The Art of Inheriting Secrets(18)

I picked it up. Yes! In Letchworth now. Back in hour or 2.

K. Text when you’re back.

K.

Perfect. I could get some kind of idea of what a rescue would look like, and he would be a good guide. “Thanks,” I said to the girl on my way out.

She waved. “Bye now.”

Out in the shopping center, I looked for a clothing shop that might give me ideas of what to wear to the garden party. I only realized I was trying to imagine what my mother would wear when I entered one clothing store and saw the quality of the fabric and turned around and walked right back out. Nice enough, but my mother had had very high standards. She’d always dressed exquisitely, simply, in very good fabrics—wool trousers and crisp blouses, nothing ever slightly stained or ill fitting. Even when she painted, she wore a long smock that kept her clothes tidy.

She had, however, disliked wearing shoes. It was one of the quirks that made her so adorable, her taste for very soft, warm socks that she wore inside all the time. In the summertime, she puttered around her garden in bare feet, singing quietly as she snipped the heads of dead flowers, plucked weeds from the roots. Her skin was fair, so she wore a big straw hat to shade her face, but her hands—her hands were always tanned and stained and entirely unladylike.

I smiled to myself, thinking of that, and rounded a corner. A woman in a good camel hair coat and a jaunty scarf passed me, leaving a trail of her scent. It was my mother’s perfume, Joy, but it also held the faint undertone of her hair—something I didn’t even realize I associated with my mother until it slammed me, breaking my heart afresh.

I had to sit down on a bench, scrambling in my bag for my sunglasses. And tissues. I bent my head so that my hair would hide my face and tried to discreetly wipe my dripping nose, my watering eyes, all the while trying to breathe through the wave of pain.

Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom.

After a moment, it eased, as always. I looked around to see if anyone was staring at me, but of course, nobody was. It was England. Everyone would give me my privacy even if I were sobbing loudly in the middle of the place. A relief, really.

I felt her with me, my mother, and took a breath, talking to her softly. “You’d just die if I did this with you, right? Die, haha—get it?”

She would have laughed. I knew it.

Taking in a bracing breath, I righted myself and looked from one end to the other of the center. I would not find what I was looking for here and would likely have to go to London for that kind of clothing. In the meantime, I probably had something that would get me through.

Texting Peter as I walked, I headed for the parking lot. In the car, I had a sudden yen. “Is there an art store in town, Peter?” I could pick up a better sketchbook and a few pens and maybe even a small box of watercolors. It would give me something to do and a way to capture memories.

After lunch, Samir picked me up in a small dark-blue car, and I realized I’d been thinking a guy who worked in the building trades would drive a truck, as Tony did. It was pouring again, so I dashed from the door of the hotel through the door he’d flung open, yelping a little as I landed and tugged the door closed behind me.

He grinned, those black curls tumbling around his arresting face, and I suddenly wished that he were a little older. Flustered, I blurted out, “So wet!” which was ridiculously obvious.

“My mum says England is a cold, wet, miserable country. Which is why”—he swerved easily into a faintly wider spot in the road to let a truck rumble by, approximately two and a half inches from my door, then swerved back onto the road—“she left it.”

“Where did she go?”

“Back to India. She was there until she was fourteen, and she has rheumatoid arthritis. The weather here was not good for her.”

The way he said it, his face wiped clean of all emotion, spoke volumes. “How long ago?”

“Two years.” Short, end of subject. Another car whizzed by a half inch away, and he muttered under his breath a word I couldn’t quite catch.

“Where does all this traffic come from? It’s such a small village!”

“This is the road to Tesco over in Stevenage and to the railway station in Letchworth. But really, these roads were never meant to carry so much traffic, were they? Built for wagons and”—he swung left beneath a row of trees with branches meeting overhead; in summer it would be a green tunnel, dark and deep—“horses.”

The road was paved but barely wider than the car—and again I glimpsed the forest of my mother’s paintings, mysterious and dangerous and intriguing. “My mother painted these woods endlessly.” I peered out. “Endlessly. Hundreds of times. Maybe thousands, in books and paintings and drawings.”

“Did she?” He glanced at me, downshifting so we could climb the steeply rising hill.

“Yeah.” Rain swashed overhead, over the windscreen, through the branches, making a humid, close cave of the car. I could smell something in his hair, elusively familiar, and thought of my breakdown at the shopping center this morning. “And never told me that it was a real place! I’m mad at her about that.”

“Fair enough.” The car rocked a bit, bumping our shoulders together. “Sorry. It’s the rough and dirty way to get here. If you want to walk, this is the way you’ll come from the village.”

“Not on that busy road?”