Read Online Where We Are Now by Carolyn Osborn - Free Book Online Page B

moved to California. Everybody seemed to be moving after the war was over. My first cousin Fergus came back from California to Tennessee with Aunt Lucy and Uncle Phillip. Half the people I went to school with were going to other states. Families were combining and recombining. It was a restless time.

    Six years later, when I was off at a Virginia girls’ school, I received a small box in the mail from Uncle George. He never wrote to me; I wondered if he wrote to anyone. Not until I opened the gray velvet ring box and saw the milky opal winking fire, did I know Marguerite was dead.
    I sat on the edge of my bed and cried the easy tears of the young saddened by the death of someone they had known. The next one came harder.
    My mother, restless herself in her peacetime Red Cross job, had gone to Europe. The small plane she took from Mallorca to Barcelona plunged into the sea. It may have had engine trouble. No one seemed to know what had truly happened. That flight was the first leg of her trip back to Nashville.
    Miss Kate suggested her church in Franklin for the memorial service. The idea of people standing up, one of them blowing a pitch pipe—the Church of Christ didn’t believe in musical instruments—to sing over an emptiness as vast as the drowning sea was unbearable.
    â€œNo,” I said, “we’ll do it in her church here,” and called the minister. Miss Kate might try to have her way with me, but she wouldn’t argue with a preacher.
    For once Uncle George didn’t have any say in the matter. Jean had restored Marguerite’s house, redecorated it with her own antiques as well as the ones George bought, joined a bridge club and a Methodist Church. George, as my grandfather had done with Miss Kate, attended it with Jean only on Easter. His father had been baptized and buried by the Methodists; so far he remained completely unchurched. My mother, like her brother, fled Miss Kate’s beliefs. She’djoined my father’s church. At her memorial I insisted on sitting alone; the rest of the family lined up behind me. I asked the minister to read the prayer for the burial of the dead at sea.
    â€œHer body already committed to the deep,” he amended the borrowed Episcopal prayer while I sat numbly trying to recall my mother’s face and voice.
    Two weeks afterward I went to Uncle George’s office again. Mother’s lawyer, Lucius Atkinson, was an old friend of George’s. They had known each other since grammar school. Lucius’s office was on the same side of the square as George’s, and they often did business together. He’d chosen what he considered a familiar place.
    It looked much the same—there was the rocking chair with the carved ladies’ heads supporting the arms, the glossy desk, and to one side, the mahogany table now emptied of its load of papers which, I guessed, had joined the other stacks on the floor. The stuffed owl still glared from his perch on top of the filing cabinet.
    Lucius Atkinson, broad faced and gentle, pulled out a chair for me. Uncle George was already seated.
    â€œIt’s really very simple, Marianne.” He laid my mother’s will before me. There were two sheets of typed paper bound in a sheet of blue.
    I looked at each page. I couldn’t read it. I couldn’t even read the witnesses’ names. All I could see was her signature. She was named Katherine after her mother, but the curl on the “K” and the slant of the “t,” were entirely her own. My mother’s breath seemed to be in that signature, her being spoke in every letter. Startled, I wanted to touch it, then I withheld my fingers. She wasn’t there.
    â€œKatherine wrote this when you were still quite young, soon after your father was killed. Everything goes to you. George is to be your guardian until you’re twenty-one.”
    My family was full of outspoken people. They said what was on their minds. Aunt