At the Corner of King Street (7 page)

“Yours wasn't crazy. She collected things.”

“She packed every square inch of this warehouse, including this floor. She did the same to our home. And I can promise you that not
all of it was lovely, salvaged goods. In the last years, she took to stowing her garbage.”

The vignette irritated rather than mollified me. My skin prickling with frustration, I rose and moved to the counter and the cherry pie plate. I sliced another piece of pie and stood at the counter, eating not for taste but because eating was better than thinking about this mess.

“Pie's gonna make you fat, Addie. It isn't going to solve a damn thing.”

I took a third bite. And a fourth. “Maybe. But I don't know what else to do.” I set my fork down. “The social worker said she could find a foster home for the baby.”

“A foster home.” The words drifted with her sigh. “I was hoping you could take her.”

The kitchen window faced Union Street and, beyond it, the waters of the Potomac River. Past the traffic and the buildings across the street the river meandered, unaware of the city's chaos, drifting out to the Chesapeake Bay and finally the Atlantic. A gentle, warm breeze carried the brackish scents up through the open window. “You and the social worker collaborating together on this?”

“We talked on the phone. I said you were young and smart and not like Janet. Said you'd be the wisest choice for the child.”

“In whose mind?” The solution solved everyone's problems and gutted my life. Damn it.

Grace sat back in her chair. “Can you take the baby or not?”

Anger and frustration caught the sharp words in my throat. I ate another piece of pie.

“Addie, look at me. My health is not great. I don't have the energy for a baby, especially a difficult one.”

The child's cries rattled around in my brain as I swiped away a tear. “I have a huge deadline at work this week. We're launching the
vineyard's new wine. A lot is riding on this. I can't have a wailing kid strapped to my chest while I discuss grapes, growing seasons, and sunlight. I can't.”

“Foster care, Addie. I've heard the stories. Overcrowded homes, babies forgotten or not fed.”

I turned from the river view and faced her. “The media always picks up on the worst of the worst. There are a lot of loving families out there that could look out for the baby for a few weeks. And if Janet can get some hospital care, then they might be able to stabilize her, and she can take the baby back.”

The words rang hollow like a cracked church bell. Mom did have good times. She was stable for months at a time. But those times never lasted. I hated our life. Hated it. And now I was asking this kid to live it with Janet.

Grace pressed wrinkled lined hands to her forehead. “Can you at least deal with the social worker for me tomorrow? If you can't take the baby, at least see that she ends up in a good home.”

I owed the kid that much. My running tally of lost moments and stolen time was so huge that another day or two wouldn't matter much to me, however it could really matter to the kid. “I can do that. I can make sure the baby gets a good home.”

Grace nodded, but there was no gratitude in her expression. The solution I offered wasn't one she wanted, but it was all I could give.

“Thank you.”

I pushed away from the counter as I dug my cell phone from my pocket and walked into my old bedroom. I sat on the twin bed made with the same red-and-blue quilt that smelled of fabric softener. A very old painting of a lady still hung over the bed. Its patina was cracked and faded and the frame, once gilded, was not dulled by time. I often stared at the delicate brown curls framing her pale white face and her
lace-trimmed collar and wondered who she was to us. Grace muttered the name Sarah, which only fueled my imagination.

The bedsprings groaned and squeaked as I sat and stared at my phone's screen saver, a photo taken of a smiling Scott and me at the vineyard in front of the new tasting room. Angry, frustrated, and backed into a corner, I closed my eyes and tapped my index finger on the image.

To discuss a piece of my history with Scott could open the Pandora's box of my past and let loose questions I never intended to answer. As panic pulled and tugged, I drew in a breath and released it slowly. “Don't do this to yourself,” I whispered. “If I handle this right, maybe I won't have to tell him.”

I took another deep breath. Scott always admired my crisis management skills, but this would put it all to the test.

“Breathe, Addie. Breathe. Think.”

It was Monday. The wine reception wasn't until Friday evening, so there was a day or two that I could spare. I worked ahead and planned to spend the week tweaking final details in my OCD way, but if push came to shove, I could handle it all in one very hectic day.

I dialed Scott's number, half hoping he shut it off or was in the fields where reception was spotty. He picked up on the second ring. “Addie. Thank God. Tell me you're on your way home. I got a call from the caterer, and she has questions I couldn't answer.”

Pressing fingertips to my temple, I rose. “What was the question?”

“Availability of shrimp I think.”

A normal, everyday kind of crisis. I liked those. “I'll call her in the morning and sort it out.”

“I knew you would.” He yawned. “Are you coming back tonight?”

“It's getting late. Better to drive when I'm fresh. Plus I have more loose ends to clear up here.” The next words rushed, carrying an
apology woven in the tone. “I'll be back tomorrow, and I'll get it all on track. Don't worry.”

After a long silence, he sighed into the phone. “Baby, what's going on there? Is everything all right?”

“Nothing I can't fix.” I'm Addie the Glue. I hold it all together.

“Where're you staying?”

I moved to the window that overlooked the alley.

“I'm staying at my Aunt Grace's house on King Street in Old Town Alexandria.”

“You've never mentioned her.”

“I used to work for her in her architectural salvage business.”

“She has property in Old Town Alexandria? That's got to be worth some money.”

“I suppose it is. My grandfather bought the land when it was cheap.”

“What kind of property is it?”

“It's a warehouse.”

“Could it be a wine warehouse?”

“What?”

He chuckled. “Just thinking, baby. We expand our wine empire, we might need a city location.”

“Our wine empire.” The words tripped off his tongue without effort, and it warmed me more than a thousand
I love you
s.

“Of course, our wine empire,” he said softly. “I wouldn't be where I am without you, Addie. You're the center of my life.”

Wine or empire didn't matter.
Our
did
.
“Really?” I nestled closer to the phone, trying to imagine the clean scent of his skin, which smelled like wine and sunshine.

“Baby, you know that.”

More anxious than ever to return to the vineyard, I sat up straighter,
determined to fix this issue and return to my real home. “We don't talk about us all that often. We're so busy.”

“After this Friday, we're going to talk more about us. I've been putting it off and that's bad. Too much work filling my head. But we'll talk long and hard this weekend.”

He ended the sentence with a sensuous chuckle, which coaxed a smile. We'd not made love for a few weeks. He chocked it up to work and stress and, though I missed the reassurance of his touch, I understood.

“I love you,” I said.

“Me, too. Me, too. Hurry home. We all miss you. I miss you.”

When I hung up, the worries melted and, for a moment, I didn't think about Janet, the baby, social workers, or Zeb's annoyed expression. I imagined my life with Scott. Sitting on the back porch, sipping a glass of wine, and watching the sunset. In my daydreams it was always just the two of us. Enjoying each other.

I tucked the phone back in my pocket and found Grace standing over the sink, washing the pie plates. She left the coffee cups on the table and refreshed both. “I'll put a call in to the social worker in the morning and get this sorted.”

“Who was that you were talking to?”

“Scott. He owns the vineyard.”

“The boyfriend.”

“Yes.”

She placed the first dish in a rack by the sink. “Does he want children?”

“He says his sole focus is the vineyard. The grapes are his children.”

“Been my experience that most men, when they reach a certain age, want a child, a legacy.”

Not a child who's cursed. Not a child who swings between highs
and lows and doesn't know when to stop spending money or cut back on the drinking. Not a child who yells and screams at imagined monsters in the shadows. Not a child who has no future.

When I turned twenty, I feared I'd have a child cursed with madness. My mother was dead by her own hand and my sister off on another manic adventure. And so I arranged to have my tubes tied. The doctors spoke to me over and over about the consequences of the surgery.
Just wait. What's the harm in waiting?
At the time, I saw no other resolution to a problem that would never go away and I refused their counsel.

“Eric is doing all right,” Grace said.

I pictured my crying niece with her red face and tight belly. “What if Scott and I have a girl?”

“You've a fifty-fifty chance.”

“You and I both know that's one hell of a dice roll.”

I had the good pleasure to meet Mistress Smyth, wife of Captain Smyth, owner of the
Constance.
The Smyth's home is also to be constructed of brick, but unlike our home they have yet to lay down their foundation.

Mistress Smyth and I shared a honey cake and tea in her temporary wooden home. The air was so hot and thick and I longed for Aberdeen. It does my heart good to know I am not the only one without a permanent place to call my own. I summoned the nerve to ask Mistress Smyth about Faith. Her face turned sour. She told me Faith is an indentured servant who fancies herself a midwife. Always growing herbs in her gardens and mixing concoctions. She warned me to, “Stay clear of that one.”

S
leeping at Grace's warehouse apartment bordered on miserable. The lumpy mattress squeaked and groaned each time I rolled on my side or back. A draft blew above the floorboards and shadows played on the walls, dancing and swaying in time with the moon. I forgot how creepy this place could feel at night. As a child, it took me weeks to adjust.

At three
A.M.
I stared at the ceiling, listening to the chilly whispers of wind whistling down the center hallway. A cool breeze blew under my threshold and across my face like fingertips.

The warehouse's quirks were easy to accept when I was a kid because, honestly, imagined ghosts and spirits were an improvement over shouting drunks lingering near the motel room Mom and Janet and I shared. The spirits didn't argue or create such a disturbance that the cops were summoned.

Janet feared the warehouse's ghosts and specters hovering in the fragments of older homes destined for demolition. They played havoc
with her already failing sanity, so she spent most of that summer living with the McCrae sisters. The summer of endless sleepovers. Janet was nearly the same age as Daisy and Rachel and the trio spent the summer running around the city.

Janet missed the excitement and stimulation of life with our mother, but I adored the quiet of the warehouse. I read. Slept late. And though Grace and I never talked much, I always found an excuse to help her in the shop downstairs. Grace taught me how to take the fragments of old homes and either spruce them up for resale or dismantle them and refashion them for the endless stream of customers. Old doors became coffee tables. A large round gear from an old sugar-processing plant became a round end table. A rusted refrigerator from the 1930s was sanded, repainted, and fashioned into a bookshelf. The old and broken found new life.

Restless, I rose and slipped on my shoes. Moving quietly, I walked the hallway to the door that led to the stairs. Carefully, I unlatched the deadbolt and clicked on the staircase light. Quietly, I moved down the stairs, wincing when one or two creaked.

In the warehouse, I flipped on the main light and took my first really good look around.

Again, I was struck by the emptiness. Once, nearly fifty lights hung from the ceiling. Lanterns, chandeliers, sconces, and pendant lights cast a warm glow over the rows of reclaimed doors, stained glass windows, fireplace hearths, and so many odds and ends I didn't think it possible to catalogue them all.

Moving toward the counter where I'd worked, I pressed my hands on the dusty countertop, taken aback that time had whittled this vibrant place to what amounted to skin and bones. One of my last jobs here included cataloguing keys and locks. I glanced under the counter, half expecting to see the dusty box filled with keys. All I found was a stash of papers and invoices that looked in dire need of sorting. I
grabbed a handful of papers and glanced through bills, flyers, site directions, and receipts. There was no real order to the stack.

“Oh, Grace.”

Instead of returning to my bed and certain tossing and turning, I began to sort papers. Making order out of chaos calmed my nerves.

By six in the morning, I'd sorted through all the papers and discovered that Grace's salvage yard was on the verge of closure. She received several generous offers, which it seemed she ignored. Zeb said she'd suffered a stroke in the last year, but judging by the ignored papers, she'd started unraveling long before.

Guilt jabbed me in the back. Grace was thrilled when I joined her company after college. Once or twice she mumbled I was her saving grace. And then I left.

“Damn it.” I neatly stacked all the sorted receipts and put them back under the counter. I thought about calling Scott, needing to hear his voice, but decided against it. He was already headed into the fields and out of cell phone range. I'd try Scott around ten, when he normally returned to his office.

Rising, I shoved fingers through my hair and padded down the hallway to the single bathroom in the apartment. A flower mosaic made up of black and white hexagon-shaped tiles covered the floor of the small room. There was no shower but rather a claw-foot bathtub that Grace and I salvaged the summer of my twelfth birthday from a farm an hour west in Middleburg, Virginia. The pedestal sink, another rescue, offered a few slim ledges barely wide enough for my toothbrush, and above it hung an oval framed mirror with silver backing that was thinning and fading on the bottom edges.

I turned on the tub water and stripped. Thankfully, I packed a small bag, somehow remembering or knowing that no Shire disaster was as quick as anyone thought.

The bath restored a little of my energy and by the time I redressed into the one change of clothes, a pot of coffee brewed in the kitchen.

Without a word, Grace poured a cup of coffee for me in a large blue mug and splashed in a dollop of milk. Breakfast was fruit and toast. Neither of us spoke as we ate.

I glanced at my watch. “It's seven. Hospital visiting hours start in thirty minutes and doctors will be making their rounds. I want to catch Janet's doctor and find out how she's doing.”

Grace's lined thin hands cradled her mug. “What about Social Services?”

“One problem at a time.”

Grace rose from the table and made herself a second cup of coffee. She cradled her large white mug in hands bent by arthritis. “Don't toss that baby away, Addie. Don't do it.”

Anger snapped. “I'm meeting with Janet's doctors.”

“I heard you the first time. But you're going to talk to that social worker and I want you to do right by that baby.”

Rising, I grabbed my purse and fished out my keys. “I'm not a monster.”

“Don't have to be a monster to do wrong.”

“Damn it.”

“There was a time when you were brave and not afraid to ruffle feathers. I need you to be that person again.”

“Stop. I will figure this out.” Keys gripped in my palm, I left, stomping down the old stairs to the first floor.

Outside, a breeze from the Potomac was warm and heavy with moisture that promised heat and maybe a storm this afternoon. A filmy haze of clouds softened the sky's crystal blue. A typical day in the city. Hot and muggy.

I checked my cell for a weather report. Ninety degrees today and
tomorrow. Scattered showers today. At the vineyard, I became adept at watching the weather and tracking storms and heat waves. As glamorous as some might have considered owning a vineyard, the bottom line was that we were farmers and as much slaves to the weather as the tobacco farmers who settled this area three hundred years ago.

Not bothering a glance toward the warehouse, I got in my car. Damn. “Is it really that wrong to want my own life?”

Traffic was already thick, clogged with tourists and commuters, and it took me twenty minutes to travel the half-dozen miles to the hospital. I parked in the lot and sat in the car for a moment. My heart raced and my hands sweated as I thought about what waited for me. Circumstance swirled up around me like a hurricane, sweeping away all the joy and excitement this week originally promised.

I wasn't supposed to be here. I belonged in the country at the vineyard at Scott's side.

Before my self-pity could grow out of control like a weed, I got out of my car quickly and moved past the receptionist toward the elevators. Elevator doors dinged open as if expecting me. Inside the car, I pushed number six for the maternity ward. Inside the elevator, soft, nondescript music played from a hidden speaker. I stood straight, hand clenched on my bag, wanting so much to run away. But when the doors opened I moved to the nurses' station staffed by an older woman with red hair and glasses. She glanced up at me. “May I help you?”

“I'm Addie Morgan. I'm here to see my sister, Janet Morgan.”

“Do you have identification?”

I pulled out my wallet and handed her a driver's license. “I was here yesterday. Is Dr. Reed here yet?”

“He's in with her now.” She handed me back my license. “Room 606.”

“Right. Thanks.”

As I moved quickly, overhead lights hummed, like buzzing flies
chasing me to room 606. I stopped at her door when I heard the murmur of conversation. A man, who I recognized as Dr. Reed, was talking to a soft-spoken woman. My sister. Janet was awake.

Clearing my throat, I moved into the room and peered around the curtains. Janet lay back on her pillows, her long face as pale as the over-bleached bedsheets. Blond hair, stringy and oily, draped over the pillow like the roots from a tree. Her green eyes, as wide as an owl's, were haunted and scared as she stared at the doctor. I recognized the expression, which was so like our mother's. Most days when I was at school, Mom drank. Gin was her first choice and though she swore each morning that today would be different, every day at two-thirty I found her in the same spot on the couch half asleep.
“It's okay, Mom. I'll brew coffee. You'll feel better soon.”
And I would gently pull the glass from her hands and head into whatever room served as our kitchen and make coffee.

I stepped around the curtain. Dr. Reed looked at me, a hint of relief fluttering over his mocha skin. “Ms. Morgan. Look, Janet, Addie's here.”

Janet shifted her gaze to me and like Mom, hope flickered. Her narrow shoulders looked so slight and slim, even childlike, in the bulky blue hospital gown. She was drowning, and I was the life preserver she expected would save her.

“Hello, Janet.” I should have smiled or softened my voice but the edges, honed by too many rescue missions, sounded brittle.

“Addie?” Long, lean fingers gripped the sheets. “Addie, you came.”

Dr. Reed's smile came from relief more than joy. “Yes, it's Addie. She came to see you.”

Janet's gaze locked on me, not wandering toward the sound of the doctor's voice. “Addie, I think I messed up again.” Her voice turned soft, and I remembered the ten-year-old girl who broke Mom's crystal vase and begged me to help her glue it back together.

Suddenly, I craved a coffee and my old quiet routine of sitting, cigarette in hand, breathing in and out. “We do have a problem, Janet. You have a baby girl.”

Delicate eyebrows drew together in worry and confusion as her hands slid to her belly, still distended from the birthing. “A girl.”

“Yes. A girl.” I moved closer to the bed, wanting to stay mad and pissed and struggling to hold on to both.

She picked at her blanket. “I called you yesterday. You didn't answer.”

“I was in meetings. I couldn't take the call.” The lie tripped over my lips so easily I believed it. “I'm here now.”

She leaned forward, glanced from side to side, and whispered, “I don't know what to do. I don't know how to fix this.”

And on reflex I heard myself say, “You think I can fix this?”

“You can,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

“I'm not sure how to fix this, Janet. This is big.”

Tears welled in Janet's eyes. “I thought I could deal with it. I thought I could make it all right. Thought maybe I could be a good mom this time around. And then the voices came back. And they got worse and worse.”

“Did you take your meds while you were pregnant?” I knew enough to know her kind of medications moved from the mother's blood to the baby's, and the effects weren't good.

“I stopped before I got pregnant.”

And she spiraled out of control. How long before Janet lost her grip on reality? Days? Weeks? Months?

“Do you want to raise the baby?”

“I thought maybe I would if I were better. And then, when the baby really started kicking and moving, I freaked. I thought about how babies get bigger and bigger and they need, need, need.” Her
fingers tightened around the folds of the blanket, her knuckles turning as white as the sheets. “Addie, I don't have anything to give.”

“I know.”

“Will you fix this?”

You'd have thought seven years away would have created new habits and different ways to cope, but old habits do indeed die hard. I had mended problems and smoothed the waters since preschool. I heard myself say, “Yes.”

Janet relaxed back against the pillows and her grip on the sheets loosened. “I knew you would. I knew you would make it all better.”

Dr. Reed slid his hands into his white lab coat. “I have a bed for Janet at the mental hospital. We can admit her for three days right now based on circumstance, but better to keep her there for thirty days. However, she'll have to agree.”

My mind jumped from today into the future thirty days. The launch party would be a memory and the Willow Hills wine would be launched. The grapes would have ripened and, if not ready for harvest, on the verge of perfection. Scott would be clearing the north property and readying it for planting.

The baby's life would also change in thirty days. While Janet struggled to regain control, the baby's life would move forward. Weren't the first months critical for bonding? Didn't their little brains grow or not grow based on outside stimuli?