The Stars Are Fire(11)

“This I like,” Grace says.

Gene, not looking at her, nods, as if his mother were right. The kitchen is the place for the help. Grace doubts Merle ever visited her kitchen because she had Clodagh to cook and clean for her. When Gene visited with the children, it was Clodagh who had cookies for Claire and a perfectly warmed bottle for Tom. Clodagh, to whom Gene has given her last pay packet. What will happen to the woman?

Outside, the gardens are withering from lack of rain. Grace remembers them as glorious, the result of Merle’s expertise and Joe-the-gardener’s efforts.


Gene coaxes them out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the second floor, given over entirely to Mrs. Holland’s bedroom, dressing room, bathroom, and a piano in the turret. Grace marvels at so much space for one woman, a space much larger, she is certain, than her own home. She touches fabric and silver, writing paper and pens. She fingers necklaces hanging from an ornate mirror, a challenge that Gene doesn’t rise to.

He wants me to like it here, she thinks.

He doesn’t announce their future until they are on the third floor, inspecting the guest rooms, all of which share a bathroom with wooden fixtures and a chain pull for the toilet. Gene invites her to glance out a window in the bedroom that used to be his. The view is majestic. “You can see ships traveling from Boston to Portland from here,” he says.

Grace catches Claire by a foot before she crawls beneath a bed.

“So what do you think?” Gene asks.

“Of the house? It’s enormous.”

“About moving here.”

She has known, ever since the second floor, that Gene would ask this, and though she wants to scream an immediate no, she understands she has to tread carefully.

“It’s grand,” she says, “but it’s isolated. I don’t know who the children would play with. They can’t get off the property unless they cross the coast road and only then to rocks and sea. How will they walk to school when the time comes?”

“There’s a bus,” Gene says. “That’s how I got to school.”

“I do love the kitchen, but the house is too much for us. I’d be working day and night.”

“You already work day and night.”

“No. I don’t.”

“Well, this has to be easier in some ways,” he points out. “More room to store things.”

This seems to Grace a weak argument. What things? “Is it your idea that we would sleep downstairs and the kids would sleep up here?”

“Well, we’d have the baby with us for the first several months.”

“And Tom and Claire upstairs where we couldn’t hear them?”

Gene sniffs. Grace thinks of Rosie. Who would be her neighbor here? “Aren’t the taxes high?”

“There’s no mortgage.”

“We wouldn’t get much for the bungalow,” she says of a house that is heavily mortgaged.

“We wouldn’t need it if we lived here.”

“All our savings would go to taxes and upkeep,” she argues.

“I’ll get a raise soon.”

She sneezes. Then she sneezes again. She apologizes and sneezes a third time.

“It’s dusty up here,” Gene says. “Nothing a good clean won’t help.”

Grace had no idea she could fake a sneeze so well.


“I can’t do it,” she says. She hates the house—the Victorian dark, the fringed lampshades, the heavy mahogany furniture. The weight of the dwelling makes her hungry for air.

“I think this is my decision to make, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Grace, for God’s sake be quiet!”

Claire looks from one parent to the other. Somewhere, far away, someone is smashing a sand castle.


At her own mother’s house, after the iced tea and the peek at the layette Marjorie is knitting, her mother asks, “How are you and Gene?”

“Times are a little tough right now,” Grace says.

“Financially?”

“No.”

“Is it the stress of the new baby coming?”

“I could say yes,” Grace confesses, “but that wouldn’t be accurate.”

Her mother wets Tom’s cheek with the icy side of her glass, and he pulls away, giggling. He comes back for more. “What’s good in your life?” her mother asks.

Grace, surprised, needs to think. “I have two beautiful children.”

“And?”

“I have a house I like, a friend next door, and a washing machine.”

“And?”

“We’re all healthy.”

“And?”

Grace short-stops her mother because she knows where this is going. “And I have a husband who provides for us, who is good with the children, and who is handsome.”

She does not add that she thinks Gene is deeply troubled.


Dry turns into drought. The word is on everyone’s tongue and is spoken at least once a day. Underfoot, the grass crunches. Men digging at the side of the highway to put in a rest stop report that the top six inches of soil is dust. On the roads of Hunts Beach, vehicles kick up smothering plumes behind them and women begin again to keep the wet wash in the house for fear that tiny particles of dirt will stick to the laundry. Grace isn’t certain when the days of sunshine turn from beneficial to unnatural, but she thinks it happens near the end of September, after everyone has returned to school and many of the summer people are gone. The niggling sense of something wrong slowly turns to mild alarm. The mums and roses have withered at the edges of her yard. Grace expects the nights to be cooler, but they aren’t. For the first time in over a year, she prays for rain.