Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (14 page)

Before Jill could apologize, a big, white Lincoln, sparklingly new, pulled up to the curb, and Brad got out, coming around to get Jill's bag. Louise waved her hand toward the front door. "Do ride in front with Brad," she said, the gracious queen, bestowing her throne on the young, blonde usurper.

"No, no," Jill said quickly. "You go ahead."

"You don't want to sit with Brad?"

There was no way to win here, Jill realized. Louise was determined to put her in the wrong. She felt abused because Jill was staying in the motel, but had Jill stayed in their house, Louise would, no doubt, have spent the whole visit feeling taken advantage of.

This was not a game Jill cared to play. She put forth her best copy of her mother's practiced smile. "Thank you. I am looking forward to seeing the Valley."

She opened the car door and slid inside, reaching out to shut the door behind her. Then she stopped, her hand still in mid-air.

Brad smoked. The interior of his car reeked with a tobacco haze.

None of Jill's friends smoked. She was used to no-smoking sections of restaurants and smoke-free suites in hotels. But Cass had smoked, and his clothes and his car had always smelled of tobacco. To this day it was a scent she associated with him. It was rare that she got into a smoky car, but when she did, she thought of him; she would turn, half-expecting to see him next to her.

She heard the door on the driver's side open. She waited a moment, then forced herself to look.

Brad had a narrow face, his shoulders were erect, his hair thinning. He looked nothing like Cass. Jill was glad of that. If it was unsettling to see Phillip's face on Doug Ringling, how much worse to see her father's face on a stranger.

Brad inserted the keys in the ignition and punched in the cigarette lighter. He pulled the car away from the curb. "Do you mind if I smoke?" he asked Jill.

"You should tell him that you mind," Louise chirped from the back seat. "It's such a disgusting habit. The girls and I are always on him to quit."

"I don't mind," Jill said.

She watched Brad take the package of cigarettes out of his breast pocket. With his left hand still on the steering wheel, he shook one free, lipping it out the rest of the way. He pulled out the cigarette lighter and, inhaling, lit his cigarette.

That was exactly how Cass had lit cigarettes. Brad had probably learned to smoke from him. After all, Cass had been his father, too.

Jill's mother had her baby book, full of pictures of Cass and Jill: Cass feeding Jill her strained cereal, Jill riding on his shoulders, Cass twirling her in airplane spins. Cass always gripped her upper arms during airplane spins; he said spinning children by the hands was too hard on their little shoulders.

Ellen had probably had a baby book just like that: Cass feeding Brad his strained cereal, Brad riding on his shoulders, Cass twirling him by the forearms in a airplane spin. No, Ellen would have two such baby books, one for Brad, one for Dave.

Maybe this was what she had been uneasy about on the plane... that after twenty-six years of loving, adoring, and being adored by her father, after two years of grieving for him, now she was going to have to share him.

She looked at Brad again. There was so much they could talk about. Brad had been eight when Ellen had brought him back to the Valley. He would remember being Cass's son.

What did Cass ask you? Did he want to know about your imaginary friends?
Cass had never seemed to understand that Jill had not had any imaginary friends. She had always thought he sounded like he wanted her to have them so she would desperately try to invent them, but she hadn't been able to.
Did he ask you about the stories you told yourself?
Jill hadn't told herself stories either.

Maybe Brad had. Maybe he had had imaginary friends; maybe he had told himself stories. Jill had inherited her father's money, she also had his charm and his sense of structure. But she did not have what was truly special about him—his imagination. Maybe Brad did.

I know Cass loved me, worshiped me, but sometimes I wonder... if I hadn't been his daughter, would he have respected me?

She could barely admit that thought to herself, she certainly could not discuss it with this stranger.

It took two hours to drive out to the Valley, and it was a strained, tense trip. Louise was unwilling to introduce a subject; she wanted someone else to take that risk so she could criticize them for doing so. Nor did Brad have much to say. He knew little about Jill's life. He probably assumed it was an idle one, and he had enough repressed disapproved of professional leisure that he was embarrassed to ask her the questions that would have told him otherwise. Clearly he hated this, having a half-sister, younger than his daughters, to whom he had nothing to say.

Jill, however, could make conversation with anyone under any circumstances.
Your job,
nanny Alice had told her,
is to make other people feel comfortable,
advice that was probably better suited to Henry, now a good, hardworking duke, than it was to Jill, now a recovering co-dependent, constantly struggling with the temptation to put everyone else's needs before her own.

So she encouraged Brad to talk about impersonal things. She learned about the economy and the typography of the Valley, about the ambitious technology of his son Randy's poultry operation, about the textile plant that had polluted the Shenandoah River. Every fifteen miles Louise leaned forward and said, "Oh, Brad, you must be boring Jill to tears. She can't be interested in that." So every fifteen miles Jill had to start all over.

It was still light by the time they got to Courthouse. The Best Western was right off the Interstate, and Brad pulled the car up to the main entrance to let Jill and Louise off, though there were parking spaces only a few feet away. It seemed like excessive formality to Jill, but perhaps this elaborate courtesy was Brad's only way of saying that she was welcome.

What an odd pair he and Louise seemed to be. He, tense and overcontrolled, seemed paralyzed by his high standards and good intentions whereas she was entirely comfortable in her manipulation and schemes. Jill wondered if Louise might not resemble Ellen, if Brad had chosen a wife who was very like his mother.

The motel's reception area was in the center of the sprawling cinderblock building. As Jill and Louise were coming through the double glass doors marked "Registration," Louise let out a little startled hiss.

A man was coming across the reception area. "I know, Louise. I know. You didn't want anyone to come tonight." He was round-faced, shorter than Jill, dressed in casual slacks and a plaid sport shirt. He had an open, cheery look to him. "Forgive us, Jill. We were sitting down to dinner, the kids were about to explode with excitement, and then I realized I was, too. So we dashed over. We'll say hello, and then we'll run right off."

Brad was through the door now. "Jill, this is my brother, Dave, and his wife, Ginny."

Behind Dave was a bright-faced, little brunette woman dressed in a pretty pink track suit.

"No, no, Brad," Dave chided his older brother, "you can't say
my
brother anymore. It should be
our
brother. We're going to need to get used to that."

Until now neither Jill nor Brad had said one word about being related. Jill felt the tendons in her neck easing, the line of her shoulders lowering. Dave's openness was a relief.

She put out her hand. Dave took it in both his and lightly kissed her cheek. "Why are you going to run off?" she asked.

"Louise didn't think it was fair to overwhelm you with family on the first night, that you would be tired after your trip with the time change and all. And she's right, of course. But Ginny and I decided to pretend that you traveled enough so that you could bear a quick grin from us."

He spoke with a warm smile as if he knew perfectly well that he, not Louise, was right. And he was. A flight from the coast was nothing to Jill, and at this point the time change was in her favor.

"Then I'll pretend to be delighted to see you," Jill replied, smiling. How different he was from Brad. It was hard to imagine the two brothers in business together, but they owned their apple orchards in common. "Why don't we all go to the bar and have a drink?"

"Don't you want to check in?" Louise was trying to regain control of the evening. "Aren't you worried that they might give away your room?"

"No," Jill said. Even Best Westerns did not give away Jill Casler's room.

"I'll tell them she's here," Brad said.

So he went off toward the registration desk, and the three women followed Dave into the lounge.

"Do you believe this?" Dave said to his wife as he held out Jill's chair for her. "That Brad and I have a sister who's so beautiful? We've seen your pictures, Jill, and I always thought they were nice, but they certainly don't do you justice."

"I take terrible pictures," Jill replied. "I don't know what it is about my face, but I do look stupid in a picture."

"We saw that picture in
People,"
Ginny said in a soft Southern voice. "The one with Payne Bartlett... my sixteen-year-old daughter is dying to know if you're his girlfriend."

"No, I'm not." Jill was one of the very few people on earth who knew that Payne was gay. In the name of his career, he had become rigidly celibate. "It sounds corny, but we really are just friends. We grew up together so we feel like—" She stopped.
Like brother and sister
didn't seem the most appropriate simile in this crowd. "Like cousins."

Dave smiled. "I'm sure our Heather wishes she had a cousin like that."

"That's not fair, Dave," Louise said stiffly. "Randy is a very attractive young man."

It took Jill a moment to follow Louise's logic. Randy, Louise's son, would be Dave's daughter's cousin. Louise was taking Dave's pleasantry as an attack on Randy. That seemed bizarre in the extreme.

But Dave hardly reacted. "You know I didn't mean anything personal, Louise. Now, where is that waitress?"

Louise pointedly ordered a caffeine-free Diet Coke. Jill, who would have ordered white wine, was not about to be shamed into temperance. She ordered a vodka and tonic. Ginny asked for a frozen apricot brandy sour, which did not sound like the order of a serious drinker, and Dave asked for two beers, one for him and one for Brad, who was approaching the table with Jill's room key.

It was an interesting forty-five minutes. It was soon clear to Jill that Dave purchased his easy charm at a cost—superficiality. He kept saying how wonderful it was to see Jill, seeming oblivious to the fact that they all could have gotten together any time during the last fifteen years. Any questions she had about Cass and their childhoods couldn't be addressed to him either. He would forever be easy to chat with, but impossible to confide in.

His easy questions about her life turned up the fact that her house had been destroyed. Dave was fascinated and sympathetic; Brad was horrified. "Why didn't you call?" he fussed. "Why didn't you let us know? We could have helped."

What's wrong? Has something happened? What can I do?
he had asked the instant he heard her voice on the phone.

Brad felt responsible for her. No, Brad probably felt responsible for everyone. Dave was the brother everyone liked; Brad was the one everyone depended on. One of the men in her therapy group was like that—overconscientious, a perfectionist, the eldest son of an absent father.

An absent father...
Well, that was true of Brad, wasn't it? Jill twisted her glass around on the damp cocktail napkin. She had always viewed Ellen as the villain in Cass and Ellen's separation. Ellen had been the one who had left. But Brad and Dave probably hadn't felt that way. Their father had been given a choice between family and career. He had chosen his career. That couldn't have made them feel treasured.

Alice had kept a scrapbook of all the articles written about Cass. From the day of Jill's birth Cass had always mentioned her whenever he could. This was in the days when few men in their fifties had newborns, and Cass was enchanted with the joys of late-life fatherhood.
I have time for her... I take her everywhere... I really know her.
And the comparison,
It was not like this the first time.

Jill had thrilled to read those comments, but Brad and Dave, if they had ever seen them, would surely have felt differently. They would have been grown men, but still, Cass's remarks must have hurt. Surely his sons would have read them as being full of rejection.

The real message behind them must have been guilt, Cass's guilt over having put his career first. But it had taken Jill a long time to learn that about her father, time that Brad and Dave never had.

She stirred uneasily. She wasn't used to thinking of Cass as the bad guy, as the one who was less than perfect.

But maybe he was.

Before Jill went to her room, Brad and Louise laid out the weekend schedule for her. Tomorrow there would be a Civil War re-enactment at the New Market battlefield, which they hoped she would enjoy. A number of family members planned on gathering there for a picnic. Then, after church on Sunday, she could tour Brad and Dave's orchards, take a ride up to Skyline Drive, visit Luray Caverns, or do any other touristy activity that might interest her. In the afternoon the family would assemble for a barbecue. "It is Mother's Day, after all," Louise pointed out, as if to underscore how inconsiderately Jill had timed her visit.

At noon on Monday, Carolyn, Brad's oldest daughter, was having a bridge luncheon for her. Monday evening Jill would have dinner with the Ringlings. Then Brad would drive her to the airport first thing Tuesday morning.

Brad, the ever-responsible Brad, offered to take her to breakfast before the re-enactment Saturday morning, but she excused herself, pleading jet lag. He was to come get her at ten.

At nine the next morning her phone rang. She guessed it would be Brad, checking to be sure she knew how to eat breakfast.

It wasn't.

"Jill, this is Doug. I hope I didn't wake you."