The Legacy of Eden by Nelle Davy Read Free Book Online Page A

breath.
    “See—” he cupped her neck in his palm “—didn’t I tell you?”
    That’s as much as she would ever reveal about what happened that evening in the garden. My grandfather on the other hand was more forthcoming. He once told me how even though he had noticed the wedding band, even though she was just a slip of a girl with a bitter tongue and even though her face was twisted in contempt, he had still looped her up by the waist and pressed his mouth against hers. He was drunk, he was angry and he saw in her the same anger at everything. Perhaps it was an act of consolation or the comfort of two strangers who found in each other a sense of kinship. Perhaps I am being too sentimental. Perhaps it was only ever meant to be just a kiss.
    Later, when her husband would decide to go home and start to look for her, she would appear next to the table with the punch bowl, and he would ask if she’d had enough and wanted to leave, and she would say, gladly.
    On the ride home, my grandmother said, she wrestled with herself. She thought about Cal’s words while she twisted her wedding ring. She conjured the faces of her cousin and her family, of the last time she ever saw her mother and finally of the pink curtain she had slashed to ribbons. The weight of it all, of all she knew and hated and all she wanted and was too afraid of, made her sag in her seat. For once her husband seemed to notice. He leaned over as he steered the car down the thin tree-laden lanes and, holding her hand he said, “Are you okay, Anne-Marie?”
    And just like that she broke.
    When I think of a time when things could have been different and then when something happened to make it so that they could never be, I find myself back at that garden party. If it were possible to undo that one thing, then everything else in time would unravel with it and we’d be left clean and renewed with hope.
    Before I went to bed that night I dialed Ava’s number. It was late but I didn’t care. In the end it was the answering machine that picked up. Usually I would not have left a message but this time was different. This time I said, “I’m going back. I thought…well someone has to look over things and I don’t want Mom’s stuff sold off to a pack of strangers or gossip-hungry neighbors. I was thinking…I don’t… I wondered if maybe you may want to come with me—just to see what stuff you’d want to keep to remember them by.... No, why would you, right? I know. But I am going. I just thought you should know.”
    I put down the receiver and lay supine on my bed. I knew I would dream that night, but I did not care. In the silence behind my mouth I said to myself, Let them come .
    As if they needed an invitation.

Chapter
3
    AT THE AGE of
seventy-one, Walter Hathaway had cancer of the colon. That was the only
reason his eldest son had come back. He had been diagnosed in the office of
an oncologist upstate, a specialist recommended to him by Lou Parks, who had
gone to college with the man and had followed his career with a respect
tinged with envy.
    After a series of tests and
weeks of waiting he had driven back up to the doctor’s office, where after a
few minutes of chitchat and polite conversation, the doctor had told him
that not only did he have cancer of the colon, but that there was also
nothing they could do to save him.
    “Bullshit,” said
Walter.
    He had picked up his hat and
thanked the man, who, after taking a moment to recover, was still hastily
trying to explain that with his symptoms Walter would be dead within a year.
Despite the doctor’s protestations, Walter left him with little more than a
curt nod of acknowledgment. He refused to believe that death would be coming
for him so soon, and so when he came home and sat before the dinner his
daughter had made for him, all he’d said when she asked him where he’d been
was that he had spent the day in a meeting with a supplier.
    But then four months later he
had woken up in a pool of