Good Riddance(45)

“Is that so?” Geneva asked. “Pardon me for questioning your truthfulness, but what was this thing she had for this particular group of students?”

“That’s easy. She taught there. And was the yearbook advisor. This one was dedicated to her.”

“And how old was she in relation to the graduates?”

I knew this figure by heart but pretended it was nothing I’d had any reason to calculate before this moment. I said, “About five years’ difference.”

“Older?”

“Yes, of course, older. She was their teacher.”

“What else was she to them?”

“Excuse me?”

“I think you know what I’m driving at.”

“I don’t have a clue.”

“What else was she to them in a personal sense. Outside school?”

I said, “I wasn’t born yet when she was their advisor. I only know that the dedication was a great honor for her.”

I wrote on the same scratch pad, Stop it.

Of course she had to report that I’d scribbled a note. “What do you want me to stop, Daphne?”

She wanted to play dirty? I said, “You stole this yearbook! I’ve been trying to get it back for months!”

“I stole it? Or did I find it in the trash?”

“That was my mistake. I recycled it, but as soon as I found out you’d absconded with it, I wanted it back, and don’t say ‘Finders keepers,’ because I don’t think that would hold up in court.”

Next, Geneva was talking to her audience. “Why would the family be so afraid of it falling into the hands of a producer—”

That provoked me to yell out, “Who calls herself a producer on the basis of one documentary!”

“We’ll edit that,” she said. “Aaron?”

“Got it,” said the voice in my earphones.

I had to sound calm. I had to stay on message, my own.

“Shall we go back to your mother’s appearance? Would you be willing to say she was stunning?”

I said, without any affect or feeling, “Okay, she was stunning.”

“And young when she started teaching.”

“We already covered that.”

“What are you afraid of?” Geneva asked psychiatrically.

“Nothing. I’m pissed off. I’m only here so you wouldn’t drag my widowed father into this.”

Whoops. I shouldn’t have brought up my father. Geneva pounced. “Why do you suppose she left the yearbook to you instead of her husband? Were there notes she didn’t want him to see? Or some symbols—those checkmarks and dots I haven’t yet translated—that were in code?” And then to her imagined future audience: “Totally fascinating.”

“Maybe to you it was. To my father, it was just a hobby of my mother’s. Like her gardening. And his following the UNH Wildcats.”

“Were they happy?” she asked.

A not-utterly-truthful “blissfully” flew out of my mouth. Still, I had to expose Geneva as a woman who couldn’t keep her word. “I agreed to be interviewed only if there were no personal questions. And that’s a very personal question.”

“Blissfull-y,” she echoed. “I see. Do you need water?”

By now, I was feeling such a rush of hatred for Geneva that my voice went squeaky. “You’ll live to regret this thing, this stupid soap opera!” And then to anyone listening: “I come from a long line of educators. Before I moved to New York, I was a Montessori teacher! This isn’t right. You never met my mother. You can’t judge a person by the dots and adjectives she writes in a yearbook!”

To Geneva’s credit, she didn’t cut my final diatribe. She also left in the sound of my chair hitting the floor as I charged out of the booth. “Are you wondering, like I am, why June Winter Maritch’s daughter is so angry?” she mused. Then she repeated her own theory that my mother had a dying wish, unconscious or not, to share the yearbook with the world.





22


I Took It Upon Myself



Of course, I kept listening to the episodes, one per week, airing on Sunday nights. Geneva managed to enlist a woman from our fiftieth reunion table. Geneva added sound effects, pages flipping. “Is this you?” she asked. “I see that your yearbook wish for your future says surgical nurse. Did that happen?”

“Let me see that,” the woman said. I deduced it was the sharper of the two pep squad members. Barbara? Rosalie? No, Roseanne. Geneva doesn’t use her name. “Now, about Miss Winter—do you know what the selection process was for the yearbook being dedicated to her? Was a vote taken? Was it the whole class or maybe just the yearbook staff?”

“I didn’t work on the yearbook,” said the woman.

“What’s your best guess?”

“Why does it mattah?”

“It matters because I’m researching every aspect of this puzzle. Was there a relationship between the yearbook staff, possibly an individual, an editor of the yearbook, and Miss Winter?”

“How the heck would I know?”

Yay, pep squad member, I thought. And what pathetic preinterviewing Geneva had done, if at all.

“Let’s move on,” I heard. “Miss Winter, now Mrs. Mah-RICH . . .” Did Geneva just pronounce my last name like that, Mah-RICH? Roseanne doesn’t correct her. The question being asked is whether this classmate can decode the dots and checkmarks that appear next to certain graduates’ pictures. Geneva added, “These symbols are only next to boys’ pictures. Well, they’re seventeen and eighteen. I should call them ‘men.’”