The Probable Future

II.

JENNY WAS WORKING at the tea house on a Saturday afternoon. No one who saw her would have guessed that she had been a moody girl who couldn’t wait to run away from home, unhappy most of the time, waiting for the worst to befall her. Today, she was cutting up a plum pie and thinking about Matt’s kisses. She was halfway through this task, humming a song about love, when an odd-looking girl came straggling in through the door, with Hap Stewart tagging along behind with a somewhat mystified expression. Jenny, as a matter of fact, couldn’t stop thinking about Matt. For the past two nights she had gone out walking after Elinor went to bed, only to find herself at his back door, knocking softly, so Will wouldn’t hear. She had tiptoed through the living room as though she were a teenaged girl herself, somehow transported back to the time when a kiss meant something, when it could bring her to her knees.

Since she’d fallen for Matt, she’d been as irresponsible as a teenager, coming in late to work, failing to see her own daughter. Jenny was so distracted she paid no attention to the girl who’d come to the counter, only nodded to Hap, before going to grab a couple of menus. Liza came out with a tray of raspberry tarts as Jenny was setting the menus down on the countertop.

“Hey, Jen. Aren’t you going to say hello to your daughter?” Liza might as well have hit Jenny over the head with a sledgehammer or tossed a handful of stinging yellow jackets into the crust of the plum pie she had recently cut into slices. Was it really possible that this outlandish girl was her wonderful child, her equinox girl, her baby, her whole world? Of all the changes in her daughter, what was the most distressing? The choppy black hair? The smudgy eye pencil she had taken to using? Was it how tall Stella was? Five-seven, a woman’s height. Or was it how pale the girl was, more so it seemed than ever in contrast to that raven hair? Or was it simply the way she was staring at Jenny, as though her own mother were a stranger who didn’t know the first thing about her? It was the exact same expression that had been on Jenny’s face when she had glared at her mother on the day she ran down the driveway and threw herself into Will’s car, ready for Cambridge and the rest of her life.

Lately, Will had been stopping by the tea house in the afternoon, and while he waited for Liza, he and Jenny had coffee and discussed their daughter, this shared worry, the one subject on which they could agree. Was she still seeing visions? Was she carrying on with Hap? (Will thought possibly, Jenny said no way.) Was she spending too much time trailing around after Dr. Stewart, visiting the dying and the hopeless? What sort of hobby was that for a young girl, anyway? When was the last time either of them had heard Stella laugh out loud? Wasn’t it dangerous for her to come by and help her grandmother in the garden when her whereabouts were supposed to be kept secret?

“Is that permanent?” Jenny asked.

The girl with dark hair who resembled her daughter sat at the counter, sulky and ill tempered and ready for a fight. Ink, that’s what the color of Stella’s hair brought to mind. The sort that was far from invisible. She sneered, but failed to answer.

“Hey, Mrs. Avery, that pie looks great,” Hap said with a nervous smile. You could cut the tension between mother and daughter with the plum-stained knife in Jenny’s hand. Hap drummed his fingers on the counter. In one of his late-night conversations with Juliet Aronson, Juliet had told him most people had only one best feature, but he had two, his height and his integrity. “I guess I’ll have to try some.”

“It’s Sparrow, not Avery,” Jenny corrected. “I’m divorced.”

“Is that why you’re sleeping with my uncle?” Stella took a wedge of pie between her fingers and shoved it into her mouth. Plum syrup plopped onto the countertop. It looked like a blob of ink, like half a butterfly’s wing, like a lie, twice-told. Jimmy Elliot had let slip that he’d seen her mother leaving the Avery house at 2:00 A.M., when he was walking home from the tea house. She certainly hadn’t been there to see Will.

“What are you talking about?” Jenny flushed with color.

There was the lie.

“I’m not sleeping with anyone.”

There it was twice.

“Uh huh.” Stella cleared the blob of pie filling off the counter with her finger and sucked it off. “Neither am I.”

Jenny stared at her daughter and had a single, horrible thought: Jimmy Elliot.

Stella looked straight back and traced an X on her chest. “Cross my heart,” she said.

Lying could run in a person’s nature, or it could spring up out of necessity and circumstance. But there were some individuals who merely stumbled into lying, honest people who fell before they knew it, only to find themselves drowning in a pool of words. It had happened to Stella, but perhaps seeing death would make a liar out of anyone. For instance, only yesterday Stella had told her science teacher, Mr. Grillo, that she would bring in her overdue homework on Monday when what she really wanted to say was: Stop drinking, it’s ruining your liver, you’ll die of cirrhosis if you don’t watch out.