The Probable Future

“Oh,” his mother had said, with a last burst of energy. She had grabbed his hand so tightly that he’d pulled back, frightened. “I loved you so,” she said.

If he hadn’t been such a greedy fool, his radar might have been out about this Ted Scott individual. It took one to know one, isn’t that what people said? Well, not this time. This time he’d been blinded by a few dollars. He phoned the Boston Herald and he wasn’t surprised when the editor of the Metro section told him there had never been a Ted Scott on staff. He called the tabloids then, but no one had ever heard of Scott.

Every con man gets conned himself eventually, and Will couldn’t believe he’d let the five hundred dollars out of his sight. He was losing his touch. He gazed at himself in the hall mirror Jenny had found in an antique shop on Charles Street when they first took the apartment. He was losing his looks as well, he saw that plainly. Someone else might not have noticed, but they wouldn’t have inspected him as carefully as he monitored himself. There was a bloating in his face, a darkness around his eyes; his skin was sallow, and this time he couldn’t blame his pallid complexion on the terrible lighting in jail.

“Idiot,” he said to his reflection.

Had he thought it would be easy forever? Had he imagined he’d never have to pay for all the shortcuts he’d taken in his life? He thought of those men on the benches in the Boston Common, and their dreams of what had been stolen from them or what they’d thrown away. Lately his fleeting murky bits of dreams had been of the very same things: clean sheets, true love, a woman who didn’t care what he looked like or how much cash was in his wallet.

For the first time in a very long while, Will looked past his own reflection. There in the mirror, right in his sight line, was the trestle table where Jenny kept the mail, where she had left Stella’s bagged school lunches, where she used to tack notes for Will, reminding him of his domestic responsibilities, errands and tasks he was sure to shirk. It was now he realized that the model of Cake House, which had been there earlier, good for nothing but collecting dust, was gone. He could tell because the empty space where it had once been seemed polished, where everything around was covered with a film. The old house in the woods, given over like a gift, free of charge. The location of his daughter, a witness before there’d been a crime.

The phone rang, but Will didn’t answer it. His stomach felt like hell now. It might be Henry Elliot calling him, or, worse still, his brother. He wasn’t ready to talk to anyone. He needed a moment before he could admit what a mistake he had made. Now whoever wanted to find Stella would have something far better than a map. He would have a model, and it wouldn’t take long before he managed to find the real thing, the address where the forsythia was not made of felt, but of flowers, tumbling into bloom. Before long he would be at the front door that was full-size, where the hedge of laurel was so tall this season no one would ever see if someone were hiding there, breathing in the scent of laurel, surrounded by the hum of bees.

IV.

IT HAD BEEN MORE THAN thirty years since the last dinner guest had been invited to Cake House, that colleague of Saul’s who had arrived late, so that even before it began, dinner had been ruined. Their guest had been attractive, with chestnut hair and arched eyebrows, black as crows. Who can find these little towns? Their guest had laughed, not bothering to make excuses for her tardiness. She’d been overdressed, lost without a map; while Saul went to the parlor to fix them drinks, their guest watched Elinor finish up the salad. She’d asked too many questions about Saul: what his favorite foods were, did he work in the garden on Sundays, watering the seedlings, wearing a straw hat? Or did he take the paper up to bed, and was it the sports page he looked at first or was it the news? Their pretty dinner guest wasn’t lying, not exactly, which made her especially difficult to read. She just wanted to know Elinor’s husband better; she just wanted him for herself, that was all.

For thirty years there had been no visitors other than Dr. Stewart occasionally stopping by for a bowl of vegetable soup or some gingerbread near the holidays. Why, the silverware had grown tarnished in its velvet case and needed to be polished, the decent china was dusty and had to be rinsed, the ashes were swept from the fireplace, and a new fire was lit, for although it was April, and the fields were filled with trillium and trout lilies, although jonquils were blooming in the lane, the dining room was as cold as a tomb.

“You don’t have to be involved,” Jenny told her mother. Elinor prowled about the kitchen, useless, as Jenny cut up leeks and onions for a chicken dish she’d decided upon, not too fancy, not too plain, a recipe that wouldn’t reveal how hard she’d been working simply because Matt was coming to dinner. In fact, she’d been up at six, planning the menu, before rushing off to North Arthur to the farm-stand where the vegetables were always so fresh.