“Now you see what I mean, don’t you?” he said. “That’s why I need you to get Fitz off this crazy theory of his and make him stop talking. Come on, Lucie, you’ve been gone two years. It’s payback time. You owe this to the family and you’re the only one he’ll listen to.” He emphasized each word like he was talking to a child or a slow- witted person.
“Hell, the gossip’s already started,” he added. “When I stopped by the general store this morning, Thelma was up one side of me and down the other. I told her Bobby said it was an accident. She clucked around for a while then said, ‘Poor old Lee. I guess we just ought to leave him lay where Jesus flang him.’ I told her that’s just what we intended to do. So now I want you to tell me that you’re with us on this. Got it?”
Too bad those Ray-Bans were opaque. I couldn’t see Eli’s eyes at all. Though probably if I could, all I’d see would be my own reflection. No window on the soul there. If he still had one.
“Us,” I said. “You mean Mia agrees with you?”
He said tersely, “She’ll do whatever I tell her.”
That figured. Though she hadn’t always been so compliant.
Mia had been fourteen when our mother was killed one fine spring day, six years ago. The two of them had gone riding together. The child had returned to the stables alone hours later, barely coherent, as she tried to describe where Mom’s horse had stumbled, for no apparent reason, while jumping one of the low Civil War–era dry-stacked stone walls that rimmed the perimeter of the farm.
She never regained consciousness. A small mercy. She died that evening. The doctor in the emergency room said later that she might have lived if she’d gotten medical care sooner.
No one told Mia about that conversation, but still she had been too unwell to attend the funeral. Afterward Leland, whose interest in fatherhood had been borderline nonexistent when Mom was alive, escaped home as often as possible. It didn’t take long for Mia, left to her own devices while Eli and I were away at our respective universities, to acquire a tattoo, a boyfriend with a slow wit and a fast car, and a pack-a-day habit. When Jacques caught her and her boyfriend soused to the gills in the woods by the winery, even Leland agreed it was time to do something.
Surprisingly he was the one who thought of asking our cousin Dominique to come stay with Mia. The daughter of my mother’s sister, she was studying in Paris to be a chef. Leland persuaded Fitz to offer her a job at the Goose Creek Inn and promised free room and board in return for “keeping an eye” on Mia. He said it would be a great opportunity to perfect her English, along with the chance to work with a top American chef.
Dominique told me later he’d described my sister as a sweet child with the morals of a Girl Scout who needed a “mother figure” to give her gentle guidance. It took less than twenty-four hours to figure out what he’d really meant was that she needed a Mother Superior-cum-parole-officer and a short leash. Mia hadn’t been overjoyed to report her comings and goings to her cousin after so much unsupervised hell-raising, but eventually she seemed to settle down and we were less worried about the road to perdition.
“Well?” Eli said. “You didn’t answer me. We need to present a unified front on this. As a family.”
The statement was freighted with so much latent irony that, for a moment, I thought he might be joking. But he was peering over the top of the Ray-Bans again. He was dead serious.
I hadn’t had much sleep in the last twenty-four hours and my head still ached. Eli could be relentless when he wanted something, like a dog with a bone.
“Okay, okay. I’ll talk to him,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do. Can we change the subject now, please?”
“Of course. Actually, there is something else we need to discuss before we get home.” He paused. “The bad news.”
He waited while that sank in.
“Well,” I said wearily, “glad we got the good news out of the way first.”
“It has nothing to do with Leland.”
He had turned west onto Route 50 and the scenery was all farmland now. The Indians made the path for this road three hundred years ago when they were following the trail for buffalo, which probably accounted for its gentle twists and turns. Here, at least, nothing had changed. Miles of low stone walls that were pre–Civil War lined the sides of the road. Horses grazed serenely on stubbly brown fields and the corn was late-summer high. The traffic had petered out to a single John Deere tractor motoring amiably down the middle of the road. The driver gave way to let Eli pass, waving as we zoomed by.
“So, what is it?”
“Greg Knight moved back home. He’s living in Leesburg.”
There was a long silence before I said, “When?”
“Six months ago.”
“How come no one told me?”
He cleared his throat. “I don’t know.”
He did know. “You might have warned me when you called last night,” I said.
Eli looked over at me the way you look at a grenade after someone just pulled the pin. “You never would have gotten on that plane.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” I said. “I just would have liked to know before I got here, that’s all. What’s he doing here, anyway? Bartending again? I thought he had some big radio job in New York. With CBS.”
“It was ABC,” my brother said, “and he did.”
“What happened? They fire him?”
Eli shrugged. “How should I know? We don’t talk anymore, not like before. Like I said, he’s living in Leesburg. He’s got a job working as a deejay at WLEE. With his own nighttime call-in show. Plays jazz in between talking to insomniacs or whatever weirdos are awake at three in the morning.” He cleared his throat again. “Not that I listen.”
For once it was my turn to look at him. “At least he won’t be at the funeral. I’d rather not see him right now and I can’t imagine he’d have the nerve to show up.”
“Actually,” Eli said, “you will and he does. There’s something else.” He gave me the grenade pin look again. “He’s seeing Mia.”
He knew better than anyone it was the last thing I expected to hear. “What, as her baby-sitter? He’s ten years older than she is.”
“He’s, ah, sleeping with her.”
“Very funny.”
He said nothing, just worked his jaw like he was trying to loosen a piece of food that got wedged between two teeth.
“He’s not really sleeping with her,” I said finally.
“Don’t tell her. She thinks he is.”
“Oh God, Eli! How could you let that happen? What happened to Ringo? Or Rocko…whatever his name was?”
“Who?”
“That guy she was dating. The one with the teeth.”
“Oh. Him. He’s at some military academy in Pennsylvania. On probation.”
“I don’t understand…” I said. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“You haven’t seen your sister in two years, babe. She’s changed.”
“Well, if she listens to everything you tell her, why can’t you put a stop to this?” I banged a fist on the wide console between our seats.
He should have been as upset as I was. He and Greg had been best friends since first grade. Then came the rain-wrecked night two years ago when Greg’s car slammed into the stone wall at the entrance to the vineyard. He’d actually gotten out and walked away, though he’d returned to watch while the Rescue Squad cut me free with the Jaws of Life. His friendship with Eli and our torrid summer affair had disintegrated into more pieces than a wall of Humpty Dumpties.
He came to the hospital to visit me precisely once during the months I was there. A mumbled apology as though he’d forgotten to pick me up for a movie date. That was it. Those fifteen minutes were acid-etched in my memory, marking the absolute nadir of the Great Depression—mine, that is—during the era when the doctors said I
