Final Rights (3 page)

FOUR

2004

Tate arose extremely early the next morning.
At least 8:15 seemed extremely early to her. She forced herself to get out of
bed and padded into the kitchen, turning up the thermostat on the wall furnace
on the way. The faint click told her the place would be warm in a matter of
minutes.

She limped a bit on her sore heel and
thought about putting shoes with arch supports on over her fluffy pink and
orange ankle socks. She shivered in the morning chill and pulled the fleece
robe around herself.

Sunlight flooded in through the decrepit
windows that lined two walls of her tiny kitchen, filling the space with a
golden glow. The southeastern exposure of the kitchen delighted Tate, and she
smiled as she put the coffee on to brew, thinking about how nice it would be to
have a kitchen three times as large, with French doors leading to the
triangular deck she imagined and glass filling every possible inch of wall
space.

She sat down with her coffee at the
glass-topped round table she had found at Goodwill and looked around. But now
instead of focusing on her vision of what the space could be like, she looked
with a calculated eye at what really existed.

“Pitiful,” she muttered.
Pocket, her cat, opened one eye halfway and looked at her before returning to
her nap on the wooden ledge between the table and living room.

“Morning, Miss Kitty,” Tate cooed as she
reached over and rubbed the old cat’s ears. Pocket leaned into her hand and
began a soft purring. “How you doing this morning, Babycakes?” Tate continued
her gentle strokes. Pocket had lived with Tate since she was seven weeks old,
and over the course of their fifteen years together, Tate had given the sweet
old cat countless nicknames. Pocket answered to none of them, choosing instead
to grace Tate with her presence only when it suited her to do so.

Tate’s little house in North Asheville had
many redeeming qualities, but she inevitably focused on the multitude of
problems it presented—the cramped rooms, decrepit old windows, tiny
bathroom—all those things she dreamed about changing.

“Why did I ever buy this place, Pocket? I
could have used the money for something already remodeled, or a new place
even.” A drawn out yawn served as the old cat’s only response before she
sauntered away.

Pocket’s lack of input
didn’t matter because Tate knew she was not likely to do what others would do
given the same circumstances. As much as she believed she wanted an easy life
free of complications, she knew in her heart she naturally gravitated toward
something much different.

Tate decided to clean up the mess of
paperwork on her kitchen table. But try as she might, she could not focus on
writing checks and sorting through stacks of junk mail. The house on Chestnut
Street kept intruding into her thoughts. She needed help tracking down its
history. Immediately she thought of Holly.

Holly had quickly become
Tate’s first friend after she arrived in Asheville. Tate found her in the local
gay newsletter when she started searching for a realtor. Their first meeting on
a beautiful Saturday afternoon in October had lasted more than three hours,
even though Tate made it clear from the beginning she had no intention of buying
property. She just wanted to learn about Asheville and what kind of housing it
offered, research in case she decided to settle down at some point.

From the beginning, Tate
recognized Holly as a knowledgeable professional who also happened to be gay,
friendly and welcoming. Not all realtors met those standards, by any means, so
Tate felt grateful to have found her.

After that initial meeting, Tate had become
quite curious about housing in Asheville, and she found the low price of real
estate very appealing. She heard many people complain about how expensive
property had become in Asheville, and she understood that could be true for
people who had lived here all their lives. But for Tate, who had become
accustomed to the exorbitant cost of housing in New York City, the prices in
Asheville seemed amazingly low.

Tate enthusiastically
dug into the stack of forms from Holly, plotting out locations of the various
listings on her map. She headed out to explore the town. After looking at
dozens of properties, she bought the first house she saw.

Not that Tate grabbed
the first thing that came along. She did her research, but after three days of
going from one place to another, into all of Asheville’s many corners, she kept
coming back to the little house on Maplewood, actually a duplex with one unit
upstairs, where she could live, and another downstairs for a great rental unit.
So she bought it, and she also bought the second duplex right next door. While
some people might consider her behavior to be rash, Tate knew she had been
drawn to Asheville and to these properties by something beyond logical thought,
by some mysterious yet driving force that had guided her safely for her entire
life. And she knew buying them was exactly the right thing to do.

Even though she expected
no answer at this early hour, Tate dialed Holly’s cell phone. Holly picked up
on the first ring.

“Hey, Tate, how’s it
going?” she asked, chipper and wide awake. Holly’s sweet and mellow voice made
Tate smile, as it usually did.

“Okay, but I need your help.
There’s this house at 305 Chestnut Street. It’s not for sale, but I want to
know whatever you can find out about it for me. When was it built? Who owns it?
Why is it so run down . . .” Tate rattled on at the fast clip so common
for her when she
became excited about something. Tate loved
puzzles and she was already fully engaged in the challenge of unraveling the
mystery of the house on Chestnut Street.

“Yeah, I can check that all out for you. I’m
headed into the office now. Give me a couple hours, and I’ll look at the tax
records, okay?”

“Okay. Thanks, Holly.” Tate hung up and left
Holly dangling on the other end of the line.

FIVE

2004

Long before the advent
of Head Start programs, Tate Marlowe had Lee Lou. The oldest by two and a half
years, Lee Lou started kindergarten about the same time Tate began to run
without falling down. Up until that time, the two had been inseparable,
spending their days playing with dolls, making up games to keep themselves
entertained and roaming about their thinly populated neighborhood looking for
pretty rocks and shiny objects.

Lee Lou adhered closely
to the rules set out by their mother. No exploring in the woods behind the tiny
house where they lived; no crossing of streets, though the only street they
knew about was the narrow one bordering their front yard and it carried very
little traffic; no playing with the cooking stove or leaving the refrigerator
door open; no taking food without permission; no noise when Mommy is sleeping;
no bothering Daddy when he comes home from work . . .

Keeping track of all the rules fell to Lee
Lou and breaking them fell to Tate. This proved to be a full-time job for both
of them.

“Stop that, Tate!”

Tate sat on the floor in
front of the cabinet in the cramped living room, methodically removing all the
contents and surrounding herself with them. “No!”

“I’ll get in trouble!” Lee Lou began picking
up the folded doilies and table scarves her mother had ironed and put away the
previous day.

Tate grabbed a crocheted doily and placed it
on her head. “Me pretty!”

“You’re bad!” Lee Lou shook her finger in
Tate’s face.

“Me not bad. Me pretty!” Tears started
rolling down Tate’s cheeks and just before she began wailing, Lee Lou clamped
her hand over Tate’s mouth.

“Mommy’s sleeping. Be quiet!” Lee Lou hissed
the command and physically dragged Tate out of the house and down the front
steps across the yard to the edge of the lawn where she made Tate sit.

Once there, Lee Lou let
go and Tate sat sobbing on the sidewalk. “You can’t wake Mommy up! You know
that.”

“I want Mommy!”

“You got me.” Lee Lou plopped herself down
on the bottom step, folded her arms over her knees and rested her head on them.

Tate’s sobbing quickly subsided to sniffling
when she realized she no longer sat in the center of Lee Lou’s attention. She
closed her hand into a tiny fist and began sucking on her knuckle, tears still
streaming down her face. Lee Lou did not respond.

“Lee Lou?”

“Leave me alone, Tate.”

“Lee Lou love me?”

“I love you, Tate, but
leave me alone a minute, will ya?”

Now on full alert, Tate
walked over and wrapped her little arms around her sister, resting her cheek
against Lee Lou’s bowed head. “Don’t cry, Lee Lou.” Tate patted her sister’s
back and began slowly rocking.

Tate learned much from Lee Lou—not just rule
following and compassion, sadness, responsibility, forgiveness, nurturing—but
also how to survive in a world with parents whose best efforts to care for her
fell far short of what she needed. In a world like that, sisters take care of
sisters as best they can.

At the hands of Lee Lou,
Tate gained something equally as valuable as the survival skills that buoyed
her through childhood. She mastered the fundamentals of education—numbers,
letters, shapes, colors, words—long before the time came for her to attend
school herself.

All this occurred because Lee Lou hated
school. Basically a shy child, she preferred sitting at the desks in the back
of the classroom. She never volunteered to answer questions posed by the
teacher. When called on unexpectedly, she felt embarrassed and became
tongue-tied.

Lee Lou’s main problem
with school, however, lay in the fact that she found it supremely boring. At
home she had access to the whole world through the magazines her mother bought
on subscription. Each week, a new one arrived in the mailbox. Lee Lou preferred
LOOK
or
LIFE
to
Ladies’ Home
Journal
because they had the best pictures, and she quickly took to losing herself in
the magazines long before she herself could read.

As Lee Lou flipped
through the pictures, she made up stories for herself and Tate about what she
saw. Lee Lou’s imagination allowed her to soar beyond the confines of her small
world into exotic places with strange animals and vast horizons, and always she
was safe there in the world of her own making. So sitting in a kindergarten
class hearing about Jack and Jill getting hurt while running up a little hill
seemed a silly waste of her time.

Obviously, school was important. Everyone
told Lee Lou so and she believed them. She tried hard to pay attention in
class, but when her mind wandered, the teachers reprimanded her and she drew
even farther into her shell of embarrassment. Her mother scolded her for the Cs
and Ds on her report card, so Lee Lou attempted to apply herself even more. The
message about the importance of education sunk in, and she figured if it was
that important for her, then it must be valuable for Tate as well.

Since no avenue of
escape from school presented itself to Lee Lou, she decided to do the next best
thing. Each day she trudged home with her assignments in her notebook. She
spread the homework out on the floor and insisted that Tate sit and study with
her.
Tate
proved to be an unwilling student, however. Unaware that a child of 2 and 1/2
years lacks the cognitive development of a 5 year old, Lee Lou took Tate’s
immaturity as stubbornness. Nonetheless, she remained determined to teach Tate.
This pursuit required creativity on Lee Lou’s part, and she possessed that in
abundance. Each lesson became a game in Lee Lou’s hands and she played those
games with Tate.

Tate remembered big
block letters and numbers printed on colored construction paper. Lee Lou taught
her to turn those letters into words, like putting a puzzle together. A-T-C
became “cat,” O-D-G became “dog,” and L-L-B-A became “ball.” Numbers could be
used to count, or to add and subtract. Tate steadily developed the skill to put
those pieces of brightly colored paper in the necessary order to make the
correct answer to whatever question Lee Lou presented. Tate learned to draw the
letters and numbers herself and to keep them on the lines of the paper Lee Lou
used for her lessons. It wasn’t easy for either of them, but with Lee Lou’s
persistence and Tate’s growing willingness, Tate learned to read, write, add
and subtract.

By the time she entered
kindergarten, Tate could produce the work expected of a second-grader. She
carried this advantage with her throughout her school life. She learned
effortlessly in most cases, and when something proved more difficult, her
curiosity usually kicked in and she dedicated herself to learning what was
being taught. Every challenge became a puzzle for Tate, an invitation to dig in
and figure out the answer. It could be a mathematical equation—not her favorite
by any means—or the theme of a book report, the motivation behind another
person’s behavior, even the secrets of an old house sitting on a hill in
Montford. They all appealed to Tate as puzzles to be solved.