, lamps for Tom’s library, two lamps for my study, and lamps for all the bedrooms. I feel like Aladdin, except Aladdin could have rubbed one lamp and gotten a genie to carry the rest. I had to lug every blessed one to the car on my own. Nobody has service these days. And now they have to be carried in.”

While she was grumbling she was leading the way to the rear access door. “Voila!” She extended one arm like a ringmaster. “Half the lamps in Atlanta, ready for you to whisk into the house.”

He raised his brows above his glasses. “Do I look like a whisker? I rather picture myself as a flowing beard.” His fingers made motions down his chest.

“You look more like somebody trying to play two flutes, but why don’t you flow with these lamps into the house while I fix us both a drink?” She reached in and hauled out a ginger jar lamp that would sit beside her bed. “Don’t you like the bird of paradise on this one? It reminds me of Miami.” She started for the kitchen door.

“Did you leave me the heaviest ones on purpose?” he complained.

She didn’t answer, for at the threshold she had run into an invisible wall. The white tile floor and gray granite countertops gleamed in afternoon dimness. The kitchen’s yellow walls were cheerful, softly mysterious in that light. All the contents of the refrigerator, drawers, and cabinets seemed to be where they belonged. Yet it still took a firm act of will for Katharine to lift her foot and step inside.

“No burglars?” Hasty asked at her heels.

“Not today.” She hated that he had seen her pause, hated even more that he understood what made her do it. Was she so transparent? Or did Hasty still know her that well?

“You’ll get over it eventually.” His voice was gruff. “Or so I hear.”

“I hope so. Right now I expect to see a mess every time I come in this door.”

She had discovered the break-in when she had stepped through the door one morning, plastic grocery bags cutting into her fingers, and found her newly remodeled kitchen awash in flour, sugar, orange juice, ketchup, broken eggs, and milk. The new glass-fronted cupboards of which she was so proud had been splintered. Glasses and dishes had been smashed. Dish towels and potholders lay amid the muck on the floor, stained with mustard and grape jelly and sprinkled with shards of glass. The seat cushions of her new breakfast room chairs had been shredded.

Hasty prodded her from behind. “Get a move on. These things weigh a ton.” She looked over her shoulder and saw that he was carrying two brass lamps so heavy that she had staggered under the weight of one.

Grateful to return to the present, she stepped aside to let him pass. “Just put all of them in the den for now. I’ll sort out where they go later.”

She set the ginger jar lamp on the countertop and called after him, “What do you feel like drinking? Beer? Wine? A gin and tonic? Or will tea do?” While she waited for his answer, she kicked off her shoes to enjoy the feel of cool tiles under her bare soles. Her feet were weary, and Katharine never wore shoes unless she had to.

“Tea’s fine. Got any cookies to go with it?” He came back empty-handed and headed to the garage again.

By the time he had carried in all the lamps, she had glasses of iced tea waiting on the table along with a plate of cookies. She had made them with double the chips and lots of pecans, the way Tom liked them, but at this rate, there would be precious few left by the time he got home Friday.

Hasty slid into a chair. He never simply sat like other people. “You’re looking good.”

She felt her cheeks stain with a flush of pleasure. She hadn’t dressed to please Hasty that morning when she’d put on beige capris, a soft white shell, a gold chain, and a bronze-toned linen jacket that complemented her hair, but she had thought, as she had brushed her hair into soft layers around her face, “You’re looking good, girl.” Now she realized it had been Hasty’s voice she had heard.

He looked good, too, in white shorts and a sage polo shirt that made his eyes look a soft gray green, but she didn’t say so. “To what do I owe the honor of your presence?” She offered him lemon and mint, which he took.

“I got home at noon and felt like a swim.” He reached for a couple of cookies.

She grabbed one before he emptied the plate. “The university has a pool. Is it closed Mondays, or doesn’t Emory give history professors pool privileges?”

“I like outdoor pools better.”

She glanced out toward hers, which looked especially inviting in the hot afternoon sun, but the memory of a private swim with Hasty in June brought a flush to her cheeks and made her reluctant to try it again without others present. Pools can be very intimate places. “Has your apartment complex filled in their pool and made a flower garden?”

“No, they’ve filled it with little kids who pee in the water. Hell, Kate, can’t I come see you when I get back to town without getting the third degree?”

Hasty was the only person in the world who called her Kate. It was a comforting reminder of her deceased parents and very happy high school years, so she hastened to smooth his ruffled quills. “Of course you can come see me. You are my oldest friend.”

“Only two months older than you.” He popped his second cookie into his mouth whole.

“You know what I mean.”

A gleam in his eye told her he was about to remind her they had once been far more than friends. It was time to include his wife in the conversation. “You were going to bring Melissa and Kelly over. Have they ever come down?”

“No, I went up. And I can characterize the visit in two words:
endless hassles
.”

Although Hasty had been teaching at Emory for a year, his wife and fifteen-year-old daughter still lived in Michigan. His story was that Melissa was reluctant to leave her mother. Katharine was reserving judgment. She hadn’t heard Melissa’s version yet.

“Are they thinking about moving here?” She wondered if that was the right thing to ask. Wondered if she had any business to be asking at all.

“Not yet. Why didn’t you answer my e-mails? I sent you several.”

“I don’t have a working computer yet.”

“Oh.” He reached for another cookie and took a big bite. “Yum! Lots of chips and pecans, just like I like them!”

She had forgotten that she began making those cookies to please Hasty. Tom had learned to like them that way after they started dating.

Beyond the window, a robin darted away from the birdbath followed by another. They swooped and darted, circling the yard, then returned to perch by the water.

Hasty stopped munching long enough to ask, “Have the police learned anything about your missing stuff?”

“Not so far.” She didn’t mean to sound pitiful, but she did.

He gave her a long, appraising look. “You used to always claim that things don’t matter, only people matter. How does that play out now?”

She looked down at the table and blinked to keep tears from forming. Even so, her voice was gruff with them. “Not real well. I hadn’t realized how many of my things were reminders of people who gave them to me—or special places where we’ve been.”

Hasty reached over and put a hand over hers. “Those thugs didn’t just destroy your home, did they? They violated your whole past.”

How well he understood. Tears welled up in spite of her efforts. One spilled over and ran down her cheek. He lifted it off with a gentle finger. She turned her head aside and spoke fiercely to curb the rest. “I keep fearing I’ll forget some person or place I used to think about every time I picked up a certain dish or wore a piece of jewelry. And I hate the thought that somebody has picked up Grandmother’s silver service for a song.”

He squeezed her hand. “That’s hard. Are you sleeping okay?”

She pulled her hand away to pick up her tea, and took a long, cold swallow to cover her confusion.
You are not a teenager any more
, she reminded herself.
No need to get wobbly just because Hasty takes your hand or reads your mind. He’s an intuitive, sympathetic kind of guy.
She would not tell him about the nightmares and could not lie to him, so she looked out the window and said nothing. The birds had returned to the birdbath, where they sat amiably side by side.

When she didn’t answer, Hasty suggested, “Why don’t you buy a blank book where you can list things you had and what they reminded you of? Then you can remember them whenever you want to.” He took the last cookie and chewed it while she thought that over.

“I might. That would take up a heck of a lot less space than the stuff did.”

He got up and headed toward the pig. “Hello, Chubs. You got any more goodies?” He took off the head, reached in, and took a handful, and repositioned the head so the snout was facing the outside door. “Guard the place, will you?” He put one hand experimentally through the empty shell of an upper cabinet door. “They broke all the glass?”

Katharine realized he hadn’t seen the house since it was vandalized. “Most of it. The man is coming as soon as he works his way down his list to me.”

He came back to the table, dropped a couple of cookies before her, and kept the rest. “Have you decided whether to refurnish the place or sell out and move into something smaller? You could, now that the kids are gone.”

That changed her mood in a gnat’s minute. “The kids aren’t gone! Jon will only be in China for a couple of years and Susan comes home from New York every once in a while.”

“For a visit, not to live.” He took a large bite of cookie and spoke through it. “And who knows where Jon will go when he gets home? Face it—they are gone. You rattle around by yourself in this mausoleum most of the time, while Tom is up in Washington doing whatever he does all week. You’ve got—what? Five bedrooms here?”

She took a gulp of tea to hide her embarrassment. “Six.”

“Six bedrooms upstairs and—” he paused to count silently on his fingers “—seven rooms down here, plus the utility room and more bathrooms than you can possibly use in a day. Not to mention how many acres of grounds?” He didn’t really expect her to tell him. “All this for one woman, Kate? What would your parents say?”

That made her lips curve in a rueful grin. Hasty had known and liked her parents, who took their faith seriously enough to live by choice in a smaller house than they could afford and who often bought secondhand so they could give more to others. She had already told him what her mother—who grew up in Buckhead—said when she saw the big stone-and-slate house Katharine and Tom were buying: “Are you planning to open an orphanage?”

“My parents aren’t around to complain.” She set her glass down with a
click.
“And Tom grew up in and loves this neighborhood. We’ll probably live here until we die.”

She wouldn’t give Hasty the satisfaction of telling him that the week after the break-in, she had begged Tom to sell the house and buy a condo down in Midtown, where she could walk to the theater, the art museum, the botanical gardens, and the symphony. Tom had replied, “I live in a condo all week, Kat. The only thing that keeps me going is the fact that on Friday I can get on a plane and come home to you and this house. It won’t be long before all that mess is cleared up and things are back to normal. Besides, I’ll be retiring before too long.” Of course, “normal” for Tom didn’t involve a house that was utterly empty five days out of seven, and except for talking about it frequently, he gave no sign that he planned to retire anytime soon. He loved his work and wouldn’t be fifty for two more years. She figured he’d work at least ten or fifteen more—a long time for her to rattle around, as Hasty so elegantly put it, in their house alone.

She came out of her reverie to find him watching the robins, who were having a spat. One splashed the other with a wing. The aggrieved one flew away, circled, and dive-bombed, creating a minor tidal wave.

Hasty laughed as the aggressor flapped angrily away. “That’ll larn ’er.”

“Or him. You’re no ornithologist. You can’t tell the difference any more than I can.”