“Which we didn’t!” Betty said with satisfaction.

“And there were a couple of nice rugs we sent out to get cleaned. Probably for the first time in a century. The rest, we got in a hauler and sent the bill to Mr. Gaylord, Esquire. I bet you’ll be shocked to learn it never got paid.”

“I mean, if my family had a house for a hundred and fifty years I’d be going through every inch of it. Even if she didn’t care about, y’know, the ‘antiques,’ you’d think she’d want her own things. Everything you grew up with? Just throw it all away, sight unseen?”

“Wait,” said Jake. “The niece grew up here too? In this house?”

He was trying to understand the order of events, but it all seemed to resist him, somehow. Evan’s parents had lived and died here, and then his sister had lived here and raised her own daughter here, and then, after his sister died and his niece departed—out of there, as Sally the barfly had put it—Evan had moved back in? It might be slightly confusing, but he supposed none of it was greatly surprising. At the end of the day, this house gave Jake a visual backdrop for Evan Parker’s irrelevant childhood, and, he supposed, for the final years of his life. But it didn’t explain anything else.

He thanked them. He had them write down their address for the signed book. “Should I send one for your sister, too?”

“Are you shitting me? Yes!”

They were behind him when he walked back down the hall, toward the front door. He stopped to put his coat back on. Then he looked up.

Around the inside of the front door was a clarion call from the old house’s distant past: a frieze of faded paint depicting a chain of pineapples. Pineapples. It caught him and let him go, then it caught him again, and held. Five above the door frame. Ten at least on either side, descending almost to the floor. They had been preserved in a strip of negative space, around which the rest of the wall had been repainted that Pepto-Bismol pink.

“Oh my god,” he said out loud.

“I know.” Sylvia was shaking her head. “So tacky. Betty wouldn’t let me paint over them. We had the biggest fight.”

“It’s a stencil,” said Betty. “I saw the same thing once at Sturbridge Village, just like this. Pineapples all around the door and up around the tops of the walls. It goes back to when the house was built, I’m positive.”

“We compromised. I had to leave a strip unpainted. It looks crazy.”

It did look crazy. It was also one of the only things left under this roof that might have deserved the word “restoration.” Had it been, in any sense, restored.

Sylvia said: “I’m going to touch it up, eventually. I mean, look at the colors. So faded! If we have to keep it at least I can overpaint them. Honestly, every time I look at my door I think, why would anybody put pineapples on their walls? This is Vermont, not Hawaii! Why not an apple or a blackberry? They actually grow here!”

“It means hospitality,” Jake heard himself say. He had not been able to look away from them, the faded chain of them, because he was reeling. All of those disparate pieces spun around him, refusing to land.

“What?”

“Hospitality. It’s a symbol. I don’t know why.”

He had read it somewhere. He knew exactly where.

For a long moment, none of them said a thing. What was there to say? And why hadn’t it occurred to him, way back in his office in Richard Peng Hall, that Parker’s first attempt at a novel would probably describe the people he’d known best, in the house they’d once shared? It was the biggest cliché of all that a writer’s first book was autobiographical: my childhood, my family, my horrible school experience. His own The Invention of Wonder was autobiographical, of course it was, and yet Jake had denied Evan Parker even this token courtesy in the fellowship of writers. Why?

The mistake, a product of his own arrogance, had cost him months.

This had never been about an appropriation, real or imaginary, between two writers. This had been a far more intimate theft: not Jake’s at all but one Evan Parker himself had committed. What Parker had stolen was something he must have seen up close and very personal: the mother and the daughter and what had happened between them, right here, in this house.

Of course she was angry. Not for one minute had she wanted her story to be told, not by her close relation and certainly not by a total stranger. That much, at long last, he finally understood.

CRIB

BY JACOB FINCH BONNER

Macmillan, New York, 2017, pages 178–80

Gab had parents: a mom who “struggled” and a dad who came and went. She had a sister with CF and a brother whose autism was so bad he sometimes had to be tied to his bed. She had, in other words, a home life so desperate and sad that even Maria’s domestic circumstances must have seemed like something out of a family sitcom. She was a year behind Maria, allergic to nuts and obliged to carry an EpiPen everywhere, dull as dishwater, and headed exactly nowhere.

Maria, at least, was marginally nicer to be around once Gab became a fixture. Samantha credited herself for being not a prude, not a religious freak like her own parents, and not a controlling asshole in general, so she tended to see the advent of her daughter’s relationship as having a positive impact on these final years. It had all passed so swiftly that sometimes, when she was first waking up in the morning, in her parents’ old bed, in her childhood home, she actually thought of herself as the person counting down the days to departure, and then she would encounter Maria and Gab at the kitchen table eating leftover pepperoni pizzas from the night before, and remember she was a nearly thirty-two-year-old mom about to say a permanent sayonara to the only child she was likely to have. Here and gone as if none of it had ever happened, and she was catapulting backward, ten years, thirteen years, sixteen years to this same kitchen table with her mother and her father and her own lost hopes, and the classroom where she had once vomited on her problem set, and the very clean room in the College Inn where Daniel Weybridge had promised her he couldn’t get her pregnant, not even if he wanted to.

One morning in the spring of what should have been Maria’s junior year, she got a call from Mr. Fortis, of all people, letting her know that she had to come in and sign some release so her daughter could graduate early. This was mystifying, but she went that afternoon, finding the old math teacher—he had been made assistant principal years before—more bent, more gray, and so addled that he failed to acknowledge her as a person he had ever met before, let alone a former student, let alone a gifted former student he’d failed to support when she’d been forced to drop out of school. And it was from this man she had to learn her daughter had gotten herself a scholarship to Ohio State.

Ohio State. Samantha herself had never been to Ohio. She’d never been out of New York.

“You must be so proud,” said Fortis, the old fool.

“Sure,” she said.

She signed the paper and returned home, where she went straight to Maria’s room, formerly her own room, and found the papers in a neat file marked OSU in the bottom drawer of her daughter’s old oak desk, formerly her own old oak desk. One was a formal acceptance to the Honors Program in Arts and Sciences and another was a notification of something called a National Buckeye Scholarship and something else called a Maximus Scholarship. Samantha sat there for a long time at the foot of Maria’s neatly made bed, the same cannonball four-poster she herself had slept in as a child, and dreamed of escape in, and been imprisoned in while incubating that baby she hadn’t wanted to carry, or give birth to, or raise. She had done all of those things without any outward complaint, simply because people in temporary power over her life had told her she had to. Those people—her own parents—were long gone, but here Samantha still was, even as the object of all of this sacrifice was herself preparing to fuck off forever, without a backward glance.