Just Like Home(22)
There were at least fifty of them in there, crowding the shelves—tall glass bottles with silver caps, each one labeled with a smiling cartoon lemon.
“Jesus,” Vera whispered. She grabbed a bottle and used a fingernail to tear off the plastic seal on the lid. She swallowed her rising guilt: she’d been here for over twenty-four hours, and she didn’t actually know if her mother had eaten anything in that time. She’d said she had a system, but who knew what that actually meant? “Do you want something more substantial than this?” she called, staring down the rows and rows of glass bottles. “I could get you a … a meal replacement shake, or maybe some … broth?”
Daphne’s voice called back from the other room, clear and piping. “No. Lemonade is all I can really taste anymore,” she said. “And it’s not like I’m ever hungry, anyway.”
It didn’t seem right—but then again, Daphne was dying. Vera didn’t suppose that proper nutrition really played a role in her mother’s life anymore. She carried the cold bottle of lemonade back into the dining room, set out a row of little waxed paper cups on the sliding table, and decanted the lemonade into them.
“You’re good at that,” James observed. He was seated in a dining chair, pulled right up to the side of the bed, leaning all the way forward, his elbows denting the covers where they rested. “I always spill half of it.”
“I’ve had practice,” Vera murmured.
It did feel grotesquely close to pouring a row of shots, the way she had for the four months she’d spent tending bar at a hotel in Atlanta several years before. That job hadn’t been so bad—no one looks too closely at a bartender’s face, and the tips had been good. She’d even started to make a few friends. They were the kinds of friends who like you when you’re in front of them and don’t think about you if you’re out of sight, which was just what Vera had wanted.
The job and the friendships had lasted right up until the fateful, predictable shift when one of those true-crime-enthusiast types had walked into the hotel. She had a podcast, that one had said, and she wanted an interview with Vera Crowder, and could Vera confirm or deny Hammett Duvall’s more recent claims about a possible haunting in the Crowder House?
It wasn’t that her manager hadn’t considered all the reasons she might be worth keeping around; it was that her manager didn’t think they added up to outweigh the combined troubles of her too-recognizable face and her famous last name.
Vera capped the half-empty lemonade bottle, gave the cap two twists to seal it back tightly. She kept her eyes on her fingers, but she still caught movement in her periphery. Daphne was picking up one of those little cups in her shaking fingers, sipping it with pursed, cracked lips. “How are things coming along, James?”
“Incredibly well,” their guest answered, handing Vera a plate with a wobbly rectangle of lasagna perched at its center. “I’m really getting somewhere. This house … it’s been waiting for someone to come along who could understand it, I think.”
Vera lowered herself into a dining chair opposite James’s seat. There was no cushion on it, and the bare wood was unforgiving under her thighs. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she snapped.
She didn’t know why it made her so angry, the idea of him understanding the house.
The idea of the house needing him.
“It’s all part of my work,” he said in placating tones that made Vera’s blood itch. “I’m here to commune with the house so it can grant me permission to express its trauma through the medium of—”
“Nevermind,” Vera said, that anger refusing to ebb. “I don’t need to hear this. You’re exactly like your father and that’s all I need to know.”
“James is a painter, not a writer,” Daphne interjected. “But you’re not entirely wrong, Vera. He’s just as insightful as Hammett was. And just as charming.”
James smiled at that as if he’d expected her to say it. “And what about you, Vera? How’s your … project?”
He wasn’t responding to Vera’s anger at all, and that made it so much worse. She bit the inside of her cheek, forced herself to take a slow breath. She would not be the kind of person who picked a fight with Hammett Duvall’s son. She would be better than that.
Daphne cocked her head a little too far to one side. “Yes, how is it coming along, sorting through my life and deciding what to keep?”
“Slow and steady,” she said, a phrase she couldn’t ever remember having used before in earnest. “A little at a time, I figure. That’ll do the job.”
“Not too slow, I hope,” Daphne said between sips of lemonade. “Only so much time before I’m not here to answer questions anymore.”
“And only so much time before I’m supposed to be gone, too,” James intoned. There was red sauce smudged at one corner of his mouth. “I’d love to be a help to you, Vera. Truly, it would be my honor. I think I have a lot of insight to offer. I could help you understand this place better. The resonances—”
“You have something, right here,” Vera said, pointing at her own mouth. The pink tip of James’s tongue quested out between his lips until it found the sauce. She looked down at her plate, her stomach twisting. “And I don’t think I’ll need any help, but thank you.”