The Woman Who Came Back
Chapter 09 - The Woman Who Came Back
The name on Dad's placemat was Ruth Calder.
I had been expecting a developer, or someone from one of those companies that bought old houses and replaced them with large gray boxes. Ruth was seventy-three, a retired music teacher who had lived three doors from my parents for almost thirty years. She had brought casseroles when Mom was ill and had sat beside us at the funeral.
I hadn't seen her since the autumn I stopped answering her telephone calls.
“Ruth wants the bungalow?” I said.
“Her granddaughter and her husband want it,” Dad replied. “They're moving back from Indianapolis with two little girls. Ruth's been looking for somewhere near her own place.”
“Why not talk to you directly?”
“She didn't know whether she was welcome. She asked Susan to make the offer.”
I looked out at the street. A city bus went past with an advertisement for new kitchen cabinets along its side. Ruth Calder had been kind to my mother, and afterward she'd been kind to me in a way I hadn't been able to tolerate.
A month after the funeral, she came by with Mom's favorite lemon cake and found me cleaning out the hall closet. She'd said, gently, that I didn't have to do everything at once. I told her I wasn't a child. Later she phoned twice to invite me for coffee. I let the calls go unanswered because seeing her reminded me of how I had behaved.
Claire remembered. “You told me Ruth wanted to feel important,” she said.
“I was unkind to a lot of people that year.”
“You were.”
Dad wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Ruth's granddaughter wants to keep the garden. She'll put the place right. I think your mother would've liked that.”
The offer was below what Susan expected the property could fetch after repairs. It was also above the amount Dad had privately decided he needed for his apartment and a secure old age. He had asked Susan to prepare a comparison before he made any decision. He hadn't asked my opinion.
This time I kept it to myself.
That evening I drove to Ruth's house. She opened the door in a plaid skirt and slippers, one of which had a ribbon tied around the toe where the stitching had come loose. Her face changed when she saw me, not with surprise but with a cautious sort of recognition.
“Margaret Bennett,” she said, using my maiden name. “Come in out of the cold.”
Her house smelled of cinnamon and a pot roast. Framed photographs covered the walls, including a picture of Mom and Ruth beside the church piano, both wearing hats from an era when women still expected to wear hats to Sunday services.
“I heard about the offer,” I said.
“I hope Arthur didn't think I was trying to pressure him.”
“He didn't. I came because I owed you an apology for what I said after Mom died.”
Ruth settled into a chair. “I remember you were grieving.”
“I was rude to you.”
“That too.”
She offered me coffee. We drank it at her kitchen table, which was crowded with seed catalogs and a half-finished crossword. She told me her granddaughter's girls were six and four. They loved the pictures of my mother's flower garden. Ruth had shown them a photograph of the roses the day she'd heard the bungalow might be for sale.
Then she reached into a drawer and took out a small package tied with string.
“Your mother left this with me,” she said. “I should have brought it sooner. After our last conversation, I didn't think you'd accept it.”
Inside was a stack of index cards. On each, Mom had written the name of a plant and a note about its care. There were drawings of garden beds and a penciled plan for a low wooden bench beneath the lilac bushes.
One card read: “Arthur keeps promising me the bench. He is seventy kinds of useful, but hopeless at finishing anything for himself.”
I laughed. Ruth smiled, relieved.
“Would you mind if the girls had the garden?” I asked.
“It's not mine to give them. It isn't yours either, really. Arthur can decide. But I'd be glad to see somebody love it again.”
On the drive home I thought about all the ways grief can make a person territorial. I'd guarded Mom's memory as though it were a small property, threatened whenever anybody else claimed a share. Ruth had lost a friend. Claire had lost a mother. Dad had lost the woman he'd made coffee for every morning since he was twenty-six. I had behaved as though I alone understood the cost.
The next week Dad accepted Ruth's granddaughter's offer, conditional on an inspection and ordinary closing arrangements in the spring, when the young family planned to return to town. He asked me to witness the signature, which I did with a hand steadier than his. Susan explained every page to him. When he had a question, she answered him, not me.
Afterward Dad asked whether I'd come to Larch Street the following weekend to help choose what to keep. Claire would be there too. He said he wanted us to tell him when we disagreed, preferably before moving the furniture.
The bungalow was dusty and cold, and the upstairs radiators made an enormous racket. We opened windows and worked through boxes of school reports, family photographs, chipped serving dishes, and tools Dad had once thought he'd need forever.
In the upstairs closet I found my old winter coat, with a dried corsage pinned to the lapel. The sight of it brought back a high school dance I'd forgotten. Mom had insisted I bring the coat, though I'd complained that it ruined my outfit. Claire held it against my shoulders and we laughed at the size of the collar.
For several hours we were simply two sisters moving our father's belongings. Then Claire found a flat envelope taped beneath the drawer of his workshop desk. On the front was Paul's name, written in Dad's hand.
I called for him. Dad came in, took one look, and sat on his stool.
“I wondered where that had gone,” he said.
He opened it and showed me a copy of the loan agreement, signed by Paul in March. At the bottom, below the promised repayment date, was another handwritten paragraph.
May you like
Paul had agreed that if the business could not repay the loan, he would sell his van and close the business rather than ask Arthur for another dollar.
But it wasn't the agreement that made my breath catch. Pinned to it was a second page dated six weeks earlier, bearing Paul's signature beneath the words: “Request for additional funds — $10,000.”
