“Perfect day to knock hang gliding off the list,” Vee said.
Vee’s lists. One with things she wanted to learn how to do and the other with things she was afraid to do, which made her want to do them. Mostly, she and Vee were two of a kind, but Cass’s lists never included doing the thing she was afraid of.
“Aren’t you going the wrong way for the library?” Cass said.
“Health center. Out of birth control pills. What did he bring you this time?”
“This handmade journal the size of my palm. With a papery light green cover and this delicate green thread that wraps around it.”
“I just love the way he brings you things.”
The light changed, and they started across Howell Mill, each knocking into the other between the white lines.
“Singer sends his regards,” Vee said. Singer was the artist bartender where she and Vee hung out—where Vee went almost every day after work. Cass joined her when Ethan was gone.
“Back at him,” Cass said, thinking of his red hair and warm smile. Singer was a bright light at the end of a long day—and he was always here.
As they separated on the other side of the street, Vee waved over her head.
But Cass felt as if she’d forgotten something, and it took her a few seconds to land on Vee’s words about Ethan’s famous Time cover. When she did, she told herself not now, steering her thoughts back to reading to May, who’d made it to ninety-three but who, according to her doctor, wouldn’t live much longer. She’d told Cass, “It’s my heart. I used it up. Isn’t that grand? I didn’t waste any of it.”
At the entrance to the deserted parking lot that had once been Hattie Howell’s front yard, Cass tripped over a tree root but recovered without falling. Maybe the staff should park out here. Energy was what this place needed. And music. Open windows. But at the moment, all the windows were painted shut.
3
At Howell’s front door, Cass used her key. Hattie Howell hadn’t had any children, and when she died at ninety-six, her will created a foundation to run a home for older women. She wanted other people to have the benefit of aging as she had—in a real home. Plus, she wanted them to have something she hadn’t had—the benefit of living with others. In the foyer, a sofa sat against the back wall and in front of it, a coffee table with a bowl of lemons—real. That had been Cass’s first suggestion. Real lemons made it an entirely different place.
“It’s me,” she yelled.
“Morning,” Ella yelled from the back of the house.
Off the foyer to the right was Bev’s glass office—regal Bev with milky smooth black skin. Cass unlocked the door. She didn’t have an office and would usually sit in the breakfast room or the kitchen to make notes or file reports. She had more contact with the Fates, whereas Bev managed the staff, the finances, the regulations. Cass was the Fate liaison; Bev, the board liaison.
But when Bev was not here, like this week, with Ella’s help, Cass did it all. She dropped her stuff on the desk. And in six more months, Bev would retire, and Cass would do it all all the time.
As she started for the kitchen, the phone rang.
“I knew you’d be there early,” Bev said. “Ethan back okay?”
“Yep, all good,” Cass said, sitting down.
“So,” Bev said, her voice different, flat, “I’m sorry to have to talk to you about this over the phone and right when Ethan’s back.”
Cass heard her take a breath. “Bev?”
“I need you to take over now instead of at the end of the year. The foundation has approved.”
“What? Why?” Cass couldn’t make sense of it.
“I’ve gotten some bad news.” She paused. “Bone cancer.”
“Oh my God, Bev,” Cass stood. “I’m so sorry.”
“But I’m happy for you. This is what you’ve been waiting for and working toward. You deserve it.”
“But are you going to be okay? And your retirement.”
“The doctors think I have a decent chance. I’ll be okay. Hopefully.” Then in her typical Bev way, she was all business. “Letters will go out to the families tomorrow, so tell the Fates and Ella and Fanny the day after. You’re a natural, you know. You have been since … well, I won’t say since you walked in the door, but since your first conversation with May. I know that. The foundation knows that. Follow your instincts.”
That first day, two and a half years ago, the front porch had been covered in brilliant burgundy leaves. Cass had seen a flyer at Vee’s library. That’s what she used to do when she wasn’t working for the boring accountant—hang out at the library, which Ethan, always on the lookout for danger, complained was too close to the jail. But Cass loved being around books, and she loved to read, always had. She loved words.
The bright orange flyer on the library bulletin board announced that Howell House, just around the corner, needed people to read to the older women who could no longer see, and it wasn’t so much that something clicked into place as that Cass felt some soft thing inside her. When she’d arrived, Bev suggested she start by talking to May, who had Cass’s grandmother’s white hair. And although Cass had not signed on for talking, she felt the soft thing again. As the weeks then years went by, Cass became like that perfume that smells different on each person—able to figure out what each Fate needed and help her get it. Except for May. All this time and Cass had yet to figure out how she could help May.
In January, Bev had pulled her aside and told her she’d be retiring at the end of the year and that she, and the board, wanted Cass to take over when she did—something Cass had already been dreaming of. But to have it happen like this was not part of the plan, and she felt terrible for Bev, who’d been looking forward to traveling with her husband and to visiting grandchildren. Now there would be hospitals, and someone would need to help her.
“If there’s anything I can do, Bev, just let me know.”
“You’re doing it,” she said.
Cass sat down. Now this was her office. Three of the walls were floor-to-ceiling windows—out the front, the gravel parking area; out the side, a line of pyramid cedars; out the back, a deck. And everywhere, those old oak trees. But it was the fourth wall, the original brick exterior of the house that with the addition of this room had become an interior wall, which made what had just happened seem real. Cass stood and ran her hands over its rough surface.
In the kitchen, Fanny, their cook, looked up from the counter where she was squeezing lemons into a pitcher and nodded at Cass, who pushed open the swinging door into the adjacent breakfast room, where the Fates were still at the table.
“How is everybody?” Cass said, gazing at the black and white faces, at Atta’s slicked-back charcoal gray hair that she kept in a long braid, and at Lois’s not blonde but yellow hair.
“How are you, Mary Cassatt Miller?” Atta said, as she continued cutting an article out of the newspaper, her plate pushed away as if she were through but she never was.
“Lois, welcome,” Cass said, sitting in May’s empty chair. “Sorry to miss your arrival.” Lois had taken Ruth Ann’s room. Ruth Ann who could never remember to put her teeth in. A couple of weeks ago, she had wandered, and if they wandered, they had to go.
Lois half-smiled, half-grimaced, her lipstick every bit as red as Atta’s—at breakfast—as she picked up a measuring cup and poured the rest of the cream into her coffee. “Is that really your middle name?” she asked.
Cass nodded. “Painting was my mother’s dream. Are you settled