White Picket Fences (11 page)

“Do you?” she said.

“It might be fun for a while. Mell’s got money.”

“How long will we be there?”

Her dad shrugged. “You like Tulsa?”

“Not really.”

“Want to see the streets of New York from the inside of a Jag?”

“Yeah.”

“Then it seems to me it doesn’t matter how long.”

She’d sipped her hot chocolate and formed the next question in her mind as the hot sweetness stung her tongue. “Are you going to sleep with her?”

He hesitated only a moment. “You and I will be Mell’s guests. We’ll sleep in the guest room.”

She never asked him about it again.

There were some nights during those six months in Manhattan when she’d wake up and the green-striped sofa across from her bed would be empty. She didn’t know if her father was with Mell in her bedroom, and she really didn’t want to know. Because, for the most part, the six months they lived with Mell in her high-rise off Fifth Avenue were enchanting. Mell bought her expensive clothes, enrolled her in a private school, let her try on all her fancy evening dresses, and sometimes brought Tally down to the studio to watch her work under a track of amber lighting with a dozen men standing around her while Mell wore nothing but a bra and panties.

Mell’s attentions weren’t motherly in nature, Tally could see that now. She had treated Tally like a favorite girlfriend’s little sister. But at the time, she felt that the connection between them was maternal. Tally had grown fond of Mell and her spontaneous generosity and was nearly beginning to envision staying with Mell forever when she overheard her father tell Mell, after he’d consumed far too much of her expensive whiskey, that Virginia Kolander blamed him for Janet’s death.

“Who’s Janet?”

Tally picked up on the tentative tenor in Mell’s sultry voice even from behind her closed door.

“Tally’s mother! The woman I was going to marry!” The
words were slurred but the tone unmistakable: Bart Bachmann was still in love with Janet Kolander, Tally’s mother, dead twelve years.

It wasn’t long after that evening that Mell announced she was moving to Paris and was not taking any of her New York staff.

Her father had enough money saved to buy two one-way tickets to Nashville, where friends of his “from way back” owned a horse ranch and offered him a job in the stables.

“Sometimes you gotta be the one with the shovel, Tally-ho,” he said after his first day mucking, the airy elegance of a Manhattan condo far behind them.

She sat at a rickety two-seat kitchen table and watched him pull off boots caked with manure and straw. “I miss Mell,” she said.

“You miss having everything handed to you. That’s a dreamer’s life. It ain’t real. In the end, you have to make your own way. It’s okay to have a little vacation from reality, but you can’t live like you’re on vacation.”

“Why not?”

He set his boots down by the front door to their minuscule apartment. “Because you wouldn’t be happy.”

“Mell was happy.”

He moved toward her and knelt so that his eyes were level with hers. “Two things you need to know, Tally-ho. First, that was
Mell’s life
we were living. She’d made that life for herself, and we were just visiting. Second, Mell was not happy.”

“She looked happy to me.”

“Money has a way of doing that. Think about it, Tal. Don’t
you think it was kind of weird she asked us to come live with her after knowing me for just one day?”

“But you went.”

He put his hands on her shoulders. “I thought it would be a nice break, Tal. And I wanted you to see what money can buy and what it can’t. I don’t have any regrets about going to New York, and I sure don’t have any about leaving. Look how quick she let us go.”

Even now, with her eyes closed and her back warm against a tower of concrete far from Tennessee, Tally still winced when she remembered Mell zipping out of her life as quickly as she’d zipped into it.

There hadn’t been any mother figures to intrude upon her life after that. Bart had dated a few women since: the manager at Luigi’s who let them sleep in the basement when they arrived in Dallas with no money the year she turned thirteen. The manicurist at an upscale salon in Houston who bailed Bart out of jail when he was arrested for driving with no license, no registration, no insurance, and outstanding traffic violations from years past. The flight attendant who took them to Switzerland for Christmas two years ago.

But no one Tally itched to think of as a mother.

Amanda was storybook maternal, everything she’d seen from a distance when she watched other mothers: gentle, kind, generous, insightful, and protective. And she didn’t seem like one to claim half an inheritance that had been left to someone else. But
her dad didn’t want to trust his sister. He didn’t want to trust anyone.

He had come home early from his job as a chauffeur the day he decided to drop everything and go to Poland. Tally had come home from registering for her junior year, and he was sitting at the little built-in table in the double-wide trailer they were renting. Open on the table was a little cardboard box he’d kept in the trunk of his car for the past two years. “Just some of my father’s stuff,” he’d said of the box, which she knew contained the silver lighter, a pocket watch, her great-grandmother’s wedding ring, and a letter from his dad that he’d never opened.

The letter lay open on the table.

“You’re home early,” she said.

He turned toward her, and his face looked weary and energized at the same time. “I’m not working for Mr. Charles anymore.”

She leaned against the door frame, mentally preparing for whatever he planned to tell her. When her dad quit a job, there was always a new plan. “Why not?”

“There are some things I just won’t do, Tally-ho.”

A moment of silence hung between them as she weighed the chances of staying in San Antonio. “What happens now?” she finally said.

“I’m going to Poland.” He picked up the letter and waved it. “All this time I thought this was either a lecture or an apology. I didn’t want either one. It’s really the map to treasure, Tal. All
the gold and jewelry my father hid in his backyard from the Nazis? I know where it is. It’s all here in the letter.”

She heard him, every word. But she still whispered, “What?”

“When he was just a kid, my dad hid the family’s gold and jewelry before the Nazis came for them. He buried it in the backyard. My grandfather told him to.”

“But…”

“It’s probably still there. I’m going to go get it.”

“But school starts next week…”

“I’m not taking you on this trip, Tal. You’re going to stay a week or two with your grandmother in Tucson. It’s all arranged. When I get back, we can live anywhere we want.”

“But, Dad…”

“We can’t stay in San Antonio, Tal.”

In that moment she knew that whatever Mr. Charles asked her father to do, it was illegal. And now he knew too much. She let her body slide down the closed door until she rested against it on her bottom.

“Sorry, Tally. I really am. But we can’t stay.”

For a long moment, she said nothing.

“When are we leaving?” she finally said.

He stood. “Now would be a good time.”

He let her sit there for a few moments before extending his hand to help her up. “You can pick the next place, Tal. Anywhere you want. You want to go back to Manhattan, we’ll go. Anywhere you want. Except Texas.”

“Why Grandma Virgie’s?” She reached for his extended hand.

“Because she’ll be so glad to see you, she won’t ask questions.
This is our little secret, Tally. My dad told no one about this except me. He told me it was my decision whether or not to do anything about it. Well, I want you to go to college and have a nice house to live in. So I’m doing something.”

She watched him grab the wedding ring and pocket watch, knowing their first stop out of town would be a pawn shop. “How long will you be gone?”

“A week, ten days. Two weeks, tops.” He shoved the ring and watch into his pants pocket. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

An hour later, San Antonio was in their rearview mirror.

That was more than three weeks ago. He had promised to call. He hadn’t.

She hadn’t read the letter. She didn’t know where he was headed, just somewhere near Warsaw.

“Hey.”

Tally’s eyes snapped open. Chase was standing next to her.

“Were you actually asleep? I said your name twice. Come on. Let’s go.”

“I wasn’t asleep. I was just…remembering.” Tally stood slowly, moving as if she had in fact been sleeping and was suddenly wrenched from a dream.

fifteen

A
manda closed the door to Penny Ryder’s office and began to walk the tiled corridor to her classroom. Her heels drummed a beat on the hard floor, punching the quiet air with a steady cadence. She liked the halls better when they were teeming with children, when her footfalls were indistinguishable from a thousand other sounds.

Her classroom was hushed and empty. Gary had already left, and she was slightly disappointed that he had not waited to see what Penny would advise. Amanda slid into her desk chair and looked at the business card Penny had handed her from across her desk moments earlier.

“This guy’s really good with young adults,” Penny said. “He’s pretty young himself. Twenty-nine, I think. But a fabulous psychologist. I think his age makes a difference. Young people trust him.”

Amanda slowly reached for the card. “I don’t think Neil is ready to do this yet. Call anyone, I mean.”

Penny nodded and then laced her fingers gently. “Here’s the thing, Amanda. If Chase has no memory of the fire, or if it’s safely tucked away in a far corner of his mind that he’s never bumped up against in all these years, then just mentioning the
fire isn’t going to open a floodgate. On the other hand, if the memory is resting just below the surface and if it’s strong and powerful and building in pressure, then releasing it now will indeed open a floodgate. But don’t you see? Now’s the time for that to happen. Not a couple years from now when he’s away from home and trying to handle college life, and not a few years after that when he’s entering the workforce or marrying someone or becoming someone’s father. If you really think there might be emotions and fears that Chase hasn’t dealt with, you owe it to him to get him some professional help now.”

“But what if he really doesn’t remember it?”

Penny unlaced her fingers as if releasing a wisp of air. “Then your bringing it up will have no negative consequences.”

Amanda thanked Penny and told her she’d consider everything she said. She now studied the name on the card: Brandon Pinelli. She tapped the corner of it on her desk.

Chase had seemed fine the last few days. He’d politely taken Tally to school, offered to help her find her way, included her on the sociology project, put air in the tire like Neil had asked, immersed himself in his video projects, teased Delcey, offered a dose of sarcasm when the opportunity presented itself, left his clothes lying around, and spent most of his free time quietly engaged with his own priorities. It had been an unremarkable week.

Still. Those fifteen unexplainable seconds at the picnic gnawed at her. Penny said she and Neil should gently ask Chase directly if he remembered the fire. There would be no wondering about those fifteen seconds if they did.

But she’d already imagined that conversation. She’d already seen it played out in her mind with several scenarios—none of which put her at ease.

“Chase, do you remember the fire at the baby-sitter’s house when you were four?”

“Fire? What fire? Why? What happened?”

What would she tell him then? Everything?
“Remember the flames? the smoke? crawling out of the room where you’d been asleep? the screams of the baby no one could reach?”

Or Chase might reply,
“The fire? Oh… oh yeah. The fire… No one came for me. I had to crawl out of a burning room. There was a baby… What happened to the baby?”

Or,
“Of course I remember the fire. Don’t you?”

Then he’d ask why they’d never said anything until now. All those years and they’d never said a word. Why?