The Probable Future (19 page)

“Me? I’m not a baker.”

“You don’t have to be. I need a shop manager, which means waiting tables and balancing the books. Cynthia Elliot comes in after school and on weekends, but I really need someone else.”

“I couldn’t make you any promises. …”

“Good,” Liza agreed. “I won’t make you any either. Unless you think it’s demeaning to take people’s lunch orders and wash a few dishes.”

“Nothing’s beneath me. I married Will Avery.”

Jenny had expected a laugh, but Liza’s expression was dreamy. “Will Avery. Man, oh man. I had the biggest crush on him.”

They had turned onto Lockhart Avenue, where the big oak stood. Jenny had met Will a hundred times or more on this corner, for it was exactly halfway between his house and hers. The old tree
was on the record books, if she remembered correctly. More than three centuries old, part of the ancient-growth forest, all of which had been chopped down by the colonists, all of it replaced by farms and fields, save for one single beloved tree.

The rain had eased off, leaving the air glassy. It was still humid, and the sweet smell of mint lingered, as it had so long ago on the morning of Jenny’s thirteenth birthday. There was a droning sound that reverberated, much like the buzzing of a thousand bees, the sort of hum that could wake even the drowsiest individuals and boil their blood. When they went a bit farther down Lockhart, Jenny saw that the noise was caused by a chain saw. Orange cones made for a detour around the base of the old oak, which had been ailing in past years, and now seemed to have finally died. The town council had voted to have the whole thing cut down before a storm could shatter the trunk, leaving limbs free to fall and strike electric wires and street signs.

“Hey, there!” Liza had opened her window so she could shout at the man on the ladder. There was a big, rusted truck parked across the street. “Think I can put in an order for some of that oak for firewood? I just love that tree. It kills me that it’s being chopped down.”

The man nodded and waved. He was tall, with fair hair and broad shoulders; he wore earmuffs to cut down on the sound of the saw. Watching him, Jenny felt something lurch inside of her; perhaps it was seeing him up on that ladder, for she had a fear of falling. Or it might be the way he was looking at her, as if he had already fallen. He hung on to one of the dying branches and watched them drive away.

“Who is that?” Jenny asked as they headed toward the dirt road everyone in town called Dead Horse Lane.

Liza was the one to laugh now. “You don’t know?”

“Should I?”

Maybe she felt queasy because of the ruts in the road and the way the SUV lurched over ditches, past the swamp cabbage and the wild
peach trees. Or maybe it was because she could now see Cake House through the trees, its many architectural details thrown together to form a whitewashed wedding cake, one that was tilted on its foundation and covered with vines.

“It’s Matt Avery.” Some people didn’t see what was right there in front of them, even if they had twenty-twenty vision. Some people needed to be led by the hand or they’d miss the most important facts of their own lives. Liza shook her head as they turned into the driveway. “That’s the man who’s in love with you,” she informed Jenny Sparrow.

THE GIFT

I.

T
HREE WOMEN IN THE SAME FAMILY FIXING A
meal in one kitchen could only mean trouble. Even at breakfast, problems were sure to arise. Someone was bound to prefer hard-boiled eggs to fried. Someone was certain to resent a comment that veered too close to criticism. Someone could be counted on to slam out the door, insisting she was no longer hungry or that she never ate breakfast anyway, and hadn’t for years. In the Sparrow household, there was the sort of civility that was far worse than yelling and screaming. It was a cold curtain of mistrust. When people related by blood were so careful with each other, when they were so very polite, there was soon nothing left to say. Only niceties that meant so little they might as well have been spoken to a complete stranger.
Pass the butter, open the door, see you after school, there’s rain again, it’s sunny, it’s cold
.
Has the dog eaten? Has the window been shut? Where are you going? Why is it I don’t know you at all?

Such statements did not add up to anything like a
family, and yet Elinor Sparrow had hope. True, she and Jenny had spoken less than a mouthful of words to each other since Jenny’s arrival; they had sat down together at the dinner table on a single occasion, and then only because Stella forced them to do so—an attempt which, having been met with nothing but awkward silence and lukewarm asparagus quiche, had not been repeated. Still, you never could tell. Especially when it came to family. You thought you were done with someone, and they’d reappear when you least expected to see them. Who, after all, would have ever imagined Jenny Sparrow would be living at Cake House again? No one in the town of Unity, that was certain. No one in the entire Commonwealth, Elinor was willing to wager. And yet here was Jenny, sleeping on the best linens, hand-stitched and presented to Amelia Sparrow from Margaret Hathaway eighty years earlier, in gratitude for easing the birth of her newborn son, Eli, a gentleman now so old patrons had to repeat themselves twice whenever they got into his taxi, and, even so, they still had a good chance of winding up at the wrong address.

Elinor had used the best of everything to make up Jenny’s room. She’d swept the floor herself, so there were no spiderwebs or mouse droppings; she’d opened the windows, to ensure fresh air. On the bureau, she’d left a vase of branches from one of the peach trees on the hill, well aware that Jenny would not have wanted anything that grew in her mother’s garden. It was a good choice; when the forced blossoms opened, the room smelled like peaches and had filled with the dense heat of summertime.

Luck came in threes, or so Elinor’s grandmother had always said. First there had been Stella’s arrival, then Jenny’s, wouldn’t it make sense for something equally impossible to follow? Of course, Elinor could not expect a reversal of her medical condition—she found herself weakening more each day, needing more sleep and less food—but perhaps the rose in the north corner of the garden would indeed be blue. It was no less unlikely an event than her daughter’s
return. And there was Jenny, in the flesh, washing her face with cold water in the mornings, for the hot tap never quite worked at Cake House, fixing herself a cup of strong coffee, the beans hand-ground, for the electric grinder was on the fritz, before she headed down the lane to the tea house, where she’d taken a job.

Was a blue rose any more a fantastic notion than the idea that Elinor’s granddaughter, whose first thirteen years she had missed entirely, now helped out in the garden on sunny afternoons, laughing at the birds who followed closely as she raked mulch, waving away bees that drifted through the damp April air. If the blooms did turn out to be blue, Elinor would feel that she had completed something: a single act that had left its mark, that’s what she wanted. Another, more impatient woman might have cut open one of the buds on the hybrid and taken a peek, but Elinor knew that a blossom that hadn’t yet opened was an untrustworthy measure. Yellow climbers could appear to be orange, snowy floribundas might be streaked with a pink tint that would disappear as soon the petals unfolded in the light of day.

We know what we need when we get it
, Brock Stewart had once said. Elinor understood this to be true whenever she heard Jenny in the hallway, when she looked up from her work in the garden to see a light burning in the kitchen. She knew it when the kettle on the back burner of the stove whistled, when the back door opened and shut, when the house she lived in wasn’t empty. She hadn’t understood how alone she’d been until she was no longer alone. She had cut herself off, not unlike those invisible roses which could not bear the weight of humankind.

Elinor had begun to seriously doubt every one of her decisions, and this uncertainty had led her to do a very foolish thing; she had allowed Dr. Stewart to drive her to the hospital in Hamilton for her most recent oncology visit. There had been one condition: he was not to discuss her case with her oncologist, Dr. Meyer. He was not to treat her like a patient once they crossed over the Unity town line.

You know me well enough to know what I’ll do if you ask me not to butt into your life
, Dr. Stewart had said.

And, yet, when Elinor came into the hall after her appointment, there he was, conferring with Dr. Meyer.
Hopeless
, she’d heard someone say. Or was it
hapless
? Or was it
blessed
, or was it some entirely new language, one she had no prospect of ever understanding?

You promised me you wouldn’t treat me like a patient
, she had said to Brock Stewart when they left the hospital. She was so angry and so disappointed by his untrustworthy behavior, she could hardly catch her breath.
You heartless creature. How could you lie to me?

Maybe that had been what was said in the hallway.
Heartless
.

I don’t lie
, Brock Stewart had said, wounded.

What had surprised Elinor most of all was that she hadn’t seen his deception. Gauging an honest man had come so easily to her, like breathing in and breathing out. But now breathing itself hurt, and she’d been blindsided by Brock, just as she had been by Saul. She might have taken the train home, she might have never spoken to the doctor again, if she hadn’t been so damned exhausted. To salvage some of her pride, she walked ahead to the Lincoln, got in, and refused to look at him.

I never said I wouldn’t talk to her
, Brock Stewart reminded her when he got in the car. He had turned the key, but he let the old Lincoln idle.
You know me well enough to know I could never do anything to hurt you. But you are my business, Elly
.

She knew this was true as soon as he said it. It had been true for some time, but she had ignored it. They knew each other better than they knew anyone else in this world, but they had never before admitted what they meant to each other. Elinor didn’t look at the doctor on the ride home, but when the Lincoln pulled up in front of Cake House, she turned to him.

How dare you give me hope at this point?

Ever since, her optimism had surfaced unexpectedly and unbidden, at a time when surely it would have been far wiser to have given
up completely. Anyone would understand if she’d chosen to draw a quilt over her head. If she’d closed her eyes and taken a double dosage of the morphine she had saved for the evening. She should have burned anything that smacked of hope in a red-hot fire; she should have swept up all the ashes. Instead, she let it rise up within her. She let it wake her in the morning, and help her to sleep at night. She let it fall down in the rain, and wash down the green lawn into mud puddles where the snapping turtles laid their eggs at this time of year, as hopeful as she was, eager for the arrival of what they cared about most in this world.

A
S FOR
J
ENNY
, no matter what she did in Unity, she was bombarded by two simultaneous sets of images—whatever she was currently doing, washing the dishes in the old soapstone sink, for instance, was overlaid with something she had done years earlier, climbing out the window above that same sink at midnight to meet Will, or arguing with her mother, or watching her father rake leaves into huge piles near the stone wall one brilliant autumn afternoon.

Each morning, when she heard the clock in the hall chime, Jenny was both rising out of bed to wake Stella and getting ready for school herself. She felt her old jeans slide up against her body when she slipped on a pair of black slacks. Her black hair fell to her waist when she combed out the strands that had been cut well above her shoulders. Her reflection in the mirror was more trusting than it would later become, as though she were still convinced love would win out, still certain the path she chose was the one she was meant to follow.

In the shadows of the laurels, in dark corners of empty rooms, she could see the girl she’d once been trailing after, flicking her long, black hair over her shoulders, waiting for time to pass so she could grow up. She’d been in such a hurry, she’d never taken a minute to think things over. Now she wished she would have opened her eyes
and considered her options instead of spending so much of her time dreaming, other people’s dreams at that, those worthless things. Indeed, there was a reason why she’d been happy enough to avoid her own dreams: hers were always dreams of mazes, intricate traps formed of hedgerows or concrete or stone. In her own dreams she tried her best to find her way, but each night she was lost once more, deeper in the maze, making an even more pathetic attempt to escape.

She understood what she was telling herself: her life had gone wrong, her choices had all led to dead ends. A job would do Jenny good; it took her away from Cake House, it gave her a reason to set her alarm and pull on her clothes and walk across the lawn while the birds were still waking, calling in a glorious ribbon of unending song. She left the house before Stella, and maybe that was a good thing as well. Better to leave well enough alone now that they were under one roof. Better to skip breakfast, keep quiet, stay away from any topics that might cause dissension, which at the moment included just about everything, so that only the weather seemed safe conversation, and even then, there were often arguments about what the day might bring.