Enith Conner wobbled through whispy caffeinated clouds back to her table, a steaming porcelain saucer and cup of Darjeeling White balanced in one hand, her cane in another, and sat across from the young, beady-eyed lawyer who’d told her she was now a millionaire.
He mopped an impossibly high forehead with a napkin, and Enith regarded the now sweat-transparent edges of the brown, proudly “80% Recycled!” material with carefully disguised disgust.
“A million dollars.” Enith took a sip of Darjeeling. That felt good, the trickle of warmth down the throat on a chilly Spring day. She’d squeezed three packs of honey and several sugars in, much to the delight of a little pre-schooler who’d regarded her with awe and proceeded to get yelled at by his mother for dumping five packets of sugar into *his* tea.
Garth would yell at her if he saw her doing that. Too much sugar. Would ruin her figure.
He’d yell at her for coddling the dog, and letting it up onto the bed. Yell at her for not getting the car turned around ready for the morning. He’d grab her cane and shake it.
“One day,” he’d say. “You’ll see you married up. You’ll see. I’m going to do something amazing, and you’ll be so happy you married me.”
And he never believed that she didn’t care.
She’d never minded drinking only tea at the Twisted Whisk, as the three dollars to upgrade to a flavored latte with cold foam with two pumps of espresso was always tantalizingly out of the family budget’s reach.
“Mrs. Conner?” the nervous lawyer asked. He had almost aquamarine eyes, so pale blue they looked diluted. When he wasn’t nervous, they appeared watery. Garth had shit-brown eyes. And sometimes Enith wondered if just having a different eye color would be exciting enough she wouldn’t mind the way he grunted at night and finished way too soon, then rolled over to sleep.
She used to think he hated her. But after some years of thinking about it, she realized the person he truly hated was himself.
But he’d been fun in the beginning, she thought. The bad boy her genteel, educated family couldn’t stand.
He’d rattled her something good, back when their skin was smooth in the way youth couldn’t imagine they’d one day lose to the damage of time and tyranny of gravity. Back when they’d been muscular from basketball and cheerleading, and they’d splashed through the streams back behind the Burkholder farm and tickled each other on a hot boulder while soaking in the sun.
They’d never wore hats or used sunscreen. Garth had to have a growth scraped off the top of his head last summer. Scared the shit out of him. He’d been up all night sobbing in her lap. Scared of dying before he’d proven himself.
Nothing to prove.
She’d decorated the Selector 78 double-wide they lived in with local artists, had Nephew Jim paint the interior, and last year Ray Lamb ripped up the floors to put in underfloor heating he’d gotten cheap out of some new development up in Montmart when the owners changed their mind. She learned how to make a ham leg last a week, could whip a stew up out of a bare cupboard, and could field dress a deer (Garth didn’t have the stomach for it, when he went out hunting he always mysteriously missed his shot). The pickup was an old HiLux frame with a new motor and transmission dropped in by Lucky’s Garage, and the garden Enith kept out back provided most of their vegetables. She liked to can.
“I’ll make your family wish they’d never disowned you. You’ll be able to stand proud when you see them in town,” he told her.
She never thought much about the family. Her therapist said that was for the best. The town wondered why Enith left a mansion on the edge of town to live in the trailer park, but the right people knew why.
And all you need in life are people who take you as you are, Enith felt. If the basics were covered, a life that you were met where you were was a kind and sustainable life.
Sometimes she missed Paris, though, or weekends in Vail. Skiing had been fun, but, she tapped her cane unconsciously, it wasn’t like she’d be shredding moguls.
She could go to Paris on a million dollars left to her from some distant uncle.
Hell, she could buy the family mansion. Nephew Jim said they were now so over-leveraged the whole thing was about to come down. A house of cards.
Garth never understood that. The crime of an unfair education and life in a world that didn’t deal with old money, or big money.
“It’s all a facade,” she’d tell him. “The whole thing.”
But he wanted to give her the life she ‘deserved.’
Deserve’s got nothing to do with it, as Clint Eastwood (a man who made squinting look good, and he had such green eyes) famously said. But a life out of that mansion, away from those broken, dangerous people, that was all she’d wanted.
Shady Acres Park, even with the meth, screaming, Billy dying in that single-wide fire, was all she’d wanted. Because it took her away from Connor House, where they slowly sucked the life out of her.
“You should leave him, he’s not good for you,” Jenny Beaumont told her just last week.
“There are far worse things out there than Garth.”
Garth was predictable, Garth was handleable. Garth never lay a finger on her.
He was a broken man, but he wasn’t a bad man.
Living in that leaky old cabin, he sat with his brothers in the only heated room in winter, and would look out through a gap in the plywood they had for windows, and a tear in the plastic that kept the heat in, to watch the bright lights of Conner Mansion.
It must have been warm there, he told her.
Only the air was, she’d said.
He had his brothers, and his parents, in the room with him. They’d fought the cold and emptiness together.
She’d been alone.
“When I had the accident, every day my husband sat with me. We had nothing,” Enith said to the lawyer. She wished she could remember his name, he’d told it to her, but she’d always been bad with new faces and new names. The benefit of a small town, she didn’t have to. “And all he did was tell me how sorry he was that he couldn’t do more, that he didn’t have the best nurses, or doctors. So he did his best to be all that for me. To prove himself.”
Enith stood up.
The lawyer gaped up at her. She knew this was his one shot to be on a retainer for a contract this large. He shut his eyes so tight Enith thought the vein on his forehead, just over his nose, looked like a sickly winter tree.
He could sense what was coming, and he looked sick about it.
“All is not lost,” Enith reassured him as she picked her cane off the back of the little wooden chair. “Draw up the paperwork to donate it to a charity, and draw up your fees for managing the process. You can still make your bones.”
His watery, pale eyes reappeared, excitement, hope, and confusion all written across his face.
“Mrs. Conner, may I ask–“
Enith leaned forward over her cane. “What will a million do for me? It’ll take Garth from me. He won’t work as hard. He won’t bend his knees to me. He won’t be around. And I want him right where he is, how he is. He’s all I wanted, our life is all I wanted. I have him. He’s mine. And if you give me this money, I’ll lose everything I ever worked for.”
The young lawyer would never understand.
But he hadn’t lived in the icy, dead halls of the Conner Mansion.
Enith let the coffee shop door shut behind her with a loud ding from the bell just above the jamb. She stood on Main Street, looked past the bank’s weather sign (45F it read, and then 3:46PM), then wrapped her scarf around a light jacket.
If she splurged a little bit on a good cut, she could have the roast done by the time the game finished. Humble cooking, but warm and filling.
And she’d lean back and listen to Garth’s plans to move them up and the world. Plans that would never ripen because he was sitting here with her drinking a Natty Light after watching a game. Hours spent being human, and alive.
Enith smiled, and started to wobble down the sidewalk.