The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [29]
Gwen feels bad now, looking back, at how she acted. It was as if her mother’s death had happened only to her. And, maybe a little bit, to her father. But not to Miller and Fee. Her brother and sister, edging toward thirty, seemed old to her. They had jobs, spouses, children. Well, Miller had all three, and Fee was living with the woman she would one day marry. It was part of the natural order for them to experience death. But not Gwen. She moped around the house through Christmas break, of help to no one, unaware that there was any help to be provided, that death required anything besides mourning. Then she went back to school and wrote a lot of poetry in between her journalism assignments, never stopping to consider that Miller and Fee had lost their mother, too. She did think a lot about how Mickey failed to come by over the holidays, which functioned as an open-ended mourning period. No Mickey, although she had remained in the area when her mother moved to Florida. The senior Hallorans made a dutiful visit. Mrs. Halloran brought crab dip, which Gwen’s father wasn’t sure was safe to eat.
That was almost twenty-five years ago. A quarter of a century, and now Gwen is approaching the half-century mark, only five years out. She realizes some of her mother’s things must still be in the house. True, the jewelry was divided between the sisters long ago, not that Fee has much use for Tally’s jewelry, although she insisted on taking a coral squash blossom ring that Gwen coveted. Other things have been boxed up, donated to thrift stores. But the closet is still quite full, and Gwen keeps returning to it, losing hours in it. Each dress has a memory. Some even hold on to Tally’s signature perfume, Shalimar.
So Gwen is sorting through her mother’s clothes, putting aside items for Annabelle’s dress-up chest and appropriating some more timeless things for herself—cashmere sweaters, a fabulous wool cape—when the doorbell rings. She shouts to her father’s aide that she will answer it and runs down the stairs to throw open the door.
“Mrs. Halloran!”
She looks awful, understandably. Puffy, sleepless, possibly unwashed. But she carries a dish in her hands. More crab dip?
“You didn’t have to do this,” Gwen says. “I should be doing this for you.”
“Oh, it helped take my mind off things.” She looks around, as if in search of something.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” Gwen asks. “My father is napping, but if he wakes up, he’ll be happy to visit with us.”
“Tea would be nice.”
Gwen takes the plate to the kitchen and peels back the aluminum foil. They are store-bought cookies, she recognizes them from the wake. And not even good store-bought cookies. How had throwing these leftovers on a plate helped to distract Mrs. Halloran from anything? Gwen doesn’t want to be unkind, but there is something hostile about these cookies. She struggles with the etiquette of the moment. What would be ruder: putting them out with the tea or leaving them in the kitchen? Gwen arranges them on an elaborate pink-patterned plate, then washes Mrs. Halloran’s white plastic one while the tea brews. She assumed Mrs. Halloran would follow her into the kitchen, but from the sound of things, she is moving around the living room, probably wondering at the disarray of Clem’s books, still in stacks on the floor. Gwen hopes she doesn’t bother her father, asleep in the sunroom at the rear of the house.
They have tea in the dining room, at the heavy Swedish modern