‘Uh-huh. And the two million was only the start. There was to be an additional million on Ki’s fifth, tenth, fifteenth, and twentieth birthdays.’ She shook her head in a disbelieving way. ‘The linoleum keeps bubbling up in the kitchen, the showerhead keeps falling into the tub, and the whole damn rig cants to the east these days, but I could have been the six-million-dollar woman.’
Did you ever consider taking the off, Mattie? I wondered . . . but that was a question I’d never ask, a sign of curiosity so unseemly it deserved no satisfaction.
‘Did you tell Lance?’
‘I tried not to. He was already furious with his father, and I didn’t want to make it worse. I didn’t want that much hate at the start of our marriage, no matter how good the reasons for hating might be . . . and I didn’t want Lance to . . . later on with me, you know . . . ‘ She raised her hands, then dropped them back on her thighs. The gesture was both weary and oddly endearing.
‘You didn’t want Lance turning on you ten years later and saying ‘”You came between me and my father, you bitch.”’
‘Something like that. But in the end, I couldn’t keep it to myself. I was just this kid from the sticks, didn’t own a pair of pantyhose until I was eleven, wore my hair in nothing but braids or a ponytail until I was thirteen, thought the whole state of New York was New York City . . . and this guy . . . this phantom father . . . had offered me six million bucks. It terrified me. I had dreams about him coming in the night like a troll and stealing my baby out of her crib. He’d come wriggling through the window like a snake . . . ‘
‘Dragging his oxygen tank behind him, no doubt.’
She smiled. ‘I didn’t know about the oxygen then. Or Rogette Whit-more, either. All I’m trying to say is that I was only seventeen and not good at keeping secrets.’ I had to restrain my own smile at the way she said this — as if decades of experience now lay between that naive, frightened child and this mature woman with the mail-order diploma.
‘Lance was angry.’
‘So angry he replied to his father by e-mail instead of calling. He stuttered, you see, and the more upset he was, the worse his stutter became. A phone conversation would have been impossible.’
Now, at last, I thought I had a clear picture. Lance Devore had written his father an unthinkable letter — unthinkable, that was, if you happened to be Max Devore. The letter said that Lance didn’t want to hear from his father again, and Mattie didn’t, either. He wouldn’t be welcome in their home (the Modair trailer wasn’t quite the humble woodcutter’s cottage of a Brothers Grimm tale, but it was close enough for kissing). He wouldn’t be welcome to visit following the birth of their baby, and if he had the gall to send the child a present then or later, it would be returned. Stay out of my life, Dad. This time you’ve gone too far to forgive.
There are undoubtedly diplomatic ways of handling an offended child, some wise and some crafty . . . but ask yourself this: would a diplomatic father have gotten himself into such a situation
to begin with? Would a man with even minimal insight into human nature have offered his son’s fiancee a bounty (one so enormous it probably had little real sense or meaning to her) to give up her firstborn child? And he’d offered this devil’s bargain to a girl-woman of seventeen, an age when the romantic view of life is at absolute high tide. If nothing else, Devore should have waited awhile before making his final offer. You could argue that he didn’t know if he had awhile, but it wouldn’t be a persuasive argument. I thought Mattie was right — deep in that wrinkled old prune which served him as a heart, Max Devore thought he was going to live forever.
In the end, he hadn’t been able to restrain himself. There was the sled he wanted, the sled he just had to have, on the other side of the window. All he had to do was break the glass and take it. He’d been doing it all his life, and so he had reacted to his son’s e-mail not craftily, as a man of his years and abilities should have done, but furiously, as the child would have done if the glass in the shed window had proved immune to his hammering fists. Lance didn’t want him meddling? Fine! Lance could live with his backwoods Daisy Mae in a tent or a trailer or a goddamned cowbarn. He could give up the cushy surveying job, as well, and find real employment. See how the other half lived!
In other words, you can’t quit on me, son. You’re fired.
‘We didn’t fall into each other’s arms at the funeral,’ Mattie said, ‘don’t get that idea. But he was decent to me — which I didn’t expect — and I tried to be decent to him. He offered me a stipend, which I refused. I was afraid there might be legal ramifications.’
‘I doubt it, but I like your caution. What happened when he saw Kyra for the first time, Mattie?
Do you remember?’
‘I’ll never forget it.’ She reached into the pocket of her dress, found a battered pack of cigarettes, and shook one out. She looked at it with a mixture of greed and disgust. ‘I quit these because Lance said we couldn’t really afford them, and I knew he was right. But the habit creeps back. I only smoke a pack a week, and I know damned well even that’s too much, but sometimes I need the comfort. Do you want one?’
I shook my head. She lit up, and in the momentary flare of the match, her face was way past pretty. What had the old man made of her? I wondered.
‘He met his granddaughter for the first time beside a hearse,’ Mattie said. ‘We were at Dakin’s Funeral Home in Motton. It was the “viewing.” Do you know about that?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said, thinking of Jo.
‘The casket was closed but they still call it a viewing. Weird. I came out to have a cigarette. I told Ki to sit on the funeral parlor steps so she wouldn’t get the smoke, and I went a little way down the walk. This big gray limo pulled up. I’d never seen anything like it before, except on TV. I knew who it was right away. I put my cigarettes back in my purse and told Ki to come. She toddled down the walk and took hold of my hand. The limo door opened, and Rogette Whitmore got out. She had an oxygen mask in one hand, but he didn’t need it, at least not then. He got out after her. A tall man
— not as tall as you, Mike, but tall — wearing a gray suit and black shoes as shiny as mirrors.’
She paused, thinking. Her cigarette rose briefly to her mouth, then went back down to the arm of her chair, a red firefly in the weak moonlight.
‘At first he didn’t say anything. The woman tried to take his arm and help him climb the three or four steps from the road to the walk, but he shook her off. He got to where we were standing under his own power, although I could hear him wheezing way down deep in his chest. It was the sound a machine makes when it needs oil. I don’t know how much he can walk now, but it’s probably not much. Those few steps pretty well did him in, and that was almost a year ago. He looked at me for a second or two, then bent forward with his big, bony old hands on his knees. He looked at Kyra and she looked up at him.’
Yes. I could see it . . . except not in color, not in an image like a photograph. I saw it as a woodcut, just one more harsh illustration from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The little girl looks up wide-eyed at the rich old man — once a boy who went triumphantly sliding on a stolen sled, now at the other end of his life and just one more bag of bones. ‘In my imagining, Ki was wearing a hooded jacket and Devore’s grandpa mask was slightly askew, allowing me to see the tufted wolf-pelt beneath. What big eyes you have, Grandpa, what a big nose you have, Grandpa, what big teeth you have, too.
‘He picked her up. I don’t know how much effort it cost him, but he did. And — the oddest thing