The Twelfth Child (Serendipity #1)(8)

I had a crock of leftover chicken soup in the refrigerator, so I heated some of that and we had ourselves an early lunch; then for dessert we ate the two blueberry muffins from Dunkin Donuts. There was something about Destiny’s company that seemed to make ordinary food a lot tastier. When lunch was finished, she went down into the basement, cobwebs and all, and lugged up the table and chairs by her lone self. I helped a tiny bit once she got the stuff halfway up the stairs, mostly just by guiding the legs of the table around the corners as she heaved and hauled. If she told me once, she told me half a dozen times how happy she was to have such nice things for her house. Anybody else might have mentioned the burn hole in the arm of the chair, but not Destiny; she just went on and on about how lovely it would look in the corner of her living room. “It’s the perfect place to sit and read,” she said and that’s when I fetched the floor lamp out of that back bedroom and handed it to her.

“No sense in you straining your eyes,” I said. “Anyway, this lamp belongs with that chair.” One by one she carted those things across the street and into her house. Everything except the overstuffed chair, it was too heavy for her to carry all that distance; so she wheeled it across the street on my trash-can dolly. That stuff was nothing more than a few scraps of furniture; but Destiny was happy and excited as a kid on Christmas morning. The odd thing was that I had the same happy feeling; anybody might think it was something contagious and I’d caught a case of zippidy-do-da from her. As for me, I knew that’s where it came from.

I never had any such feeling with Elliott, although he was supposedly a blood relative. His great granddaddy was my papa; a fact which in and of itself would have been enough to turn me against the boy, even if he didn’t have such a pricklish personality. He sure wasn’t related to Mama; she had a sweet disposition. Elliott’s great grandma was Papa’s first wife, a woman who died in 1881—almost thirty years before Papa married Mama. For the longest time, I never even knew Elliott existed and to this day I wish it had stayed that way. He came nosing around after Will sold the farm; then after Will died and Elliott found out I’d gotten all of the inheritance money, he started coming to see me. He’d show up every once in a while, just often enough to remind me that he was a relative—someone who maybe ought to be in for a cut of the pie. Anybody with half an eyeball could see it was the money he was looking to latch onto; he sure didn’t care a thing about me. Not once did Elliott offer to so much as wheel out the trash bins, let alone clean the toilet or take me for a Sunday afternoon drive. No, his visits usually lasted about fifteen or twenty minutes, then he’d have someplace else he had to dash off to. Well, it certainly didn’t bother me; I can’t say I enjoyed his company anyway. I certainly never watched out the window hoping he’d come by, the way I did with Destiny.

Judge Kensington never got to see that side of Elliott; all he heard was that slick-tongued story about an unfortunate nephew who had his inheritance swindled away. Nobody thought to tell Judge Kensington that Destiny was the one who’d call up and ask if I needed a quart of milk or loaf of bread when she was going to the store. He also never got to see the happy look in the girl’s eyes whenever I gave her some little thing to brighten up that empty house of hers.

I sure as hell would tell him the truth, if I were able.





The Hard Years



In the spring of 1923, when a number of the Valley’s farmers moved off to places where there was work in factories and a man could make a decent living, the Lannigan family dug deeper into the parched earth. Livonia had a vegetable garden that for years had been plentiful, but this particular summer the string beans withered on the vine, the blackberries didn’t grow at all and the yams were small as hen’s eggs. William’s patience was shorter than ever and at times even young Will’s lack of attention would be enough to set him off. “Damn it, boy, you’re gonna grow up stupider than a mule!” he’d shout and then tear into a God-awful rage over some piddling thing such as the proper way to pitch a forkful of hay.

“Fussing at the children won’t make the crops grow better,” Livonia would say but she could just as well have saved her breath.

It happened that summer, on a Tuesday morning when the air was so thick and heavy it clogged a person’s nose just to breathe, the awful animosity between Abigail Anne and her papa got to be full blown. It was the same Tuesday two milk cows were laboring to birth calves. William had been out in the barn since suppertime the day before. One of the heifers had slid down the chute like greased lightning and was already suckling on its mama but William’s best milker had a breech calf damned and determined not to make its way into the world. Right after breakfast, Livonia sent young Will to the barn, “Give your papa a hand,” she’d told him; but when the second cow took to bellowing like her guts was being torn out of her, the boy got sick and came scurrying back to the house with his face green as early meadow grass.

“Please don’t make me go back, Mama,” he said. “That cow’s suffering something awful. She’s gonna die. I can’t just stand there and watch.”

“You’re not supposed to watch. You’re supposed to help.”

“I can’t. I just plain can’t.”

“I can, Mama!” Abigail Anne piped up.

“You’ll do no such thing,” Livonia told her. “You stay in this house and leave your papa alone. He’s got troubles enough this morning.”