I Heard That Song Before Read Free Page B

predecessor’s taste in landscaping.
    Daddy was eight years older than my mother, thirty-two when she died. By then he had established a solid reputation in his field. All might have been well enough except that after my mother’s death, Daddy began to drink too much. Because of it, I began to spend more and more time with my grandmother. I can remember her pleading with him, “For God sake, Jonathan, you’ve got to get help. What would Annie think of what you are doing to yourself? And how about Kathryn? Doesn’t she deserve better?”
    Then one afternoon after Elaine Carrington fired him, he did not come to my grandmother’s house to collect me. His car was found parked on a bank of the Hudson River, some twenty miles north of Englewood. His wallet and house keys and checkbook were on the front seat. No note. No good-bye. Nothing to indicate he knew how much I needed him. I wonder how much he blamed me for my mother’s death, if he thought that somehow I sucked the life from her. But surely not. I had loved him fiercely, and he always had seemed to love me the same way. A child can tell. His body was never recovered.
    I still remember how, when we got home from Maggie’s, he and I would cook dinner together. He would reminisce about my mother. “As you well know, Maggie’s no cook, Kathryn,” he would say, “so your mother opened a cookbook and learned out of sheer desperation. She and I used to try recipes together, and now it’s you and me.”
    Then he would talk to me about my mother. “Always remember, she would have given anything to watch you grow up. She kept the bassinet by our bed for a month before you were born. You’ve missed so much by not having her, by not knowing her.”
    I still can’t forgive him for not remembering all that when he decided to end his life.
    All of these thoughts were going through my mind as I drove from the library to Maggie’s house to tell her the news. She has a beautiful red maple tree on her small lawn. It gives a special air to the whole place. I was sorry to see the last of its leaves blowing away in the wind. Without their protection, the house looked somehow exposed, and a bit shabby. It is a one-story Cape Cod, with an unfinished attic where Maggie stores the accumulated paraphernalia of her eighty-three years. Boxes of pictures she’s never gotten around to putting in photo albums, boxes of letters and treasured Christmas cards she will never live to wade through, the furniture that she replaced with the contents of my parents’ home but couldn’t bear to throw out, clothes that she hasn’t worn in twenty or thirty years.
    Downstairs isn’t much better. Everything is clean, but Maggie creates clutter just by walking into a room. Her sweater lies on one chair, the newspaper articles she always means to read on another; books are piled by her easy chair; the shades she pulled up in the morning are always uneven; the slippers she can’t find are tucked between the chair and the hassock. It’s a real home.
    Maggie wouldn’t meet Martha Stewart’s idea of good housekeeping, but she’s got plenty going for her. She retired from teaching to raise me, and still tutors three kids every week. As I found out through experience, she can make learning a joyful thing.
    But when I went inside and told her my news, she let me down. I could see the look of disapproval on her face as soon as I mentioned the Carrington name.
    “Kay, you never told me you were thinking of asking them to let you hold the literacy fundraiser in that place.”
    Maggie has lost a couple of inches in height in the last few years. She jokes that she’s disappearing, but as I looked down at her, she suddenly seemed very formidable. “Maggie, it’s a great idea,” I protested. “I’ve been to a couple of events in private homes, and they’ve been sellouts. The Carrington mansion is bound to be a big draw. We’re going to charge three hundred dollars a ticket. We wouldn’t get that