Of course, Heidi had been too loud in her franticness, and she’d woken up their mother. She heard her, weeping in the bedroom, wailing from the pain in her head and her body and her heart. Heidi was angry with herself, both for worsening her mother’s symptoms and for pushing the school topic with their father. But what else could she do?
“I’m so sorry, Carrie,” Heidi whispered. Tears drained from her eyes, but she didn’t bother to clean them off her face.
Carrie shrugged and continued to sweep. “I told you. I have to drop out of school. There’s no way around it.”
Heidi wanted to kick and scream. She wanted to throw the dining room chairs across the room and teach her father a lesson. As she careened around the room, gasping for breath buttrying to calm herself down, she spotted the shotgun by the door and imagined picking it up and pointing it at her father. She imagined telling her father that she was taking Carrie far away from him, far away from the horrors of this mountain town. But the image faded shortly after. She’d never touched her father’s gun, and she didn’t like violence, generally, not even the threat of it.
That differentiated her from others in Tennessee, she knew.
When Carrie started crying harder, Heidi scooped her sister into a hug and whispered that it was going to be all right, that she would take care of things. But Carrie begged her to stop. “He’s just going to keep getting angrier and angrier. His word rules this house.”
All day, Heidi and Carrie worked in silence, baking and cooking and cleaning. Carrie seemed unwilling to talk to her. So, about a half hour before her father was set to come home, Heidi left and walked the half-mile to the shack where she lived with Harvey.
Heidi had very little time to cook dinner. She was grateful when she realized Harvey would be late. At half-past seven, he barrelled in, reeking of whiskey and singing a song she didn’t recognize. “There she is,” he said sloppily, taking her by the waist. “My little wife.”
Heidi thought she might throw up at the smell of his breath just then. She flinched and turned her head away. But Harvey noticed this. To get back at her, he reached for the pot of stew and threw it on the ground, so that it became a sludge of mud and vegetables on the floor. Heidi gasped, unable to do anything. By the time she bent down to clean it up, Harvey was on the sofa, snoring off his drunkenness. Outside the window, skylarks twittered.
5
Present Day: Martha’s Vineyard
Within a half hour of the attorney Ralph Conner leaving the Harbor Estate, Candice and her siblings had Gwen Harper on the phone. The speakerphone was on, so that the three of them could stand around the living room coffee table and glare down at the phone as though the phone were Gwen herself. When she answered, Gwen sounded meek and very tired, as though she’d been trying to gain the strength to talk to the Vanberg siblings.
“Good to hear from you,” Gwen said. “Are you all together?”
Lindsey spoke first, as she was the loudest and the brashest and always had been. “We’re all here at the Harbor Estate, yep. We’ve just listened to the reading of the will.”
Gwen didn’t say anything at first, before muttering, “I want to say…”
“You knew about this,” Lindsey spoke over her. “You knew that she was planning something like this, and you wanted to take advantage of the situation and make sure that you had a beautiful place to live—and a job.”
Gwen sighed. “Your mother wasn’t sick. I had no way of knowing this would happen.” Her voice shook, as though she were on the brink of tears.
Candice didn’t know whether to believe those tears.
“But you knew this was a possibility,” Lindsey continued. “And you didn’t say anything? You didn’t mention this at the funeral?”
“Honestly, I’m just as surprised as you are,” Gwen offered. “The lawyer just called me earlier today. In fact, I was planning on leaving your mother this year. I hadn’t told her, but I’d already begun interviewing for a few other jobs. Things that would push me, you know? But I loved working with your mother! She was probably the person I was closest to for the past five years, as crazy as that sounds. She …”
But this time, Henry cut her off. “We’re going to contest the will, Gwen.”
Gwen was quiet.
“We have to, honey,” Lindsey said, belittling her in a way that made Candice immediately uncomfortable. “The Harbor Estate is our home. You wouldn’t get it. We have thousands of memories here. And as much as I believe in my mother’s philanthropic efforts, I can’t watch this place be transformed like that.”
Now, there was a sharper edge to Gwen’s voice. “How much time have you spent at the Harbor Estate over the past few years?”
Candice, Lindsey, and Henry searched one another’s faces. They probably should have rehearsed how they wanted to speak to Gwen before calling her.
“She was our mother, Gwen,” Candice said in a small voice, a voice she hoped would prove to Gwen that she did still care about their mother despite everything. “We loved her.”
“I loved her, too,” Gwen said. And then, she started crying loud enough for the three Vanberg siblings to hear her. “She was like a mother to me. My own mother died when I was young, and she really took me in, you know? She saw something in me. She wanted me to overcome everything that I went through. It was only because of her that I started therapy! It was only because of her that I felt mentally healthy enough to meet my fiancé!”
Candice didn’t know what to say. She shoved her hands into her pockets and looked at Lindsey, who looked slightly stunned but mostly annoyed.
“And because I loved her so much, I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure her vision comes to life,” Gwen stammered. “I suggest that you work hard to clear out the estate and get it ready for its next iteration. It’s going to be wonderful. It’s going to change so many women’s lives.”
After Gwen hungup on them, Candice, Lindsey, and Henry sat sprawled on the sofas and fine chairs of the living room, drinking wine and stirring in their own anxious thoughts.
