Chapter 6: The Back Step
She stood in the middle of the front room and looked at the dust-sheeted furniture and said nothing.
I waited.
"I used to do my homework at that table," she said finally, nodding toward the shape under the largest sheet.
"Miriam would make me finish it before she'd let me go outside.
She was strict about that." A pause.
"I didn't mind."
"Gerald told me about her," I said.
"A little."
Vivienne looked at me.
"What did he tell you?"
"That she was a schoolteacher.
That your father loved her.
That you were twelve when she was part of your life."
"I was eleven when they met.
Thirteen when she d*ed." She looked back at the table.
"Two years.
That's all I got."
I didn't say anything.
"My mother had already been gone four years by then." She moved to the window and looked out at the garden.
"My father was not a man who was good at being alone.
He needed someone to come home to.
Miriam was — she was the right person for him.
I knew it even then.
Kids know."
"And when he met me?"
She was quiet for a moment.
"You weren't her."
"No."
"I knew it wasn't fair." She said it flatly, without apology but also without deflection.
"I knew it even while I was doing it.
Being cold to you.
Making things difficult.
I knew it wasn't your fault." She turned from the window.
"That didn't stop me."
"Why are you telling me this now?"
"Because he asked me to." She reached into her coat pocket and took out the letter — the envelope from the lawyer's office, now open, the pages folded back.
"He wrote that he'd watched me treat you badly for twenty years and that he'd let it go on too long.
That he should have said something sooner." She looked down at the letter.
"He apologized to me for that.
For not protecting you better."
I felt something move in my chest.
"He also wrote that you had never once complained to him about me.
Not once in twenty years." She looked up.
"Is that true?"
"He loved you," I said.
"What would have been the point?"
Her jaw tightened.
She looked back at the letter.
When she spoke again her voice was lower.
"I went to his accountant eight months ago.
I told him I was worried about Dad's mental state.
I suggested that the will might need to be reviewed." She folded the letter carefully.
"I told him you might be taking advantage of a sick man."
The room was very still.
"I know," I said.
She looked up sharply.
"The lawyer told me this morning, before I drove here.
Thomas had instructed him to inform me, after the will was read." I kept my voice even.
"Thomas knew what you were doing.
He didn't change anything.
He just — knew."
Something crossed her face that I hadn't seen there before.
It wasn't anger.
It was closer to shame.
"He should have confronted me," she said.
"Maybe.
That wasn't his way."
"It should have been." Her voice was rough now.
"I deserved to be confronted.
I deserved to have him look me in the eye and tell me what I was doing was wrong." She pressed her lips together.
"Instead he just — forgave me.
In a letter.
After he was already gone."
She sat down on the floor near the window, her back against the wall, the letter in her lap.
It was such an unguarded thing to do that for a moment I didn't know what to say.
I sat down across from her, on the bottom step of the staircase.
"He left you this house," she said.
"And he left me a letter telling me to be better." A short, broken sound that might have been a laugh.
"That's very him."
"It is," I said.
She looked at the back of the room, toward where the kitchen would be, toward the back door.
"There's a step out back," she said.
"Stone.
Cracked down the middle.
I used to sit on it and read." She paused.
"I read the entire Narnia series on that step.
Miriam bought me the box set for my birthday."
"Do you want to go see if it's still there?"
She looked at me.
For the first time since I had known her — since the very first Sunday dinner twenty years ago when she had looked through me like I was made of glass — she looked at me without the wall up.
May you like
"Yeah," she said quietly.
"I think I do."
