Page 19 of Again, In Autumn

“No issues being here at all?” she prods.

“Nope.” I slide the cardigan across my tank top.

“Well…good.”

“Well, good,” I mock.

“It is good. I’m glad you’re here! Finally.” Fran scoots off the bed. She pulls the quilt back and begins stripping the sheets. “It’s nice you had time alone, and I hope you were able to fix whatever issue you have with being here.”

“No issue,” I attempt, taking the pillowcase off and adding it to the pile of laundry.

She didn’t want me to date Adam, so I snuck around with him behind her back and the thrill of having something all to myself, free from inspection or unwanted commentary, made it even more special.

I’m afraid to ruin the good stuff with the truth.

“Okay,” she murmurs. “I mean, obviously Heddy knows what it is because she hasn’t asked you to come in years and she doesn’t seem to think it’s weird that you don’t come back for the summer.”

“Well, Heddy’s psychic,” I point out, hoisting the pile of sheets in my arms and heading toward the laundry.

I cross hand-woven vintage rugs and crystal pendant lights and wind down the stairs. At first glance, this house appears as eccentric as Heddy, but the expensive details pop out like ancestral ghosts.

From a young age, I knew my family had money. Kids called us rich. You can’t unlearn your parent’s wealth through the eyes of a child who has every need met and then some. If Joey Parker said we were rich, we were.

When we were teenagers one day, David pointed to the living room piano and said, “That’s a Steinway.”

“So?” I asked.

“So, she has a crazy expensive piano, a library, and exotic taxidermy. Only rich people have those things. Heddy is loaded.”

It didn’t occur to me that wealth could present itself any other way than monochromatic furniture and working your life away. Heddy treated money like everything else in her life: with respect, not idolatry.

After she divorced the landscape guru Kenneth Gually, she no longer drove her Porsche. I asked her about it, and she shrugged. “Kenny wanted it.” After that, she drove a twenty-year-old Honda she bought for less than a rare crystal.

I carefully step over the falling bedsheets in my arms.

Spindly as ever and wearing his Red Sox cap backward, David meets me at the back door, his arms full too, but with backpacks and nylon grocery bags full to the brim. “Vienna,” he offers, leaning over his load – I do the same – to kiss my cheek.

“Hiya Davey,” I say over my shoulder, continuing down the hallway.

From behind him, Grayson calls out, “Dad, where’s my Switch?”

“Somewhere you can’t touch for a few days,” comes the answer.

I dump the sheets in the machine and start it, spinning around to my blonde five-year-old nephew who stands in the middle of the foyer, staring at the stuffed peacock on the entry table.

He cocks his head toward me. “Where did that come from?”

“Heddy hunted it,” I answer.

“She shot it with a gun?” His mouth gapes open.

From upstairs, Francesca calls out, “No weapon talk!”

“Oh, yeah,” I ignore her. “That peacock was very aggressive. It used to prowl the grounds and attack anyone who came near. Slice you right around the belly like a velociraptor. Savage.”

I sidle up beside him and view the emerald feathers and beady black eyes that have been perched on this table for longer than Heddy’s been alive.

I continue, “And now this angry creature terrorizes the house. At night, when you’re asleep, it haunts the hallways and particularly loves that part of the house.”

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