He doubted he’d used these exact words, but it didn’t seem an important point at the moment.

“The kid,” Sally said with great exasperation. “But she was like, out of there. She left home the minute she could. Who could blame her, with a mother like that? I don’t think she even waited to graduate from high school. Don’t let the door hit ya!”

And then, as if to echo this dismissal, Sally turned away. He saw now that her brother-in-law had departed, and that she had made a new friend on the next bar stool over. Wait, he said, but actually he couldn’t have said that out loud because neither of them appeared to notice. So he had to say it again: “Wait.”

Sally turned back to look at him. She seemed to require a moment to get her bearings, or possibly to remember who he was. “Wait what?” she said, with real hostility.

Wait. Evan Parker’s only living relative. That was what.

“Where does his niece live?” Jake managed to say.

She pinned him with a look of extravagant contempt. “How the fuck would I know?” she said. And that really was the end of their conversation.

CRIB

BY JACOB FINCH BONNER

Macmillan, New York, 2017, pages 146–47

The conventional wisdom was that they were alike, mother and daughter: both smart, both feisty, both highly intent on not spending their lives in Earlville, New York, and incidentally so physically similar—narrow and tall, with thin dark hair and a definite tendency to slouch—that Samantha struggled to see Dan Weybridge anywhere at all in the girl. But watching Maria grow up—and Samantha did watch, that was pretty much all she did—a few key differences gradually came into focus. Maria, in marked contrast to her mother’s fervid planning for departure, seemed to waft toward this goal without much obvious effort, and even less in the way of apparent concern. She lacked even Samantha’s small inclination to placate (let alone capitulate to) others, declined to grub for favors of any kind, and could not have cared less that there were adults in her life (notably those in her school life) who wanted to encourage her and ease her way forward. Where Samantha had been diligent with schoolwork and careful not to mess up (one significant exception there!), Maria turned in homework when she felt like it, departed from assignments if they failed to interest her, and disparaged her teachers when she thought they’d misunderstood (translation: were too stupid to understand) the material.

Also, Maria was a lesbian, which meant that whatever else might happen, she was hardly going to drop the ball just short of the goalpost, the way her mother had.

Her classmates included the children of Colgate professors and the children of Colgate grads who’d settled in the area (mostly organic farming or making art) alongside the children of the county’s oldest families (dairy farmers, county employees, plain old upstate hermits), but they broke down along another divide: those determined to make high school the best time of their lives and those who expected to move on to far more interesting experiences. Maria, it was obvious to all, was just passing through. She drifted between cliques, unconcerned by a party she hadn’t heard about or some rift in the social fabric of her class, even if she was one of the parties involved. Twice she shed her entire friend group, leaving people mystified and wounded. (About these social acts Samantha was completely unaware, until somebody’s mother called her to complain.) And once she stopped speaking to a girl who’d been coming around to the house for years, a rupture so obvious that even Samantha knew about it without being told. Maria, when asked, simply said: “I just can’t anymore, with a person like that.”

When she was thirteen she taught herself to drive in the new Subaru (a replacement for her grandfather’s, which had finally given up the ghost), and in fact drove herself to the DMV office in Norwich to pick up her learner’s permit. When she was fifteen she made out with a senior named Lara in the lighting booth during a rehearsal for Legally Blonde. It was a relief and a thrill. And when Lara graduated a few months later and immediately moved to Florida, Maria spent most of that summer moping. Or at least until she met Gab at the bookstore in Hamilton. She didn’t mope after that.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Hospitality

Late the next morning he drove west on Route 4 with the Taconic Range ahead and the Green Mountains in his rearview mirror, intent on finding the house where Evan Parker’s family had lived. Without an exact address he wasn’t sure how difficult it was going to be, but once he turned off at the West Rutland exit he discovered that the town didn’t have much of a there there; certainly less of a there than most New England towns with their classic squares and village greens. Jake easily found Marble Street just beyond the old brick town hall, and he drove past automotive shops and supermarkets and the old quarry itself, which was now an arts center. A mile later he spotted the Agway, and slowed down. The house, just past it on the right, turned out to be impossible to miss. He pulled over and leaned forward in his seat to take it in.

It was a massive three-story Italianate with a marble base, set back from the road and frankly stunning: large, clean, freshly painted yellow, and surrounded by intentional plantings, an encouraging offset to some of the architectural decay he’d seen over the weekend. Whoever lived there now had carefully trimmed the hedges, and Jake could see the outline of a formal garden just behind the building. He was attempting to align the relative splendor of what he was seeing with Evan Parker’s reported money woes when a green Volvo slowed beside him and turned in to the driveway. Jake grabbed for the key and turned it in the ignition, but already the driver had climbed out and was giving him an unequivocally friendly wave. She was a woman about his own age with a long and very red braid down her back. Despite the baggy coat she wore, it was obvious that she was rail thin. She was calling something. He rolled down his window.

“I’m sorry?” he said.

Now she was walking toward his car, and the New Yorker in Jake cringed: Who took this kind of a chance with a total stranger parked outside your home? Evidently, a Vermonter did. She came closer. Jake began grasping for some explanation of why he was here, but he couldn’t think of anything, which was probably why he ended up with a version of the truth.

“I’m so sorry. I think I knew somebody who once lived here.”

“Oh yeah? Had to be a Parker.”

“Yes. He was. Evan Parker.”

“Sure.” The woman nodded. “You know, he passed away.”

“I heard. Anyway, sorry to bother you. I was just driving through town and I thought, you know, I’d pay my respects.”

“We didn’t know him,” the woman said. “Sorry for your loss.”

The irony of that, of being offered condolences for Evan Parker, nearly made him confess right there. But he produced the required noises. “Thanks. I was his teacher, actually.”

“Oh yeah?” she said again. “In the high school?”

“No, no. It was a writing program. Up at Ripley? In the Northeast Kingdom.”

“Ayuh,” she said, like a true Vermonter.

“My name’s Jake. Your house is gorgeous.”

At this, she grinned. She had distinctly gray teeth, he noticed. Cigarettes or tetracycline.

“I’m trying to get my partner to repaint the trim. I don’t like that green. I think we need to go darker.”

It took him a moment to understand that she actually wanted him to weigh in on this issue. “You could go darker,” he said finally. It seemed to be the right answer.

“I know! My partner, she hired the painter one weekend I was out of town. She pulled a fast one on me.” The woman grinned at this. She wasn’t holding much of a grudge, in other words. “My name’s Betty. You like to see the inside?”

“What? Really?”

“Why not? You’re not an ax murderer, are you?”

The blood rushed to Jake’s head. For the briefest moment he wondered if he was.

“No. I’m a writer. That’s what I taught up at Ripley.”

“Yeah? Have you published anything?”

He turned off the car and slowly stepped out. “A couple of books, yeah. I wrote a book called Crib?”

Her eyes widened. “Seriously? I got that out of the library. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m going to.”

He held out his hand and she shook it. “That’s great. I hope you like it.”

“Oh my god, my sister’s gonna lose her shit. She said I had to read it. She said I wouldn’t see the twist coming. ’Cause I’m the person who leans over in the movie and tells you, five minutes in, what’s gonna happen. It’s like a curse.” She laughed.

“That is a curse,” Jake agreed. “Hey, it’s really nice of you to invite me in. I mean, I’d love to see it. Are you sure?”

“Sure! I wish I didn’t just have a library copy! If I had my own copy you could sign it.”

“That’s okay. I’ll send you a signed copy when I get home.”