Bill Justice drives over to Fox Hill after lunch, if anyone could consider crackers and tea a proper lunch. His old Saab grunts and acts ornery whenever the ditches are too mucky, but Bill Justice just keeps going, and so does the Saab. When he gets to the house, he parks and gets out; the smell of wood smoke immediately brings tears to his eyes. Bill wipes at his face with his big, gnarled hands. For a moment, he’s completely disoriented. What day is this? He can’t quite recall. What is it he’ll find when he walks through the door? He can’t figure that either.
Bill is known to be a rational man, one who loves logic and facts. He can weigh murky, emotionally charged information-rage and love, for instance; divorce and hit and runs-and come up with a fitting legal solution. Who gets the children, who keeps the house, how many years is enough time served, what constitutes a crime of passion. However, at this moment, standing in front of the house on Fox Hill, everything seems like a puzzle. And then someone waves to him from the window and he realizes it’s March’s daughter. That’s it. March is the one who lit the fire in the fireplace. She’s waiting for him to go over Judith’s estate.
“It’s that judge guy,” Gwen calls to her mother.
Gwen has been standing by the window, fogging up the glass with her breath and feeling as trapped as a fly in pudding. Being here is beyond nowhere. This morning she had to help her mother begin to sort through Mrs. Dale’s belongings, and the whole time Gwen was carrying boxes up from the cellar she’d been wishing she could teleport home. She has tried to call her best friend, Minnie, three times, but the line is always busy. This is beyond purgatory. That’s what she planned to tell Minnie, if Minnie ever shut up long enough for her to get a call through. It’s worse than hell. It’s hell times two.
“He’s got a briefcase with him,” she tells her mother, who’s in the kitchen fixing coffee.
The Judge has one hand over his eyes and he’s staring at the house. He walks toward the gate, then takes a step back.
“He’s kind of stumbling around,” Gwen reports.
“The Judge doesn’t stumble,” March informs her daughter as she brings the coffeepot and two china cups over to the dining room table. She comes to stand next to Gwen at the window, then waves to the Judge. He waves back and swings the gate open.
“I’ll bet he was great-looking when he was young,” Gwen decides.
March snorts.
“What?” Gwen asks.
“When are you going to understand-you can’t rate people by the way they look.” The funny thing is, March never realized how handsome Bill Justice was, but now she remembers that her father used to tease him about their women clients being the only ones who preferred Bill. “Anyway, he’s over seventy.”
“Well, I bet he was cute,” Gwen insists. “He’s still not too bad. For somebody ancient.”
“A perfect day for October,” the Judge says as he comes inside. “Unfortunate that we have to use it to tend to such sad business.”
He kisses March’s cheek, then takes off his overcoat. He seems a little bewildered when he sees the cardboard boxes filled with Judith’s belongings that are strewn across the dining room table.
“I thought I should go through everything,” March explains.
“Of course you should.” The Judge sits down and accepts some coffee.
“You can’t believe some of the things I’ve found already.” March holds up a blue ribbon. “Alan’s. From some debating team he was on.”
“Alan,” the Judge says sadly. “There’s a man who ruined his life.”
Gwen has been looking out the window, idly eating Pepperidge Farm Mint Milanos from the bag. Now, she shifts her attention.
“How ruined?” she asks the Judge. “Completely ruined? Totally ruined?”
“Gwen!” March says. She turns to the Judge. “She’s never even met him. Do you think I should bring her to visit him?”
“He wouldn’t see you. He wouldn’t open the door.” The Judge notices a silk scarf in one of the boxes; when he narrows his eyes he realizes that the blobs of orange are lilies, like the ones which grow in his own yard. “How long do you plan on staying?” he asks March.
Gwen stops chewing so she can hear the answer. Her whole life depends on this.
“I thought a week.” March looks around at the accumulation of a lifetime. “But there’s so much to do. And so much of what’s left in the house was Alan’s or mine. I found all my sweaters, every one I ever wore, from kindergarten on up, folded into two boxes in the attic.”
“Richard should have come with you,” the Judge says.
“Oh, no.” March pours more coffee. For some reason, just the mention of Richard’s name makes her feel flushed, as if she’d already betrayed him, somehow. It was going up to the attic, that was the problem. She keeps seeing dust, out of the comer of her eye. She keeps hearing the door shut, the way it used to when she and Hollis sneaked up there; she keeps feeling the way she did whenever he was near. “Richard had classes. Midquarter exams. He couldn’t leave.”
“I don’t care what he had. He shouldn’t have let you come back alone.”
Gwen puts down the bag of cookies. This judge guy is more interesting than she would have imagined.
“Cookie?” March offers the Judge, hoping to change the subject.
Bill Justice takes two bites of a Mint Milano, and when there’s only a small piece left, he whistles.
“Sister,” he calls.
March and Gwen look at each other, confused.
The Judge whistles again and holds out the piece of cookie, and then, all of a sudden, he gets a pained expression. His whole face falls.
“Where’s the dog?” he asks, and when March looks blank he tosses the cookie bit on the table. “Shit,” he mutters. “Where’s the damned dog?”
The Judge rises to his feet and heads for the door. He’s already pulling on his overcoat when March and Gwen reach him.
“Judith got a dog last winter,” the Judge says. His breathing sounds off and he’s having trouble finding his car keys. “A West Highland terrier.”
“A West Highland terrier?” March feels a bit dazed.
“A little white dog,” the Judge says, impatient. “Have you seen her?”
Now that it’s mentioned, March remembers Judith saying something about a dog she got for Christmas. Judith had been planning to come out to California for Thanksgiving, and she worried about putting the dog in the kennel.
“There was something out on the porch last night,” Gwen pipes up, but when her mother and Bill Justice look at her, expectantly, she feels silly. “But it was a rabbit.”
“I didn’t remember there was a dog,” March says. “There was no sign of it when we got here.”
“Oh, fuck,” the Judge says.
March gets goose bumps from the sound of those words coming from Bill Justice. It is so unlike him to speak in that manner, that she feels she has done something terrible, perhaps even criminal, in forgetting Judith’s dog.
The Judge opens the hall closet and takes out a leash neither March nor Gwen noticed when hanging up their coats; then he goes outside without bothering to say goodbye.
“It probably died because of us,” Gwen says. Her voice sounds sad, but also accusatory, as if the whole thing were really March’s fault.
March grabs a sweater. “Look around the yard,” she tells her daughter. “I’m going with the Judge.”
Bill Justice is already backing out of the driveway, but March runs over and taps on the window. When he stops, she gets into the Saab and they drive slowly along the road, windows open, calling over and over again for Sister, the little white dog.
“I wasn’t thinking,” March says as they drive too fast over the bumps. Or perhaps the problem was that she was thinking too much about subjects she shouldn’t have allowed past the first circle of her mind. Just as before, Hollis is taking up too much room. “I was so upset about Judith.”
Instead of listening to her excuses, the Judge is peering into the bushes as he drives. At the turnoff, they head for the village, driving so slowly that other cars honk, then pass them by. They keep the windows open and
