“By Dell? I didn’t know him. Besides, I was in shock. I didn’t feel . . . anything, I guess.” I hadn’t said those words before. They sounded solitary, like the single bounce of a basketball in an empty gymnasium.
“Of course,” Ginny said. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry for me,” I told her, shutting the door on my emotions. “Anyway, it looked as though I was going to end up a ward of the state. Then, out of nowhere, Martha stepped in.”
“And she was . . .”
“A mathematician. A college professor. My mother’s favorite teacher at Vanderbilt University. After my mother graduated, she kept up with Martha, called her every so often and sent her letters and pictures—first of my dad, then me.”
“And she just showed up?”
“Martha heard about the fire on the news, found out about my situation through an ex-colleague who lived in D.C., and decided to have a look at me to see if there was something she could do.”
“Was she married?” Ginny asked.
“Her husband had died of a heart attack, and she was living alone;she’d relocated and was teaching at the University of California at Berkeley. Martha hadn’t been able to have kids of her own, even though she’d wanted them, and she and George never adopted because he was against it.”
“So at eleven years old you became Martha Belle Tucker’s kid?”
“No! I was nobody’s kid,” I snapped. “I just lived in her house. Kept her company. That was it.”
Ginny didn’t seem satisfied.
“We had the same address,” I clarified.“That didn’t make me her son.”
“She was good to you?”
“She was a cranky old buzzard, though it wasn’t her fault. Her body ached from rheumatoid arthritis. Terrible thing to have. Make anyone cranky.”
“Was she strict, lenient, what?”
“Only strict about geometry. That was her passion. Shapes. Deducing their properties. Turning postulates into theorems. She made sure I got pretty good at it myself. That’s why she was friends with Mona Kinsky, you see. Because Mona was fascinated by shapes. Now you want to know about Mona.”
“No,” Ginny said. “What happened to Martha?”
I sighed. “After high school, I went on to Berkeley, majored in Art History. Martha died two weeks before I graduated. That’s it.”
“That’s it . . .”
“Well, yeah.”
“So when you swung your tassel, there wasn’t a single soul in the world to clap for you?”
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t.
A minute, then: “How did she die?”
“Heart. She just fell over in the backyard while taking the kitchen tablecloth down from the laundry line.”
“You found her?”
I fidgeted in my seat. “Can we talk about something else?”
“Martha was taking the tablecloth down and died.”
I looked out the window, touched it. Cold. “It was draped over her chest,” I said. “The corner of it was bunched up in her hand. She looked so serene lying there in the grass.”
“What did you do? I mean, right then.”
I felt a flush of embarrassment. I’d never spoken about my past with anyone, not even Archie, but this girl, this quirky pain in the ass, was scooping out my innards, sifting, exploring. Me—the guy with the shaking hands.
Closing my eyes, I was back there in the yard with Martha. The grass had needed cutting and I’d told her I’d do it on the weekend. She was lying on long grass.
“I sat down cross-legged,” I said. “Put her head in my lap, ran my fingers down her hair, and stroked her cheek with the back of my hand. It already felt cold.”
“Did you say anything to her?”
I whispered, “Now you’re going to be with George.”
I couldn’t bring myself to tell Ginny that I’d cried. Rocked and cried and stroked that silver hair I used to braid when Martha could no longer do it herself. Then after they’d taken her away, I’d cooked her favorite meal and laid it out for two and cried at the kitchen table until long after the food had gone cold.
I dragged myself from that dark place, straightened up in my seat, and opened my eyes. “So . . .” I said, “that was that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean ‘cut and print.’ The end. Anyway, you want to know about Mona Kinsky. Graphic artist. Nice lady. Very sharp. Good calligrapher, too. Always had state-of-the-art equipment. Like I said, Mona was good with patterns. I’m sure she’s still designing things. You know how some people just never give up? Like Renoir, seventy-five, in a wheelchair with his brush strapped to his wrist? Hell, Mona couldn’t be more than mid-sixties at the most.”
