Emily's Ghost (46 page)

As usual after his one
o'clock nap, her father came out to chat with her while she worked.
Emily was sharpening the scraper blade with a file, aware that for
as long as she could remember the house had needed paint on one
side or another.

"Have you decided on a
color yet, Dad?"

"Any color, as long as
it's white," her father grumped, rubbing the sleep from his
eyes.

She looked up from her
sharpening with a wry smile. "Still as flexible as ever, I
see."

"What's right is right,"
he answered stolidly.

He grabbed hold of the
arms of the ladder-back rocker that was a permanent fixture on the
porch and eased himself into it. The afternoon sun, October low,
threw him in golden relief, softening the stark whiteness of his
hair and the craggy, weathered lines of his face. She was reminded
of a night more than a decade ago when -- no longer young, even
then -- her father had sat in the same rocker on the same porch
with the same righteous look on his face, waiting for her to come
home from a date in a car that had broken down three different ways
in three hours.

George Bowditch had tried
hard to raise good people; he'd tried hardest of all with Emily.
Now, with his Agnes gone and his children all grown, it was obvious
that his house was too big, the burden of maintaining it too great.
Obvious, that is, to everyone but him.

"Don't you wish you'd sold
this old place a couple of years back, when Boston yuppies were
snapping up anything with a gable and a frieze?"

"Them damn fools? They'd
be pickin' out the trim in designer teal and brick red and settin'
up the cordwood all picturesque on the porch where the termites
could step nicely into the parlor, thank you very much. No. I ain't
sorry."

"The gutter's bad on the
west side, Dad. The trim underneath here is pretty punky. I don't
think it'll hold paint."

"Sure, I know it. Ben's
promised to fix it first thing. Just do the best you can. And,
Emily?"

Emily dragged the scraper
across a long stretch of peeling paint, bringing down a rain of
flakes into her hair. "Yeah, Dad?"

"I suppose you know I'm
pleased to have you here," he said gruffly.

"Yeah, Dad," she said,
smiling. "I know."

****

One day rolled into
another, with the two of them falling into an easy, predictable
routine: an early morning walk in the woods, followed by a meat and
eggs breakfast, after which Emily scraped and primed a section of
the porch while her father puttered inside. Then they had lunch,
and while he napped she would put on a finish coat. She was rushing
the work, but she had no choice; the weather could turn any day.
Besides, it was time to return to her job. Bankruptcy was
imminent.

Still, being an obsessive
type, Emily wanted at least to finish the porch, and that included
122 peely balusters. She was on her knees, working on number 83,
when one of the loaner clunkers Gerry kept handy at his garage
pulled into the gravel drive. She waved her paintbrush at the big
yellow Ford Fairlane, glad of her brother's company, and went back
to painting.

But it wasn't Gerry who
got out. When she looked up again, Emily was face-to-face with the
man she'd fled, face-to-face with the emotions she thought she'd
put to rest.

"Lee. This is a surprise,"
she said, her voice unnaturally calm.
Oh,
no! I'm a disaster! My hair's sticking out like a punk rocker's;
I'm dressed in salvage from an all-male rag box. Where can I run?
Where can I hide?

Lee, not surprisingly, was
impeccably casual in oxford shirt and khakis. "Hello," he said,
shifting a large paper-wrapped parcel from his right arm to his
left.

"Please don't say I look
very nice," she warned, standing up and wiping her paint-stained
fingers on her brother's worn-out fatigues. She was blushing to the
core.

Lee's smile was tentative,
as if someone were giving him directions and he wasn't exactly sure
which way north was. "You look very ... independent," he
ventured.

She laughed and said
breezily, "Hey, you've seen our license plates: 'Live Free or Die.'
What brings you to this neck of the woods, anyway -- in that
hulk?"

He had one foot on the
bottom step, but he declined to come up farther, and Emily's mind
was somewhere else than on her manners. So they stood there in a
kind of New Hampshire standoff, with him not pressing and her not
inviting.

"I'm here for a couple of
reasons, actually. Sarah and Ben invited me up for the night
-—"

"My
sister-in-law?"

"-—and on the way up my
car developed a funny knock. Gerry insisted on taking a look at it
and gave me the loaner -—"

"My brother?"

"-—so that I could still
make my lunch date with Jean and the new baby -—"

"My niece?"

"-—Katherine. Yes. She's a
doll."

Emily didn't know what to
say. Here he was, lock, stock, and barrel, settled in snugly with
her family. She had a passing sense of déjà vu, but she couldn't
imagine where she'd learned about it.

"Katherine weighed eight
pounds nine ounces," she said with startling
irrelevance.

Lee smiled, shifted feet,
shifted the package. "I think Jean mentioned that on the
phone."

There was a pause, and
then Emily said rather defiantly, "Are you just passing by,
then?"

For an answer he held up
the package, the size of a framed poster, to her. "This is from
Helen."

Helen was one of the
illustrators at the
Boston
Journal
. Emily checked to see that her
hands were dry and accepted the parcel from him, then tore off the
brown paper. It was the original artwork for her piece on Fergus
and Hessiah Talbot, beautifully framed and matted. Emily had
steadfastly refused to open the
Journal
magazine section that she
knew Sarah had packed along with her things. And now, just when
she'd least expected it -- bang! Ambushed.

"It ... it's beautifully
done," she said, her voice catching in her throat. She stared at
the artist's rendering of the principal players in the drama:
Hessiah herself, not really pretty but somehow intriguing; Mayor
Abbott, dashing and driven; the handsome Lieutenant Culver;
Hessiah's brother Stewart, aloof and dangerous; and, of course,
Fergus O'Malley. The artist caught
him
perfectly, from his finely cut
features to his flashing green eyes. "It looks very like him," she
whispered.

"I recognized him right
away," Lee agreed.

"I ... well, thank you for
bringing this," she said, holding up the frame a little in
acknowledgment. "You shouldn't have gone out of your way. I'll be
heading back to my job sometime next week."

He looked up quickly, then
turned casual again. "Phil will be glad to hear it."

So he knew Phil didn't
know. "Phil's not the reason I'm going back," she said, rather
perversely. "I've got a mortgage to pay." Not that Lee would know
what a mortgage was.

He nodded sympathetically,
then glanced around the crisp white porch. "This is nice work. Have
you considered exterior painting as an alternate career?" he asked
in a friendly, teasing way.

She allowed herself a
small, wry smile. "Probably not. The pay's not great, the commute's
too long, and my father stifles creativity. Speaking of careers,
congratulations on holding on to yours. I read Stanley's exposé. It
was devastating. If I were Strom, I'd have run for the hills
instead of sticking out the primary."

"I supposed he figured
what the hell, he had as good a chance as I did of
winning."

"You're too hard on
yourself, Lee," she said in a softer voice than she'd intended.
"People are a lot more afraid of toxins than ghosts."

Their polite standoff
ended when Emily's father harrumphed his way onto the porch behind
her.

"Dad!" she said, surprised
to see him up early from his nap. She felt exactly the way she'd
felt at fifteen, when he wandered out one evening right into the
middle of her first kiss with a boy named Tommy Betts. "Dad, this
is Sen -— Lee Alden," she said, confused about the proper protocol.
"My father, George Bowditch," she added to Lee.

"Mr. Bowditch, pleased to
meet you, sir," Lee said, extending his hand.

Emily's father took it,
saying, "My boys been tellin' me about you, Mr. Alden. Come in.
Emily, you'll be wanting to clean yourself up now."

"I'm not finished yet,
Dad," Emily said through a tight smile.

"Tomorrow's supposed to be
a good drying day. C'mon, c'mon," he added, which had the immediate
effect of driving Emily's blood pressure up ten points.

She stood her ground, more
to resist the littlest-kid syndrome than anything else. "Mr. Alden
is on his way to visit Ben and Sarah, Dad. I don't think we should
keep him."

"Oh, pshaw. I'll take care
of Ben. 'Tisn't every day I have a Democrat under my roof," he said
with a siy glance at Lee. "How do you take your coffee,
sir?"

Emily rolled her eyes and
left Lee at the mercy of her father. Upstairs she scrubbed the
latex paint from her hands and arms as well as she could and
slipped into a pair of stone-washed jeans and a clean white shirt.
Her hair, with the shaved part growing out, was in that
indeterminate stage between avant-garde and normal. She combed it
through, flopped it around a little, and gave up. As for makeup,
she didn't need any; her cheeks were ruddy from the outside work.
She hesitated over her tiny bottle of Joy perfume, then purposely
dabbed a little scent behind each ear, just to prove she didn't
care either way.

When she returned to the
old-fashioned bay-windowed parlor, she found Lee Alden in her
father's Barca Lounger -- a rare concession by her father to any
guest -— flipping slowly through a photo album while from a Hiscock
chair alongside, her father kept up a running commentary on family
history.

Lee tried to stand up when
she entered the room, but her father said, "Sit, sit," and flipped
the next page for him. "This is her at a school play, I forget
which grade. She was Mr. Frog. I remember the day the assignments
were made; minute she steps off the bus, she starts wailing over
the cruelty of it."

"Dad, Lee doesn't want to
hear that old -—"

"But I think she looked
real cute, don't you? Her mom taped those frog lips across her
cheeks; how they flapped when she done her lines! How'd they go
again, Em? 'Sittin' on a rock, just takin' stock, that's what I do,
the whole day through, 'cause I'm Mr. Frog.' She wanted to
be
Ms.
Frog, if
you please, but the song needed two syllables before
'Frog.'"

"Dad!"
she said, her eyes wide with reproach.

"It sounds as if your
father's a big fan, Emily," Lee said politely. She wasn't fooled;
his blue eyes were howling with laughter.

"Dad, if you're going to
put me through the bearskin rug routine, then I'd just as soon go
outside and paint."

"No, no," he said, waving
the idea away. "Not now that you're all cleaned up." He looked up
from the album at his daughter. "You
did
change, didn't you?" he asked
suspiciously.

Emily said, "Very funny,"
and he turned to Lee with a shake of his head and said, "You clean
'em, you clothe 'em, and this is how they turn out. Her mother,
now, she wouldn't have been caught dead in dungarees.
Whenever
I
came
courtin', Agnes'd be waitin' in a nice floral dress."

Emily went faint with
embarrassment. Her father had never been one to mince words. It was
one reason she'd never dated much, one reason she'd moved out as
soon as she could. Her brothers had never minded the teasing, but
of course, they were boys. She sat stonily silent, staring out the
window. Let
them
come up with the damn small talk.

"Uh-oh, I went too far,"
said her father with a wink at Lee. "Em, I'm sorry," he said
candidly, rubbing his knees in an almost distressed way. "I can't
get it out of my head that you're not my little girl anymore.
Y'see, Senator, with my boys it was different. They all grew up in
the normal way: got married, had kids -—"

"I
believe
it's time I started dinner,"
Emily said, slicing through her father's good
intentions.

"It's chops, tonight,
isn't it? For three, Em."

"Oh, but the
senator—"

"Is staying. He didn't
want to, but I prevailed."

On what possible
pretext?
she wanted to ask. She turned and
headed for the kitchen without further comment. Behind her she
heard her father whisper, "Ayah, here's a cute one. Look at her at
fourteen, her first date. She's half a foot tallah than the little
feller ...."

In the kitchen Emily
slammed each chop into a bowl of beaten eggs, then into one with
breadcrumbs.
He can't stay. I can see why
he stopped by -— to see that I was alive and functional, to satisfy
his curiosity. But he can't stay. Dad shouldn't have put him on the
spot like that. Sarah shouldn't have asked him up in the first
place. And Gerry shouldn't have gotten in on the act. What is this,
a conspiracy?