She looked at the fire for a little while. “I’ll watch that.”
Cal mimicked: “ ‘Your father would want you to do this. Your father would want you to do that.’ It was powerful medicine, I guess. But when they set standards you can’t meet, you feel as if you’d betrayed the dead. Lollie, one of the things I’ve been wondering about. What’s the financial picture?”
“Not too bad, really.”
“What kind of advice have you been getting?”
“All kinds, believe me!”
“This isn’t the time or the place to go into it. School day tomorrow. But I would like to... advise you, if you think it would do you any good.”
“I’d appreciate it, Cal.”
“When would be a good time?”
“Come over about ten in the morning? Or do you have...?”
“I saw the people I had to see. I’m free for as long as I can be of any help.”
She walked him to the door. “A crummy motel,” she said. “And a perfectly good guest room right here.”
“It’s a very comfortable motel.”
She made a face. “Hah! The fragile reputation of young widows. Or, more accurately, a widow who is not so young.”
“Younger than I am. By a year and a day. Remember the joint birthday parties, Lollie? My birthday would end at midnight and yours would begin.”
“And Mitch was a very fast man with the champagne.”
“Calling himself the natural-born celebrator.”
“Cal, do you ever hear from Barbara?”
“Not from her directly, but I heard about her, almost a year ago. Somebody saw her in Los Angeles. She left the guy she left me for and went back into club work. Doing all right, I guess. It’s what she likes best.”
“Does it still hurt?”
“To use one of her lines, only when I laugh.”
He kissed her good-night, a light fraternal peck on the cheek. She stood hugging herself in the autumn night and then waved to him as he drove off in the rental car. She went back in and sat on the raised hearth with her back to the fire until she was warmed through. She forced herself into briskness and picked up in the living room. She rinsed the buffet dishes and packed them into the dishwasher.
When the house was locked, the lights out, the fire screen closed, Laura Barnes lay in her bed. She could hear the distant drone of the dishwasher in the last of its cycle. She was on her back, her eyes open. Cautiously, carefully, she let herself relax, thinking, Will I cry tonight, or won’t I? It was like a strange sphincter she kept closed against the hollowness of her heart as she walked through her timeless days. Alone, she dared relax it to find if tears had been stored. This night there were none. She turned on her side and burrowed her way into sleep.
When Cal arrived that Thursday morning a little after ten, she was talking to Molly Moyer on the kitchen extension. She interrupted the call to let Cal in and tell him to help himself to coffee. She went back to the phone and finished making the arrangements for the committee meeting with Molly.
She poured herself coffee and took it to the breakfast booth and slid in, facing Cal. He wore a tweed jacket and a soft blue shirt. He had nicked the edge of his jaw while shaving. Casual clothes never seemed quite right on Calvin Burch. He had a long sallow face, straight black hair, deep-set eyes, with a jutting prominence of bone at brow, cheek and jaw. He looked severe, judicious, scholarly and humorless, all his warmth and wit most carefully concealed.
“By two o’clock this morning, when at last the world grew still,” he said, “I think I had it all figured out, just who was occupying the unit next to mine. Two deaf auctioneers, three moose — full grown — one roller-skating team, and four sacks of cats.”
“Good thing they didn’t put you next to somebody real noisy.”
“At six o’clock the maids started. I couldn’t figure out whether they were using megaphones, or a P.A. system.”
“It was very quiet here.”
“Don’t tell me about it. Please.”
“I dozed off after the alarm went off. I lost twenty minutes. I just barely got the kids onto the bus.”
“Good school?”
“Pretty good, I think. David got into their gifted child program this year. He’s insufferable about it. They won’t test Kit until next year. His latest method of infuriating her is to speak to her in French.”
“Will you be able to stay on here?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out, Cal, as the weeks go by. The estate is sort of settled now. Under the terms of his will, I’m the executrix, which I’ve learned is the wrong way to do it. It should be a bank, people who do it all the time and know what to do and how to keep records. Mitch’s personal lawyer was Bill Wandell. He’s been a lot of help, but you certainly have to pay for that help. That Bar Association is quite a union. Standard rates on estates. It comes out to four percent on the net estate.”
“If you think I’m being too nosy, Lollie...”
“Heck, I want to tell you where I stand. Thank heavens he had the mortgage-insurance stuff on this house. It made the house free and clear. It’s too much house for the three of us. Actually, it was too much house for the four of us, but we bought it on the anticipation of Mitch’s future. You know how well he was doing. It wasn’t foolishness when we took on this much house five years ago. It just turned out to be a little foolish.”
“Are you going to keep it?”
“That’s one of the decisions. I’ve told myself it represents a kind of security to David and Kit. It’s their home place, you know. Their yard, their neighborhood friends. I didn’t... want to take too much away all at once. And it’s my home place too, you know. A refuge. I’ve wanted to stay... where the memories are, for a while anyway.”
“I can understand that.”
“But it takes money to run. Bill helped me work it out. Taxes, insurance, heating, utilities, yard-work, the whole out-of-pocket thing comes to a hundred and twenty dollars a month on a year-round basis, without putting in anything for maintenance or depreciation. I don’t understand about depreciation, but Bill keeps mentioning it.”
“So how about your income?”
“I can tell you that the Social Security was a pleasant surprise. When you have little kids, it works out pretty well. Without that I’d really be sunk. But it stops when they get to be a certain age. Or it goes way down, at least. He was in the group insurance plan at the company, so I got ten thousand from that. I had to take it in cash; there weren’t any options. He had a thirty-five thousand-dollar policy on his own. The insurance agent and Bill and I had a conference about that. We decided the best thing to do was take it as a life income, five years certain. And there was another forty-four hundred, the amount Mitch had in the corporation retirement fund. So I did have fourteen thousand and some cash. He had an insurance thing on the time payments on the car, so I got that free and clear too. I kept that one and sold my little one. There weren’t any medical and death expenses. The group insurance plan took... care of it. And he wasn’t sick long enough for it to run over... over the...” She felt her face changing as her voice became uncertain.
“I’ll get me more of your coffee, m’am,” he said easily and stood up and went over to the stove.
She was grateful for his quick tact. She was under control by the time he came back to the booth.
“So, Cal, the total estate came to about eighty-five thousand, which sort of sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t. Part of it is the thirty-two-thousand-dollar appraisal on this house. And I know what major things have to come out of the cash. Sixteen hundred for estate taxes. Thirty-four hundred to Bill Wandell’s firm. I paid off the things we owed here and there and put the rest in the savings account. I keep trying not to dip into it. My income is four hundred and eighteen dollars a month now, tax free. It sounds like it ought to be enough. But, gosh, it seems to be an awful close thing.