thing.”
“Didn’t you tell them the circumstances?” asked Piper, shocked.
“Of course I did. They said I could take as much time as I needed but, uh, I just don’t think I’ll be needing that much time.”
Piper’s eyes slid away from her brother to the floor. Leo paused and then pushed back his chair before wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.
“Well then,” he said, “well then. No need to make no fuss.”
“My thoughts exactly,” said Cal.
Of course that wasn’t how it turned out.
It began when Piper came down from their father’s bedroom a few days later and started making a list at the kitchen table of things to get in town. Not from the local store, but up in the city from the place their mother had always used when she needed something special. Then she went out to see Leo. When she found him hoisting hay bales in the barn, she told him to keep the seventh free.
“What for?” he’d asked between grunts of exertion.
“Pa’s planning something,” she’d said.
“Pa can’t wipe his own ass. You’re planning something for him.”
“And?”
“And what is it for?”
“For the family.”
Leo had grunted again but he did not speak.
Then three days later, as she went to pick up some meat for dinner, Anne-Marie Parks saw Piper Hathaway order up two sides of beef, three hams, four chickens and a hog.
“You hibernating?” asked Dan Keenan from behind the counter. “If so you’re early, it ain’t even fall yet.”
“Luck favors the prepared,” said Piper as she counted out the money.
Later that week over mashed potatoes with sausages and onions, Lou Parks told his wife about the invitation they had received.
“Walter’s having a party up in the house,” he said.
“Where?” asked Anne-Marie.
“Aurelia, their farm. We’re invited.”
“Oh,” said Anne. “Why?”
“To celebrate Cal coming home.”
“That’s nice,” she said halfheartedly.
“Leo won’t think so,” her husband muttered in reply, before turning back to read his paper. And so, because he was preoccupied, she didn’t bother to question him, and as usual they finished the remainder of their dinner in silence.
Two weeks later and my grandmother stepped foot on Aurelia for the first time. The place as it was then would be unrecognizable to me: no sign in curlicue lettering, no pockets of flowers, no white house. I have seen pictures of what it used to be like. Instead of the daisies and hyacinths, the entrance to the farm was simply a sandy drive that wove its way along the crab grass. The house on the mound was not white and tall, but gray and flat with dark shutters and a roof that peeked over the front in a slanted fringe. In the distance the grass swept on and on, periodically knotted with thatches of prairie grass until eventually it found the fields of corn and the stream. It was large and expansive and Anne-Marie’s first thought when she saw all of this was that it was ugly.
Did she see everything then that it could be? Did she re-envision the sight before her and see in her mind the potential that could arise from beneath her guiding hand? It would not have surprised us if she had. In fact in some ways it is what we would have expected from her, because in the end the way she knew exactly how to mold the farm to suit her tastes and bring out the beauty in it was almost prophetic. She was so intuitive that we all assumed she must have connected to it from the first. But in truth there was no such feeling. Maybe Lavinia Hathaway would come to feel that way, but in 1946, Anne-Marie Parks did not. Instead, she did not like Aurelia and she hated the idea of going to the party.
It was not the first time this had happened. Her insides had a habit of withering in anxiety whenever she was faced with an event like this. The farm at this point was not the great estate it would come to be in my lifetime, but it was still considered to be a prosperous holding and the Hathaways were a very respected family in the community. Nobody would have missed the party if they could help it and the weight of expectation that was implicit in the invite weighed down on Anne-Marie from the moment her husband had mentioned it to her over dinner. Because no matter what she wore or how many hours she spent on her hair and makeup, she always felt like the unwanted niece of her lawyer uncle, the abandoned child, a product of other people’s charity.
It was as if she had been branded and nothing could remove it. Not seducing and marrying the town doctor; not moving into a house of her own, which was only slightly smaller than her uncle’s. Often she would wonder if this was to be it. If she would live and die as nothing more than the doctor’s wife and her uncle’s former charge. She would think these things as she cooked, or ran her errands, and she would suddenly be consumed with an urge to utterly annihilate everything around her. Once she took the kitchen knife to the soft pink curtains that hung over the window above the sink. She slashed at them, not caring where she plunged the knife, thrusting so deeply that the point scraped against the glass, leaving long thin scratches on the pane. She eventually stopped, the energy just draining from her, but once it was over she hadn’t felt contrite or ashamed. She bundled up the material, composed an excuse for her husband and ordered some new curtains from a magazine she subscribed to. Why she felt like this she did not know. It seemed to her she had always been this way: always bitter and resentful because she did not count, and even now she did not know how to change this.
As she climbed the mound to the house, which was already strewn with lights, she began to prepare herself for the night ahead. She knew it annoyed her husband that she couldn’t interact with their neighbors. He had known about the comments and gossip that started after their engagement had been announced, but only from a distance. To his face, at least, it was clear that all the men were secretly envious that he had managed to entrance a pretty nineteen-year-old. He did not know that the women had labeled his wife a harlot and a temptress; that despite the respectability of his name, to them she was still no better than his whore. Nor did he ever guess at how they stared at her belly after the first six months and noted with pursed lips and inward smiles that it had continued to stay flat. He did not sense their distaste, he only saw her isolation, an isolation he believed was self-imposed. That was why he left her at gatherings. After a few weeks into their marriage, he told her that if he stayed with her, she would never force herself to socialize. He chose not to acknowledge that whether he was with her or not, it made no difference.
So when they reached the door and were shown through to the garden, he immediately detached himself, leaving her standing on the back porch, cradling the flowers she had brought and staring at the islands of people knotted among the expanse of green punctured by white-clothed tables and multicolored streamers of silver, turquoise and gold.
She moved through these islands like a navigator through treacherous waters, slipping between the gaps she could find until she reached a small clearing that had not yet been invaded. She did not even try to see where her husband had gone. She came near one of the long tables covered with steaming hams and bowls of salad and rested the flowers near the paper cups and the punch bowl. Nearby stood a group of huddled men, whom she ignored. Instead she served herself a drink, and as she picked over the food she began to wonder how she would be able to get through the evening without taking a knife to something.
“Must just eat you up, Leo,” one of the men near her said.
“He’ll be gone soon, we all know he won’t stay.”
“What was he doing up in Oregon anyway?”
“Salesman.”
“Walter knows he ain’t no farmer. Blood or no blood he’s seen you sweat over this place and he won’t do anything that ain’t in the interests of the farm. Ain’t