The Silent Sister(12)
“Not at all.” I smiled. “The pipes will be yours to do what you want with them.”
We chatted a little while longer and then I walked back to my car. I felt like Santa Claus. Not a bad feeling.
But as I drove away, it wasn’t their smiling faces or their grief over my father I carried with me, but the certainty in Verniece Kyle’s face when she told me it was my adoption that had inspired their son’s.
* * *
Late that afternoon when the weather began to cool off, I put on my running shoes and headed downstairs. I’d taken a nap when I got home from the RV park. A sure sign of depression, I thought. But the truth was, Verniece Kyle’s chatter about me being adopted had unsettled me in a way I couldn’t quite explain. Of course she had no idea what she was talking about, but at a time when I already felt lost and lonely, her suggestion that my one and only beloved and mourned family wasn’t my biological family was enough to leave me empty inside.
When I reached the living room, I noticed the mounting stack of bills on the table by the front door. I’d brought all the bills that had been forwarded to me in Durham, but I hadn’t even looked at them. And now there was a handful more. I pictured the electricity suddenly being cut off to the house, the lights going out on me any minute.
Giving in to the worry, I picked up the envelopes and carried them to my father’s desk. The rolltop was up and I could see Daddy’s checkbook poking out from one of the many cubbyholes. I opened all the envelopes and laid the bills one on top of the other, then took a look at his check register, hoping he was better than I was at writing everything down so I could see how much money was in the account. The register was up to date as of a week or so before he died. If he had any automatic bill payments not reflected in the checkbook, though, I could be in trouble. I’d go to his bank tomorrow and look at his accounts with someone there before I started writing checks.
I was about to set down the register when I noticed the name Tom Kyle on one of the lines. My father had written him a check for five hundred dollars. What for? I wondered. I glanced through his register. The checks all appeared to have been written to utilities except for a monthly five-hundred-dollar check to Tom. Did my father owe him money? Was he paying him back for … what? I could think of no reason he’d be giving him money. There was only one way to find out, but I didn’t see the rush. I’d ask Tom when I went back to the park to check out my father’s RV.
I looked at the stack of bills again, this time with a sigh. One task of a thousand. I pulled the rolltop over the desk, covering the bills and the checkbook, making them disappear. They could wait one more day, I thought as I got to my feet. Then I left the house, walked down the porch steps, and started to run.
6.
The real estate office where Jeannie Lyons worked was only a few blocks from the house, so I stopped in after my run the following morning. It was a hole-in-the-wall building, with pictures of homes for sale taped to the narrow front windows. Inside, a young woman with stick-straight blond hair sat at one of two desks and she gave me a broad, do-you-want-to-buy-something smile when I walked in.
“Good morning!” She got to her feet, holding her hand out to me.
“Hi,” I said, shaking her hand. “I’m looking for Jeannie Lyons.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
I shook my head. “I just need to talk to her for a minute,” I said, although that was a stupid statement. Telling her my father was leaving her—someone I barely knew and hadn’t heard him mention since my mother’s death—the piano and ten thousand dollars would probably take more than a minute. “I’m the daughter of an old friend of hers,” I said.
“Hold on a sec,” the woman said, and she disappeared through a door in the rear of the office.
A moment later, Jeannie came through the same door. She was only slightly familiar to me. I’d been eighteen the last time I saw her, which was at my mother’s memorial service. That day was such a haze to me that I couldn’t really recall who was there. But I remembered Jeannie’s eyes. They were enormous and an intense blue beneath deep brown bangs. Her bob was a bit edgy, one side tucked behind her ear, and although I knew she’d been the same age as my mother, she looked younger than my mother ever had. It was hard to believe she was sixty-four. I could tell right away that she knew who I was, but her smile looked uncertain. She held out her hand as she walked toward me. “Riley,” she said.
“Mrs. Lyons.” I nodded and shook her hand.
“Oh, call me Jeannie,” she said, squeezing my hand with a warmth that didn’t reach her face. “I’m very sorry about your father.”
“Thank you.” There was a moment of awkward silence and she looked at me expectantly. “I need to talk to you,” I said. “Do you have some time now … or I could come back tomorrow?”
She glanced at the clock on the wall. It was eleven-fifteen. “I have some calls to make right now,” she said. “How about we meet for lunch? I’ll make reservations at Morgan’s Tavern for noon. Would that work?”
“Yes, perfect.” That would give me a chance to run home and change. “I’ll see you then.”
* * *
I was first to arrive in the restaurant and I gave the hostess Jeannie’s name. She put me in a side room that was otherwise empty, and I couldn’t help but wonder if Jeannie had told her we needed privacy.