there was a silhouette, and CJ shuddered to think of what his mother had done with the effigy of her ex-husband once she’d extricated him from the photo.
“Have you seen him?” His mother had returned from the kitchen, holding a glass of something dark, chilled with a pair of ice cubes. She took a sip and set the glass on the coffee table.
CJ frowned at the glass and looked at his watch, but his mother seemed oblivious to his disapproval.
“Not yet,” he said, replacing the picture on the piano.
Dorothy Dotson sat on the arm of the couch, and Thoreau got up from his spot by the window and moved his large head beneath her hand. She absently scratched behind his ears while reaching for a pack of cigarettes in the pocket of her housecoat with her other hand. She shook one out, removed it with her lips, slipped the pack back into her pocket, and then lit the cigarette, all without removing her hand from the dog’s head.
She looked up at CJ and saw that his eyes were wide.
“What’s the matter with you?”
CJ shook his head. “Since when do you smoke?”
“Since the day that sorry excuse for a human being left,” Dorothy said, gesturing with the cigarette. She took a long draw on it, then stopped petting Thor long enough to lean over, get her drink, and take several sips. After setting the glass back down, she clarified. “And in case there’s any doubt, I’m referring to your father.”
CJ had no response, because that would have meant having to pick his jaw up off the floor. This woman looked like his mother—or at least an older, hard-worn version of her—but it was like she’d taken a role in a bad dinner theater. When he left for college his mother was June Cleaver. Now she was something out of a Tennessee Williams play.
He’d heard the divorce, now almost fifteen years past, had been contentious, and a long time coming. While his dad’s infidelity had been the final straw, enough water had passed under the bridge to make the ending inevitable. Sal had filled him in on the main points, convincing him there was little to be gained by his coming back from school and getting involved. Graham and Maryann had been here to handle whatever needed to be handled.
“I was smoking long before I met your father,” Dorothy added. “And I smoked when I was pregnant with your brother. But let that be our little secret, alright?”
“Whatever you say, Mom,” CJ said.
Dorothy Dotson’s face still evidenced the chiseled lines of East Coast refinement years after her looks had stopped turning heads. Her father, Major Dotson, inherited the money his own father had inherited and, true to the Dotson pedigree, had proceeded with the serious business of increasing the family wealth. When Dorothy, at seventeen, announced her intention to wed George Baxter, the Dotsons were the third wealthiest family in New York, and her father had responded in a fashion befitting their status. As the bruise faded, Dorothy, along with a more sympathetic ally in her mother, dove into the planning of her wedding, knowing that even though he disapproved, her father would foot the bill. If he opted for anything less than extravagance, it would have been the talk of the social circles, which was the reason for the major’s opposition to the union in the first place.
By the time the sixties rolled in, the Baxter name had lost much of its former cachet, and there was little merit the major could see in the union of the two families, save that proceeding with the marriage was a lesser evil to the possibility that his strongheaded daughter might elope with George Baxter and thereby provide fodder to every gossip within a hundred miles. The wedding was held in the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, and then Dorothy was shuttled off to Adelia, with the major turning his hopes toward a more appropriate arrangement for her younger sister.
Dorothy had been in exile ever since, and such was the totality of the divorce from her own family that divorce from her husband had not prompted her to return home, even with her father long dead. There was also something to be said for spite, which was a habit one could nurse over the course of decades. Dorothy had vowed to die in this house rather than let George ever get his hands on it, and that vow extended to every item