Chapter 4 - The Four Rubber Feet
Marin Vance was not tall.
At ninety-one, her spine had taken on the gentle, curved arc of an orchard apple bough that had borne too many seasons of northern fruit. Her shoulders were narrow, her neck was thin as a birch wrist, and the plum-colored hat sat slightly crooked on her white curls.
She was not in her wheelchair.
Miriam walked three inches behind her, her hands hovering four inches from the small of Marin’s back—not touching her, not guiding her, but ready to catch the sixty-two pounds of her if the rubber tips failed on the damp floor.
*Clack. Thump. Slide.*
*Clack. Thump. Slide.*
The hall was so quiet now that the dripping of the thawed snow from the exterior eaves sounded like a clock ticking in an empty church.
Arthur turned.
His face, which had been purple with the exertion of the slap, lost its color with a speed that was almost grotesque. The gray, curdled white of cold tallow spread from his jawline up into his temples.
"Ma," Arthur said.
He took half a step forward, his hands coming up in that universal gesture men use when they want an animal to stop moving toward a road.
"Ma, what are you doing up? Miriam, what the hell are you doing? She can't be on her feet like this! Her hip’s only ninety days out from the pin! Put her back in the chair!"
Miriam did not look at Arthur.
She was a fifty-year-old woman from Zeeland whose father had worked thirty years in the furniture factories; she had seen men like Arthur Vance in four different church basements and three different bowling leagues. She kept her eyes on Marin’s heels.
"Your mother told me to help her up, Mr. Vance," Miriam said, her voice completely neutral. "She said she was done sitting by the coats."
*Clack. Thump. Slide.*
Marin stopped six feet from the head table.
She did not look at Arthur. She looked at Esther.
Her eyes were not the clouded, milk-blue eyes of the woman who had sat by the window at St. Jude’s at Christmas, staring at the snow on the bird feeder while Eleanor talked about Bridget’s car payments. Her eyes were dark, small, and sharp as iron tacks.
She looked at Esther’s left cheek, where the red outline of Arthur’s four fingers was now rising into a hot, angry welt against the white skin.
"Esther May," Marin said.
Her voice was thin, but it didn't wobble. It had the dry, whistling authority of a handsaw cutting through seasoned oak.
"Yes, Grandma," Esther whispered.
"Come here."
Esther stepped around Ellis. She didn't look at her father. She walked across the two yards of open parquet and knelt down on the floorboards so that her eyes were level with the small silver brooch on Marin’s coat.
Marin lifted her right hand from the rubber grip of the walker.
The hand was spotted with brown sun-freckles, the skin transparent as parchment over the blue ropes of her veins, but the knuckles were large—the knuckles of a woman who had pulled sugar beets out of the muck in 1944 while her brothers were in Normandy.
She laid her cold fingers against Esther’s swollen cheek.
The touch was very light. It felt like a dry leaf settling on water.
"That's sixty-two years of Vance men," Marin said, her voice carrying into the rafters where the cedar beams met the stone. "Sixty-two years of hitting the thing that won't move for them."
"Ma!" Arthur shouted, his voice cracking like a boy’s. "Don't you start this! Not here! I’ve taken care of you for five years! I’m the one who signed the papers! I’m the one who pays the supplement!"
Marin didn't turn her head. She kept her thumb against Esther’s cheekbone.
"You haven't paid fifty cents for a postage stamp since nineteen-ninety-eight, Arthur," she said.
The silence in the room seemed to drop another ten degrees.
Eleanor came scurrying forward now, her dusty-rose lace skirts swishing against the tables. "Marin, please! You’re confused! You know how you get after four o'clock! It’s the sundowning! Let Miriam take you back to the van! We’ll come out tomorrow with some of the wedding cake! We’ll bring the lemon one you like!"
Marin slowly, deliberately turned her head and looked at Eleanor.
"Eleanor," Marin said. "You were twenty-two when you came into my kitchen with that cheap vinyl pocketbook and told me you were going to teach my son how to run a dairy farm. You couldn't tell a Holstein from a Hereford then, and you don't know the difference between a mortgage and an embezzlement now."
Bridget stood up from her chair. "Grandma! How can you say that to Mom? After everything—"
Marin’s hand left Esther’s cheek.
She reached into the pocket of her black wool coat—the deep, square pocket that had been sewn for a heavy checkbook or a pair of leather gardening shears.
She did not pull out a handkerchief.
She pulled out a bundle of gray, legal-sized envelopes, bound together with four thick red rubber bands.
"Miriam," Marin said.
"Yes, Mrs. Vance."
"Take the walker."
Marin let go of the aluminum grips. She didn't fall. She swayed slightly, her small frame finding its balance on her two swollen ankles, her feet planted three inches apart on the pine floor.
She held the bundle out toward the middle of the room—not toward Arthur, not toward Eleanor, but toward the table where Aunt Loretta sat with her cataract glasses and the lumber-yard cousin sat with his beer.
"My son told you all I was simple," Marin said. Her voice was not loud, but it had that terrible, penetrating clarity of an old woman who has stopped caring whether anyone in the room survives the truth. "He told the church I couldn't remember my own name. He told my sister Loretta that I needed him to sign my pension checks because my fingers were too stiff to hold the Parker pen your father gave me when we finished the barn."
She dropped the bundle onto the white linen of the head table.
It hit the cloth right beside the handcrafted walnut box with a solid, leathery *thwack.*
"There are forty-eight months of bank statements in that rubber band," Marin said. "From the Old Kent Bank in Grand Rapids. The one Arthur told me was closed three years ago when the state merged the charters."
She looked at Arthur.
"He didn't close it," Marin said. "He just changed the mailing address to the post office box behind the car wash. The one Bridget holds the key for."
Arthur took half a step back. His mouth was open, his lower lip wet, his eyes rolling toward the exit doors like a steer that has smelled the blood on the floor of the abattoir.
"Ma," Arthur whispered. "You don't know what you're doing."
"I know what thirty-four thousand dollars looks like, Arthur," Marin said. "It looks like the timber right off the back forty that your grandfather told you never to cut. And it looks like the checks my granddaughter Esther has been mailing to the manor every third Tuesday since my hip was pinned."
She reached out and touched the fern brooch on her lapel.
"Bridget told me this was from the Goodwill," Marin said. Her eyes flicked to Bridget, who was now backing away toward the kitchen doors, her face the color of skim milk. "She brought it to me in a paper sack from the grocery store. She said, *'Here, Grandma, someone threw this out with the old spoons; you might as well have it.'*"
Marin looked down at Esther, who was still kneeling on the floorboards at her feet.
May you like
"I found the card in your mother’s wastebasket three weeks ago, Esther," Marin said softly. "The one with the owl. Bridget used it to write down the phone number for the bail bondsman in Ionia."
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