“I’m so sorry. I think I knew somebody who once lived here.”
“Oh yeah? Had to be a Parker.”
“Yes. He was. Evan Parker.”
“Sure.” The woman nodded. “You know, he passed away.”
“I heard. Anyway, sorry to bother you. I was just driving through town and I thought, you know, I’d pay my respects.”
“We didn’t know him,” the woman said. “Sorry for your loss.”
The irony of that, of being offered condolences for Evan Parker, nearly made him confess right there. But he produced the required noises. “Thanks. I was his teacher, actually.”
“Oh yeah?” she said again. “In the high school?”
“No, no. It was a writing program. Up at Ripley? In the Northeast Kingdom.”
“Ayuh,” she said, like a true Vermonter.
“My name’s Jake. Your house is gorgeous.”
At this, she grinned. She had distinctly gray teeth, he noticed. Cigarettes or tetracycline.
“I’m trying to get my partner to repaint the trim. I don’t like that green. I think we need to go darker.”
It took him a moment to understand that she actually wanted him to weigh in on this issue. “You could go darker,” he said finally. It seemed to be the right answer.
“I know! My partner, she hired the painter one weekend I was out of town. She pulled a fast one on me.” The woman grinned at this. She wasn’t holding much of a grudge, in other words. “My name’s Betty. You like to see the inside?”
“What? Really?”
“Why not? You’re not an ax murderer, are you?”
The blood rushed to Jake’s head. For the briefest moment he wondered if he was.
“No. I’m a writer. That’s what I taught up at Ripley.”
“Yeah? Have you published anything?”
He turned off the car and slowly stepped out. “A couple of books, yeah. I wrote a book called Crib?”
Her eyes widened. “Seriously? I got that out of the library. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m going to.”
He held out his hand and she shook it. “That’s great. I hope you like it.”
“Oh my god, my sister’s gonna lose her shit. She said I had to read it. She said I wouldn’t see the twist coming. ’Cause I’m the person who leans over in the movie and tells you, five minutes in, what’s gonna happen. It’s like a curse.” She laughed.
“That is a curse,” Jake agreed. “Hey, it’s really nice of you to invite me in. I mean, I’d love to see it. Are you sure?”
“Sure! I wish I didn’t just have a library copy! If I had my own copy you could sign it.”
“That’s okay. I’ll send you a signed copy when I get home.”
She looked at him as if he’d promised her a Shakespeare First Folio.
He followed her up the tidy driveway and through the large wooden front door. Betty, as she opened the door, prepared the way by calling: “Sylvie? I’ve got a guest.”
He could hear a radio going off somewhere in the back of the house. Betty reached down to scoop up an enormous gray cat and turned back to Jake. “Give me a sec,” she said, and went down the hall. He was trying to take it all in, greedily recording details. There was a wide wooden staircase ascending from a very grand central hallway that had been painted a fairly stomach-churning pink. To his right, a large parlor visible through an open door, and to his left, an even more formal living room through an open archway. The dimensions and the details—dentil crown molding, high baseboards—were a highly intentional display of wealth, but Betty and Sylvia had pretty much bludgeoned any trace of grandeur to death with folksy signs: ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE … AND A CAT! and CRAZY CAT LADY lined the wall up the stairs, and visible above the parlor mantelpiece was LOVE IS LOVE). There was also a cacophony of too-bright area rugs, all but obliterating the wooden floorboards, and everywhere Jake looked, too much of everything: tables covered with knickknacks and vases of flowers too healthy and bright to be real, and so many chairs pulled into a circle it looked as if a group was expected, or had recently left. He tried to imagine his former student here: descending this staircase, following Betty’s steps into the kitchen he assumed was at the end of the hall. He couldn’t do it. The women had placed a kitsch-encrusted barrier between whatever had been here before and what was here now.
Betty returned, without the cat but with a stout dark woman in a batik headscarf. “Sylvia, my partner,” she said.
“Oh my god,” said Sylvia. “I can’t believe this. A famous author.”
“Famous author is an oxymoron,” said Jake. It was his go-to assertion of personal modesty.
“Oh my god,” said Sylvia again.
“Your house is just beautiful. Inside and out. How long have you been here?”
“Just a couple of years,” said Betty. “It was so run-down when we moved in, you wouldn’t believe it. We had to replace every damn thing.”
“Some of them twice,” said Sylvia. “Come on back, have some coffee.”
The kitchen had its own complement of signage: SYLVIA’S KITCHEN (SEASONED WITH LOVE) over the stove, HAPPINESS IS HOMEMADE above the table, which was itself covered with a bright blue cat-festooned glazed cloth. “Do you like hazelnut? It’s all we drink.”
Jake, who loathed all flavored coffees, attested that he did.
“Sylvie, where’s that library book?”
“I haven’t seen it,” said Sylvia. “Cream?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
She brought him the mug. It was white with a black line drawing of a cat on it, and the words “Feline Good.”
“There’s donuts,” said Betty. “That’s where I was coming from. You know Jones’ Donuts in town?”
“Well, no,” he said. “I don’t know the town at all. I was really just driving through. I wasn’t expecting all this Vermont hospitality!”
“I have to admit,” said Sylvia, who came bearing a plate of oversized glazed donuts, “I sneaked a look at Google on my phone. You’re obviously who you said you are. If not I’d be out back calling the troopers. In case you thought we’re all hospitality and no common sense.”
“Oh.” Jake nodded. “Good.” He was relieved he hadn’t lied, out in the car. He was relieved that his recent proclivity for lying hadn’t fully replaced a default instinct to tell the truth.
“I can’t believe this place used to be run-down. You could never tell that, now!”
“I know, right? But trust me, the whole first year we were spackling and painting, peeling off old wallpaper. There hadn’t been any serious upkeep in years. Which shouldn’t have surprised us. People actually died in this house because of bad maintenance.”
“No maintenance,” Betty said. She had returned, bringing her own coffee.
“What do you mean? Like a fire?”
“No. Carbon monoxide leak. From the oil furnace.”
“Really!”
The enormous gray cat had trailed Betty into the kitchen. Now he leapt into her lap and settled himself down.
“Does that weird you out?” She looked at Jake. “House this old, it stands to reason people have died in it. Home births, home deaths. Just how things were done back then.”
“Doesn’t weird me out.” He tried a sip of his coffee. It was vile.
“I don’t like to say this,” said Betty, “but your old student died here, too. Upstairs in one of the bedrooms.”
Jake nodded solemnly.
“Hey, so I have to ask,” said Betty, “what was it like, meeting Oprah?”
He told them about Oprah. They were big Oprah fans.