We Hope for Better Things Read online

“And of course you mustn’t breathe a word of this to anyone.”

  The man nodded. “God bless you.”

  Mary hurried to the library, Bridget on her heels. Once they were inside, she shut the door and leaned on it. “Make sure he’s out of the house and lock all the doors or I’ll never be able to sleep.”

  The girl nodded.

  “I know this is much to ask of you,” Mary went on, “but you must keep watch out your back window as I can’t see the barn from my room.”

  The girl looked frightened. “What should I watch for?”

  “I’m not sure, but I feel it would be foolish not to watch.”

  If possible, Bridget’s eyes grew even wider. “You don’t suppose he’d steal a horse?”

  Mary felt the blood drain from her face. “I hadn’t thought of that. Let us pray he doesn’t.”

  Mary tossed all through the night, questioning every decision she had made. Would Nathaniel have done the same? Perhaps she should go to Mrs. Maggin’s room and apologize, ask the cook to stay. But by the time gray morning peeked through her windows, Mary had resolved to stand firm.

  She found a weary Bridget alone in the kitchen. “Has Mrs. Maggin been down?”

  “She’s already left,” Bridget said. “She gave me an address for you to send her pay.”

  “Good. And our . . . guest?”

  Bridget shook her head. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him this morning.” She looked at her hands. “I fell asleep.”

  “Never mind that, Bridget. Of course you should sleep.” Mary looked around the room. “Hand me those extra biscuits.”

  Bridget put a biscuit in each of her mistress’s hands. Mary walked out to the barn with more poise than she felt and slid back the heavy door with an elbow. “Hello?”

  When no one answered she checked the stalls. The horses stomped. The cow waited to be milked. The pigs were all accounted for. From outside she heard the quarrelsome sound of chickens. The clothing she had asked Bridget to gather sat in a neat stack upon a bale of hay. The old boots were nowhere to be found.

  All at once, Mary became aware of the smell of manure and the restless stirrings of hungry animals. Inside her womb the baby moved. She put the biscuits in her pockets, took up a pitchfork, and squared her shoulders. Then she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to remember what she’d seen Nathaniel do with a pitchfork.

  seven

  Lapeer County, August

  Nora pointed toward a half-open door on the west wall of her bedroom and said, “Here’s my workroom.”

  I dutifully followed her into a small back room. Three sewing machines of varying ages—none of them new—sat upon tables. Long metal racks, bowed by the weight of the many clothes that hung on them, crouched over the machines like buzzards. Pins encircled the cuffs of pants and the arms of jackets, emerged from pincushions, clung to magnets. And everywhere there was fabric. Piles and piles of it.

  I took one experimental step into the crowded room and tripped. My hand found a stack of fabric and pulled it all onto the floor with me.

  “Hey!” Nora yelled.

  I looked up, mortified, only to find that she was yelling not at me but at the swiftly retreating orange cat that had tripped me. I picked myself up off the floor and began re-creating the stacks I’d demolished.

  “I’m so sorry!” I said.

  “Never mind that. That cat. He knows he’s not allowed in here.” Nora looked at the wobbly tower I’d constructed. “I’m not sure just what to do with all of this.”

  “You must sew an awful lot.”

  “No, I don’t sew anymore.”

  I glanced around what was so obviously a sewing room, tiny alarm bells ringing in my head on Barb’s behalf.

  She looked hopeful. “Do you sew, Elizabeth?”

  “No. I can barely tie my shoes. I’m a lost cause when it comes to the domestic arts.”

  “Everyone has different gifts. I understand your gift is with words.”

  “Maybe. But it’s kind of hard to use it when you don’t have a job anymore.”

  “Perhaps,” she said in a doubtful tone. “Let’s eat some dinner and you’ll see what gift I don’t have.”

  I would have liked to help prepare our meal—there was nothing else to do, after all—but Nora insisted I sit at the kitchen table while she cooked spaghetti with marinara sauce. She toasted white bread, buttered it, and sprinkled it with a little garlic salt. It was a simple meal, but I was happy to see that the woman could still manage to feed herself. And it was better than the microwave dinners and fast food I had been eating so often of late.

  “When you cook for just one you kind of lose the knack,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t know. I never had the knack. This is perfect.”

  “You won’t think so when you get it three times a week.” She laughed.

  “I hope you don’t think I came here expecting you to be slaving over a hot stove for me all day. I’m here more to look after you than for you to look after me.”

  The moment I said it I wished the words back into my mouth. Nora’s expression soured.

  “Elizabeth, I was under the impression that you had lost your job and you needed a place to stay and some time to think about what you’d like to do next with your life. Did Barb lead you to believe I needed a nursemaid?”

  I shook my head. “No, I don’t know why I said that just now. She never said anything to me of your situation except that you lived alone far from town and could probably use some help around the house.” I hated lying to her, but more than that I hated how easily lies had rolled off my tongue since I’d started my undercover investigation of Judge Sharpe.

  She nodded. “So she didn’t tell you about my drinking?”

  Drinking?

  “Or my sleepwalking?” she continued. “Or the various wanderers I’ve invited into this house only to murder them in their sleep and bury them in the backyard?”

  “What?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Elizabeth, I’m a perfectly capable and healthy person in control of my wits, despite my age. Let’s agree to treat each other as adults. I don’t need a babysitter. The only thing I might be in need of is some company.”

  I silently cursed Barb for putting me in this position. Nora was just lonely, that’s all. I could relate. It was as easy to be alone in a city of 700,000 people as it was in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.

  The orange cat walked into the kitchen just then, jumped up on the chair across the table, and glowered at me.

  “What’s your cat’s name?” I said to change the subject.

  “Matthew. My cats are always Matthew.”

  The doorbell rang and Nora rose to answer it. When I looked back at Matthew he was gone. I glanced around the room, which was still impeccably clean despite dinner preparations. Nora had washed each dish as she went, leaving me nothing to clean up.

  “Elizabeth,” Nora said as she reentered the kitchen with a short stack of fabric in her hands, “this is Brenda Morris. Brenda, this is my great-niece Elizabeth Balsam.”

  I rose to shake the hand of the sharply dressed woman who followed my aunt.

  “Brenda’s one of my regulars.”

  My face must have registered blankness.

  “I do alterations for her.”

  “Me and the rest of the county,” Brenda said. “You should have been here in the spring. That’s when she gets all the prom girls and June brides and all their bridesmaids. It’s a madhouse.”

  I struggled to picture the parlor overrun by tittering girls. This house was a museum and Nora its curator. It seemed that with little effort I might discover velvet ropes tucked in some closet, ready to come out at any moment to keep humanity at bay.

  “Ms. Rich did my daughter Kelli’s wedding three years ago, and it was gorgeous!”

  “That was none of my doing,” Nora said. “You have a beautiful daughter who has lovely friends and good taste. I just made sure no one looked sloppy, that’s all.”


  Brenda crossed her fingers on both hands. “It will be Katie’s turn pretty soon.”

  “No doubt about it,” Nora said with a pat on the woman’s shoulder.

  “I better get moving,” Brenda said. “I’m running late.”

  “Your jacket is hanging on the workroom door.”

  “Jacket? I thought you were hemming that teal dress for me?”

  Nora looked momentarily confused but recovered. “Yes, yes. The dress. That’s what I meant.”

  Brenda smiled. “It was so nice to meet you, Elizabeth! I hope you can use that fabric, Nora.”

  They disappeared through the swinging door.

  “I thought you didn’t sew anymore,” I said when Nora came back into the kitchen.

  “I don’t. I just do alterations and mend things.”

  “That’s not sewing?”

  “There’s sewing involved. But it’s not the same. Sewing is making something from scratch. I don’t do that anymore. I just do repairs these days. The quilt in your room was my last true creation.”

  “Why?”

  She gave her head a little shake. “I just haven’t been in the mood. Alterations keep me plenty busy. Between that and my pension from the school system, I should be able to keep the electricity and water on until I die.”

  Except for my Dana wardrobe, I’d never thought much about clothes. I looked closely for the first time at what my aunt was wearing on this humid August day. Her white pants were long, cuffed, and pressed to a crisp crease down the center of each wide leg. Her lightweight blue button-up shirt was tucked securely into her waistband and held there by a stylish belt. She was entirely too well dressed to live in the boondocks.

  “Were you a teacher?”

  “No. Secretary. Thirty years. Would you mind taking this fabric up to the big closet in the blue room? There may be a smidge more space in that one.”

  Upstairs I found a room with pale blue walls. The bed was covered with a quilt made of strips of blue fabric in washed-out stripes, checks, and plaids, and the closet was filled to the gills. I slid Brenda’s unwanted gift into place and quickly shut the doors to keep it from escaping. Then I went snooping.

  Beautiful quilts graced every bed in every room. I pulled open each dresser drawer, peeked into every closet, and found stacks and stacks of fabric like ancient layers of sediment. If she didn’t sew, why did she have all this fabric? It appeared that Nora was a prime candidate for one of those hideous reality TV shows about demented people who amass great hordes of stuff for no apparent reason.

  “Elizabeth,” I heard my aunt call from somewhere below. “Did you get lost?”

  I found her just outside the back door of the kitchen, silhouetted by the beguiling light of early evening.

  “I wanted to show you the gardens before the sun goes down,” she said. “I’m afraid the formal garden is all but gone. It’s been so long since I had the time or inclination to fuss with it. But the field is pretty and it takes care of itself.”

  I followed her through the screen door and onto a wide lawn that ended where the field began.

  She motioned to the wildflowers nodding in the light breeze. “All of this used to be planted with crops. When it was a functioning farm, those trees weren’t there. There was corn and wheat and an apple orchard way, way out there.” She waved at the twisted remains of a dilapidated wooden structure surrounded by bent and rusted wire. “That’s the old chicken coop. And that pile of rubble out a ways in the field was the barn. It fell down about ten or fifteen years ago.”

  I shielded my eyes against the sinking sun as we ambled on to a large square of weathered wooden fencing.

  Nora rested her wrinkled hand upon a picket. “This was the herb garden. Mostly perennial herbs, but some you have to plant every year—or they seed themselves. Nowadays, they’re so grown over with weeds you can’t tell what’s what, and my eyes aren’t as good as they used to be, so I stick to buying dried herbs from the store. There’s a lot out here that’s not for cooking. Some medicinal herbs. I’ve never known what to do with any of those. Some of them you probably shouldn’t mess with.”

  I looked over the sad, tangled patch of ground.

  “Do you like gardening?” she asked.

  “I like gardens,” I said. “I never had a real one. I like the idea of gardening.”

  Nora gave me an appraising look. “I’ll tell you what, Elizabeth. I’m going to give you a job to do. You can’t sit around the house doing nothing while you wait for a job offer, and I doubt you want to. So here’s your project. Look through the books on the dining room shelves and find the ones on gardening and herbs and such. I know there are some there. You start studying those, and then see what you can make of this herb garden.”

  Did everyone in the world have a special task for me? Mr. Rich and his artifacts, Barb and her busybodying. Still, I couldn’t spend every waking moment on those things, and I was here to help out, after all. It would be nice to expend some energy on a project with a positive and palpable end result rather than simply helping with laundry and cataloging all the reasons my great-aunt shouldn’t be living alone. I could work in the garden by day and work on my résumé and my story by night.

  “That sounds fun.”

  “It won’t be any fun pulling those weeds.” She laughed. “They’ve been there a long time and the roots run deep.” She headed toward the house.

  “Hey, what’s the story with this tree?” I asked, hanging back.

  Nora stopped walking and looked at me with eyes that had lost their sparkle. “I noticed it struggling a few years ago. I got a man out here to treat it. It’s a catalpa tree. William planted it. They always leaf out late, so this spring I had been holding out hope it would make it a little longer, just until I was gone. But it’s pretty clear to me that it’s dead now.”

  The colossal, denuded tree stood a little to the south of the herb garden. Not far from the ground, its immense trunk had split, looking like two massive arms lifted up to the heavens. I squinted at the topmost branches. One trunk was most definitely dead. The other clung tenuously to life.

  “I think there’s still one branch with leaves.”

  Nora trained her eyes skyward and adjusted her glasses, and while she didn’t smile, she no longer looked quite so dismal.

  “Still,” I said, “that’s too bad. It looks like it was a beautiful tree.”

  “It sure was a messy one,” she said, “but yes . . . it was beautiful.”

  eight

  Bloomfield Hills, April 1963

  “It looks like the artist found a garbage can, glued its contents to a board, and used a dead cat to smudge some paint on it. I could have made this—if I were a lunatic.”

  Nora let the mixed media painting in her hands drop a little and felt her ire rise.

  “What did you pay for this monstrosity?” her father asked.

  “It was very reasonable.”

  “If it were anything other than free, it couldn’t be that.”

  Nora let out an exasperated sigh. “You told me to choose things that were less pedestrian, more eye-catching. I was trying to follow your advice. Anyway, I like it.” She looked around at the bare walls of her new apartment. “Though I’m still not sure where to put it.”

  “How about the dumpster out back? Send it back where it came from. I cannot believe you would use the money I gave you for investing on this junk.”

  Nora would not tell her father that she had spent most of that money on a camera for a stranger, whom he apparently despised, and so had less than she’d hoped to spend on an actual piece of art.

  “What kind of a gallery would display something like that?” he continued.

  “It was at the Detroit Artists Market. They just opened a special exhibit of Cass Corridor artists. It’s very avant-garde. Very cutting edge.”

  Daniel Balsam shook his head. “I don’t know where I went wrong with you.”

  The phrase had been uttered so many times since she’d t
urned thirteen, she had begun to take it as a compliment.

  “Anyway, get your clubs. We’ll be late for our tee time.”

  Nora sighed and thought that perhaps she could enjoy golf if she played with anyone other than her father.

  “Stop choking the club, Nora. It’s not a baseball bat.”

  “Your feet should be farther apart.”

  “You’re slicing, Nora.”

  “Too much power. Look how close you are to the hole. Lightly, lightly.”

  She endured it all in silence as it was the only time they spent together without her mother. Nora preferred her father’s disapproval of her taste in art or her backswing to her mother’s brand of criticism, which tended toward the very personal.

  Just two weeks earlier, as they shopped for a new Easter dress, Mallory had frowned at her daughter’s hips in the mirror and declared, “I’m sorry, honey, but you just can’t wear sheath dresses. You’ll have to get the yellow one with the full skirt even if it does make you look washed-out.” Nora had wanted to sew her own Easter dress that year, but a heavy schedule of volunteering and social calls made it difficult to find the time, so it hung unfinished in her closet.

  “Your mother wants you to come back to the house with me when we’re done here,” Daniel said as they left for the golf course. “Something about some charity event or other.”

  “I have plans with Diane tonight.”

  “It will just take a moment.”

  It wouldn’t, and they both knew it.

  Nora finished their eighteen holes two under par and slid her putter back into her bag. Her father loaded the bags on the cart, and they headed for the clubhouse.

  “Nice job out there today,” Daniel said.

  “Thanks.” Nora looked out at the lush green grass and smiled.

  “Hey!” her father shouted. “Ray!” He lifted a hand in greeting to his favorite groundskeeper and slowed the cart to a stop.

  “Mr. Balsam, Miss Balsam,” Ray said as he tipped his hat to reveal a head of tightly curled black hair that had just a little more gray in it than last year. “Good to see you both out here this fine afternoon.”