to be cremated, and I’d like my ashes to be scattered here, in the garden. Could you see to it that that gets done?”
“You should have a,” I said. This conversation was becoming more and more unbearable, like some carefully calibrated form of torture that ratcheted up one precise notch every time I managed to catch my breath. I wondered idiotically if I could claim that I heard the phone ringing indoors, if I could pretend to fall asleep right there in mid-sentence, anything to make it stop. “You should have a will. To make sure. In case anyone argues about, you know, wants to do something different—”
“A will.” Hugo snorted bleakly. “I should, shouldn’t I. I’ve been telling myself every day: This week, I must get it sorted out this week, I’ll get Ed or Phil to recommend a good solicitor— And then I look at their faces and think, I can’t do that to them, not today, I’ll find a day when they’re in better form . . . And before I know it another week’s gone past. It seems that counselor woman in the hospital was right all along, wasn’t she? Denial. A part of me must have been still hoping.”
Until that moment, I’d forgotten all about asking Hugo what would happen to the house. It was the will stuff that brought it back. “The house,” I said. “If you’re making a— I mean, if you want to, to be here”—I made some kind of shapeless gesture at the garden—“then the house should stay in the family. Right?”
He turned his head and looked at me, a long intent look under those shaggy eyebrows. “Do you want it to?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I really do.”
“Hmf.” The eyebrows twitched. “I didn’t realize you were so attached to the place.”
“I didn’t either. I mean, maybe I wasn’t, I don’t know. It’s just . . . now. Being back here.” I had no idea how to explain myself. “I’d hate it to go.”
He was still looking at me; it was starting to make me itchy. “And your cousins? What do they think?”
“Yeah, them too. They’d really like to, to hang on to it. I mean, we’re not all trying to grab the house for ourselves, it’s not like that, at all—” The slight frown on his face, I had no clue what he was thinking— “Just, it’s the family home, you know? And they’re kind of worried that Phil would want to, like, sell it, not that he doesn’t care about it, but—”
“All right,” Hugo said abruptly, cutting me off in mid-gibber. “I’ll sort it out.”
“Thanks. Thank you.”
He took off his glasses and polished them on the hem of his shirt. His eyes, gazing unblinking out over the sunlit garden, looked blind. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d appreciate a few minutes to myself.”
“Oh. Right.” For a minute I hovered, dithering—was he pissed off with me? had I fucked up, offended him by talking about his death as a fait accompli? was he going to be able to get up without my help?—but he ignored me completely, and in the end I gave up and went inside.
* * *
He was out there for well over an hour, just sitting, so still that the small birds foraging on the grass came within feet of him (I was hanging around the kitchen to keep an eye on him, staying well back from the windows). When he came in, though, he was brisk and a bit distant, impatient to get to work—he had done some incomprehensible DNA triangulation and turned up something on Mrs. Wozniak, more cousins or cousins’ cousins in Tipperary, he had explained it to me the day before but it hadn’t stuck. There was no mention of the conversation outside, and part of me wondered with a horrible sinking feeling whether he had forgotten the whole thing.
The next morning over breakfast, though, he announced cheerfully that Susanna’s lot and Leon would be coming over that afternoon. “Let’s make apple-and-walnut cake. Not the children’s favorite, I know, but it’s mine, and I think now and then I should be shameless about using the situation to get my own way. And”—with a flash of a smile at me—“apple-and-walnut cake is much less trouble than LSD, isn’t it?”
And so: Saturday afternoon, tea and cake in the living room. Warm smell of apples and cinnamon all through the house, still gray sky outside the windows. Tom earnestly explaining how he had finally got