Chapter 9 - The Reckoning of Vaughn Stark
The garden room had large, double-paned windows that looked out over a courtyard where four metal bird feeders swung in the March wind.
Grandma Marin sat in a wide armchair with a floral quilt spread across her lap. On the small end table beside her sat an untouched tray containing a tuna sandwich on white bread and a small plastic cup of applesauce.
When Ellis and I walked in, she didn't look at the door immediately. She was watching a black-capped chickadee cling to the wire mesh of the suet feeder outside, its tiny wings fluttering against the sleet.
“Your grandfather built those feeders,” Grandma said softly, without turning her head. “The maintenance boy here said he was going to take them down last November because they made a mess on the flagstones. I told him if he touched those posts, I’d take his kneecaps off with my cane.”
I sat down in the vinyl armchair across from her.
Ellis didn't sit. He stood near the window, his large frame silhouetted against the gray afternoon light, checking the lock on the outer courtyard door to make sure the wind wouldn't rattle it.
“Grandma,” I said.
She turned her head. Her blue eyes were clear, dry, and terrifyingly calm.
“Is Vaughn in jail, Essie?”
I swallowed down the knot of bile that had been sitting in my throat for twenty-four hours. “He’s at the sheriff’s station in Hastings. They’re arraigning him in the morning.”
Grandma took a slow, deep breath through her nose. Her chest rose and fell beneath the green knit cardigan.
“Good,” she said.
The word was so small, so flat, that I thought I had misheard it.
“Good?” I repeated.
“A man who hits his daughter over an envelope of money doesn't need to be sleeping in his own bed,” Grandma said. She reached out and took my hand. Her skin was cool and thin, like dry parchment, but the grip in her fingers was Sanford Stark’s grip—the grip of forty years of moving white oak timbers through a shaper. “Your father was always soft, Essie. He was an only child, and Sanford spoiled him because he was the only boy that lived. When the world got hard, Vaughn always looked for a woman to bleed so he wouldn't have to sweat.”
She looked down at my left cheek, where the dark red welt had turned into a sick, yellowish-purple shadow.
“He bled me for six years,” Grandma whispered. “And when the well started to go dry, he came for you.”
“Grandma, the house on Elm Street—”
“The house is wood and plaster, Essie,” she interrupted, her voice firm and level. “Sanford and I had forty-two good years in that house. We had fifty Christmases where we didn't owe any man a dime. If Vaughn sold it to some crook from Detroit, let the crook have it. The plaster’s cracked anyway.”
She reached under the floral quilt and pulled out a small, worn leather address book with the initials *M.S.* stamped in gold foil on the corner.
“Take this,” she said, pressing it into my palm.
“What is it?”
“It’s Sanford’s safety deposit key,” she said. “Taped inside the back cover. Box 412 at the Old Colony Credit Union. Vaughn never found it because he never looked in anything that didn't have a screen on it.”
I held the small, heavy book. The leather was soft from decades of being kept in an apron pocket.
“What’s in the box, Grandma?”
Grandma looked out the window again, watching the chickadee shake the ice from its feathers before darting into the safety of the cedars.
“The original title to the forty acres on the lake,” Grandma said quietly. “The ones my father left me in 1963. The ones Vaughn tried to sell three times to the timber company until Sanford had the land put into an irrevocable spendthrift trust that only my eldest granddaughter could sign for upon my death.”
My breath caught in my throat.
Ellis turned from the window. For the first time all day, his eyebrows went up.
“The lake property?” Ellis asked. “The one near the county park?”
“One thousand feet of shoreline,” Grandma said with a small, sharp smile that showed all her bottom teeth. “Sanford told me fifty years ago: *‘Marin, don't you ever let Vaughn touch that dirt. He’ll turn it into jet skis and golf shirts inside of twenty minutes.’* And I never did.”
She patted my hand twice, then folded her fingers over mine, pressing Sanford’s safety deposit key into the flesh of my palm until it left a sharp, triangular dent.
May you like
“You build that house you were talking about, Ellis,” Grandma said, looking up at my husband. “The one with the big kitchen and the porch where a woman can sit and watch the water without having to ask her father for permission.”
***
