“Everything you have I own,” Alan Murray told Hollis when he came back from his father’s funeral.
Well, he’s fixed that, hasn’t he? Sitting in the dark, Hollis thinks about his money. He thinks about the woman, asleep in his bed. Why is it he continues to feel so poor? Why is he waiting for March to bolt out the door? He’s been worrying about Richard Cooper, who’s not giving up so easily and who has taken to calling. Hollis has been hanging up on him, but sooner or later March will answer the phone, and that won’t do. He’ll see to it the way he’s seen to the mail, so that March hasn’t received any responses from the stores that want to sell her work. A woman who has her own money can leave you when you least expect it; she can walk off anytime.
Long before anyone in the house is awake, before Hank has fed the dogs, before Gwen has written a letter to her father or March has set about making a cranberry coffee cake to bring to the Justices’ Thanksgiving dinner, Hollis has taken care of the phone lines.
“Must be some wire down,” he says, when March tries to contact Susie to ask if there’s anything else she should bring to dinner.
“Are you sure you won’t go with us?” March asks.
“Dinner with those old coots?” Hollis grins. “I don’t think so. I’ll stick to frozen food.”
Hollis has actually encouraged March to take the kids and go to dinner; their absence will give him the chance to look through her suitcase and her dresser drawers to make sure she hasn’t managed to receive any letters from Richard before Hollis could retrieve the mail.
“I want you to have fun,” Hollis tells March. “Enjoy yourself. Take Hank—he can eat the Justices out of house and home for a change.”
“Remember,” March says when they’re ready to leave, “you can always change your mind and come for dessert.”
“I’ll think about it,” Hollis tells her, even though he’d rather be tied into a straitjacket than have a meal with the Justices.
“Hollis isn’t going?” Hank asks when March comes out to the car.
Hank is in the backseat, and March hands him the coffee cake. “He hates polite society. You know that.”
“Well, I’m sure it hates him right back,” Gwen says. She’s sitting in the front seat, with Sister on her lap.
“You’re bringing the dog?” March asks.
“I’m not leaving her here.”
Hank looks over his shoulder at the house. “Maybe I should stay.”
“Oh, no you don’t,” Gwen says. “Don’t you feel sorry for him.”
“It’s not that,” Hank insists.
Gwen smiles in spite of herself; it’s exactly that.
“It’s a holiday, that’s all,” Hank says.
“Well, you’re coming with us,” March says. “Hollis wants you to. One of the reasons Louise is getting a twenty-five-pound turkey is because I’m bringing two teenagers.”
When they get to the Justices’, Gwen and Hank take Sister for a walk, since March wants the dog to stay in the car during dinner. Actually, it’s a pleasure for the two of them to be alone in the smoky air, because today everything smells like roasted chestnuts and burning wood and cinnamon wafting from the windows of the bakery, where they’re working overtime to fill holiday orders.
“I wish you wouldn’t be so concerned about Hollis,” Gwen says as they walk past front lawns and fences. They’ve let the dog run on ahead through the last of the fallen leaves, those which haven’t been blown away or turned into dust. “He still hasn’t given me the ownership papers for Tarot.”
“He will,” Hank tells her. “He keeps his word.”
“Yeah, right. I’ll bet he does.”
“He does,” Hank vows. “You’ll see.”
Hank and Gwen take a longer walk than they’d intended, but the Justices’ house is crowded even without their presence. Dr. and Mrs. Henderson are there, along with the Laughtons, Harriet and Larry—all of them so polite and stuffy that Hollis would have gone nuts in their presence. The Hendersons’ daughter Miranda is there, free as a bird since her divorce last spring. Ed Milton has of course been invited, along with his twelve-year-old daughter, Lindsay, as has Janet Travis, the new attorney in town—since a resident of ten years is still considered a recent arrival—and her husband, Mitch, who teaches social studies at the high school.
“Where were you this morning?” Susie asks, after she’s hugged March and taken the coffee cake out of her hands. She can’t help but wonder if March knows that some of the white in her hair has grown in; March looks older with her hair like this, and her face seems drawn. “I’ve been trying to call you to ask you to pick up some eggnog.” Susie lifts the foil and peers at the cake. “Cranberry,” she says. “Yum.”