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cold air, greedy to clear her mind. She should’ve been
the one flinging accusations back there, making demands, not him.
But he’d been vicious, the hatred pulsing in the chords of his
neck, spreading to his throat, spilling out of his mouth. He’d
hated her father.
    . . . fourteen years too late.
    Fourteen years?
    She would’ve been thirteen years old . .
.
    She drove on, mindless of the new snow
falling, heavy around her; white, pure, forgiving. What had life
been like fourteen years before? She tried to remember, tried to
pull it back through the haze of work filled days at Blacksworth
& Company, four years of college, Senior Prom, further still to
family trips in Vail, Palm Springs, even middle school. But she
could only snag scraps of memories, a half-formed picture of a girl
in braces with pigtails, a blue spruce brilliant with lights and
ornaments, a black dog named Jesse.
    Fourteen years of good-byes, promises to be
home for Sunday dinner, returning with smiles and sharp embraces,
and all the while, going to her. How had she not known? How had she
looked into her father’s eyes, listened to his words, and not been
able to see the truth?
    Did he really love me? And Mother, what about
her?
    They were his family, but had he really loved
them, or merely felt duty toward them, obligation, as one does to
an old pair of tennis shoes, scuffed and ripping at the seams, that
should be tossed out on garbage day but somehow never make it
there, instead gets relegated as something else, garden shoes, lawn
mowing shoes, anything to avoid being discarded completely. Maybe
that’s what he’d done, relegated them to ‘something else’, a lower
position, in order to avoid the costly, damaging, choice of
permanent separation.
    She thought of all the days he’d been with
Lily Desantro, all the years he’d let his real family believe he
was somewhere else. Her father was the only one she’d ever truly
counted on, the standard for everyone else in her life; friends,
boyfriends, business associates, even, and she hated to admit this,
her mother. Had it all been a grand lie?
    Christine drove the remainder of the trip
replaying the conversation with Nate Desantro. Part of her wanted
to go back to Chicago, forget about the cabin and Magdalena, and
most of all, Lily Desantro. The other part worried that the woman
would not be so easily forgotten. What if she showed up in Chicago
asking for Gloria Blacksworth?
    Her mother would never be able to handle
this. The thought of the two women, face to face, gave Christine
renewed strength to drive back to Magdalena in the morning,
confront Nate Desantro again if she must, though hopefully, Lily
would answer the door. Then Christine could tell her about the
will, the enormous amount of money that would be hers, uncontested,
and all she had to do was forget she’d ever heard the Blacksworth
name.
    It was early afternoon when she reached the
cabin. She’d stopped off at Henry’s Market, a small grocery store
that wasn’t much larger than a 7 Eleven, and picked up a quart of
skim milk, four raspberry yogurts, a box of Multi-Grain Cheerios, a
bag of red licorice, and a small bottle of Palmolive Dish
detergent. She’d almost asked the wrinkled man at the counter if he
knew Charles Blacksworth. You probably saw him about once a month,
she’d wanted to say. He came to stay in the cabin up the road. Of
course, you’d remember him if you saw him . . . medium build,
silver hair . . . distinguished . . . very polite.
    What if they were all mistaken, what if he
really had been living in the cabin and only visited the woman once
in a while? The shopkeeper would recognize him, wouldn’t he? She
could find out, give herself hope that maybe he hadn’t lied about
everything. But in the end, she’d said nothing.
     

Chapter 5
     
    Harry answered the phone on the second ring.
“Hullo?”
    “ Uncle Harry? I’m sorry.
Were you asleep?”
    “ Chrissie.” He glanced at
the woman lying in the middle