She had handed it to me at Kate and Rob’s Christmas dinner party and asked me to carry it up to her daughter in New York. No hint as to what it could be and too securely wrapped in heavy brown paper and tied with carpenter’s string for me to sneak a look. Longer than it was wide and surprisingly heavy, the package could have held a tall can of beer or a jar of the white lightning my daddy used to make, except that it didn’t gurgle.
Or rattle either, for that matter.
Okay, yeah, I
Mrs. Lattimore is rather wealthy and had once been a very large fish in our small-pond end of the county. She and my Stephenson grandfather were second or third cousins, once removed—a kinship so tenuous as to be meaningless anywhere except in the South. My mother had used that kinship to get Mrs. Lattimore’s support for enriched school programs, but there was no social interaction. The Lattimores were connected by wealth and marriage to some of the leading families in the mid-Atlantic states, while Mother had forfeited any Junior League aspirations when she married the area’s biggest bootlegger. Growing up, she may have known the three Lattimore daughters, but they had scattered as soon as they reached college age and began impressive careers in other states. Some of the grandchildren used to come for a week or two in the summer, but they kept to themselves behind the iron railings that surrounded the large Queen Anne–style house.
I had briefly met the daughter I was supposed to give the package to. Anne Lattimore Harald is a Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist, and the museum in Raleigh exhibited her work a few years ago. Kate introduced me at the opening reception, but there’s no way she would have remembered me among so many that night.
Kate’s first husband had been more closely related to the Lattimores than my weak link, and Kate kept a sort of a watching brief on Mrs. Lattimore, a thankless task since the elderly autocrat had sworn her to secrecy as her physical condition deteriorated. “She knows her daughters would try to bully her into more chemotherapy,” Kate said, when I told her that I’d been commissioned to take something to New York because Dwight is a deputy sheriff.
“Aunt Jane’s been sorting through the house and labeling everything so that they will know who’s to get what when the time comes. Even her jewelry and her silver and her antique furniture. What could be so valuable that she’d risk letting Anne know how sick she is just so she could be sure it got to her safely?”
That Christmas dinner was the first time I’d seen Mrs. Lattimore in months and I’d been shocked by her fragility.
According to Kate, Mrs. Lattimore was convinced that chemo would only give her a few extra months. Miserable months at that. With no desire to prolong the inevitable, she intended to wait until it was clearly too late before telling her children.
“She doesn’t want to spend the last year of her life bald and wretched,” said Kate, “and the older I get, the more I think she has a right to make that decision for herself.”
Chemotherapy has probably advanced tremendously in the twenty-one years since Mother died, but remembering how nauseated, weak, and physically depleted she was by the end of that summer, I could understand Mrs. Lattimore’s reasoning. All the same, difficult as it had been for me to watch Mother struggle and suffer, the memory of that summer is precious to me, and I thought it was unfair of Mrs. Lattimore not to give her daughters the choice of being there with her while she was still able to enjoy them.
Not my decision, though. Unless I was asked a direct question by Mrs. Harald, I didn’t plan to say a word.
From far down the track, the train’s airhorn sounded absurdly like the whistle of the toy train Cal and I had given Dwight for Christmas. My stepson wasn’t unhappy about spending the week with Kate and Rob’s three children, but he
Soon we were wheeling our suitcases down the aisle to a pair of comfortable seats beside wide windows. Dwight stowed our things on the capacious overhead rack and snagged a couple of pillows for our necks. Legroom was at least half again what you get on a plane and there were even adjustable leg-and footrests. I know it wasn’t the Polar Express, but I could have sworn that the conductor who came around to punch our tickets looked a bit like a black Tom Hanks.
As we pulled out of Raleigh, the last call for breakfast came over the intercom and Dwight and I lurched down to the dining car, where we shared a table with a couple who had celebrated their thirtieth anniversary with a week in Florida and were now on their way back to Brooklyn. Over scrambled eggs and French toast, they gave us a list of must-do things while we were in New York. We added their suggestions to the list we’d drawn up, then they headed back to the sleeper cars and we returned to our coach.
When Dwight insisted that I take the window, I didn’t argue. I put my seat back, adjusted the pillow, and watched the landscape roll past till I fell asleep to the rhythm of the wheels. When I woke, we had stopped in Rocky Mount. Dwight’s own seat was as far back as it would go, his eyes were closed, and his long body was almost a straight line. Neither of us had slept more than four hours the night before. I’m a district court judge and my calendar had been jammed as we played catch-up after the holidays. Dwight is second in command at the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department and he, too, had put in extra hours so that he could take this week off with a clear conscience.
Carefully, so as not to wake him, I turned my head on the pillow and studied his face, a face I had known since infancy. Indeed, he was there the day I was born. Daddy had rounded up all the boys in the yard that hot August day, packed them in the back of his pickup, and hauled them over to the hospital. After eleven sons, he was so tickled to have a daughter that he’d been sure the boys would want to see me, too, whether they were his sons or friends of his sons. Dwight swears he remembers seeing me held up to the nursery window. My twin brothers don’t. “All I recall is that Daddy stopped on the way home and bought everybody ice cream cones to celebrate,” says Zach.
“First time we ever had pistachio,” says Adam.
“And it’s not like babies were real rare in our family,” Will says when the subject comes up. “But pistachio ice cream cones? Now
“Only reason I remember,” says Dwight with a teasing grin, “is that I’d tasted pistachio ice cream before, so you were the only thing new to me that day.”
Except for his height, nothing about him is particularly memorable—ordinary nose, strong jawline, clear brown eyes, straight brown hair with an obstinate cowlick at the crown.
For years, he was just good ol’ dependable Dwight, a handy escort when I was between men, a convenient shoulder to cry on when a love affair went sour, and certainly not someone who had ever made my heart flutter.
