Another time, after Alan had deduced that Wendell had no family of his own, they’d invited him to Thanksgiving dinner. Wendell had been flummoxed. He had one good suit, and he hadn’t worn it since Wesley’s funeral. He could not imagine being more out of place than at their sweeping walnut table, laden with crystal and fine china and candlelight. Alan and Anne would preside at either end, as cemented in their happiness as one of those wedding-cake-topper couples. And the girls. For some reason those little girls had always followed him around, though Wendell could not for the life of himself imagine why. At least on the estate he could avoid them, walk faster, stay busy. But there would be no escaping them in their own living room.
Wendell dreaded the invitation right up to Thanksgiving morning, almost begging off with an excuse of stomach upset. But he was honest, if nothing else. The meal had been rich and hearty, the family’s conversation boisterous, and by the time dessert was served, he’d almost begun to enjoy himself. But after, when the girls ran off to play outdoors and Alan carried out a tray of steaming Irish coffees by the fireplace, Anne had asked about his own family. Wendell felt himself sinking into the buttery recess of the leatherarmchair, struggling to keep his breath even. He’d choked down the rich drink and excused himself abruptly, burning with shame as he pulled the front door closed behind him. He could not mix business with pleasure, he chided himself on the drive home. For him, there could be no pleasure.
Now he knocked on the front door. No one answered. Alan had told him to come and go as he needed that day, so, reluctantly, Wendell let himself in. He headed through the foyer, keeping his head down. He really hoped it was just a matter of resetting one of the breakers in the fuse box. He was just about to turn down the hall for the basement door when Anne caught sight of him from the kitchen. “Wendell! Come in.”
He froze, looking down at his work boots, then up at Anne. She was a vision in a slip of a white dress, her hair pulled up and her face aglow. But there was a furrow in her brow. She pointed to a half-collapsed tripod in front of her. “Would you please give me a hand? I can’t get the darn thing to stay up. And Alan and the girls aren’t even dressed for the family photo.”
Gingerly, Wendell joined her, praying he had stomped his boots hard enough outside not to track any dirt. He caught a flurry of pink dash by. There was the little one, Pippa, in a fancy dress. She grinned at him, then ducked behind her mother, who was still focused on the buckled tripod. Anne tugged at one leg, then the other, her cheeks flushed. “This stupid thing.” She was not quite ready to hand it over, and so he stood to the side, trying to keep a straight face. “Oh, hell.” She stepped away and blew a tendril of hair out of her face, looking suddenly like a little girl herself.
“May I?” he asked.
“Please. But if you can’t get it to work, I get dibs on smashing the damn thing.” This time he did not hide his smile.
There were clips on each leg she hadn’t noticed, but he fiddled with them a good while, so as not to show her up. “It’s tricky,” hefibbed. Then he extended the legs and screwed each clip tight, almost afraid to meet her gaze.
She cocked her head. “Well.”
“You would’ve figured it out, I’m sure…”
“Liar.” But Anne recovered quickly and laughed. “Thank you. Now don’t let me keep you from whatever it is you were trying to do.”
Wendell headed back down the hall and into the basement. Sure enough, there was a blown fuse in the box, a simple fix that filled him with relief. It was when he passed the living room on his way out that he stopped in his tracks.
By then the whole family had gathered in the living room for the photo. Eliza, Anne’s assistant, stood behind the camera and the tripod he’d helped set up. Wendell watched Pippa wiggle and fidget. Julia stood beside her mother in a summer dress, a foreign creature out of her usual riding clothes and jeans. She was as tall as Anne and threatening to be almost as beautiful. Wendell appreciated the slight curl of teenage disdain to her mouth as Eliza directed her to smile “like she meant it.” Alan seemed as unperturbed as he was thrilled by all of it, arms wrapped tightly around his three girls, that crazy dog of his leaping about at their feet. Frozen, Wendell took it all in.
“Smile!” Eliza instructed one last time, and when the flash went off, Wendell saw stars.
Outside, he scanned the scene with military-like focus. Tall vases of hydrangeas had been set on each linen tabletop. The musicians were setting up in the gazebo. A faint plume of smoke billowed from the catering tent, delivering the scents of the lavish summer menu, causing his mouth to water. What pleased him most was that none of it could compete with the spectacular view of WhitePines. Beyond the patio and all its trappings were the rolling fields, green and gold. Crisscrossed by the occasional tumble of New England stone wall, the view was tamed, then wild again, and it left Wendell with a deep sense of peace. It was the best tribute to an evening devoted to land conservation, and though Wendell was not a political man, the ruralness of his hometown mattered very deeply to him. He felt good about his contribution.
He was on his way out when the first guests trickled in. There was Donald Hungerford, the town’s first selectman, and his wife, Estelle. The position had changed a good deal since Wendell’s father held it, but Don was a fair man who worked closely with the citizens of Saybrook, and Wendell liked him quite a bit. Right away Wendell recognized the president of the bank, Tim Gordon. The man had donned a white tux, dressed more formally than most. Tim had denied Wendell a home equity loan when he first inherited the family farmhouse and wanted to repair the roof; Wendell had been fresh from Afghanistan without a job or savings. On the way out of their meeting, Clara Wintonberry, the longtime bank teller who’d been friends with his mother, averted her gaze before marching back into Tim’s office. A day later, Wendell got a call that there’d been some kind of error and the loan had been approved.
The guests were really flooding in now, and among them Wendell spied the chairwoman of the historical society, Gloria Rose; the library director; and the head of the Candlewood Lake Authority. They were as known as some of the celebrity-caliber weekenders of Saybrook: the choreographer of the New York City Ballet, a morning news anchor from NBC Studios, a journalist for theWall Street Journal. They were regulars, and while Wendell knew none of them personally, thanks to the size and nature of Saybrook, he knew many of them. He had to give it to Alan Lancaster: the man drew everyone from every corner, and he was as well connected ashe was respected. From years of watching his own father, Wendell could appreciate the challenge of that achievement.
When he was sure things were going as planned, he stole away down a side path to the lower barns and climbed into his truck. Wendell adjusted his rearview mirror. In it was the shimmer of the setting sun and the white tents and the twinkling lights. The upper pasture sparkled with row after row of shiny cars. The party would roll late into the night, possibly into the early-morning hours of tomorrow. His work here was done.
Back in his own driveway, Wendell breathed a sigh of relief as he pulled up to the house. When he cut the engine, he sat a moment, staring up at the farmhouse.
He’d inherited it years ago, after his father passed away, but it still felt strange to him, the only surviving member of his family.
From the beginning, Wendell hadn’t been sure he’d wanted it, so full of memories it was. But he kept it up, at first in memory of his mother, and later as a sense of obligation to his father. And it was worth a pretty penny now, sitting on ten acres of land just outside the town center. Over the years, he’d had more than a few offers for it, several times from out-of-towners who happened by it on a Sunday drive. Those offers were met with the same reply each time: a blank look from Wendell and the squeak of hinges as the door swung shut in their faces. He was not a rude person, but it got under his skin every time. Wendell did not need the four lofty bedrooms that spanned the whole of the upstairs. Nor did he need the open kitchen with the original woodstove or the wraparound porch or the formal parlor his mother had insisted be added to the side. But even less did he need other people’s money or opinions.
True, it was the place where his mother had died. It was also the last place the whole family had been together, before Wesley hadgotten it in his head that he needed to enlist in the National Guard and serve his country overseas. Wendell did not believe those were the reasons that rooted him to the property, but he also couldn’t say they were not. One thing he’d learned since being in Afghanistan: there were some questions that did not require answers. Sometimes you just did what you thought was the right thing in the moment. Sometimes that was the only thing you could do.
He made his way down the side walkway to the back door and into the kitchen. Nothing in the house had changed since his childhood, and he liked it that way. The kitchen wallpaper was a blue chintz design his mother had favored. He hung his truck keys on the same rack his parents had used by the door. Wesley’s room was as he’d left it: navy blue walls, pine bunk bed. In the downstairs parlor, which his father had used as an office, the mahogany desk still stood in the corner. How many meetings had his father held at that desk that Wendell overheard as a child?
As first selectman of Saybrook, Wendell’s father had always been a fair man, in his son’s estimation, but it was different viewing a man through a child’s eyes than as an adult. He’d been a politician, and even fair ones had to bend and flex, he often told Wendell.
Of all the memories of his father managing negotiations, there had never been more than the year before the breast cancer took his mother away from them. Charlotte Combs had fought long and hard, but in the end, when the cancer had won, she’d insisted to the doctors that she come home to die. On her terms, she’d said. As devoted as Alder was to Charlotte, he could not escape his work at the town hall entirely. As life would have it, he was also wrapped up in a town development project involving a particular piece of open space that Charlotte was very fond of, called the Town Meadows.
The Town Meadows was a place Charlotte had taken her boysall throughout their childhood: to sled down its hills and skate across its pond in winter, to picnic in summer, and to hike its wooded trails in the fall. Her favorite thing to do was to take the boys fishing and hunt for spotted turtles. For hours she’d crouch at the pond’s edge, showing the boys how to locate them among the rocks and cattails. The spotted turtles were so rare they’d been feared almost extinct, but they’d begun to thrive in recent years in that section of protected parkland.
That summer, however, a developer from Hartford had made the town an offer to purchase it. A sprawling suburban development, the first Saybrook had seen, was proposed dead center in the meadows. The woods would be felled and the pond drained. Thirty-six lots for a series of vinyl-sided boxy Cape-style houses, each as uniform as the one before it, would fit the tract-style pop-up neighborhood. Not many in town were happy.
Despite her frail condition, Wendell’s mother was among the most outraged. “They cannot dig up that field and fill it with such ugliness. You cannot let them, Alder,” she’d cried from her bed. “What about the turtles?”
“Yes, darling. The DEP is on it. They’ve got state biologists coming in to do a count.”
Wendell’s mother was not done. She propped herself up on shaky arms. “Those turtles are special, Alder. You must fight this.”
