Page 9 of The Fadeaway

"You could," Helen Pullman says, leaning her weight against the doorframe of Patty's bedroom in Santa Barbara. She's flown in from D.C. after Ruby's quick trip to Seattle, and the women have plans to go through Patty's jewelry and clothing together. "You have gone through much bigger things--and on a public stage, I might add--and the death of your mother, while terrible, is not unexpected in the life of a middle-aged woman."

Ruby is taping the bottom of a box and she stops mid-job to look at Helen. "You don't pull any punches, do you?"

"It would be a waste of my time," Helen says, ambling over to the bed and sitting at the foot of it. "I ran the Oval Office and kept your husband on track, so helping you organize your mom's house will be a walk in the park.”

True to form, Helen keeps them on task with a firm but loving hand, and by late afternoon there are boxes of family photo albums taped and ready for Ruby to FedEx back to Shipwreck Key for storage, as well as several boxes of clothing, dishes, shoes, and brand new linens set by the door that sheplans to donate to the local women’s shelter. Helen has headed off at least four breakdowns, swept through whatever room Ruby was in throughout the day and dropped off a box of tissue to dry Ruby’s perpetually flowing tears, and made the whole thing about ten times more fun than it would have been by insisting that they put some of Patty’s vinyl on the turntable as they work.

“Helen?” Ruby calls out, trying to be heard over Fleetwood Mac as she sits on the floor of her mom’s sunny little office. She shifts around on the faded rug that covers most of the wood floors. “What do you think I should do with this?”

Helen pokes her head into the office and Ruby sees that she’s got several of Patty’s silk scarves hanging over one shoulder like she’s moving them from one spot to another. “What, babe?”

From her spot on the floor, Ruby holds up a blown glass hibiscus flower the size of her palm. She frowns at it. “It’s beautiful, but it feels too fragile to FedEx.”

“Pretty,” Helen says. “Put it in the box to go.”

Ruby gives a little huff of a laugh. “It’s that easy, huh?”

Helen shrugs. “If you don’t know where it came from, who made it, or why it was important—and if it has no meaning to you—I say send it down the river. But if you think it has some importance, then I guess bubble wrap the crap out of it and send it home with the rest of the boxes.”

Ruby understands the simplicity of making these calls; it should be easy to look at an item that she has no emotional ties to and say yay or nay quite easily, but something about this delicate glass hibiscus gives her pause.

“I’m going to hang onto it for now. Maybe I’ll just carry it on the plane with me to take home.”

Helen shrugs and moves on, leaving the room with a wide-brimmed hat on her head that she’s picked up from its spot on a chair, and the scarves still dangling over one shoulder.

As the record in the front room ends and Helen switches it out without asking, Elton John’s crooning voice drifts down the hall. Ruby continues sifting through her mother’s personal items, emptying out drawers and pulling books and photos from shelves. The picture she’d picked up before her trip to Seattle catches her attention again, and she turns the frame over in her hands, unclasping the latch to take the back off of it. The photo comes out easily and Ruby turns it over, looking first at the front—her mother, standing in that gorgeous afternoon light in a vineyard with a handsomely weathered man—and then at the back, where a faded inscription is scrawled in Patty’s looping cursive:With Lyle W. Napa 1988.

Lyle? Ruby frowns.Lyle who? In 1988, Ruby’s father had only been gone a few years, and she and her mother were living in Southern California, navigating Ruby’s teenage years together as Patty argued court cases and dipped her toes back in the dating pool. But this man—Lyle—appeared to be more than a casual date. The way he leaned in to Patty, the familiarity with which she pressed her face close to his. The faraway look in their eyes, as if they’d just been talking about something that had made them both wistful, made Ruby feel as if she’d stumbled into a room in the middle of two people having a private conversation.

Ruby stands from the floor and stretches her arms overhead, then picks her way through the piles of books and photos and tchotchkes until she’s standing at Patty’s desk. She flips through the calendar next to the computer, running her fingers over the last entry Patty had made there:May 21—appt with Dr. Sanderson; send $ to FSV.

This tickles her brain and Ruby wiggles the mouse on the computer until the screen springs to life. There, as a screensaver, is a photo of Patty with her daughter at her side and her two granddaughters behind them, their hands resting on hershoulders lovingly. It had been taken during a visit to Shipwreck Key the previous year, and Ruby’s eyes fill with tears at the sudden memory of a visit with her mother where she’d assumed that nothing would happen to her for years to come. If nothing else, life has taught her in the past few years that everything is temporary; there is no guarantee not just of a tomorrow, but of the very next moment. From Jack’s death and finding out a year later about his diagnosis, to Harlow’s getting trapped in the crossfire in a shooting in New York City, and now Patty’s death, Ruby feels as though life has grabbed her by the roots of her hair and dragged her into midlife kicking and screaming.

With a few keystrokes, Ruby is back into her mother’s account, and she skims the disbursements again until she finds what she wants:FSV—Fair Skies Village. The retirement home in Austin. Sinking into the chair rather than hovering over it, Ruby navigates to a new browser page and types in the name of the retirement home, watching the screen as an image of a building that looks like it’s situated on a golf course appears before her.

It’s almost resort-like, with palm trees, manicured green grasses, and man-made oases sprinkled around the main building. Ruby scrolls to the bottom and finds a phone number.

After a few minutes of explanation and transfers, she has a woman on the phone in the main office, and she’s once again explained that her mother has passed away, and that she has been sending checks to Fair Skies Village each month for several years, and now Ruby needs to find out more about these payments so that she can determine what her mother’s intentions were.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t give out information about current residents,” the woman on the line says.

“I’m not asking about your residents,” Ruby explains patiently, “I just need to understand what my mother’s monthlypayments were for. If she was supporting one of your residents and her checks stop coming, that could be hugely detrimental to the person relying on them.”

“Yes,” the woman agrees. “It could. Let me see what information I can provide.” She asks Ruby a few questions and taps at her computer keys audibly while Ruby waits. “Hmm. Okay. I see that two thousand dollar checks have been coming monthly from Patricia Dallarosa for nearly twenty years now.” There is a pause. “And that the remainder of the payments are coming from someone in Austin. I guess…I could reach out to the person paying the other portion, who appears to be the resident’s daughter, and perhaps she would be willing to talk to you about it? That’s the best I can do.”

“Of course,” Ruby says. “That would work.”

“I’m sorry I can’t give you more than that.”

“No, no—I understand. Patient confidentiality.” Ruby is mildly distracted as she gives a phone number and her email address to the woman.

“Ruby Hudson,” the woman on the other end of the line says. “I bet people confuse you with the former First Lady all the time,” she teases, a smile in her voice.

“Oh, you have no idea.” Ruby takes off her reading glasses and spins around in her mother’s desk chair so that she’s facing the window. “Thank you for your help. I’ll wait and hope to hear from the woman you’re reaching out to, and I guess we’ll go from there.”

“My condolences on your mother’s passing,” the woman says before they hang up.

As soon as Ruby ends the call, her phone rings again and she answers.

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