The Excellent Lombards(64)

For quite some time there had been no talk of the transfer of assets and I had come to believe that May Hill had changed her mind. Or anyway, surely the decision was far off. Certainly she would never make any legal alterations in apple season, not when we were all caught up in the harvest. It was something so futuristic and far-fetched there didn’t seem any need to try to bring up the subject with William. When you thought about it in a realistic way it made no sense that Philip “Plato” Lombard, the Renaissance man, was going to commit to a lifetime in our burg and our home.

I therefore wasn’t prepared down at the library one afternoon when Dolly came through the door. She didn’t so much approach the checkout desk as march up to it, the color in her cheeks unusually high. No doubt there was going to be a news flash about Adam, our cousin now at Pomona College in California. He’d gotten a full ride including a travel stipend. Surfing had become an interest. And whales. I was sitting at a nook nearby cleaning DVDs with a shammy cloth. Never had I seen Dolly look so well and so pretty. There was the girlish flush and the tinsel effect of the shiny threads of silver in her dark hair. I smiled eagerly at her but she paid no attention to me, standing firm at the counter.

“How are you, Mrs. Lombard?” my mother as always said so cheerfully to the relation.

“I’m not going to say my opinion.” That’s what Dolly said. No Amanda or Adam reports, no Muellenbach intelligence, nothing about the sisters’ diets or one of the husbands shooting his foot accidently.

My mother understood the topic. She spoke quietly. “I’m not sure anybody realizes how much of his strength Jim has lost in the last few years, Dolly. We need this change. We need it to be legally binding.”

Dolly began to hum. She had perhaps come into the library to complain and maybe hadn’t expected my mother to have a point of view.

“I’m saying something,” my mother said. Never before, as far as I knew, had she spoken to Dolly in that warning tone. “I’m telling you an important piece of information, Mrs. Lombard.”

“May Hill has no right to give up her property to that boy,” Dolly cried. “That boy could go off tomorrow, for all we know. He could sell it to someone else. He could lose interest. For all we know he could ruin us.”

Yes, yes, it was so.

And yet my mother said, “May Hill has every right to transfer her acres to Philip. She has every legal right.”

“No one cares about my opinion.” Dolly looked as if she might burst into tears. “No one. I’m nothing. All these years and no one listens to me.”

“That’s not true—”

“You sit up here in the library. What,” Dolly asked, “do you know?”

My mother was startled.

“You sit up here,” Dolly repeated.

“Excuse me?” my mother said, a foolish question, a nothing question.

Dolly muttered, “You don’t work in the business.”

That was a fact—what could my mother say?

“I know I don’t, Dolly,” she nonetheless said. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t understand the dynamics.”

“I’ve killed myself on that cold floor in the sorting shed. Standing for ten hours, day after day, season after season. Pret-near killed myself.”

“Everyone appreciates your work—”

“You,” Dolly said fiercely, “have no right to an opinion.”

My mother pressed her hand to her lips. Dolly wiped her eye.

“I do have rights,” my mother said then in a very calm voice. “We all do. We have rights, you and I, for some of the same reasons. Because of marital property, for one. Because of family feeling, and there are different reasons, too.” Her voice was lulling, smooth, so quiet. “For instance, for my part, the chunk of money that came to me at my parents’ death, most of it has gone into the farm. You might not know that. I’m guessing you don’t.” My mother pulled her thin graying hair into a ponytail with one hand and held it there. “I didn’t mind the contribution, but don’t tell me I know nothing, or have no rights, or that I’ve just been sitting around. Please don’t do that.”

Money was involved? My heart was doing its pricking, my hands cold. The buzz in the ears. Dolly was the stunned one now, staring at my mother. She looked as if a poison dart had pierced her breast; she looked that stricken. My mother, though, seemed not to notice the wild hurt expression shaping up, the little gimlet shine of Dolly’s narrowed eyes and the bit-by-bit collapse of the doughy face.

“I never wanted,” my mother went on—

Stop! I wanted to scream.

“—it to cause bad feeling, our putting cash into the operation, Jim and I.”

SHUT UP!

“I only say so now because it’s my sitting around over here that has made some of the capital improvements possible.”

My mother let go of the ponytail. Time, it seemed, skipped a beat or two, a stillness in the room, no tick of the heart. Did Nellie Lombard have any idea what she’d done? What you’d know instantly if you’d been in the audience? The hands on the clock then moved, the filter in the aquarium remembered to purr. A child shouted on the playground. Did she have a clue that Mrs. Lombard and Mrs. Lombard could never be jolly or even cordial again? The friendship over now that my mother had laid out what had been a fine secret charitable thing, now that she had declared herself the martyr. Dolly was reduced, her pride smashed. For once in Mrs. Sherwood Lombard’s life she was unable to say even one word.