Chapters (14)
But she’d answered the wrong question. I asked it more directly while I still had her attention. I wanted to draw my face away from hers but I couldn’t. It might have broken the spell, and the right question had not yet been aired.
“Tatie,” I tried again, “It isn’t true, is it? I’m not Avery, am I?”
Despite my best efforts, my words carried a tinge of fear that made her smile. I loathed myself for requiring this weird, uncomfortable intimacy, but what else was I to do? Lulu said Eliza knew, and I had Eliza talking. She might not be telling me the truth, but she was at least giving me something to chew on.
“Malachi thinks you are,” she finally responded.
“What do you think?”
“Doesn’t matter. So long as Malachi believes you are. You’re the last, and when you’re gone . . .” Her words petered away. Her slitted eye closed and she exhaled, long and warm so close to my face. Then she drew in a shallower breath and her body drooped, her head lolling against the chair’s winged sides. Her wrist went limp and the remaining gin and water dripped onto the floor.
“Tatie?”
She did not reply.
I stood and stretched, leaning my back to crack the kinks out and returning to the photo. I turned it over and pried the frame loose to remove the picture, fully intending to cut Rachel out of it at a later date. I deserved one picture of my father, didn’t I?
When I turned around to leave, Harry was standing in the doorway. He must have seen me take the picture, but he said nothing to indicate that he planned to do anything about it.
I waved at the softly snoring old woman in the chair. “She fell asleep.”
Harry nodded. “I’ll see to her.”
“Hey, Harry?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“There’s a cemetery near here, right? A family plot?”
“Leave to your right, out of the driveway. Go up the hill—you can’t miss it.”
“Thank you, Harry.”
“You’re welcome, ma’am. Ma’am?”
“Yes?”
“She wasn’t too hard on you, was she?”
I grinned, clutching the picture to my chest. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”