Chapter 4 - The Color of the Stone
The drive back to the Old Oak Road estate took exactly twenty-two minutes. The sky over the Lowcountry had turned that thick, bruised shade of indigo that always preceded a late-afternoon thundershower, the air so heavy with humidity that the moisture seemed to bead on the windshield before the wipers could even touch it.
Lily was asleep in the back seat, her head tilted against the red plush of her car seat, her little fingers still twitching slightly as she dreamed of wild strawberries and the old brick walls of the Battery.
When I pulled my Civic onto the long, circular gravel driveway of my mother’s house, the white Range Rover was still parked at an angle near the front portico, its door open slightly as if Blair had been in too much of a hurry to close it properly. Through the massive, double-height glass windows of the entry hall, I could see two figures moving back and forth across the white marble floor like characters in a silent film whose projector was running too fast.
I unbuckled Lily, lifting her small, warm body onto my shoulder. She didn't wake up; she simply let out a long, sweet sigh against my neck, her small arm draping over my shoulder like a soft silk ribbon.
I walked through the front door. The house didn't smell like bacon grease or French press coffee anymore. It smelled of cold air conditioning and panic—the sharp, electric scent of people realizing that the rules they had spent their lives playing by had been rewritten by someone else.
My sister Blair was sitting on the bottom step of the grand staircase, her honey-blonde hair falling in wild, uncombed strands across her face. Her designer sunglasses were gone; her eyes were red-rimmed, swollen, and dripping with a furious, hysterical stream of tears that had ruined her perfect foundation, leaving long, dark streaks of mascara running down her neck like dirty rain.
My mother, Sylvia, was standing near the marble kitchen island, her fingers gripping the edge of the quartz so tightly her manicured nails looked white against the stone. All the color had drained from her face, leaving her skin looking a strange, chalky gray—the color of dry river silt before a flood. Her porcelain cup lay shattered on the floorboards behind her, a dark pool of Ethiopian coffee soaking into the hand-woven rug she had bought in Paris the previous spring.
My father, Graham, was there too. He hadn't gone back to the patio. He was standing near the telephone console in the corridor, his face completely dark, his leather briefcase open on the table before him as if he were preparing to flee his own office.
“What did you do, Maren?” Blair shrieked the moment the door clicked shut behind me. She stood up from the stairs, her linen shirt wrinkled, her hands shaking as she pointed a manicured finger at my chest. “What did you say to Grand-Charles? The corporate office just called. They’ve locked the doors to the boutique! The regional security manager arrived five minutes ago with a team of locksmiths and told my staff the lease had been terminated for non-compliance with the trust rules! I have sixty thousand dollars of fall inventory sitting on the loading dock right now!”
I didn't stop walking. I kept my eyes fixed on the corridor that led to the rear service entrance—the path that led to my small cottage at the edge of the lawn.
“Maren!” my mother barked. Her voice had lost its smooth, melodic country club modulation; it sounded sharp, brittle, and desperate, like a piece of dry glass being scraped across a brick wall. “Look at me when I am speaking to you! Your father has been on the phone with Arthur Vance for twenty minutes. Arthur says your grandfather has signed an eviction directive for this house. This house! I designed every single room in this building! I chose the marble! I chose the moldings! He cannot throw his own daughter onto the street because of a minor misunderstanding about a shopping trip!”
I stopped at the edge of the kitchen. I turned slowly, balancing Lily’s weight on my hip, and looked at the two women who had spent five years treating my daughter like an uninvited guest at their table.
“It wasn't a minor misunderstanding, Mother,” I said. My voice was very quiet, very clear, and completely devoid of the old, submissive cadence they expected from the widow in the cottage. “Blair left a five-year-old child alone in a public electronics aisle because she wanted to teach her a lesson about Grand-Charles’s will. You laughed. You said it was good for her.”
“She was safe!” Sylvia screamed, her hand slamming down onto the quartz counter with a sharp, hollow slap. “Target has security! Graham knows the chief of police! We could have had the whole thing cleared up with a single phone call before dinner! But you went behind our backs to that old man! You’ve been plotting this since David died, haven't you? You’ve been using that child to worm your way into his estate because you couldn't make a success of your own life!”
My father stepped out of the corridor then. He looked at me, his eyes wide and dark under his graying brows. He looked older than sixty, his shoulders slumped inside his tailored linen jacket, his hands resting on his briefcase as if he were trying to find something solid to hold onto in a room that was spinning.
“Maren,” he said. His voice was low, carrying the old, courtroom gravity that had always made me feel like I was six years old again, standing in front of his big desk in the library. “Your grandfather is eighty-eight years old. His mind... it isn't what it used to be. He’s reacting out of emotion. You need to call him back. You need to tell him that Lily is home, that she’s safe, and that Blair made a foolish mistake that has been handled within the family. If this eviction order goes through to the registry on Monday morning, it will ruin my standing with the senior partners. It will be in the local business logs by Wednesday.”
I looked at my father—the man who had walked out the sliding glass door because he didn't want to hear his daughter being abandoned.
“The order has already been logged into the electronic registry, Dad,” I said softly. “Grand-Charles doesn't use the weekend as an excuse for delay. He signed the digital instrument ten minutes ago from his terminal on the Battery.”
Blair let out another high, ragged sob, dropping back down onto the stairs and burying her face in her linen knees. “My shop... my beautiful shop... everything is gone, Mom. All my friends... what am I going to tell them on Monday? That my grandfather locked me out because of Maren’s kid?”
My mother didn't cry. She took two steps toward me, her eyes narrowing until they looked like two small, cold pieces of flint embedded in her gray face.
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“You ungrateful little bitch,” she whispered, her voice dropping into a register that was so toxic the air seemed to turn cold between us. “We let you live in the cottage. We gave you David’s old insurance settlement. We let you eat at our table every Sunday. And you bring the state inspectors into our lives? You bring the social services to my front door?”
“The social services will be here on Monday morning, Mother,” I said, turning my back on her to open the door to the rear porch. “I suggest you make sure the kitchen is clean. Officer Miller said they’re very particular about the domestic environment of families where neglect has been logged.”
