The Last House on the Street(75)

“So you’re Reed’s daughter?” she asks after a pause.

“I am.”

She shakes her head. “Ellie missed the boat there.” She brushes a bit of lint from her navy-blue skirt. “Your daddy was a fine boy and she was a stupid girl to let him get away.”

“Oh, well,” I say lightly. “It’s hard to know what someone’s relationship is like from the outside.” I don’t bother to mention that I wouldn’t be here if Ellie and my father had stayed together.

“I don’t even know that girl.” She turns her head away from me to stare out the window.

“You mean Ellie?” I ask.

“Who else?” she says. “I don’t know her. She left at twenty and came back at sixty-five. What loving daughter does that?”

Oh boy, I think. I have a therapy session on my hands here.

“I guess it was hard to have her so far away for so long,” I say.

“It was like not having a daughter at all,” she says. “But frankly, there were many days I was glad of it.”

“Why is that?” I feel nosy, but I’m curious.

“That girl,” she says with disdain, as though those two words alone answer my question.

We’re both quiet for a moment. I’m waiting for more. And it comes.

“She brought us nothing but trouble and shame,” she says. “She put other people—perfect strangers—ahead of her own family.”

“She told me she was—and still is—a civil rights worker,” I say.

Miss Pat makes a dismissive motion with her arm. “She turned her back on us,” she says. “Cost us our friends. It wasn’t like it is today. You couldn’t imagine a Black president back then. Hard to imagine it now, frankly. No one approved of what she did. I could never get back my standing in Round Hill. She didn’t care who she hurt. I don’t know how she turned out so selfish.”

I’m having a bit of trouble following her. “Do you love her?” I ask the question, flat out.

“I love Brenda,” she says with great certainty and a nod of her head. “Brenda’s been a daughter to me. She visited me at least once a week while I was in that assisted-living cesspool Buddy stuck me in. And I do love my son,” she adds hurriedly, turning toward me. “Let me assure you of that. He had no choice but to put me someplace, what with his own illness. But Brenda is a real saint. She’s my true daughter.”

“I’m glad she’s been there for you,” I say.

We fall silent for a moment. She tells me to turn right, then left. It’s a shortcut, she says. I think about the night before, when I found some newspaper articles in a file marked “Hockley Street” in Jackson’s office. There was a lighthearted article about Hockley Street’s invasive kudzu, including a photograph of what looked like an almost perfect topiary of a dinosaur. There was an article about nineteen-year-old Buddy Hockley opening his car shop. There was one about Brenda’s husband’s death, how he was brought to the hospital by Brenda, Sheriff Byron Parks, and Danny Hockley, who must have been Ellie’s father.

The final article was about Ellie joining the civil rights organization SCOPE. It’s the last few lines of that article that stick in my mind as I listen to Miss Pat malign her daughter. Eleanor Hockley had a long history of good deeds in Round Hill, the article said. When she was eleven, she nearly lost her own life when she tried unsuccessfully to save a Negro girl who’d fallen into Little Heaven Lake.

The imagery was horrible. I pictured the little girl being sucked under that murky black water. I’m going to get my property fenced off from that lake if it’s the last thing I do.

“Last night, I came across some newspaper articles my husband must have found as he researched Hockley Street,” I say. “I saw—”

“Why would your husband do that?” she asks. “Research Hockley Street?”

“Because we were moving there,” I say. Maybe she hasn’t made the connection that I’m her new neighbor. “I live in that house at the end of—”

“Oh, right.” She shakes her head. “I hoped I’d be dead by the time all that building nonsense started.”

“It’s very noisy, I know.”

“Tell your husband to come talk to me,” she says. “I can tell him anything he wants to know about Hockley Street, as well as some things he’d probably rather not know.”

My chest squeezes tight. How I wish I could send Jackson down the street to talk to her! “I’m afraid I lost my husband in an accident earlier this year,” I say.

“Oh. Right. Sorry.” She scratches her temple. “Ellie said something about that. How old was he?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“Mine made it to forty-five,” she says.

“Oh, that’s still young,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

“I blame that on Eleanor, too,” she says, and I have the feeling Ellie couldn’t win with this woman, no matter what she did. “She dragged our family down,” she says, smacking her palm on her thigh. “You don’t put other people first. You put your family first. It’s her fault Brenda got widowed at twenty years old and lost her baby. It’s her fault her father—my Danny—killed himself. That’s not a girl who loves her family. That’s a girl who loves herself.”