Good Riddance(2)

“A jury? Are you going to call a lawyer? Or 911? I’d like to hear that conversation.”

“Why contact me in the first place?” I asked. “You found the yearbook. Why not just keep it? I’d never know.”

“Because I wanted to go about this in the most professional manner possible. Believe me, intellectual property can be a real shitstorm. We should talk—face-to-face, I mean. I want to get this settled before I leave for my writers’ retreat.”

Get what settled? So far, it was just a question of the keeping or the giving back. In case she thought she had leverage—that she’d expose my mother’s poison pen—I said, “You realize that the owner of the book is dead and it’s too late to embarrass her?”

“Embarrass her? I’m stunned you would say that! Your mother wasn’t writing for her own amusement. There’s no question she had a future audience in mind.”

Did she? What audience? Who else could possibly care? “I don’t know what you want from me,” I said.

“Permission.”

Was I catching on? Not yet. She asked again if we could talk face-to-face. I said, “Is this really necessary.”

“Be there in a jiff,” she said.

She rang my doorbell forty minutes later, finding me newly annoyed with her interpretation of a “jiff.” Her breathing was labored from the short walk, no doubt attributable to her extreme bulk. I recognized her—having shared elevator rides or exchanged nods in the mailroom—due to her colorful, bigger-than-life appearance and persona. She was large, wide, round-faced, with black curls that tumbled around her face, eyeglasses upswept, employing rhinestones. Her outfit could be called a dress if one were kind. It had no shape, only volume, in blocks of red, yellow, and black. She might be forty; she might be fifty. I couldn’t tell.

“Sorry it took so long, but I didn’t want to come empty-handed.” She passed me an open shoebox lined messily with wax paper that contained several layers of cookies. “I figured who doesn’t like chocolate chip? They should be cooling on a rack.”

No yearbook in sight, however. “Cookies,” I said. “Really, you shouldn’t have.”

“They’re Pillsbury slice and bake. I always keep a package in my fridge.”

“Come in,” I said.

As soon as she stepped into my living room, I could see she was puzzled. Is there another room? Who lives like this? She looked around, asked if the hallway . . . went anywhere?

“To the bedroom and bath. And my kitchen, of course.”

“It’s very . . . cute. What do you do?”

Even though I’d progressed no further than registration, I said, “I’m studying to be a chocolatier.”

“Where?”

“Online.”

She couldn’t have looked less impressed. “Are there jobs doing that? And do they pay?”

With that, I officially categorized Geneva as a boundary-challenged chatterbox whom I didn’t want to be chummy with. “Haven’t we just met?” I asked.

“I know! Very bad habit, asking personal questions. It’s not so much nosiness but a failure to know what’s personal and what’s just conversation. I get it from my mother, who thinks it’s perfectly polite to ask a near stranger why they didn’t have children or how much they paid for their co-op or how much they tipped the doorman or, once . . . oh, never mind. I need more people who can tell me when I’ve crossed the line.”

We were still standing. I motioned toward the couch and said I was going to put some of these cookies on a plate.

“No! The cookies are for you,” she said. “I have that highly annoying type 2 diabetes. If I lose weight, they tell me I’ll shake it. No cookie, but do you have vodka?”

I did. I poured us each a glass and returned. She raised hers, and said, “To your mother, the most committed yearbook advisor who ever lived.”

After my half-hearted clink, I said, “I don’t understand why you’d want someone else’s yearbook from a class she didn’t graduate in.”

“I ate it up! It’s fascinating. It’s got a point of view and—what the fuck!—an attitude! I can’t wait to hear more about her.”

“Such as?”

“Husband, marriage, interests, hobbies, wardrobe. Crushes, boyfriends, lovers?”

“Okay. This just got creepy. I’m her daughter. She left it to me in her will, and now I’m asking for it back.”

“Why?”

Why? Did I not just say why?

“It tells a story,” Geneva continued. “Correction: It tells a hundred stories. I remember the exact moment I knew this had my name on it: next to one girl’s picture, a pretty brunette with a perfect flip, under ‘Future,’ she had ‘beautician.’ Your mother drew an arrow across the page to a good-looking guy, thin face, Italian last name, whom she married. What do you think his future was?”

“I have no idea.”

“Ballroom dance. Guess how that turned out, at least according to your mother’s note. You can bet the ‘D’ stands for divorced and the ‘H’ is for homosexual.”

I said, “No, it didn’t. ‘H’ meant ‘home’ or ‘here’—that they still lived in Pickering.”