The Probable Future (20 page)

Surely, Jenny’s first shift at the tea house was incredibly long. No one could debate that. She had no idea so many people in town stopped by on their way to work, or came in for lunch. They all were so persnickety about what they ate: mayo with this, mustard with that, tea with lemon, coffee with cream. By late afternoon her head was reeling. But at least she had not once thought about Will Avery, left to his own devices in her apartment, inviting his girlfriends up, no doubt, using every dish in the house, leaving the back burner of the stove switched on while he took a leisurely nap. At least she had not thought of Matt Avery, either, or at least not so very often. The vision of Matt’s cutting down the tree, waving at them from atop the ladder. It should have been a foolish image, ridiculous, almost, with that saw droning on, and all those bees floating around him. It
should have been easy to chase Matt Avery out of her head right alongside his older brother, what with all the work that was at hand and so many tea house details to consider—fizzy water or tap water, knife or fork. But there he was, like a line of heat across her skin, a bee caught between glass, humming along no matter what the circumstances.

“There are women who have thrown their aprons on the floor and flown right out the door after their first day of working here,” Liza Hull announced once the teatime crowd had cleared out and the end of the day was in sight.

Liza presented Jenny with a plate of lemon chess pie and a hot cup of coffee. Jenny never ate pie, but Liza’s recipe was a mixture of tart and sweet that wasn’t easy to refuse. Some people vow that when someone feeds you well, you have to be honest with them, and Jenny was no exception to this rule. She asked the question she would have been most mortified to recite at any other time.

“Were you serious when you told me about Matt?”

“Come on, Jenny. Didn’t you ever notice the way he followed you and Will around? He was like a dog, checking out your every move.”

“He idolized Will.”

Liza Hull snorted. “He thought Will was a moron. He told me so himself. The way he saw it, Will had been granted everything a man could want in his lifetime, and he’d thrown it all away.”

“A quote from twenty years ago,” Jenny said dismissively.

“From last week, Jenny. He was in here for tea. And bread and butter—that’s his favorite, for some reason. Just like you are.” Liza grinned and Jenny could see how someone who knew Liza well could think she was pretty rather than plain.

Jenny had been warned that customers often arrived just at closing, and sure enough, at ten minutes to four, Sissy Elliot was helped inside the tea house by her daughter, Iris. A light rain was falling and they tracked in puddles of mud. In the kitchen, Cynthia heard the
scratch-scratch of the walker and put a hand to her forehead as though she were in pain.

“Don’t tell me. It’s my granny and my great-gran. Why can’t they go to the Pewter Pot on the highway?”

Cynthia immediately started pulling the tiny braids out of her hair, which she had died a hennaed red the color of a stoplight. She threw on a long white baker’s coat to hide how short her skirt was, although there was nothing she could do to conceal her multicolored leggings and her thick-soled black studded boots. Cynthia set to work rubbing off her dark lipstick, then wiped the black liner from her eyes.

“I’ll wait on them,” Jenny said. “Relax.”

“Thank you, more than you can know. My great-gran hates me. I’m like the missing link to her, less than human, more than a bug.”

“She can’t be that bad,” Jenny insisted as she grabbed some menus. Liza and Cynthia stared at her. “Can she?”

Iris Elliot, who was Henry’s mother, and Cynthia and Jimmy’s grandmother, was a pleasant woman who looked embarrassed when Jenny handed them their menus. “Hello, dear. Sorry to come in so late. We won’t be a minute. My mother just wanted some tea.”

“Jenny Sparrow,” Sissy said thoughtfully. She was ancient, with a sharp face and cloudy blue eyes. “Aren’t you the one whose husband is in jail for murder?”

“That’s me.” Jenny recommended the lemon chess pie and the homemade shortbread, although what she really felt like serving up was a plate of nails.

“Well, don’t you worry,” Sissy went on. “Iris’s boy Henry will get him off no matter what awful thing he’s done. But it must be a horror to have a husband like Will Avery. Even before he committed that murder, he must have worn you down. It shows in your complexion, you know. Pallid.”

“Ex,” Jenny said. “We’re divorced. And he didn’t commit anything.”

“What about your poor mother?” Perhaps Sissy could no longer hear. Certainly, she was unable to listen. “How is she? Still as bitter as ever?”

“My mother,” Jenny found herself saying, “could not be better. But I’ll be sure to give her your regards,” she said as she went for the sugar and cream. “You’re right,” she told Cynthia and Liza in the kitchen. “She is that bad. She had me defending my mother. I never thought I’d see that day.”

“Spit in her tea,” Cynthia whispered. “It would serve her right.”

When Jenny brought out the pot of English breakfast tea and two orders of pie, Sissy Elliot still hadn’t let go.

“So many people are getting divorced I can’t keep track. Of course, it’s not always a moral failing, more like an epidemic of bad judgment. Anyone could have told you your life would be ruined if you married Will, and here you are, waiting on tables. Speaking of that, where is my great-granddaughter? She’s on the same downward spiral. Cynthia!” she shouted.

Cynthia Elliot stuck her head out of the kitchen. “Hey, Grans. I’m doing dishes.”

Iris Elliot waved. “You go right ahead,” she called to her granddaughter. “Don’t let us interrupt.”

“What has she done to her hair?” Sissy wanted to know. “It’s monstrous. And why is she washing dishes? She never does anything at home.”

“They pay her, Mother,” Iris Elliot said. “It’s her job.”

Out in the kitchen, Cynthia Elliot angrily added more soap to the sink. “What a bitch,” she said of her great-grandmother when Jenny returned. Cynthia was good-natured, but now she was all riled up, and her hair was stuck straight out, like a porcupine. “Is it all right to say that about someone in your family? Lightning won’t come through the window and strike me dead, will it?”

“It’s fine,” Jenny assured her. “You won’t be punished for your thoughts. And she really is a bitch.” Why, Sissy Elliot made Elinor
seem like a darling, a notion that was entirely disconcerting for Jenny.

“It’s not very compassionate to be so judgmental,” Liza Hull told them both. “When there are ashes around, then you can be sure something has burned.”

“What does that mean?” Cynthia and Jenny both wanted to know. They couldn’t help but laugh to visualize Sissy Elliot pushing her walker through a pile of ashes.

“It means when somebody’s that nasty, it’s because she must have walked through fire. Those comments you’re getting are flying off her like sparks without her even knowing she’s all burned up inside.”

“I think Liza’s saying
we’re
the bitches,” Cynthia whispered to Jenny.

The back door opened and Stella peeked inside. “Is that your great-gran out front?” she asked Cynthia. When Cynthia nodded, Stella said, “I thought we should probably avoid her. I’ve heard she cooks up babies for lunch.”

“Only on Tuesdays.” Cynthia grinned. “The rest of the time she eats lemon chess pie.”

“Ooh,” Stella said. “Pie.” She grabbed a slice for herself. “Is that who Jimmy takes after? Your great-gran?”

“She refuses to sit down at the table with him. Even at Thanksgiving. She calls him ‘the delinquent,’ right to his face.”

Although Cynthia was two grades ahead, she’d taken Stella under her wing at the high school; the two often had lunch together. Cynthia’s brother had tried to join them on several occasions but Jimmy had been told, in no uncertain terms, that his presence was not appreciated. For this Stella was eternally grateful, for something strange happened to her when he was around, and she hated herself for whatever wicked thing she felt. It was during these lunches with Cynthia, with Jimmy glowering at them from across the room, that Stella had heard all about Sissy Elliot, who was known to keep a pile
of rocks by her front door, ready to throw if anyone was foolish enough to walk across her lawn.

“Where’s your partner in crime?” Cynthia joked. “I thought you and Hap were always together.”

Stella opened the door wider and there was Hap Stewart waiting for her on the back porch. Hap leaned his head through the door and asked for a piece of pie-to-go, if that wouldn’t be a bother. He was ill at ease in Jenny’s presence, but he had that grin you couldn’t help but respond to, a sort of goodness that shone through.

Stella came to stand next to her mother as Jenny wrapped up some pie for them. “So you made it through your first day.”

“Barely,” Jenny admitted. “I never worked so hard in my life.”

Stella had a heavy backpack over her shoulder, always favoring that side that had been broken at birth. She wore jeans and boots and an old rain slicker that Jenny thought she recognized as her own from years ago. Stella’s hair streamed down her back, rain-soaked and pale. All the same, she looked more solid since she’d moved to Unity.

“But you made it through.” Lest she sound too complimentary, Stella added, “Now I can say my mother’s a professional pie-server. I’ll be home late. We’re still working on our science project. Can I have another piece of pie in case I run into my uncle?”

“Your uncle?” Jenny had a light-headed feeling, surely brought on by standing on her feet all day.

“He’s cutting down that big old tree on the corner of Lockhart. I met him there one day. He’s great. But it’s so weird—he’s nothing like Dad.”

“No,” Jenny said. “He wouldn’t be.”

“Call me later,” Cynthia reminded her new friend as Stella and Hap left through the back door. Cynthia and Jenny finished cleaning up the kitchen, allowing the more compassionate Liza to collect the bill from the grans. Let her be hit by the sparks of old Sissy’s comments. Let her put out the fire.

“I think I will spit in your great-gran’s tea next time she comes in,” Jenny confided to Cynthia. She wished she could feel as at ease with Stella as she did with this child with the scarlet hair.

Cynthia laughed. “I wish my mother was more like you.” Annette Elliot was a lawyer like her husband, Henry, and Cynthia hadn’t spoken to her in a month. “Nothing I do is right.”

“Maybe everyone wishes her mother was like someone else.”

“Especially my grandmother, I’ll bet,” Cynthia said.

Jenny had thought,
Especially me
, but in light of Sissy Elliot’s dreadful behavior, she didn’t feel she especially deserved anyone’s sympathy. She was now completely exhausted; all the same, she decided the walk home would do her good, the fresh air might revitalize her. The rain had eased off and was little more than a sprinkle, so she turned down Liza’s offer of a ride home.

“Get a bike, like me,” Cynthia called as she zoomed past the porch of the tea house, spraying Jenny with water from the damp road. “It will take you where you want to go.”

But where was that exactly? Jenny was far too old to be taken in by the green light of spring or by the way she felt when she breathed in the humid air. She was certain Liza Hull was mistaken. She and Matt weren’t even the same people anymore. She would assuredly never have recognized him if Liza hadn’t informed her of who he was. He was just a good-looking man hired to take down the oldest tree in town, waving good-naturedly, someone she used to know, nothing more.

B
ECAUSE OF THE RAIN
, the oak on the corner of Lockhart Avenue had been spared one more day. Matt had been taking the tree down slowly, in pieces, the top limbs first, and he didn’t want the trunk to split on him, as it was a sure target for lightning. In fact, Matt had been in the library ever since noon, having lunch in the historical collections annex, able to enjoy the sandwich he picked up
at the market by special permission of Mrs. Gibson, who didn’t usually allow food in the library, but was willing to make an exception for one of her favorite patrons.

Matt especially liked the collections room when it rained; he felt as though he were in a fishbowl, swimming toward knowledge, diving into the journals of the Hathaways and the Elliots and the Hap-goods. Today he had been working on his favorite topic, charting the effects of the Sparrow women on the town of Unity. Constance Sparrow had begun the lifesaving station, out on the tip of the marshes where the lighthouse was later built, initially set up because her husband was a sailor, so often at sea. Coral Sparrow, who predicted the weather with amazing accuracy, rang the bell at the meetinghouse to warn of storms, thereby evacuating half the people in town during the hurricane of 1911, an incident which began the weather service stationed on the far end of Lockhart Avenue, still in operation and far more accurate than those meteorologists on TV. Most people in town knew that Leonie Sparrow began a brigade that was later to become the volunteer fire department. But few people knew that Amelia Sparrow was the first midwife in Unity, and if not for her ability to see a mother through the most difficult of births, there’d be no Hathaways in town, including old Eli, for Margaret Hathaway would have died during labor before producing a single heir.

“Still fooling around with those Sparrow women?” Mrs. Gibson said when Matt brought the key to the research room to her desk at the end of the afternoon. She and Marlena Elliot-White exchanged a look. Neither had figured out why none of the girls in town had managed to snag Matt. Mrs. Gibson’s own daughter, Susan, who had changed her name to Solange and was dating a married man up in Boston, an alleged artist who treated her cruelly, when here was Matt, all alone in the library nearly every day, free as a bird.

“Hopefully, I’ll be done by the end of May,” Matt said. “That’s when my thesis is due.”

Mrs. Gibson lowered her voice. “I heard about your brother.” She looked over her shoulder to make sure that Marlena, who always reported everything back to her mother, Sissy, and her half-sister, Iris, wouldn’t overhear. “I’ve heard he murdered some woman in Boston.”