relative. On rare occasions they stayed overnight. Sarah had been eleven the last time they’d spent an entire weekend. She remembered waking in the night with a terrible ache in the pit of her belly and being certain she was about to die. Hearing her crying, both Aunt Emma and her mother had hurried to her room.
“Mariah Gilbert, didn’t you even tell the child what to expect?” Emma had demanded. Her great-aunt had never liked the senator, and preferred to ignore the fact that her niece had married him.
“They teach that sort of thing at school, Aunt Emma. I’m sure she knows all about it, don’t you, darling?”
All Sarah had known was that she was dying. It had been Emma who had explained that her body was preparing her to be a mother. And that, she remembered, had terrified her even more than the bellyache.
But between the two women they had made her understand that what she was feeling, while unpleasant, was perfectly normal. Then Aunt Emma had brought her a cup of hot, sugared and watered-down whisky, while her mother had located and filled an old rubber hot-water bottle.
After that they hadn’t stopped as often. Her mother was diagnosed with leukemia, and Sarah had all but forgotten her great-aunt over the next few years. When Mariah had died, Emma had gone to the funeral, driven there and back in a single day by a neighbor. Sarah had had only a few minutes alone with her. J. Abernathy, distraught over the loss of the wife he had neglected for years, had insisted on having his daughter constantly at his side.
The two women had corresponded, though. Sarah had kept every one of her great-aunt’s letters. When Emma had died at the age of eighty-four, she’d left her entire estate, consisting of a house, a Hudson automobile up on blocks in the shed, and sixty acres of land, partly wooded, partly under cultivation, to her great-niece, Sarah Mariah.
It was almost as if she’d known that one day soon Sarah would need a place of her own. The senator—he was still called that, even after being forced to retire in disgrace—had the place on Wye River, but he’d given up the Watergate apartment where she’d practically grown up. Sarah and Stan had bought a tiny house in Arlington, but they’d had to sell it to pay his lawyers. To Stan’s credit, he wouldn’t allow her to go into the small trust she’d received from her mother, much less sell Aunt Emma’s house.
Her father had been no help at all, either financially or emotionally, but she hadn’t expected anything from that source. In the end, Sarah had been left with the one thing she valued more than anything in the world.
Privacy. A place of her own where she could retreat, where the world couldn’t follow. And if that included loneliness, so be it. She had cut off her friends early on during the first scandal—those that hadn’t already cut her. Here the neighbors were few, the closest being almost a mile away. If any of them had connected Emma Gilbert’s great-niece-who-married-that-nice-congressman with the recent Washington scandals, they never mentioned it. But then, they weren’t inclined to drop by for coffee and gossip.
She missed her old friends, missed the volunteer work she’d been doing for years—the children she’d worked with. Now she kept to herself, paid her utility bills and made the monthly payment to the grandparents of her late husband’s secret illegitimate daughter.
What Stan had been involved in had been depraved by anyone’s standards to the extent that his political future had been shattered beyond repair. One of the participants had been a juvenile at the time. Her name had not been released, but shortly before Stan’s fatal wreck she had called to tell him she’d just had his baby and now she needed money. Utterly distraught, Stan had promised to send what he could, even though at the time they’d been scraping the bottom of the barrel to pay for his defense. He had hung up the phone, blurted out the whole pathetic story, then buried his head in Sarah’s lap and cried.
“She…she named her K-Kitty. Oh, God, Sarah, what have I done?”
“Shh, we’ll deal with it. Maybe when this is all over we can adopt her.”
But before they could make any arrangements, Stan had been killed. By then, a sixteen-year-old girl from Virginia Beach who claimed Stan had fathered her child had been the last thing on Sarah’s mind.
Somehow she had managed to get through the following days and do all that needed doing. Her father’s old friend, Clive Meadows, had been a big help. The day after the funeral, when a man named Sam Pough had called, claiming his daughter had run off and left him and his wife stuck with her bastard, it had actually taken her several minutes to sort it all out.
If Clive had been there at the time, she probably would have simply handed him the phone and let him handle it. Later on, when she’d had time to think, she was glad she’d been alone. She remembered taking so many deep breaths she had grown dizzy. Once her head had cleared, she’d heard herself calmly promising to send an initial sum and make monthly payments as long as the grandparents promised to look after the baby. They were decent, God-fearing people, the man had repeated several times, but their trailer was too old, too small, and their social security would stretch only so far.
Sarah had done the best she could. By liquidating her trust fund, she’d been able to send a sizable check to cover the cost of a new mobile home. Since then she’d sent monthly payments with the understanding that those payments would continue only so long as the child was well cared for and her identity remained a secret. No child, she told herself, should have to grow up bearing the stigma of a father’s disgrace.
As time passed with no further contact from the Poughs, Sarah had made herself learn to relax. It wasn’t that easy, in spite of having left the past behind and moved to the country. Growing up as her father’s daughter, she’d been expected to dress a certain way, to behave a certain way—to go to the right schools, the right summer camps—to smile at appropriate moments, and to express herself only on noncontroversial topics.
Once she’d become the congressman’s wife there had been a whole new set of expectations. Never once had anyone asked her personal opinion on an important issue. And she most definitely did have opinions, on any number of issues. Nor did they agree very often with those of her father or her husband.
Never once in her entire life could she recall being asked how she would have preferred to spend her vacations. Given a choice, she might have chosen to attend a fiddlers’ convention with her college friends, sleeping in tents, wandering from campfire to campfire listening to the music, sharing food and easy companionship. Instead, she had spent every vacation with one or both of her parents, usually at Clive’s beach house, surrounded by other adults.
Instead of flying lessons, she had taken piano lessons. Instead of choosing her own friends, she’d had appropriate ones chosen for her, at least until she’d gone off to school.
It wasn’t that her childhood had been unhappy, it was just that she’d never been allowed off the leash long enough to discover who she was. And now that she was free to be herself, she didn’t know where to begin, other than wearing thrift-shop jeans, going barefoot and drinking water from her own tap instead of what her Aunt Em had called store-bought water. After a lifetime of pleasing others, she had only herself to please, and the most rebellious thing she had done so far was to stay up half the night reading and then sleep until noon the next day.
These days she couldn’t even manage that. Since she’d started on the long-overdue yard work, tackling one square foot at a time, she was usually so tired she fell asleep in the recliner.
Dull was a matter of degrees. Her life had always been—well, until a little over two years ago—dull, as in boring. Now it was dull as in restful. As in taking time to sniff the roses, not to mention the honeysuckle and corn tassels and whatever else grew in the country. As in trying her hand at writing and illustrating a special story for a little girl she would probably never even get to see.
But right now—at least once she’d caught her breath—it was time for another attack on that blasted board on her front porch that she’d tripped on at least a dozen times. Tomorrow would be time enough to free the rest of her shrubbery from the strangling clutches of those voracious vines.
After