Please Remember This (12 page)

P
hil Ravenal had arranged for Tess to rent a house on Olive Street. It was small, he had warned, but would be fine for one person. It didn’t have central air, but there was an attic fan and a window unit in the bedroom. He had offered to meet the moving van and arrange for the phone and utilities. He would leave the key under the flowerpot to the left of the door.

Fleur-de-lis was laid out on a grid with the numbered streets running north-south and the named streets in alphabetical order going east-west. Six-thirty-five Olive Street was exactly where Tess expected it to be, two blocks south of Main and six blocks west of the river. The house looked exactly like the pictures Phil had sent, a gray stucco bungalow with a deep front porch. The key was exactly where he said it would be.

Someone had planted scarlet geraniums in the flowerpot and in the window boxes. The front porch had been swept, and there was a welcome mat. Inside the house, Tess’s one carpet had been unrolled and her furniture carefully positioned on top of it. The new bookcases that she had ordered from a catalog
had been placed exactly where she would have put them—although that was hardly surprising, since there was only one possible spot for them.

The kitchen was narrow and dated, but immaculate. A note was propped up on the counter.

P.S. Dad said you’d probably need a utility knife for opening the boxes.

Tess had no idea who Emma and Brittany were. But right next to the note was a utility knife with extra blades. Paper cups and plates were stored in the cabinet; a forest-green tea kettle sat on the back burner of the stove. Inside the refrigerator was a foil-covered casserole dish, a few apples, a three-inch slice of watermelon, and a chocolate Bundt cake. Tess couldn’t imagine what she was going to do with a whole Bundt cake. In the bedroom, the bed was
made, the towels had been hung in the bathroom, and a roll of toilet paper installed.

This could have been so hard. She could have been standing in the middle of an empty house that was dreary and smelled of mildew. It was late on Saturday afternoon. She could have had no water, no electricity, no phone, and no idea where the movers were. But instead, all her belongings were inside this freshly painted little playhouse. Everything was going right. She wasn’t used to that.

Things hadn’t gone right for Tess’s grandparents. Houses had been dreary and mildewed. Automobile tires had gone flat on rainy nights. Medical tests had come back with “not quite the results we were hoping for.” Their daughter had been manic-depressive.

But it’s her money that’s making things work for me. Your raising her wasn’t for nothing. Knowing that would have been a comfort, wouldn’t it?

But they hadn’t known.

The air-conditioning unit in the bedroom was running, so Tess closed that door and went around the rest of the house opening the windows. She had started looking for the switch to the attic fan when she heard a knock on the door.

On the porch were two young women, probably college-aged. Clearly sisters, both had sandy blond hair and freckles.

“Mrs. Parkinson across the street called and said you were here. We’re so glad you made it today.” One girl started speaking the instant the door opened. “We’re just in town for the weekend—classes are in session—and we were afraid we’d miss you.”

“I’m Emma,” said the other girl, the smaller one. “And this is Brittany.”

So these were her magic elves. “Come in, please come in. And thank you. You did so much. It was wonderful.”

“Dad said that maybe you wouldn’t have liked us opening the bedroom box, since you aren’t from the Midwest and all,” Brittany reported. “He said it might seem like we were snooping, but by then it was too late, because we’d already done it.”

“It hadn’t even occurred to us not to, which shows you that we most definitely are ‘from the Midwest and all,’ “ said Emma, as lively as her sister. “But at least we didn’t unpack your clothes, even though we had heard all about how great they were. We
knew
we’d be snooping there. I do hope your kitchen stuff didn’t get lost. We couldn’t find anything.”

Tess wondered what being or not being from the Midwest had to do with being grateful for a roll of toilet paper. “I didn’t bring any kitchen things. I didn’t have much and so I left it all for my roommates. I’m going to buy everything new.”

“Oh, that will be fun,” Emma exclaimed. “Especially now that we have the Kmart. They have everything. Otherwise you’d have been in trouble. They’re open late on Saturdays, so if you need anything tonight you can run out and get it.”

“Or we can go for you,” Brittany offered. “It’s no problem.”

“Thank you.” Tess could not continue in ignorance anymore. “Forgive me, this is awkward when I am so grateful—but who are you?”

Emma and Brittany stared for a moment. Emma clapped her hand over her mouth, and Brittany laughed. “What idiots we are,” Brittany said. “We’re so used to every one knowing everything about us. We’re the Ravenal girls, at least two of the three. Caitlin’s in dental school and she can never get away. Dr. Matt is our father, and Phil is our older brother. He gave us the key and asked us to do what we could to make you feel welcome.”

“You certainly succeeded at that.” When she had had dinner with Dr. Matt, Carolyn, Phil, and Ned, the daughters had been away at the university, and as far as Tess could remember, everyone spoke about them as “the girls,” never using their first names. “Come in and tell me what’s happening with Ned and the riverboat. The last I heard, he had found one of the paddle wheels.”

“That was almost two weeks ago. He’s now uncovered the engines and the boilers and is moving back toward the other paddle wheel. He’s very happy, but unless you’re wildly interested in steam engines, it’s a little boring.”

Tess was not wildly interested in steam engines. “Has he found any artifacts yet?”

“No; the river current washed everything off the deck. Anything interesting will be down in the cargo hold, but he’s not going to get to that for a while. He’s being Mr. Systematic about everything. But why are we standing around like this? Put us to work. We can always talk while we work.”

Tess had a feeling that refusing their help would violate all that the town stood for. “Let’s start in the
bedroom. You can snoop through my clothes if you’d like.”

The movers had roped Tess’s chest of drawers shut, and all her folded clothes were still in place. She had paid for wardrobe boxes, so that her other garments had remained on hangers and now only had to be transferred to the closet. But Brittany and Emma took their time about it, looking at everything. Both of them knew how to sew, and they marveled at the detail Tess had put into her clothes: the godets, the cannon pleats, the drawn work.

“How did you pull off this inset?” Brittany wondered. “I couldn’t get those corners so nice in a hundred million years. Mother’s going to love this. I can’t wait to show it to her. They ought to be here soon, shouldn’t they, Em?”

“Dad just had to finish his calls. Mother secretly wanted to come over with us,” Emma explained to Tess, “but she thought it was more grown up to wait for Dad. Oh, wait, that’s them now, isn’t it?”

The doorbell was ringing and indeed, it was Carolyn and Matt Ravenal. Carolyn had a big bouquet of sunflowers with her. “Welcome to Kansas,” she said. “I’d hug you, but I’ve got too much vegetation.”

“Well, I’ll hug you,” the doctor said and he gave Tess a quick, warm embrace. “But don’t touch Ned. He’s filthy.”

Sitting on the front steps behind his parents and the sunflowers was indeed Ned, or at least his back. He was bent over, untying his shoes. He looked back over his shoulder. “I showed up just as they were leaving.” He tugged off one of his heavy work boots.
He was wearing gray rag socks. “They wouldn’t give me a chance to change.”

“Do you care where I put these flowers?” Carolyn called from inside the house.

“No, no, anywhere you can find,” Tess replied.

Ned stood up and looked down at himself. Sometime during the course of the day, he must have picked up something very dirty. Its weight had scrunched up his shirt, pleating the fabric into little folds that had remained clean, forming light streaks running horizontally across his chest. “Are you sure you want me to come in? Since I’m usually down in the pit and covered with mud, my standards have gotten really low. If I’m not actively oozing, I feel clean.”

Tess hated being dirty. “Don’t be silly. Come in. Your sisters said that you uncovered the engines.”

He was being careful not to brush against the freshly painted walls. “It’s great. For a while there, we were just sinking wells, and no one was interested except the seven-year-old boys. They seem to like anything that resembles mass destruction.”

His mother looked up from the sunflowers she was positioning on Tess’s coffee table. “What do you think you were like at seven?”

“I wasn’t criticizing them,” Ned protested. “They’re great, and some of them can already subtract two-digit numbers, which is”—he was now speaking to Tess again—”apparently something to be quite proud of.”

“I worked in a retirement home,” she reminded him. “We never underappreciated the capacity to subtract two-digit numbers.”

“Wait until you work retail,” Brittany put in. “At the end of a busy Saturday, you won’t be able to—”

She was interrupted by the doorbell ringing again. Tess went to answer it. This was fun. She couldn’t remember when she had last had this much company.

It was Phil Ravenal.

He was better-looking than she had remembered.

You didn’t come here for him. You came to start a business, to find a place where you belong. You’ve never needed a man before. Don’t start now.

If something happened, that was fine. But she wasn’t going to expect it. She wasn’t going to need it.

His greeting was warm. Had the car been right? Was she finding everything she needed? Were the girls being a nuisance?

Yes, yes, everything had been perfect, things couldn’t have gone better. Had she been to the Lanier Building yet? Had she seen how well it looked?

No, she had come straight here.

They were inside the house now. He nodded to his family but continued to speak to her. “I heard that you stopped at the cemetery first.”

“Well, yes, I did.”

“I ran into Junior Hobart, who saw you there, and he said that you said that you are Nina Lane’s daughter.” His tone was carefully neutral. “Is that true?”

“You’re what?” Emma sat up. Brittany had been perched on the arm of her chair and she had to grab hold of Emma’s shoulder to keep her balance.

“My mother was Nina Lane,” Tess acknowledged. “Lane was her pen name.”

“That is so cool,” Brittany gasped. “Why didn’t
we know? Why didn’t—” She broke off. “Oh, my God, wasn’t the baby named …”

“That’s right,” Tess said. “I was named after Ned’s boat. Until I turned sixteen and my grandparents changed it, my legal name was Western Settler Lanier.”

“Oh, gross.”

Tess had to agree with that. She turned back to Phil. Could she make this sound simple? “I didn’t mean to be hiding anything from you, but I don’t go out of my way to tell people about it. It creates too much of a fuss.”

“Of course,” Carolyn said quickly. “We understand.”

Phil looked across the room. “I do notice that neither my father nor my brother seems wildly surprised. Did you know?” he asked them.

“I guessed,” Dr. Matt admitted.