Rose Hill (20 page)

“Cremated?” Hannah said, shivering in distaste. “Wasn’t a silver bullet enough?”

“It’s their family thing,” Maggie said. “Lots of people do it.”

“Maybe it’s a British thing,” su
ggested Hannah, and Maggie shook her head.

She knew anything outside the small town culture in which they grew up tended to make Hannah suspicious. Maggie and Hannah stood outside to wait for Maggie’s mother to join them.

“I guess this means Gwyneth is staying in town,” Hannah said. “I was hoping she’d go back to Manhattan today.”

“No way,” Maggie said. “She likes the idea of being Lady Eldridge. She’ll be living in the big house up on Morning Glory Circle, looking down on us all, throwing us bits of stale bread and cheese. Noblesse oblige.”

“What’s that mean?”

“When rich people condescend to help the poor people who hate them, whether the poor people like it or not.”

“You know, I think Gwyneth will be great at that.”

“I almost feel sorry for her. She wants so badly for everyone to think she’s a proper English lady, but she only learned how to do it from books written two hundred years ago. The blue blood she claims to have running through her veins has been diluted by too many Yankee transfusions. She’s no more British than you or me.”

A procession of black limos carrying Gwyneth and the more stalwart and curious mourners passed them going up Peony Street.

“I wish Caroline was here,” said Maggie. “She’s nothing like her sister.”

“I always thought she was just as big of a spoiled brat as Gwyneth,” Hannah said. “She doesn’t fool me with all that saving the rain forest and building the ashrams, or whatever they are. She’s only doing that because it’s trendy.”

“She’s delivering medical supplies to needy people in Paraguay,” Maggie said. “That’s a worthy cause.”

“Does she not know there are needy people right here in her own country?”

“We live in one of the richest countries in the world, Hannah. We should be able to take care of our own poor and everyone else’s.”

“Are you done preaching to me, oh righteous one? Cause I’m just saying there are plenty of good works she could be doing right here.”

“Like, say, paying for a bigger and better kennel facility for the local animal control officer?”

“Who has been taking care of her dead brother’s dogs, and offered to find them all homes, all for free, I might mention.”

“Caroline is not like Gwyneth. She gives back. That’s all I’m saying.”

“We may have to agree to disagree.”

“If Brad hadn’t died her parents would’ve let Caroline stay here with us. I think shipping her off to boarding school was cruel. Look at how Gwyneth turned out.”

“If Gwyneth were my daughter I would have shipped her off, too. She was always a screamy little turd, if I remember correctly, all ‘she touched me, she’s touching my toys, she’s getting me dirty.’”

“Due to her delicate health, no doubt.”

“Due to her delicate mental condition. Tell me again how you pitched her out of your store. That is my new most favorite story.”

Just then, Bonnie Fitzpatrick came up behind them and pinched them both on the backs of their necks.

“Ouch! What was that for?” Maggie complained.

“Whatever you two were saying, I know you weren’t reciting Bible verses.”

“How about thou shalt not abuse your only daughter?” Maggie said. “You’re going to give me the cancer pinching me all the time.”

Bonnie was always claiming things were going to give her “the cancer,” so it was an effective complaint to make back at her.

“Don’t even think it,” her mother warned. “Father Stephen says ‘wishing is fishing and saying is praying.’”

“Well then, I wish you would quit pinching me and I pray you will cease and desist,” Maggie replied.

“Can you believe she got both the name of the preacher and the town wrong?” Bonnie asked them.

“That’s what we were just saying,” Maggie said. “I ought to pinch you.”

“I don’t think you will,” Bonnie replied, hugging both girls with either arm as they walked up the hill. “Not if you value your life.”

The men of Rose Hill were well trained. While their wives walked in gossip clusters up the hill from the funeral home to the community center, deconstructing the funeral and picking apart the bereaved along the way, the husbands took the food their wives had prepared up Peony Street to the former Rose Hill High School, now the Rose Hill Community Center.

There they unloaded and carried various plastic containers and plastic-wrap-covered trays into the vast commercial kitchen and placed them on the long work island in the middle of the room. Then the men retired to the game room to shoot pool, to the lounge to watch sports on television, or outside to smoke, and the women put out the feast in what used to be the school cafeteria, now called the “common room.”

Good sons and daughters were expected to report to the common room to set up tables and do their mothers’ bidding, while their mothers took turns making statements that were a special combination of complaining and bragging about their offspring.

“Tony, see if you can get the furnace to come on, please,” said Antonia Delvecchio to her son, and then turned to the assembled women. “I’m beginning to think he’ll never get married, but he says he can’t find a girl who will spoil him like I do.”

Beverly Myers countered with, “My Charlie says girls these days don’t know how to cook or clean, and he’d rather eat my cooking than anyone else’s.”

“My Heather keeps a spotless house, and you could eat off her kitchen floor,” claimed Alva Johnston, “but that’s just how she was raised.”

Hannah and Maggie rolled their eyes at each other as they unfolded tablecloths and draped them over the tables.

Maggie was obviously looking for someone and Hannah said, “Scott and Ed probably went up to the cemetery.”

“I was looking for Drew,” Maggie replied. “I don’t care where Scott is.”

“Oh well, my mistake,” Hannah said, pretending to take offense.

Mamie Rodefeffer came in, dragging her tote bags and swinging her cane around. A mountain of food was spread out on the long buffet tables and Mamie was first in line, where she loudly criticized everything yet piled her plate high.

“Mamie wasn’t at the funeral,” Mrs. Myers told Maggie. “She told me Theo was the devil’s own son and deserved whatever he got. But put out some free food and she makes a beeline.”

“Anne Marie went and got herself in a car wreck,” they heard Mamie tell someone. “We may be doing this again in a few days if she doesn’t come out of her coma. This potato salad has pickle relish in it; someone has ruined a perfectly good potato salad!”

Hannah and Maggie retreated to the kitchen, where they washed plastic containers and made sure the lids were reunited with the bottoms that had the same last name written on them in permanent marker. They heard when the bereaved appeared, and then had steady reports on her movements.

Maggie tensed when she knew the funeral party had arrived and Scott was somewhere nearby. She wondered how his meeting with Sean went, and whether he found out what was in the envelope he’d taken to her brother. Sometimes she appalled herself with the things she’d do to that man. Still, he kept coming back.

Hannah infiltrated the common room to score some cupcakes and when she got back, she whispered, “Scott’s sitting with Ed and Patrick back by the rolling chalkboard where they stack the chairs. Not that you care.”

“I don’t.”

They also got a steady stream of information on Gwyneth.

“She says she isn’t hungry,” reported Erma Cook. “How could she be that skinny and not be starving?”

“She says she doesn’t eat white flour or sugar,” said Alva Johnston. “She says they’re like poison to the digestive system.”

“She’s complaining that they don’t sell loose leaf tea at the IGA,” Beverly Myers said. “I told her to pop open a tea bag; what does she think they put in there?”

Later the women brought the leftover food back to the kitchen and “made plates,” which consisted of piling a sturdy paper plate with dabs of everything, covering it with plastic wrap, and taking it home to snack on all afternoon until supper.

Funeral director Peg Machalvie came in to thank them, acting as if they had done it all for her. With those surprised looking eyebrows, painful looking smile, and her shiny pale skin, she looked like she’d been flash-frozen.

She was offered a plate, but said, “Oh no, thank you. I have to watch my figure so Stuart will still want to.”

“Looks to me like the mayor’s too busy watching someone else’s figure,” Erma Cook murmured.

As if on cue, Gwyneth came in with the mayor close behind her, and thanked the ladies very graciously, if a little condescendingly. Maggie steeled herself, then walked right up to her in front of everyone and stuck out her hand. Gwyneth stepped backwards, but Maggie forced herself to smile and look the woman in the eye.

“I want to apologize for my rude behavior the other day,” she said. “I hope you will forgive me and accept my invitation to come back to my store.”

Gwyneth had her hand to her throat and at first looked appalled. Then, perhaps realizing she had a full house watching her debut in the role of Lady Eldridge, she gave Maggie a tight smile that didn’t reach her eyes and shook her hand, albeit with the tips of two limp fingers and only for a second.

“Of course, Agnes, I’d be delighted. I’d already forgotten about it.”

The mayor beamed in approval and said to Maggie, “Nicely done indeed. All friends again, see? That wasn’t so hard.”

Maggie walked back to the sink and started scrubbing the hell out of the nearest pan. The mayor led Gwyneth out and Hannah rushed up to the sink.

“All right, pod person, who are you and what have you done with Maggie?”

Bonnie Fitzpatrick came up and kissed her daughter on one flushed cheek.

“I’m very proud of you, Mary Margaret. You’re a good girl.”

Bonnie then fixed her evil eye on Hannah, who threw up her hands.

“Hey, I’m not the one who threw ole Twiglet out in traffic.”

Maggie smiled at Hannah, who put her head next to Maggie’s and murmured, “Twiglet, the British Bumstick.”

Maggie’s mother pinched them both and said, “Stop that whispering, it’s bad manners.”

With ten women working flat out
, the kitchen was cleaned up in a short time. Maggie walked out with Hannah and her mother, and turned down Peony Street toward town. Gwyneth was standing outside next to the funeral home limo, which was parked at the curb, and as the women neared her, Gwyneth asked if she could have a word with Bonnie. Hannah and Maggie walked on and waited at the corner.

After a brief conversation with Gwyneth, Bonnie turned and came toward them. Her cheeks were stained pink, and she wore the kind of look that still made her children want to hide in the nearest cupboard. Maggie could hear her mother muttering the prayer she always used to keep her temp
er right before she went ahead and lost it.

“What did she say?” Maggie asked.

“She asked if I would be interested in a job cleaning her house. She said her father always told her there was nothing like rough Irish hands to keep a house clean or a garden green.”

Scott, who had come up behind Maggie, was able to grab her around the waist as she lunged toward the limo, now pulling away from the curb. He was not, however, able to stop Hannah from removing and throwing her shoe, which just missed the back of the car as it glided up the hill toward Morning Glory Avenue, and Gwyneth’s new home.

A few members of the Fitzpatrick family and some friends congregated back at Maggie’s parents’ house. Ed and Patrick sat in the living room watching an old western movie with Grandpa Tim and Fitz. Maggie, Bonnie, and Hannah converged in the kitchen to pick at the plates of leftovers and rehash the day’s events. Lazy Ass Laddie was sitting right next to Hannah, with his furry red head on her knee, looking up longingly at what she was eating. As soon as Scott arrived, he came straight through to the kitchen.

“I can’t believe you apologized to that woman,”
he said to Maggie. “What on earth compelled you?”

Maggie looked pointedly at her mother, who was still nursing her feelings over Gwyneth’s insult.

Bonnie said to Scott, “I told Mary Margaret how you’d been called on the carpet in the mayor’s office, and she’d better make it right, seeing as how you might lose your job.”

“And how do you feel now?” Maggie asked her mother.

“Well, as a Christian I know I should turn the other cheek, but now that I’ve met that awful woman I wish I’d been there to cheer you on when you booted her out of your store.”

Scott hugged Bonnie and kissed her on the cheek.

“And such a lovely, rosy cheek it is,” he said.

“Stop that nonsense!” Bonnie said, and pushed Scott away, but she was smiling.

“A Scottish bakery owner’s cheek,” Hannah said. “Not an Irish housekeeper’s cheek.”